Nseobong Okon-Ekong holds a conversation with Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State on how he is tackling security challenges in his state and the big move to bring new and more vigorous life, especially in economic terms to Aba, the popular commercial city
Abia has been enmeshed in multi-pronged security challenges, how have you been managing these crises?
I was trying to say that if I have the privilege of being in charge of the policing of my state, part of what you will see that is different is that from the first day, I will establish a county police force. Every local government will have a Sheriff that will be under the control of the local government chairman with sufficient power to bring criminals down and police their locality. They will also be advised to put intelligence on ground at the community level involving the traditional rulers and everybody that needs to be part of it. We are looking at how to gather sufficient intelligence and ensure that these criminals don’t crystalize and imbed. At the state level, it will be the duty of the state command to undertake research and intelligence; to digitalize and bring science and technology to bear in the operations of those various areas. We are going to have special considerations for border communities to make sure that we don’t allow unfettered filtration of wanted criminals. There is a programme already. We are having a little bit of problem in implementing it. We call it the CPAMS-Crime Prevention and Management Systems-to ensure that somebody who is a criminal and arrested at Osisioma cannot be on bail and become a pastor or a bishop in Obinwa. Every local government DPO, will have a tablet. On that tablet, you do your case file. It will completely abolish writing crime diary on a chalk board in the police stations. That is not the way to go. If you say Chijioke Lawal was arrested for kidnapping-everything about him; his height, complexion, the colour of his eyes, any mark that are outstanding and his picture will be taken, his fingerprints; the IPO investigating the crime takes Chijioke to his village, takes picture of his house and then gets the identity of his parents and their telephone numbers and everything about Chijioke. If Chijioke is granted bail or escapes or something happens and Chijioke suddenly appears somewhere else and begins to commit crime again. Once they apprehend Chijoke, what the DPO there will do; if he decides to bear another name, is to put his height, complexion, colour of his eyes and fingerprint into the system. The name will pop up-the question will come, you were Chijioke Lawal two weeks ago at Obinwa, how come you bear a different name altogether?
This is basic. We have bought the computers. We went ahead to do solar panels for powering these things in the various police stations, but because we don’t have the capacity to sanction the Abia State Police Command, assuming they refuse to use and implement it, they can just be looking at it. I tried to get the IGP at that time to adopt this thing and replicate it all over. I don’t know what is difficult in making that to happen.
It is possible to study the pattern of crime. For every law enforcement officer that is killed, that should be good enough for a B.Sc thesis in the Police College. As a layman, I can see certain patterns that will be useful in terms of diagnosing and predicting how these criminals operate and what they are doing. Such depth of research can carried out, case-by-case, so that somebody will do an analysis and be able to look at patterns. As a scientist, I don’t believe in coincidence, I believe that action leads to reaction. We need to enrich our data and our capacity to predict. Once you can’t predict a criminal, the criminal will continue to surprise you. These are time tested devices and strategies all over the world. It shouldn’t be a problem for us.
Then the reaction time is another issue. A police officer is confronted by somebody who is clutching an AK47 and he is waiting for an order. The man that is out there with the AK47 has his order to gun you down. Once that AK47 is fired, it will be too late. I have seen instances when we saw hoodlums approaching and soldiers are in place, but because they had no orders, the soldiers moved away. Policing our space has to come from a home-grown strategy. You can’t possibly copy and paste. Everything you want to talk about, survival and otherwise has a relation with geography-where you are in time and space.
Abia, for instance, is almost a confluence state-Abia has a border with seven states. Apart from Kaduna, no other state has as many borders. I have looked at it. It keeps us where whatever happens in Rivers-if they police well, we are in trouble because the criminals will come here. If they don’t police well, we are also in trouble because the criminals will create enclaves around the border. Criminals love the border towns because they can crisscross. They know also that there is a limitation, in terms of what a CP can do beyond the borders of his state. So, why are we still tying our hands behind our backs and asking ourselves to run? It speaks to everything.
People largely decided to sit at home, not necessarily because all of them believe in the ideology of IPOB, when the proscribed asked them to stay at home. For me, I could not rise to say you must go out. I was elected here to protect lives and property. Whenever I see myself unable or incapable of protecting lives and property of my people; I don’t want to put them in harm’s way. Most of the people could not even be persuaded to go out because they looked at how they will make and the value of their lives and they preferred to stay at home. When I drove around town, I didn’t see police officers patrolling or moving around. In some states where police officers ventured out, they were attacked. We are in place where we need to prepare the Nigeria Police Force and the military to do the needful. They are not sufficiently prepared. I do not know how many of us will want our children, I don’t even know many Superintendent of Police who will want their children to go and enlist in the Nigeria Police, the way it is. It has become a very risky job. What we need to do is to step up our game. Can we raise the bar to the point that we equip them sufficiently to do the needful? There is something going for these bandits. Some of them are very fetish. They believe in native doctors. Whether the native doctor’s charm will work or not, it places them where they are psychologically attuned to the risk they want to take and then confronting people who are demoralized and running for their dear lives. This is the time for us to begin a new thinking. At the root of all of these, we must do two more things-one, is to seize the initiative and to be a little bit more creative in terms of providing opportunities for our youths, by engaging them through job creation. The other one is that we must now embark on massive social mobilization strategies. You can’t do security successfully anywhere if the people are not sufficiently mobilized. Social mobilization is everything. It supports governance. It supports security because the people can rise and tell you this is where the criminals are hiding-they are in my farm. They are behind my house. The person is doing so, knowing that they intelligence will be actionable and that it will free him and his children eventually and not to put him at grave risk. You can’t ask people to take risks unless they are very sure their chances for survival is more than 50-50.
These criminals that you are talking about have other persuasions, for instance, those who are agitating for independence, for them, criminality is by the way, there real intention is freedom, as it were. Are you exploiting the option of trying to engage them, to hear their grievances or take their grievances to the central government?
I am pro-conversion, pro-negotiation, pro-discussion. I know that the fiercest wars, the most difficult of wars end in the conference room. Why don’t we start there? The problem is to say that I won’t listen at all. I have a message for those of them who think that this is the channel. I want to say to them that this can’t work. It has not worked anywhere. It is going to be costly. It is going to bring about serious casualties. If you say a group of people do not like you and that man who does not like, you chose to play with is dog, if his dog bites you, who will take responsibility? I am saying that this route is not the way to go. That is why I think that they may be enjoying some sympathy from a few people who don’t have the privilege of sufficient knowledge in things like these, who are acting ignorantly. If they were serious, this is the time for them to also have an arm that is capable of engaging. If my phone rings today and I pick it up and it is somebody and the person introduces himself as commander of ESN, I am not going to end the call. I will ask him Mr. Commander, where are you? What is the matter? If he offers to talk to me, I will give him only one or two conditions. The first condition I will give is, let me know what your grievances are. If he tells me the grievances even if he gives some conditions like bringing back my late mother, which is impossible, I will also listen and then it will be my remedy to say I have heard everything I don’t think this one is doable. This is doable and this is how long it will take and all of that. Before I take it from that room, I will ask him to give assurances that if I go into this conversation, there will be ceasefire; that if I achieve results holding this conversation that there will be ceasefire. If you are not prepared to change. If you are not prepared to give peace a chance. If you are not prepared to allow the system to move forward, then you also not prepared to engage. I can’t embark on an enterprise that does not hold prospects of yielding fruits. I have heard some of the things and I heard people say some of the things that are agitating the mind of our people. I still believe strongly that some of them can be handled, some of them can be done. It will be perhaps unfair to imagine that President Buhari can do everything within two years. That will be unfair. I dare say that he can begin the conversation.
There was a 2017 engagement between some South-east governors and Nnamdi Kanu at a peace meeting brokered by Mr. Elliot Ugochukwu-Uko, President of Igbo Youth Movement, what happened? Why did it fail?
I do not think I was at that meeting, but I know and I heard from some people who have contacts with Kanu, he reneged on some of the terms of the conversation. I have not had the privilege of going back to Nnamdi or any of his lieutenants to say, why did you renege? I am also sure that he will have some stories to tell. It goes back to trust deficits and lack of it. It borders on who we are. We are structurally defective. Even as the Chief Security Officer of the state, how much do I know in terms of the operations of the armed forces in my territory? I do not have the details of their operational mandate. I do not know their strategy. If I go and stick out my neck and claim to be able to do this and that, what happens if something goes wrong? You remember what happened to Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State? He asked one notorious bandit to come to government house to surrender. He persuaded the guy to leave his location in the forest and the guy was willing, but on his way, in a convoy of state house vehicles, he was attacked and killed. We have to be responsible. We have to be trust worthy. We just have to be intentional about solving this problem because the much that has gone under the bridge already is capable of putting everything we have done in jeopardy. You are dealing with people. Every state, every nation develops with other peoples money-OPM. For you to attract Other Peoples Money, there are certain things you must put in place. There must be peace, then you must have a strong judiciary that can be predictable and trusted. An investor who is coming from Switzerland, his godfather is the law and trust enforcers of the law are his strength. If he comes to a place where a judge can say anything. Court can sit at 9pm. Things can happen and you are surprised and there is no due process, every other thing that you have done collapses. Every investor earned his money and he goes to a place that will give him return on investment and not because of any other sentiment. There are criminal investors. There are people who are in the business of selling arms and drugs to mine diamonds in Congo or they want to plant confusion in Niger Delta and steal Nigerian oil. Those are criminal investors, but any right thinking investor wants to see due process and watch his investment mature and grow and it takes them time.
I once went to China to canvass for investor to invest in Enyimba Economic City and the guy that we met has the richest cotton farm in the world. He commissioned a study-two professors to study Africa and Aba and Nigeria and they were sitting in the room. For over six months they did not do any other thing apart from sourcing for pieces of information on Aba. They perhaps knew my place better than me and the man had a facility that once I mentioned a place he put it on Google map. It was not a question of trying to deceive anybody. We were asking him to bring his money. For him to make a decision about bringing his money, he had to employ two professors for six months and beamed the searchlight here. The things we deny are also known. The more we deny those things, the worse it becomes for us. If you have a subordinate who steals your money or takes away your phone, and you say, ‘Old boy where is my phone?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know’, but the phone is in his pocket. He knows he wants to steal it and steal again. If he says, ‘Sir, I put it in my pocket mistakenly’, you can give him a second chance. The CCTV caught him put it in his pocket and he is still denying then you know that he wants to steal and steal again. When we are in denial of some of the issues and challenges, we make ourselves a laughing stock. This administration both at the centre and sub-national level have laboured to put a lot of things in place. We can build the best rail and nobody will use it. You can build the best airport and nobody flies there. The greatest thing we needed to do is to mobilize Nigerians and in mobilizing Nigerians every leader must be sufficiently dynamic to listen and to respond frankly. Who will give me information about where these people are, are they not the people? All the drug barons in the world like Pablo Escobar succeeded for a while because right there in his village, he was spending money among his people and they refused to expose him. Once, they see anything strange they tell him and he begins to prepare himself. We must take away the heart of our youths from wandering. We must occupy them with something that they can do, they see and touch and apply their energies. Otherwise somebody comes to preach to them that you do not have a future and if the person wants to buttress his argument he points graduates in that community who are Okada riders, then nobody will go to school again.
Nnamdi Kanu is your subject, have you ever met or spoken to him? Has he tried to reach you?
I have never met him. Incidentally during Python Dance and all of that he was still around. He has never reached me. Whether he has been trying I don’t know. He should know that I am not averse to conversations
I don’t know how to reach him sincerely speaking. I became very worried and a little laid back because of the things he says. I was just trying to see if I can read his psyche from where I stand that would reinforce my confidence in making overtures or trying but he positions himself as a factor against me. How do I even try to reach him? I am not somebody who will say can we meet and then we don’t. May be the opportunity hasn’t come. If he had people around him that can sit down and talk, not in the manner he talks. If I am coming into a conversation, I come prepared to make concessions and yield ground. I also want to talk to somebody who will be prepared to yield ground too. If you are coming to hold a conversation with somebody that you know ab initio will not yield ground what is the point going into the conversation?
What is the secret of your being in a relatively good relationship with your predecessor?
I bring everything-every resource, every knowledge available to bear in every assignment I am given. I bring my Christina background. I bring my home training. I bring everything. By the special grace of God, I am somebody who is a little modest about my expectations from people. I take my destiny in my hands. I do things myself. I am also very sensitive to other peoples feelings. I would say also that Senator T. A. Orji is a gentleman. He has said this to people that try to instigate some misunderstanding between us that he knows the red line. He would not cross that red line. If there is an advise, T. A. wants to give to me. He would not choose to advise me on the pages of newspapers. He will try to place a call to me. At some point in the early days, he tried severally to call me on phone and I am not very good with taking calls. I had to go to him and say, ‘Sir don’t judge me by my telephone habits I am not good at taking calls.’ And he said, ‘ I have seen that you are not very good at taking calls.’ He finds a way to talk about it. That is one, the other one is that I am guided by what is true, what is fair and what is best for Abia people; knowing fully well that it is my name that will be written in the space for governors between 2015 and 2023. I don’t make the mistakes when I have to take decisions. If I need to consult him, I consult him first, as a Senator and I consult him as an elder statesman and he has earned some respect. He speaks carefully and he picks his words carefully. We have the best of relationships. He is like a father to me. He knows he can’t run Abia for me. If there is something he wants done, he usually concludes with a caveat, ‘Íf you can’t do it, leave it.’ It gives me joy that he knows that I can decide not to do it. I think of this was helped by the fact that he has been in that position before and he saw how not to be somebody’s predecessor.
What projects have you done from start to finish in the last six years?
I will like to take you to our pillars of development because I will like to be judged based on my manisfesto and the things I promised to do. It is important that I say this frankly because in 2015, I never promised that I will do everything and it will be foolhardy for anyone to expect me to do everything. I gave myself a set of questions and a marking scheme so that I can check whether I am in line. My first Pillar, because I have Five Pillars of Development, I said I was going to create a better life for Abia people, running on these five pillars and these five pillars, I crafted them based on what I think Abia people can do better than other people, but there was no time to begin to reinvent the wheel, therefore the best thing to do was to reshape the tools available and then use them to create a better life for Abia people. The first pillar was Trade and Commerce; we have the best traders all over the world from this part of Nigeria. What are the things that drive trade and commerce? Chief among them was road. How do you know if you have enabled trade and commerce? You know if you have enabled trade and commerce by what has become of your output. In 2015, nobody could go to Akwa Ibom State from here. There was no road from Aba to Akwa Ibom State. If you try, you will be spending like five hours running through bush tracks and at the risk of being victim of criminals. I know that that the oxygen that drives trade and commerce in Aba is this geography. We are at the centre of South-east and South-south states. If people from Akwa Ibom, Rivers and Cross River can’t come here and we can’t go to these states, then we can’t survive as traders. I decided to do a short-cut between Nto Edino in Akwa Ibom and Abia and connect it to Aba. Akwa Ibom people could come up to the fringes of Aba, but they couldn’t enter Aba; so quickly I did three roads in Aba within the first 100 Days and they eased you into the major roads that take you into Aba. Then the man coming from Akwa Ibom will first of all say, ‘can I get into Ariaria?’ It is not just coming to see Aba that he is coming to do. I had to now come and embark on Faulks Road. People have had problems accessing this road from end-to-end for almost 30 years. If you are coming from Port Harcourt, you need to enter Faulks Road to enter Ariaria, same with Ikot Ekpene, or you are coming from Owerri or Umuahia. You may also need to enter Brass Road to get into Faulks Road into Ariaria, but for almost 30 years that road was impassable. The people at Ariaria were not doing anything. Having opened the road all the way from Akwa Ibom into the city, I needed to open Faulks Road and we dealt with Faulks Road; so today for the first time, you can go into Faulks Road, it is a dual carriage. It is no longer a single lane. It is done and dusted. We needed to enter Ariaria so we had to do Samec, which is the widest road, I have done in Aba. It leads you into the express. We decided to do a ring road. How do we bypass Aba? People have started coming, we did another road. You can come all the way from Ikot Ekpene to Obike Abia Junction, head right and you are in Umuahia, you are in Owerri, you are in Onitsha, you don’t need to come into the city again. All these roads are done and dusted. This is my narrative about roads. We were strategic in tackling roads, we had a vision at the back of our mind that we want these roads to ease up traffic in this market to make sure that people can come into the market and then enable trade and commerce to happen. Along the line of trade and commerce also we supported the establishment of an i-hub, an ICT centre that started grooming traders in the tenets of e-commerce. They could stay at the comfort of their shop and sell their wares. With that came the business of logistics. That ICT hub is doing so well. They have moved from their previous office to somewhere around the GRA
QUOTE 1
They may be enjoying some sympathy from a few people who don’t have the privilege of sufficient knowledge in things like these, who are acting ignorantly. If they were serious, this is the time for them to also have an arm that is capable of engaging. If my phone rings today and I pick it up and it is somebody and the person introduces himself as commander of ESN, I am not going to end the call. I will ask him Mr. Commander, where are you? What is the matter? If he offers to talk to me, I will give him only one or two conditions. The first condition I will give is, let me know what your grievances are. If he tells me the grievances even if he gives some conditions like bringing back my late mother, which is impossible, I will also listen and then it will be my remedy to say I have heard everything I don’t think this one is doable. This is doable and this is how long it will take and all of that. Before I take it from that room, I will ask him to give assurances that if I go into this conversation, there will be ceasefire; that if I achieve results holding this conversation that there will be ceasefire. If you are not prepared to change. If you are not prepared to give peace a chance. If you are not prepared to allow the system to move forward, then you also not prepared to engage. I can’t embark on an enterprise that does not hold prospects of yielding fruits. I have heard some of the things and I heard people say some of the things that are agitating the mind of our people. I still believe strongly that some of them can be handled, some of them can be done. It will be perhaps unfair to imagine that President Buhari can do everything within two years. That will be unfair. I dare say that he can begin the conversation
QUOTE 2
An investor who is coming from Switzerland, his godfather is the law and trust enforcers of the law are his strength. If he comes to a place where a judge can say anything. Court can sit at 9pm. Things can happen and you are surprised and there is no due process, every other thing that you have done collapses. Every investor earned his money and he goes to a place that will give him return on investment and not because of any other sentiment. There are criminal investors. There are people who are in the business of selling arms and drugs to mine diamonds in Congo or they want to plant confusion in Niger Delta and steal Nigerian oil. Those are criminal investors, but any right thinking investor wants to see due process and watch his investment mature and grow and it takes them time
(Thisday)
