National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Audu Ogbeh, who was accused of being anti-Igbo, said weekend in Abuja that he would be the last person to take on a whole ethnic group for whatever reasons just as he reeled out what he had done to promote Igbo cause in recent times within the context of national politics.
He said, for instance, that the attempt to use the Police to remove Governor Chris Ngige of Anambra State
amounted to a mafia operation, which was why he pointed out the party under his leadership condemned it and assured that “we will not run a government by mafia here”.
“If anybody is hurt by that, I am sorry, but I will do it a thousand times if it is repeated; we will not use the mafia to run our government; if there is anything, go through the court system and if the court says that the man is no longer Governor, we will abide by the court ruling and no other ruling”, he said when a delegation of Ohanaeze Youth Council (OYC) visited him in his office in Abuja.
Chief Ogbeh also said that he mobilized against the planned impeachment of the Senate President, Chief Adolphus Wabara because, apart from the fact that he did not commit any impeachable offence, the impeachment if it was allowed to succeed would embarrass the senators and the Southeast zone.
He spoke in self-defence against the accusation that he was an enemy of the Igbo people. According to him: “In the past few weeks or days, I have been reading full page adverts of all kinds, alleging all kinds of things, describing me as the enemy of the Igbo people.
“I do not know how one individual in this country can stand up to make himself the enemy of a whole people. A few things, which we have done at this secretariat, clearly showed that we are here to defend every segment of this country. And I may cite one or two examples:
“After the elections in 2003, there were certain individuals who said that we should zone away the Senate President from the Southeast; I was away in the U.K. and they started lobbying at very high levels. On arrival, my flight landed about 5 a.m. I got to the house by 7 a.m. and I got a phone call.
Big people in the party called me and said, oh! You know people are lobbying us to remove the Senate President from the Southeast.
“I asked them what the reason was; they said you know that in 1999, it was not originally zoned to the Southeast and I said now that it is zoned there, if we change it, how do we explain to the Southeast? I told them the position belongs to the Southeast and would stay there.
“At the time we had this, we did not even know who was the candidate; and when we came here, every member here said naturally we cannot change it because if we do that would be sending a very nasty signal.
“Even the contest for that office was the neatest we did in the history of the National Assembly in this Fourth Republic. We rehearsed it; we even warned the members from the Southeast to keep money out of this exercise. We rehearsed the night before and the next day, we went to the National Assembly to make sure it happened.
“And, again, when the impeachment came up, people gathered to remove this Senate President. I was away on a trip and I came back and I said: No! How many Senate Presidents are we going to have? How can you people continue to embarrass themselves?
“All of us sat; when I went there, I said you cannot touch the Senate President. We called all of them, eighty six members who are in the leadership and that is how it ended”.
Ogbeh stated further on the Anambra crisis: “For God’s sake, I will tell you: we sat on this table and took a decision to expel those who attempted to use the Police to remove a Governor and replace him. I will repeat a thousand times that we will not run a government by mafia here.
“If anybody is hurt by that, I am sorry, but I will do it a thousand times if it is repeated; we will not use the mafia to run our government; if there is anything, go through the court system and if the court says that the man is no longer Governor, we will abide by the court ruling and no other ruling. And this job is not about doing anybody a favour; it is about following the rules and trying to balance the interest of the society”.
He said: “I heard that they will even take me to court, that I am causing all the troubles in PDP; they said I caused the religious trouble in Plateau and I caused the one in Benue. I heard that the decision to impeach the Abia Deputy Governor was taken in my sitting room. But those are not issues.
I want to thank you for coming and I want to assure you that when we take responsibility like this, it is not so much about what human beings know but about what God will judge us by.
At the end of it all, we will stand before the Almighty God and try to say to Him that we did our best.
“It is not about hating one section of the country. What will you gain? How can I as an individual take on the Igbo people? How can you achieve it? What do you gain from there? We do take every effort to balance the interest in the society and such publications were engineered by interest groups who have an axe to grind.
“But some day, may they realize that what we did was not against them, but we must uphold a principle that in governance all your decisions may not always be popular.
They used the word Ohanaeze, the official umbrella of Igbo group and I said that couldn’t be because definitely serious minded people cannot say that I am their enemy. It cannot be; I cannot even afford to be.
“We were in Abia two days ago and making peace there and begging the House of Assembly not to impeach the Deputy Governor. Let us leave him. When that crisis happened, we called all of them here (Anenih, the Deputy Governor and Governor) and we told each one of them where we thought each of them made a mistake; we try to keep the interests balanced; it is not very easy”.
Secretary General of the Ohanaeze Youth Council (OYC), Comrade Chuks Ibegbu told Chief Ogbeh that the group decided to visit him to “physically dissociate itself from the recent virulent attacks by a fictitious group by name Ohanaeze Youth Forum”.
He said the publication by the fictitious forum was the handiwork of mischievous and unguarded youths whom he alleged were on the payroll of Ogbeh’s political rivals.
According to him “Igbo youth have a civilized way of dealing with issues as Igbo culture demands”.
