Tony Udemba
Dr. Kenneth Oti is the founder and National Coordinator of National Youth Movement for Igbo Presidency, South-East Youths Assembly and Imo Liberation Group. He has been involved in youth activism for two decades in Nigeria.
In this interview, he spoke on a wide range of issues, including moves by his organisation to mobilise the masses of Imo to regain their political consciousness and take full ownership of their state and their destinies.
You were one of those involved in national youth mobilisation and struggle that ensured the former President Goodluck Jonathan was elected into office in 2011, after his predecessor passed on. After that, you went out of circulation, what have you been up to?
I have been on self-innovation and expansion. In 2011 an injustice was about to be effected against a Nigerian, ostensibly on the basis that he happened to come from a minority tribe, we teamed up and synergised with well-meaning Nigerians and ensured that the unfairness would not succeed. We are grateful to God for backing our agitations then, we thrived. After that, everything is now history.
As a youth activist, what is your assessment of President Buhari’s administration?
I am not one of those who see everything negative with our leaders, as it is the norm in Africa. I relate to caustic criticisms of our leaders with reticence. But in recent times, our so called leaders have gone berserk with abysmal anti-humanistic proclivities; to the extent our collective consciences are being mortally violated. So for the sanctity and sanity of human existence some of us who are the light of the world should rise and challenge the nebulous and unhappy situations we have found ourselves in the hands of our leaders. President Buhari, as an elderly statesman and a patriot means well for Nigeria. But what can he do considering his age for a delicate and capricious country like Nigeria. He is doing all he can, giving the prevailing circumstances.
Tell us about your new organisation; Imo Liberation Group (ILG)?
Our group represents and comprises 98 percent working, middle class and poor masses of Imo citizens who are presently disadvantaged and exploited by the less than one percent ruling elite. We exist to revolutionise politics in our state and would strive to make our elected office holders accountable and ensure that our people are chosen by ordinary party members on merit from constituents level not by virtue of being born in a feudal family or political dynasty. The evolving and prevalent feudal and oligarchic system in our state is the main obstacle to the progress and prosperity of her people. This has made it difficult for a genuine democracy to be established in our state and our people cannot get their due rights, social justice, equal opportunities, rule of law and real participation in the affairs of the state.
Our main struggle would be to abolish this obsolete, detrimental and retrogressive system and introduce participatory democracy, merit based bureaucracy, independent legislature and judiciary wherein the state shall promote social and economic wellbeing of the people in order to establish a truly democratic, progressive and egalitarian society where all citizens have equal rights irrespective of the person’s status in life.
ILG believes in realism. We are against all types and forms of impunity and extremism and we are committed to entrenching socio-political and economic well-being and harmony for the masses of our people.
Recently Gov. Okorocha made Nigerians to know that he will sponsor and support his son in-law to succeed him at the expiration of his tenure. What is your take on that?
The political emergency we have today in Imo state is Okorocha and everything he represents. Against this background, members of our group are watching with keen interest all his manipulations and manoeuvres in the political climate of our state. We have taken serious exception to how he has turned our state into his personal fiefdom and private empire. We are fully aware of all his schemes and strategies, and we’re mobilising to ensure he’ll not succeed come 2019 to have his son in-law, Mr. Uche Nwosu or any of his known eight surrogates he has instructed to start warming up to succeed him in the Douglas House, Owerri.
It is true that he is packaging his son-in-law to succeed him through irregular means in the upcoming 2019 gubernatorial election in the state; but God’ll stop him. Imo state is in God’s hand and God will disappoint him this time around for his anti-humanistic approach to the governance of our people. He may be having his laugh now, and feeding his pleasures sumptuously from the tears and misfortunes of our impoverished people, but, time is the final arbiter.
We wish to seize this opportunity to inform the governor that he should not take our people’s silence for cowardice, everyone knows that our people are lovers of peace and resilient in all human dispositions. But time has come when the masses of Imo citizens would in one accord rise to demand their state back from the strangleholds of one man. Democracy is threatened in our state. There was no time Imo State was willed to one man, members of his families, in-laws and cronies. Come 2019 our people would resist any attempt to mortgage their individual and collective destinies as a result of an unbridled primordial cravings of one man because he had the opportunity to govern the people. We are out to wage a new patriotic struggle for political liberation and economic emancipation of the masses of our people from the malevolent spell of one man. What is happening in Imo State is not ordinary, looking at it from all esoteric perspectives. What is happening is a spiritual battle between darkness and light. Our people are under a malevolent bondage and everybody seems to be stupefied and marooned, while a personality is running rough-shod on the masses of our people. In Imo today, few capitalists are holding sway at the expense of the poverty-stricken citizens. The yoke must be broken!
But the governor is saying that he will not permit anybody he cannot trust to come and rubbish all the progressive legacies and development he has initiated, and it does appear he cannot trust anyone else in the state but his son in-law?
(Cuts in) Imo under Okorocha is ruined, devastated and doomed. It is an open fact that since he assumed office our people are pauperized, impoverished and the masses are living in abysmal woes, while our state has been brought to her knees.
How do you intend to actualise the mission of your organisation?
What is seriously needed now is how to get Imo state out of the doldrums of underdevelopment, ruins, corruption, impunity and mismanagement occasioned by his malevolent administration. Now is the time for genuine, sincere, and truly patriotic Imo citizens to join the movement to liberate our state from its current state of abysmal failure and ruination. Now is the time to save our state from the grips of its political predators, by joining forces with our group.
We believe strongly that the purpose of government is to use the common wealth of our state to improve the standard of living of the citizenry. To stop the politics of self-imposed failure, new crop of leaders with a patriotic outlook and transformational vision must move to the centre of our political space to re-engineer it away from damnation and woes and chart a new course in the direction of stupendous success. This is the original destiny of our beloved state and our people. And we will attain it.