With the incoming administration of General Buhari about to commence in a few days, Senate Leader, Senator Victor Ndoma Egba, spoke to journalists and expressed hope on the incoming administration. Reuben Bojor was there

What are your expectations in the incoming government of Muhammadu Buhari?

General Buhari promised change and I believe that Buhari means what he says. Nigerians will expect to see that change not just from the major issue also very small issues. Today, we have become very ostentatious and very large. People judge you by the amount of clothes and the quantity of starch on it. So I believe that General Buhari will bring change. The other day I saw online how he boarded the airport bus and also obeying traffic. Those are the little things which we saw in those days. We have accepted the culture of: for you to be a big man, you must be ostentatious. I don’t believe that. I think that, General Buhari will take us back to those days that we saw humility and discipline in leadership.

Though a good number of senators will not return including you…Some supersititious people will read meanings into this and PDP’s failure at the polls generally.

Laughter… I am Roman Catholic so I can’t be superstitious. But what has happen has happened. You know in the Bible, we are told that, God brought down nations because of single individuals. I don’t know. But all I know is that so many things went wrong in PDP. First, the governors got too powerful, and we lost the party from the members of the party to the governors and the big lesson today is that the only way political party can survive and thrive is when we have internal party democracy. So the lesson is that ownership of political parties must go back to the members and not governors. It is not sustainable.

•Senator Victor Ndoma

Though they can be members of the party but it is expected of them to be influencial members of the party and not the owners of the party. The parties are in the governors’ pockets. It became a new norm that whatever the governors wanted (not what the members wanted), they have it. And it is a big lesson for APC and every other person. If APC makes the same mistakes, they will end up exactly the same way. The big lesson is that, impunity is not sustainable.

You could see the mass defection even long before the elections and after the primaries, people started leaving the PDP immediately to APC and not people leaving other parties to PDP. So it was a trend that should have alarmed the PDP. Remember the seven governors, 37 members of the House of Reps and some senators. The major factor is, primaries were problematic in states that are PDP strongholds- Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Plateau, Nasarawa, name it. So by the time we were out of that primaries, there was a lot of haemorraging within the PDP and people have to leave and in our arrogance at the time we didn’t even notice what was happening.

How about the much talked about cost of governance. And how can the economic problems be solved?

It’s been an issue long before now. I will go back to even when I was a commissioner which is thirty something years ago. At that time, we were concerned that the cost of constructions in Nigeria were amongst the highest in the world because we did a comparative analysis. For public goods, the funding comes from public coffers, so that is part of cost of governance. When I was commissioner, I remember there was this massive retrenchment across the country. Because it was thought that the public service was overbloated due to cost of governance. It’s being there with us for a long time.

What I see as diversionary today is the attempt to implicate the National Assembly as being responsible for that high cost of governance. We are missing the point. For us to address it, we must avoid the mistake of looking for scapegoats. Now this year’s budget is close to N4.9 trillion with the National Assembly having about 120 something billion as against N150 billion in the past years. Now that is about two per cent of the national budget. So even if you scrap the National Assembly, you will be saving only two per cent. The irony is that the National Assembly’s two per cent is receiving ninety eight per cent attention and the rest of the budget which is ninety eighty per cent is receiving two per cent attention. The reason is, historically, Nigeria has survived during the military rule without the National Assembly. The National Assembly does not operate in secrecy as our salaries and allowances which are fixed by Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) which publishes it and not the National Assembly. I earn the same as a minister, a minister earns the same as a Supreme Court judge. It is the same salary.

Fact is, the running cost is what they are ignorant of. The workforce of the National Assembly is not only the members of House of Reps and senators but also the cleaner to the highest officer.

I read something online that I earn N29 million a month and I said, I wish these were possible. Because if you earn that kind of sum, in ten months you are a billionaire. So I challenge you to name one former senator who is rich. From Dr. Joseph Wayas down, mention one. So, it is simply institutional blackmail. Anything that goes wrong, it is caused by those bastards in the National Assembly!

For the economy, you need to have certain economic infrastructure and mindset for the economy to grow. And productivity will be positive because incentives must correlate to productivity. Sorry to say, that in Nigeria, some of the richest people you see cannot actually point at what they do because it is a rent economy. It creates a disconnect in the economy. The basic infrastructure for an economy to thrive are power, roads, waterways, rails and these are still not developed. But with these constrains come opportunities. depending on how you look at it. The development of power, roads, rail system and all that is also an opportunity for job creation. So how to synthesis these constrains to opportunities is a challenge for us.

Lastly, the rule of law. People must learn to obey the law and nobody must be above the law.

Feasibility studies shows that there is scant improvement of infrastructure. And ethnicity is Nigeria’s greatest headache. What is your take on that.

Yes we haven’t reached where we ought to be. But that is not to say that they has been no movement. They are people who believe that nothing good has happened which is not true. Let’s take the transport for example. The roads were not made for heavy vehicles which are all over our roads. In those days From Ogoja to Calabar was two hours. I was practicing in Ogoja. So I leave Ogoja to Calabar or Warri to attend court cases and I will be back the same day. The period I am talking about, you could be on the road for 10 to 15 minutes without sighting a car. Today, you see a chain of different types of vehicles including bicycles and tankers scrambling for space and the tonnage they convey outweighs the road’s capacity and the roads were not designed for that tonnage. The rails and waterways are best for such materials like cement, chippings and other materials. And until we are able to develop these other means of transport, we will continue to have problems.

Ethnicity is an elite problem. In my office, we have people from all over Nigeria, they operate as a family. In my household, my S. A. domestic is from Akwa Ibom. I served in Bauchi, travelled almost the entire north and what I saw is kind people. Ethnicity is an elite thing when we are looking for power, we introduce it so that we can divide and rule. The Nigerian in the street, whether Christian or Moslem, Fulani or Ibibio, Akparabong or Hausa have the same experience of poverty and religion has no rule to play in how we see hunger or poverty. The challenge is for us to build a prosperous society where many more will have opportunities. An egalitarian society where the opportunity will be democratized and can reach anybody. So I don’t believe in ethnicity. My wife is Ibo.

Take us down the memory lane of your childhood, political sojourn when you became a Commissioner at 27 years of age.

Well. First of all I come from a family I call a transitional family because my parents had western education and despite their western education, they were still very rooted in their traditional values. Perhaps the first generation of an Ikom person to have both parents that had western education. I grew up like a normal village child, doing the normal things children of my age did-like, going to farm, the stream and all that. So I know the inside out of my Ikom and Akparabong communities, irrespective of how things have changed. Unlike those days, today, there’s contradiction with those with western education, throwing away their traditional values and holding on to western values.

This is troubling because it is creating a crisis of identity because we are neither African nor white and the impact is most of our languages are being lost. That is the first implication of all of this. Next is the culture that is being lost, for you to speak the traditional languages, you must live in the village and grow up there. That is a sign that the languages are weak, because a strong language will survive anywhere. If you take for instance, an Hausa, Ibo or Yoruba family, even if they grow up in Japan, they are likely to speak their respective languages. But in our case where we come from is different. There arises ambiguity about your identity because I will like to know who I am. Am I an African, am I an Akparabong man. Once there is that ambiguity about your identity, it also creates its own crises.

In those days growing up in my time, we had a community setting which had just four points. The family, school, church and home. A child didn’t necessarily belong to the biological parents but to the community. Every elder in the community, admonishes, took an interest in the life of a child. Your values were community oriented, your reactions were community. It was community first before you. You came last.

What’s your world of experience from being a commissioner at the age of 27 to a Senate leader in the national assembly.

The commissionership was perhaps the highlights. Then for you to be a commissioner, you must be in your fifties, sixties, to see a twenty seven year old being a commissioner was something a bit dramatic and a bit unusual with my permanent secretary being my father’s classmate.

Yes. But we got on quite well. My first outing to take a political office was during my youth corps days at 22, I was made the chairman to set up the Legal Aid Council in Bauchi. Then at 24, a year later after service, President Shagari appointed me into a federal board. You can see the picture hanging there on the wall. I am the third person in the back row. Also, I think, about the same time, late Dr. Clement Isong, also appointed me the chairman of the board of the governors of Government Secondary School Ikom. So I have always been in and out, let me say from the age of 22, a dramatic one until the commissionership.

I must say, it’s God’s grace. Because we use to have a category of students in those days in school which were branded ‘NFA’, meaning No Future Ambition. So I think ordinary, I fit into that category.