Chidi Onyeukwu Ajaegbu, senatorial candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) for Abia Central, in the forthcoming general election, a former president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), a stock broker and investment banker, says he is in politics to liberate his people from maladministration. He spoke with GODFREY OFURUM in Aba. Excerpts:
Do you think you stand a chance, as a greenhorn in politics?
If you are talking in terms of elective position, yes, I have not contested an elective position before, but since 1999, I have participated actively in politics. And I want to put it on record that there is no politician of note from the Ngwa extraction that has not in one way or the other benefited from my support. From Enyinnaya Abaribe to Nkechi Nwaogu, Ezuche Ubani, Onyema Ugochukwu, Solomon Adaelu-my younger brother and of course Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, whom I expected much more than the comedy that we are witnessing.
You supported Governor Okezie Ikpeazu in 2015, and why are you withdrawing your support in 2019?
I am withdrawing my support for Ikpeazu, because of total lack of performance, not meeting the minimum expectation of the people that elected him into office, not being able to identify that Theodore Orji and his family are the major challenge the State has had in the last 20 years, not recognizing the fact that the interest of the State is far above anybody or family in the State and not rebuilding Aba and the economy of Abia State.
Was that why you left the People’s Democratic Party?
Yes, in the first place.
How come you hold a different view about the achievements of Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, when some stakeholders in the state are applauding his efforts so far?
I am sure you live in Aba and from your conclusions, you can deduce whether he has done well or not. So, it is not about me, but about what we see on-ground. It does not take a rocket scientist to renew the infrastructure of Aba. It does not need federal allocation to renew the infrastructure of Aba. The State and Local Governments in Abia State collect between N3 billion to N4 billion every month.
I say between the Local and State Governments, because the State Government controls the Local Governments. And in our parlance in accounting, what we look at is substance over form or reality over legality. So, I can conclude without any equivocation that the Abia State Government gets about N3 billion to N4 billion every month.
Let’s assign a zero value over that in terms of renewing the infrastructure of Aba without getting entangled with the appropriation of the monthly allocation.
Aba could probably have about 80 to 100 kilometer road network, strategic ones (I.e, core inner strategic ones) and if you say that a world class road that will last 20 to 25 years, will cost between N150 million and N200 million per square kilometer, what that represents is that with N30 billion to N40 billion, you can effectively rebuild Aba road network over a period of time.
And what that therefore, means is that you can actually source funds outside these subventions to fix Aba over that period of time, knowing full well that it is not a one-off thing, it is not a bullet payment.
Payments are made on achievement of milestones. If you give a 500-kilometer road contract, you pay, may be at every 10 kilometers, so the N30 billion to N40 billion is not needed immediately. It does not have to be accumulated and put aside.
What therefore, that means is that, if I give you a contract of N30 billion, if I have about N3 billion in the next 30 days, I can get you to start work and every 90 days, I will look for N3 billion to give to you.
It is also important that we should recognise that every Aba citizen or resident will appreciate effectively that there is a true and genuine intention to fix Aba. And therefore, for them to pay tax, what we call tax psychology will come into play. They will be willing to pay tax, knowing full well that you show transparency.
You can even dedicate accounts where they will pay some specific tax to fund the renewal of Aba network. And when they see that the contractors are of international standard and that there is transparency in what you are doing, I can assure you that some people can overpay what you ask them to pay.
Yes, it has happened in Lagos. And that is not to say that we don’t have leakages in Lagos, but the point am making is that if there is genuine intention to fix Aba roads, then you can actually do that without relying on subventions.
You can do that through your internally generated revenue, you can do that through some sorts of financial engineering, you can get multilateral institutions to support renewal of Aba infrastructure, knowing full well that at some point in our history that Aba was the commercial hub of Central and West African trade.
The multiplier effect of getting Aba right, will flow across into other countries. So you could have multilateral agencies, using empirical studies to support your request to fix Aba infrastructure and it does not stop you from whatever it is, you are doing with the subvention, all that is required is an approval from the State House of Assembly and not even in most cases.
You can appropriate the subvention and then have a financial mechanism of funding the renewal of Aba and you will have nothing to lose, after all Government is a continuum, it is not your money. Even if you are borrowing, you are doing that in the name of Abia State and not necessarily your money.
But the problem we have is that some of our people see the State commonwealth fund, as their individual fund. And by giving contracts, they believe that they are spending their individual resources, meanwhile this mandate is given to you to hold in trust and therefore all resources that are associated with this mandate should actually be the peoples’ money and you should be accountable for it.
But that is not the mindset and that is why you hear things like security votes that are bigger than the salary bill of the whole State for one or two persons to appropriate every month.
People are walking about aimlessly hungry, dropping dead for lack of food, for lack of payment of salaries and pensions.
What I have to say is that these people that drop dead, these families that can’t buy basic medicine, people, who die because of typhoid that could be handled with just N5,000, because they do not get their salaries and because you failed to deal with these basic things that you are supposed to deal with, attracts generational cause.
So, the point I’m making is that Aba, can be fixed without Federal subvention, if truly we want to deal with it.
You are gunning for Abia Central Senatorial seat and you are facing two strong opponents, somebody, who had been in the Senate for 4 years, standing for APC and another candidate, who is seeking re-election on the platform of PDP, how do you see your chances and strategies of defeating these two candidates?
It is even written in the bible in Ecclesiastics chapter 3:1, which says that there are seasons for things. If in 20 years or 12 years, you cannot find a solution to the ills of the society, it simply means that you are clueless about the solutions and therefore it will be criminal to seek to influence to lead these people, if after 20 years you’ve made them worse than they were.
Nkechi Nwaogu has no business coming back or attempting to come back to the Senate. Whatever it is that she forgot, she should tell me, I will collect it for her, from the Chamber. Coming to Theodore Orji, I strongly believe that he is the major problem the state has and the reason why I have come out, is to challenge him.
He has been a chief of staff for 8 years, governor for 8 years and senator and super governor for nearly 4 years and don’t forget that this gentleman retired from civil service, so he must have done 35 years in service. And I think Abia State has deteriorated under his watch. And I think he should bow out from the leadership of the state. There is nothing more that this gentleman can offer to this state.
What are your chances?
In 2015, Theodore Orji got 44,000 votes from Osisioma. He lost in his Local Government, and lost everywhere and he was losing to a guy that did not even contest for election in the true sense of it. I am from Osisioma and it is unlikely that that scenario will repeat itself in 2019, because coming from Osisioma, guarantees me some votes. So, I think I stand a very good chance of defeating my opponents hands down, no matter how much they play in their system.
What will you do differently, if elected into the senate?
I have a manifesto, but aside from that I also believe that APGA will win the 2019 elections in Abia. I believe that we will win in all positions, because the people are yawning desperately for change and the elites cannot continue to keep quiet, while things continue to go wrong. And that is why people like us came into politics.
In 1934 when Adolph Hitler was coming into power, some Jews and elites among that society in Germany, felt unperturbed, by the anti movement of the Nazi Party and that consumed over 60 million people.
Abia State is not working. Abia State is a failed State; Abia Central has no representation anywhere. So, when I get into Senate, one of the first things that I will do, which is in my manifesto, is to invest in education.
I like education a lot. I know that it won’t cost me more than N1.4 million to fence a primary or scondary school on an acre of land. I have done it before in a primary school, located in my village. We need to create a conducive atmosphere for the pupils to take their lessons. We need to also upgrade the quality of teachers, who are teaching these children, by organizing refresher courses for them. And in order to encourage them, we need to give more financial incentives to motivate them to attend these refresher courses.
We need to expand our scholarship scheme to indigent, but very intelligent students.
We will also develop vocational centres to take care of students that couldn’t get into the University, in the 6 Local Government Areas of Abia Central.
Environmental upliftment
If you pass through Osisioma, you will find out that we are living on top of plastic waste. I intend to partner with a foreign firm, using the Public Private Partnership (PPP) scheme to develop a cottage industry that will recycle this plastic waste and convert them to plastic bottle waters. How will it work? When you bring your plastic waste to our reception area, they will weigh it and pay you some money, clean it, melt and remold it and sale it.
If we get the economic model right, it will be self sustaining and have important effect on the economy of the people, because people will be paid for picking up plastics on the road. We will process it, convert them to pharmaceutical and plastic water bottles and sell it to companies that need them.
And we believe that over some years the impact will be felt. We believe that it will go a long way, if we get it right to start living in a clean environment.
I believe strongly that we need to rebuild infrastructure, especially the ones that we think are strategic. For example, the road between Osisioma junction to Eke Akpara, pass the market to Owerrinta into Imo River. We can dualise it, channel the water from Osisioma and direct it into Imo River.
What you have done is to open up that axis that populates about 200,000 people. When you open up that road, you then can modernize Eke Akpara Market, through a PPP arrangement.
Having dualised and created a world class road network into that place, you have opened up that market and people from neighbouring States of Imo, Anambra and others, will find it more convenient to pass through that ultra-modern road and get into that market. And what it means is that you will have more demand and the subsistent farming of our people, will attract more price, because when supply is constant and you have more demand, the price goes up.
And you don’t require State funding to get these done. You can actually go into fund arrangement to get it done. These things are workable. You can think about concessioning of the road and tie the money as part of the cost of the road project or the ultra-modern market. These things are workable; you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that they are working.
So, when you dualise the road to Eke Akpara Market, channeling the water to Owerrinta, that will cost between N1.8 billion to N2 billion. You don’t need to do it in one year, you can do it in 18 months. And you could actually be running that simultaneously with the development of the market.
People would move into that area. Price of land will go up; urbanization will start crippling to these villages. The culture and way of doing things will change. There will be new houses. These are things that can be done within two to three years effortlessly without the State putting good money, apart from seed money.
Abia State is a laughing stock, because multilaterals don’t take us serious, nobody takes what we are talking about serious.
If you go to Ikwuano, there is a bridge that just collapsed about three months ago. A bridge that is less than 100 meters, it now takes people about 3 hours to go round the bridge to be able to connect the road and that bridge will not cost more than a N100 million to N150 million to rehabilitate.
We can take some palliative measures to ensure that the road is motorable before complete rehabilitation.
We intend to do all that, because I hear there is a constituency project fund of about N700 million per annum, which is about N2.8 billion for four years, and other legitimate monies, available to Legislators to appropriate.
N2.8 billion that you expend expeditiously can clean up the whole of Abia Central.
Portable Water
A sumo costs about N45,000 in Ariaria, but if you buy these equipment in large quantity, the price will drop. A generator to power the Sumo in Ariaria is about N70,000. There is what they call mounted drilling equipment, used to drill borehole, it was about N22 million to N23 million 4 months ago. What it means is that, you over 2 to 3 years, provide portable water in all villages in Abia Central. And these facilities will be handed over to the youth associations in the communities to take care of.
Electricity
I bought the transformer in front of my compound for N2.4 million. It is brand new. And if you go to Germany, you can even get better ones for less that price and so we are going to provide transformers in all the communities in Abia Central.
Road maintenance
We can buy earth moving equipment for every local Government and make our horrible roads motorable, pending when there is money to asphalt them. These equipment are not expensive. A fairly used Caterpillar in the United States of America is not up to N15 million. We’ll introduce centralized fuelling system to monitor the handlers.
These things are workable and won’t stop you from living a good life.
I keep telling people in position of authority that controls common resources of the people that N2 billion you put in Federal Government Treasury Bill, will give you N25 million every month with your principal sum still intact. So, why do you want to steal N30 billion to N40 billion.
What are you spending that N25 million cannot pay the bills every month? So, if for example, you’ve gotten or stolen N2 billion, why don’t you stop stealing and now start looking at your legacy?
What they fail to understand is that these generations unborn that they are accumulating this illegal wealth for cannot manage it. Some of the boys living under the bridge in Lagos are from good homes. Their parents stole for them, and when they died, their children didn’t know how to manage it, because they never worked for it.
So, they will sell everything. 5 to 10 years down the line, there will be nothing to sale. And by this time, they have gotten used to drugs, women and laziness. So, what becomes of the family?
Finally, let me conclude on what I want to do in Abia Central. I will also make sure that citizens of Abia Central, especially the youths are placed in the right and appropriate Federal parastatals-the army, police, immigrations, federal ministries, among others.
Qualitative representation
I will give my people of Abia Central qualitative representation and attract Federal presence to the zone.
Of course you’ll ask how is that going to be, as APGA is not going to be the number-one party after the election, but there is going to be a Senate President. I’m sure he or she, whoever that will emerge will need some form of support from APGA. And if we play the right politics, we will support the right person. The candidate will win and there will be some conditions.
And this thing is about interest, so we will play the politics for the interest of our people. We want to show that there are possibilities in voting for the right people.
What makes you outstanding among other contestants?
I have done everything that you’ll expect a man to do. I don’t want to say a couple of things so that I won’t sound immodest. I have reached the pinnacle of my profession, haven attend the highest position of my profession, which is the President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN).
All my biological and non-biological children are all graduates. I have built all the houses I need to build. My wife and I are low maintenance people. I am not going into politics to make money. I came into politics to challenge the high level of impunity in this State. I came into Politics to see what I can do to liberate Abia State, for my children to be able to identify with Abia State and proudly answer my name in this State. And most impotently, I’m a people’s person.
In 2008 when I didn’t have any form of plan to run for elective office, I gave out almost 100 motorcycles, free. It is verifiable. I was coming home one evening, some youths blocked me and said we must drink together and I came down and joined them and they made a request that they need motorcycles for commercial purposes. I told them to write their names and 3 weeks later, I delivered on my promise.
In 2004, I built a civic centre for my community, when I hadn’t a house in my father’s compound. I was still living in my father’s house., but I built a civic centre of about N16 million.
How did I do that?
I saw a widow that was crying that they seized her farming tools, because she couldn’t pay N1,000 levy for that civic centre. I called her and after narrated her ordeal, I called the person in charge to refund everybody their money and promised to build the civic centre, which I delivered in 90 days.
