Chief Thompson K. O. was national vice chairman of the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the Second Republic. He was also the majority chief whip of the old Rivers State House of Assembly.
For those who do not know, Thompson was also the person who coined the name Bayelsa when the state was created in 1996. In this interview, he reviews governance in the state and gives reasons Governor Seriake Dickson should be re-elected.
With the appointments President Muhammadu Buhari has made so far, he seems to have excluded the South-east and South-south. What is your take on that in relation to national unity?
There is a great deal of unity in the criticism that has trailed the appointments with many insisting that he has violated the federal character principle.
There is a section of the constitution that says that the federal character, appointments and wealth creation should be distributed in such a way that a sense of belonging is given to different parts of the country. When you look at the distribution of appointments, I walked through that constitution as a law maker and these sections are there and that is why there is a federal character commission which has the responsibility of making sure that in the civil service, police, army and in the different agencies of government that there is even distribution. If it is not totally even, then there must be such a spread that every part will have and feel that we belong to Nigeria and that is what the South east is crying about and I support them. This is because they feel that they are being punished because they voted Goodluck Jonathan. They voted him for good reasons; the man appointed the first Igbo man after the war as Chief of Army Staff. They were totally forgotten and it looked as if there was even a policy then, maybe unwritten, that they won’t appoint an Igbo man as Chief of Army Staff just because there was Biafra but the country has been restructured and it is very difficult for a coup to take place now because of the decentralization of the army and indeed all the armed forces. It is good for the country that democracy has come to stay and we might follow those steps and I hope and believe in the presidency when they say that they are going to balance the appointments; we are looking forward to that.
Recently, Dickson declared for a second term. I know that you are one of his strong supporters; what are his chances for re-election?
Well, his chances are very good because firstly, he has performed very well and thank God he was in a hurry; when there was money, he rushed. Most of what he did was in his first two and a half years before the national or indeed the global halt came; so there is a slow down. Already he has completed a number of projects. He has also gone far with major ones and therefore, by the time he is able to secure the first loan that he is obtaining, which ever the Assembly recently approved, I am sure even the ongoing ones and most of them will be completed. That is performance. Secondly, he is a lover of people. He is a consummate leader, he knows the title of just some ordinary people in the villages, he will call you by your first name and some of them usually get shocked because he had lived with us for some time. His first term in the House of Representative, his second term in the House of representative, he believed in going around and touching everywhere and our campaign is down to the unit. The voting unit level, we have a campaign committee there, we aren’t even suffering at the community. So, it will be very difficult for any other person to come, there is no space.
As somebody who knows former President Goodluck Jonathan, how will you describe him and what do you think he did well and did not?
I am very happy with that question because I have been itching to say something about that. I have said it on some other fora. I personally believe that Jonathan has done us proud. I am talking as an Ijaw man. The very first Ijaw man that we produced as president has saved this country from collapse at the rate we were going. Let me tell you that in some areas in Abuja, some people were carrying machetes and short axes to celebrate as the votes of the opposition were increasing. Now, if they were celebrating with axes and machetes, if the results were different, what do you think would have happened? Instant war! Even the developed countries had stockpiled and waiting to sell arms to us but Goodluck disappointed them and he has been so acknowledged throughout Africa. Most people have stayed in their office and have refused to leave. Take the issue of power, the opposition kept sabotaging power, vandalising the gas pipeline. As it was rising at a point, Nigeria got to 4000MW and then suddenly, it dropped. But since they came to power, no single line has been vandalised. Now, if you look at the educational sector, we now have a federal university in every state by his introduction of 12 new universities. In the agriculture sector, the appointment of his minister as the head of the Africa Development Bank is a pointer that he performed well.
There has been an evolution in that sector, if people don’t see it, God is seeing it. The fertilizer was a source of corruption; you are talking of fighting corruption, Goodluck stopped corruption there. They were now supplying fertilizer by mobile phone. He stabilised fuel price for several years. He wanted to remove subsidy to a great extent; do you remember? It is the same people who got up and said ‘no, you must not do it’. They are the same people that are talking about it now and they say he is weak. I want to tell them that in two years time, they will see Goodluck as an angel because this country is so tough that you require a flexible leader to keep it together. In my mind, that is what they were doing. Our people criticised him a lot that he favoured the North and that he favoured other geopolitical zones and almost neglected his area. It may be true but what he was doing at that time, he needed to do. He looked at a place where school children weren’t going to school. And because he is an academic and an all made in Nigeria president (first degree Nigeria, second degree Nigeria, third degree Nigeria), he saw that he should do something for those little children that came from poor backgrounds.
I know that whether we like it or not, there are few things that he also did in the South South but it was not enough; maybe he was reserving us for a second term but now he is not there.
Are you disappointed in any aspect of his administration vis-a-vis things he didn’t do at all or he didn’t do well?
Yes the area of disappointment is that he surrounded himself with people from other geo political zone; it was his greatest undoing. Our people weren’t around him.
Many insist that the power elite in the North adopted a game plan to take over power immediately Jonathan emerged in 2011. Do you agree?
My advice is that they should look at what Buhari is doing now. It doesn’t matter if the person is his cousin, he would appoint him including those who have retired.
I am not saying that is the best to do but let us learn our lessons from what we are seeing now. To a large extent, you can’t love others more than yourself. I will advise that we love all equally. Look at the East west roads, he tried when he came on board; there was even no drawing. It was meant to fail but there is still a small portion and there is no reason why that should have been left for now but we hope that will be done.
Are you not worried over the caliber of opponents facing Dickson in the coming election?
There is nothing like that. I think we will talk better when their primaries are concluded and we shall now know who has emerged. It is not all of them that are coming; you will also see that in that camp, after the primaries, some of our people will return. Some of the people that left us after we have developed them in PDP were even told ‘who gave you the authority to come and contest governorship?’.
Out of six or seven governorship aspirants in the PDP, Dr. Jonathan has thrown his weight behind Dickson; don’t you think it will affect the party?
The president is building the party by it because there has to be sanity. He gave four reasons for that. All the states surrounding us have had only two governors and we have had four and that is a dent on our development process because those other states, they had two terms; each of the governors had two terms. You see the thing about continuity is that when you have a vision and you have conceived projects and they are yours and you also enter a second term, you continue them.
