Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State

What is the state of the Ogbia-Nembe road?

The Ogbia –Nembe road is a product of a very good partnership between NDDC and Shell. Budgeting and funding stalled the project, I had to intervene like I did on the airport because I was concerned. In 2012, when I became Governor and because of the importance of that road, I called the community leaders, Shell and NDDC for a meeting and I was told they had no money to continue and I asked the contractor, ‘‘how much do you need to take this road to Nembe, and he said N3 billion? I immediately directed the release of 3 billion naira to them and that was how they tarred the road and that was how Nembe became passable and became like an upland local government. We need to start a similar partnership in other critical areas. Having reached Nembe, the challenge now is how to hit Brass. Much of the constructions we call roads in Bayelsa are actually bridges because there is no land for you to build on particularly when you are moving towards the ocean, like the road from Sagbama to Ekeremor which we have been dredging for four years now.

In all of these, what can you say is your central focus?

It can’t be one thing at the expense of the other. it has to be all. For example in agriculture, you are seeing the biggest cassava Starch Processing Plant investment, the first of its kind in Bayelsa. We have over 300 hectres of land in which we are planting cassava, most of it already planted. We now have a starch processing factory in Ebidebiri. As we speak, our partners, a Danish firm is installing the machines. The cassava plant is there, we have a lot of aqua culture projects going on, the most penetrative is the 500 pond fish farm per local government which we have started.

First one in Yenegoa is done. In it, we have a hatchery so that we can generate the fingerlins and train people who can do that as a business, then you have the processing plant, when you harvest you process them, dry them and so on, then you have the feed mill installed, integrated with the schools already built. The idea is to train these young boys to attend that school for training and then we allocate the ponds to them and they now take each pond and we give them the fingerlins produced there, we give them feeds to feed the fish and when the fish is matured, you buy it from them.

So, it’s a very revolutionary intervention in the field of agriculture. Our poultry has capacity of close to a 100,000. It is actually running now. Over time, this will help to train people on how to run some of these ventures on their own and the state can now divest and then privatise them. So Bayelsa, unknown to a lot of people is a state that can do very well in agriculture because that is the best place for palm plantation; aqua culture comes with our terrain, everybody there is fishermen or fisherwomen, we can even do trawling which the country is not doing yet. That’s why running a state like Bayelsa is very excruciating and doing it in a recession and without federal support. We bleed in Bayelsa to drive and force development.

What is the future of your party, the PDP?

I think the right question should be what is the future of Nigerian democracy? The tragedy of our democracy today is that we neither have a strong political party in government nor a strong political party in opposition. You all know the efforts we in my committee made to reconcile the various tendencies in PDP so that the party could come back on stream to play its role as a credible opposition platform. As a matter of fact, Nigeria’s democracy is worse for it. Unfortunately our party has not been playing the role of an opposition party because of the needless crisis plaguing us. What is happening in PDP is a great danger to Nigeria democracy, but I still believe that all hope is not lost. But what is happening in PDP is unfortunately also happening in APC. For our democracy to be secure, we need a strong party in government, strong cohesive united party in government, pursuing their democratic agenda as well as a virile party in opposition. But so far our democracy is weak because of the absence of these.

There is crisis in APC, it is brewing and nobody is talking about it. The sooner we in the PDP salvage our platform that is terribly suffering a lot of de-marketing the better for our democracy. It is unfortunate that a political party has to go to the judiciary to resolve its internal problem that is essentially political. Relying on the court to resolve internal crisis is an indictment of the political class. It is an indictment on the democratic credentials of all players. My belief, my views might be in the minority, but my belief is that the judiciary is being over worked and labored unnecessarily by political actors of all parties. We have abdicated our responsibilities as political players, we have surrendered too much to the judiciary, we have involved the judiciary in too many unnecessary political issues, and thereby exposing them to ridicule.

We are not helping the judiciary. Political leaders who are key players in the democratic system should show the maturity, the political temperament, the credentials to be able to recognize and solve problems within themselves and see politics as essential element of democracy, which is a market place of ideas. We all do not need to belong to one political party, even within our parties there are tendencies. There should be contestation of tendencies but the irony in Nigeria is that politicians in Nigeria are more militant than the military. Honestly, politicians in Nigeria do not know how to argue or disagree amongst themselves. We don’t listen to ourselves, we can’t argue amongst ourselves. If you hold a divergent view, you are marked for destruction or blackmail, or tagged as being antiparty and this is so because our political actors and leaders neither have the skills nor the democratic temperament to drive the political process. These are partly the reasons why the crises in both PDP and APC are strong. In the US for example, you see all the tendencies playing out, Clinton on the centre of the Democratic Party, you have Bernie Sanders on the left of the Democratic Party and others. So also in the Republican Party, all marketing their ideas

But I am confident PDP will still bounce back after the Supreme Court judgement but my view is that we had no business going to court. If PDP leaders had agreed to implement our template for reconciliation, a national unity convention would have held this month to elect a brand new leadership. The irony of it is that the Judiciary does not reconcile, it only adjudicates. Even after the Supreme Court judgement, the party will still hold a convention and embark on aggressive confidence building and reconciliation. So what is the real reason for going to court? As for me and my committee, we shall not give up on PDP. Reconciliation is ongoing, court or no court. After the judgement, I will address party faithful. People should stop decamping from PDP or leaving PDP to form new political platforms.

I was opposed to Senator Ali Modi-Sheriff when some of my colleagues and others brought him. I didn’t like that, I thought that our party needed a fresh face to craft a fresh message after losing power at the centre. Losing election is bad but that is not the end of the world for a party or for a politician. Unfortunately those who brought him for whatever reason, fell apart with him. And when the Appeal Court upheld Sheriff as Chairman, I as a product of the law, as a law-abiding citizen adhered to the Court Judgement by duly recognizing him as Chairman and the same people said I was a Sheriff man. As politicians we shouldn’t be law breakers or hold the Judiciary in contempt. We should not personalize judicial pronouncements by selecting the verdicts to respect!

Why should a politician for example want to pocket his party. Why should you be the one to select the National Chairman and Secretary and all the other posts? That they must be in your pocket for you to be a member of that party, does that make sense, is that not madness? If that is the thrust of a politician then you can go and form a political party of your family and be in charge. But once it’s a national party, it is an aggregation of all interests and top of which is the national interest. After the Supreme Court judgement, PDP must address many of its problems top of which is funding.

We want to know your views on this quit notice to Ndigbo by some people who claim to represent the youth in the north.

I condemn in very strong terms the quit notice on Ndigbo. Nigeria has gone past that. The 1999 Constitution guarantees the right of all Nigerians to live in any part of the country and go about their daily bread without molestation. We must remain as one indivisible country because our strength lies in our diversity. We didn’t even need the civil war we fought as a country because it didn’t result in anything. I support what the Northern Governors Forum and their counterparts in the East have done. I read the statements by my governor colleagues and I believe that all governors are united in this: to see how we can promote peaceful co-existence and harmony. At our level as Governors, we set up a committee of which I am a member,to continually preach peace across the country and intervene in areas where need be.

I believe that the APC -led Federal Government could have done more in the area of promoting national unity and building trust amongst the peoples of this country. I have spoken about this severally. The country has been too divided. The Federal Government should consciously promote national cohesion and unity. But unfortunately Government has not done enough whether in the management of federal political power, appointments or in evolving a national strategy to deal with the menace of herdsmen. The government must evolve the right strategy to contain all these as quickly as possible.