The DeltaState governorship candidate of Democratic Peoples Party (DPP), Chief Great Ovedje Ogboru, on Sunday, once again said that all doors are not closed against him of becoming governor of the state before 2015, imploring his supporters to keep hope alive.
In Abraka, his home town, Chief Ogboru while speaking to newsmen at the end of the state meeting of DPP held at the Abraka River Motel, said that the legal firework for him to occupy government house, Asaba before 2015 was not over yet.
While expressing the hope that sooner or later, his dream of becoming DeltaState governor will be realised, Chief Ogboru picked holes in section 285 of the 1999 amended constitution.
In his words; “First the merit of our case has not been heard at all and we are challenging the legitimacy of section 285 of the amended constitution of 1999. I think there is a process somewhere that is going to remove the insertion. We want to get rid of section 285 because it is an illegitimate insertion.”
Here, we serve you the full details of the interview
Why are we in Abraka today?
Let me first of all thank all of you for coming. The main reason why we are here today is to address our faithful. As you are all aware after the last election we went to the tribunal, from there to the Appeal Court and then to the Supreme Court. We felt that the tribunal did not do enough in the number of votes they nullified. About a hundred and fifty five votes were nullified and we asked the Supreme Court to do that. But there is this insertion into the constitution which we are also challenging section 285 (7) which limits the time for an electoral petition should be dispensed with, and we believe that this insertion is not a valid insertion because it did not meet all the constitutional requirements for an amendment to be made in our constitution. Well, in any case, as you know, the Supreme Court did not hear our case and they in fact threw us out of court. They simply said that our lawyer, Sylvester was brought to public disrepute and for that reason we simple lost our right to appeal. And of course that is ridiculous anywhere in the world. And I am sure that the Supreme Court Justice who sat over that issue will confess that he carried out a great injustice, not just only to the Democratic People’s Party, not just to my person but the entire Nigerian people and of course to the continent at large. Having said that, we thought that this is the best time, having exhausted all possibilities, to speak to our teeming followers, our faithful, those who have stood with us in all these trying times, and to tell them that hope is not lost and that they should keep hope alive and we also believe that what was taken from us must be brought back. And that we are not leaving any stone unturned in the process to do so. We will still be exploring all available means to get justice. In any case, we thought it was time to say thank you to them and that is what we have done today. We also want to let them know that all the political calculation will not leave us out and that we should not be in hurry to do whatever they have been told to do by some persons. They should remain faithful to the DPP and maintain our structure in the state because if the DPP is united as we have seen today there is no political party that can beat us, and that is the truth. So I am surprised when some people say that because one or three persons have left our party, our party is dead. Or because we are not going to get help from the South West our party is dead. Our party is not going to die because of the help we are not going to get from South West or any part of the country. Our party will die when our people refused to believe in the quest for justice and the quest to enthrone democracy in the state. When we have failed in that our party will die. But as long as we believe that we want a change and we stand for change and we are seeking for justice, I do not think this party is going to die until justice is gotten. So that is what we are telling us, please stay where you are and wherever we are going to go if we are going somewhere, it must be as a political party. We are not joining any party but we are not averse to a merger. We will merge, but on the proper terms of merging. We are not going to do merger behind closed doors or from the back door. When we want to merge, there are principles of merging. When you want to merge you must recognize your strength and weaknesses. We concede your strength to you and then we dispense with our weaknesses. That is what merger is all about. But when a merger emerged in trying to create a new political party, we do not see that as a merger at all. So, as far as we are concerned Democratic Peoples Party we are not in this merger at all, and of course, the registration by INEC has proved that. There are only three parties in that merger and any one that is joining is a new comer. And if we are going to join the merger one day – I say one day – it will be on the principle of merging. We shall find out who have the strength and capabilities and in which part and whereof in this state and to be able to take responsibilities of moving our people forward. That is really why we are here. The chairman has said so eloquently. But unfortunately I could not tell our people, but I have to go out in rain and talk to them to assure them of this.
What is your party doing to ensure that it wins the vacant position caused by the death of Senator Pius Ewherido?
The chairman of the party is here and I think he should answer that question. Well, our party is going to field a credible candidate at the end of the day. If you saw in the gathering we have very important, serious and responsible Nigerians who are members of our party. For instance we have Sir Richard Odibo, Olorugun O’tega Emerhor, who was in our party and we do not know if he is still in our party, we have Ede Dafinone, we had Napoleon Gbinije, Chief Abel Izomare Oharume, Olorugun Abel Edijala, all these are eminent people in the state and I think they are all qualified to be senators. But with the structure of the Democratic Peoples Party in the state, especially in Delta Central, I do not see how we will not produce the Senator. It is not impossible. For any party again to muster the kind of gathering we had here today, all faithful, not paid, not rented crowd, faithful who came to show their solidarity and to show their loyalty to the aspiration of the party.
Local government election is around the corner and in less than two years the governorship election will take place, what structures are you putting in place to ensure that your party is not rigged out?
Well, the peculiarity of the problems in DeltaState is the riverine communities. And it was from these riverine communities that they manufactured two hundred and ninety-one thousand votes to defeat us. I know we defeated our closes rival by a wide margin of not less than a hundred and eighty thousand votes and these two hundred and ninety-nine thousand votes was an experience for us and in the next election we will not allow the INEC to be complacent again for votes from non-existing communities to be used to defeat the wish of the people of Delta State. We will be talking to INEC on this and there is going to be a workshop when the INEC Chairman will be here on the 25th of August. We shall make a presentation to INEC and we shall follow vigorously for INEC to redress this and to assure us that this will not happen again. As a matter of fact we are going to show empirically to INEC that the communities they are talking about, the voter turn-out was in excess of 90%, whereas the average nationwide was about 35%. We shall show by empirical evident that this is not just lip talk, we are not just crying wolf when we should not be crying wolf, we are saying as a matter of fact that we were defeated not by legitimate votes but by invalid votes.
What are you doing to ensure that people who are not members of DPP do not infiltrate your party to cause chaos?
It is not possible to infiltrate the party just like that because this is a tested party. It is a party that believed in goals. We are not in politics because we are looking for political office per say. We are people who believe that democracy, good governance and the rule of law should prevail in the state. So if you come here as an infiltrator it will be very easy to find you out because in any case the structures that are on ground is tested and they have withstood several unfavorable circumstances. So infiltrators cannot come into our midst because we know ourselves.
You are very sure that you are going to get justice because you are always talking about justice and knowing full well that corruption is increasing in the state. What is the magic wand and why do you think you will get justice eventually?
Because we are looking at history and we are looking at where we are coming from. We came from 2003 for which results were announced of elections that did not take place, the results announced were not the true results. We did not die. We challenged that and we took it to the Supreme Court and it somehow got into the ex-convict case. We did not give up hope because we knew that it was a miscarriage of justice. Nevertheless, in 2007, the worst took place and elections did not take place at all in this state but the government was put in place. We challenged that in the Court of Appeal. And then the governor was dethroned and a re-run election was declared. We lost that re-run election by the voodoo votes that came from the riverine communities. And then we have the other election in 2011 where we had proper elections in our 18 local governments and in those local governments we won about nine or ten of them properly. We were declared in about nine of them and we challenged the results of about three of them. So you can see that in 2011 we already declared winners in about nine local governments. We have a Senator won for us, we have members of representatives and that means we were making progress. Some of them were in PDP but they crossed over to our party because they believe in the programmes of our party. For those who have gone back we have said goodbye to them and they will not come back again. The important thing is that we believe we are making progress and that Rome was not built in a day. And if we could get about ten or eleven members in the house in 2011, then nothing stops us in 2015 from getting the governorship, getting two or three members in the Senate, getting about five or six members in the House of Representatives, and of course we are going for 17 or 18 of the members of the House of the Assembly. We believe very much in this and we know the difficulty in making change in the political environment. So sometimes, also when we are critical of the justices of the Supreme Court and the justices of the courts in our land, we also understand that political decisions are very difficult. If you understand that you are working in a political environment we have to do some home works right. We shall get there and we have no doubt about it.
Are you running for the gubernatorial position come 2015?
I think it is too premature to say so. Earlier on I told you that sometimes we think that the course is lost and it is not.
Is it true that you do not defend your votes after elections?
It is not truth. If we did not secure our votes we would not have had members in the House of Assembly, we could never have had a Senator and members in the House of Representatives. We were not declared a governor in DeltaState because we cannot produce results or annul election, that is why.
You were quoted sometime ago of saying that before the governor’s tenure expires you are going to occupy government house, tell us the magic?
First the merit of our case has not been heard at all and we are challenging the legitimacy of section 285 of the amended constitution of 1999. I think there is a process somewhere that is going to remove the insertion. We want to get rid of section 285 because it is an illegitimate insertion. And when that happens the merit of our case will be heard.
I was at a press conference when one of your Chairmen alleged that DPP has merged with APC, what do you have to say about this?
You are talking about Chief Henry Olori. He was expelled from our party and he will continue to misrepresent himself in public. He is not our Chairman in central. We have expelled him. As you are seeing today, some people misrepresent themselves trying to deceive the public that DPP has merged with APC. But when INEC came up with the registration of APC they told you specifically that there are only three political parties that merged. So those people that have told you that we have merged with APC are actually living in fool paradise. They do not know what they were doing. They do not understand the structure and constitutional demands and they think that their wish may become law.
Just for your information, only on the 1st of August this year, that is a few days ago, the Independent National Electoral Commission gave us a letter addressed to the National Chairman of Democratic Poeples Party, Major General B.S. Magashi (Rtd) confirming that there is no faction in DPP, which is to say that DPP is one. Anybody who is organizing himself in our party with the intention of going to another party, of course he is free to do so. But the legitimacy of such an action is questionable.
