Victor Akpan, a University of Jos trained architect is a civil and construction engineering industry specialist. The old student of Federal Government College, Okigwe is the Nsit Ubium chairmanship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the December 2, 2017 Local Government elections. The widely travelled scion of the late Chief Frank Okon Akpan, one of Nigeria’s finest pioneer port administrators and former General Manager in the Nigeria Ports Authority, in this interview with Ibom Telegraph, says the APC will shock Akwa Ibom people in the elections. Excerpts:
You are very experienced, widely read and traveled. For some time now, we have not had your type come into contests like this and people think your coming into this chairmanship race in Nsit Ubium has upped the ante. What motivated you to do this?
In life, usually there comes a time where you take certain decisions and those decisions are usually governed by a lot of things. Getting involved in politics at this time has got to do with many factors. Of course, here in Akwa Ibom it is unusual to see somebody like me get involved in politics at the local government council level. But you really need to understand that local government is the arm of government that is closest to the people and if you consider that, it means that is where you can reach the bulk of the populace at the local level and interact with them if you are thinking about giving back to the society. For me, I have risen to a certain height in my professional career and equally, I have rightly travelled widely and when you see things happen and the kind of development elsewhere, you wish you had it back home. When you come back and see the way and the condition in our local government areas where majority of Nigerians live, most of the time you are thrown aback and you wonder why so. The simple truth is that we do not have the quality of leadership that is needed to move those places to the level that it should be and I think you need a lot of very experienced people to be at the grass root level to be able to deliver the dividends of democracy to the people.
So, getting into this at this point has got to do with a call to service and the fact that I can actually take our people to the next development level and get government presence to be felt by the people.
Specifically, what do you have to offer to your people?
When you look at the local level and what is directly in the purview of the local government council, you look at early education which has got to do with pre-school; you look at primary healthcare and agriculture. These are things that most affect people at that level. That is why my campaign is anchored principally on these three point agenda. Of course we know that employment is paramount; accessibility to funds for job creation in the private enterprise is paramount but at this level, for you to impact on the people at the local government level, the greatest and fastest way to enhance or emancipate them economically is for you to increase their involvement in both agriculture and early education. And if you do that, you will be able to up their development and progress.
So, if you get agriculture to be largely entrenched at different levels in the local government area, then you will be able to create employment and get earning power down to the people at the local level. Then the other part of it is that education must be really enhanced for us to get the people to the level where they can contribute optimally to the economy of the country. So, education at the early level, which is actually what lays the foundation for you to be able to attain any other height in life and that is direct in the control of the local government council, must not be toyed with. So, you need to look closely at that and that I will do. I will look closely at education to be able to prepare our people to take an active part in the 21st century. It will be a disservice to our people if we cannot get this done.
Then, when you look at primary healthcare, from the studies that have been carried out in the country by the World Health Organization and by our own health authorities, it is the biggest problem that we have. Access to basic treatment for malaria, clinics for normal delivery is totally lacking and this is where we have the highest infant mortality rate and equally death of mothers during child-birth. So, we will come up with ways that we are going to provide this basic healthcare at the local level to our people and increase life expectancy. So, if can look at those things that are directly simple and straight forward and actually dabble in them at that level, then we would have at least started.
You must have gone out to meet and interact with the people, how has your reception at the local government level been and given the fact that you are going to stand election against an opponent of a party that is the ruling party at the state and at the local government?
The reception in the first instance was a big surprise and so far it has been overwhelming and when I get to interact with the youth and with the people at the local level, I found out that they are not as naïve as we may think. When we go out on campaigns and town hall meetings to discuss with the people, I find them to be very receptive and they are all interested in seeing new things happen and being done differently from the way that it has been done previously. At first, they tell you all their disappointments and all that has been going on, how they have been given false promises and all the times their hopes are raised and then dashed thereafter. And when you come up and interact with them on the possibilities in the local area, you get so amazed at what they will tell you. For instance, 90% of the rural roads are actually not motorable and it seems we are actually retrogressing because I know early on when we were little kids, when you go home you find out that people use to sweep roads in the village. They had days that were set aside for things to be done and now those things are no more and the roads are all eroded because they now form trough for which rain water flows. So the roads are now the drains and the gullies. So you can hardly drive on them. There are simple things that can be done and even most of our rural areas do not have power. And this, to my mind, is the most difficult thing. You cannot understand why it happened. There is actually no plan to how it is ever going to be done. It is just sporadic and there is no culture of saying you are getting things done in a systematic way. So, we are interacting with people to see the need to have an organized rural planning for these places and they are very receptive and happy about it.
How do you hope to wriggle through all these, knowing that Nsit Ubium is PDP-controlled?
I will like to remind you that Nigeria was a PDP-controlled country and now we have an APC President. Yes, we have very strong PDP stalwarts in Nsit Ubium but we equally have strong APC stalwarts too. Nsit Ubium is actually one of the Local Government Areas that we have parity in the capacity and strength of the two political parties. Apart from that, my candidature is not about APC or PDP. My candidature is more about Nsit Ubium. Whenever I am discussing with the people, I discuss across aboard and from my interactions, we are discussing what is the situation on the ground and how to move our people from this situation to the next level and I have found a lot of reception in that thinking. And right now, my people are thinking in the direction of how we can get Nsit Ubium to the next level and not divided along party lines strictly anymore and I think Nsit Ubium politics is gradually getting to that point. So, for me, it is not just about party. It is about the people of Nsit Ubium.
Why did you choose the APC as a platform to achieve that?
The truth is that for the past 18 years we have been having the same kind and way of doing things, which is the impunity way, and that truly is not sustainable. Secondly, if you really do not give the people the option, then you have not really given them the opportunity to make a choice, which is what democracy is all about. In this case, we need to be able to have another option and the option that is truly forward was that of the party that did transparent primaries and in this case, we are all aware of what happened in the PDP. They were handpicking candidates. But we had proper primaries and elections in the APC. Therefore it could throw up the quality of candidates that can actually come into the arena and deliver the real dividends of democracy. If you really want to glance through the pedigree of the APC candidates in this particular election and if we were to put it side-by-side those of the PDP, I will leave that to you to assess. And if we look at that, I will say our democracy is maturing.
On your own, can you assess the pedigree of the candidates of the two parties?
If we were to assess broadly and compare both candidates in my local government, we are going to look at exposure, experience and educational background. And I will say that that of the APC is the stronger and this is replicated in other local government areas. For instance, if you look at Etinan, Mkpat Enin and other local government areas, you will see that the APC made a better choice. The system that threw up the candidates of the APC is a better system and it just simply because it allowed internal democracy to prevail.
People think the local government election is already won possibly because Akwa Ibom State Independent Electoral Commission (AKISIEC) that is controlled by the state government will be the umpire of the election. Are you not bothered by that? Why throw your hat into that kind of ring?
When people feel or think the election has already been won, I think it is not very correct. Yes, the State Government controls AKISIEC and the State Government from antecedence has been doing selection of candidates instead of election but in those days in the life of Nigeria, particularly Akwa Ibom, there were no opposition parties and today, we have a robust opposition party in the state. For the first time in Akwa Ibom, we have an opposition party that is fielding candidates in all the elections and an opposition that has a very strong presence at the national level. So, the constitution is not one that allows you to handpick a candidate for elective position. There is going to be election and it is our place not to give in to the handpicking of candidates for elective positions. It is for us to insist that the elections are done.
Again, you asked why do I get involved in an election that is assumed by the people to be won. For God sake, if you don’t stand up and be counted and don’t stand up for something, who will? We have to draw a new line in what concerns us and in the development of our state and say enough-is-enough. That is one of the reasons why I felt that there is no reason to sit down and expect that the right thing will be done. So, I think this election is going to be quite different.
We have a new Board of AKISIEC in the state; do you have trust in it to deliver on transparency?
No, I do not have the trust and confidence that AKISIEC will deliver transparently but we are going to insist and see to it that AKISIEC delivers. We will insist that the new Board does the right thing and we expect them to do the right thing.
Why don’t you have the confidence?
My reason is based on AKISIEC’s antecedence and the way things had been done before by the same political party and the state government. As I have said earlier, the times are different. So, I expect them to act differently by conducting a free, fair and transparent election where votes will count.
Nsit Ubium is one local government area that is filled with political heavyweights and these days, it is believed that people do not just aspire to occupy political offices without riding on the shoulders of such heavyweights. Whose shoulder are you riding on? Do you have a godfather?
I actually do not believe that the right word should be godfather because in our politics we have seen the way godfatherism has taken us to. In our own case in Nsit Ubium, I consulted across board and I am known across board. I am known by all the political heavyweights and I will like to say that they were all excited to have somebody with my pedigree involved. So, it has nothing to do with a particular godfather. So, I want to tell you that I am a candidate that has been accepted across board. Irrespective of the political differences, I know that most of the heavyweights already know who I am and what I stand for and they know what to expect. So, I enjoy the support of most of the prominent and exposed people in my local government.
