From Fred Itua, Abuja
Chief Ray Ugba Morphy is a trained journalist, accountant and economist. He started as a reporter for the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA). He ran for the House of Representatives on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999. He was publisher of the defunct The Summit Newspaper. For years, he worked in the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA). He recently defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC) and plans to run for Cross River state governorship in 2019.
In the next few days, APC-led Federal Government will be celebrating two years in office. Do you think the government has lived up to expectations?
I will start in a very simple way. We are a people who often forget our history. We tend to forget the recent history that all of us just experienced. Two years ago, four years ago, we publicly derived a new style of some measures of our hearts in our hands or in mouth. A clear illustration is the issue of security in the case of Boko Haram.
Banex Plaza in Abuja, we had a bomb blast. But these things are now history; we do not have them anymore. So I can use that to illustrate to you that certainly no matter how we want to deny the facts on the ground, the threat to the ordinary citizens on the streets, the issue of Boko Haram has abated.
Our major challenge was the corruption of our morals and usurpation of the goodwill of the people. There has never been a time when we said all the rots will be gone in two years. It is not a matter of APC. Let us understand the human process of doing things. My point is that Nigeria was in far much worse state than most of the average man on the street could understand. We had a deficit financing. We were running a high economic budget with very low output and capital expenditure. Most of the projects we had under the budget for the last few years were never funded and we all know that. My point is that, the country was so bad that if you want to correct it, it would take a little bit of time to get the systems processed. That is my view regarding the ability of the current administration at the federal level to put things the way they ought to be kept.
I can tell you today that my state was not motorable. Anybody who knew Cross River will know that for me to drive from Ogoja to Calabar, I had to go to Ebonyi State. The road that everybody complained about has been contracted to Julius Berger. They are not to remedy, but to build because the road is old. Everything takes gestation and we owe it to the fact that anybody who has not driven a trailer even if he is a professional driver, the moment he enters that trailer, he must try to feel.
As much as you like to paint the scenario of the state of things being very bad, there were specific campaign promises they made and they gave a time lag. I have been a little bit around the corridors of power and I know this is one of the things that you hear. By law, it is information. There are some things you do not give out by law and that is why we have the secrecy act.
There is no way the APC as a party, could have had access to certain information about the government then. When you actually talk about deceit, talk about my state where the PDP was in power as state government and there is a PDP to PDP transition and the PDP governor has not been able to achieve one of the promises he made. You can call that deceit because he had access to the system before.
In essence, you are admitting that APC ran campaign on information they were not sure of? Are you saying that APC underestimated governance in Nigeria?
You go and find out. The information by the Federal Government of Nigeria which was given was false. One of the Ministers of the PDP government said that some of the statistics that were being pushed out by the past government were false.
It appears APC knew what they were getting into and still made bogus promises. For example, they said before 2019, we will have 19,000 megawatts, in two weeks they will rescue the Chibok girls, they said they will feed school children. Is it that they said those things to win election or they just wanted to get everything done?
Welfarism is a system where you try to place a safety net. When you have an ideology that is tended towards welfarism, you will work towards such things as social security. To project social security under a progressive umbrella is certainly that which qualifies. The fact that they were not in government could not have given them the kind of authentic data that was required for them to understand as much as they perceived.
Is there any challenge Nigeria is currently having that has never been there before?
My position is very simple. The longer the problem, the more the work needs to be solved. In psychology, you do not treat somebody who ran mad yesterday the same way you treat a person that has been mad for ten years. The fact remains that if you are given a story, you must make an effort to go into the structures. This fact is that in all these years, the political elites gave lip services to the challenges of our nation. If you look at the money that was spent by Obasanjo in power, it ought to have given us steady power.
In 2019, what are your plans?
First, my political ambition is that the politics of Nigeria is stable. That is my ambition, hope and aspiration. Whatever I can do, whatever office I can take by the grace of God that will help me be part of that process, and certainly I am up for it. My state, Cross River has deteriorated in the recent times, from the most peaceful state in the country to the terror state in Nigeria. The situation today is that some of us are even scared. I am interested in our state returning to what it used to be both as a tourism destination and as a peaceful place. The governorship of my state is vested in northern senatorial district right now where I come from. Governor Ben Ayade is doing a first term of our normal eight year rotational turn and he is in PDP. He is not doing well. We in the APC will vie for that office. We are not going to let the PDP keep it and when we vie for that office, it will be from the north, my senatorial district. If my people consider me worthy to be the arrow head or the spearhead it, why not, I am on for it.