For building a false economy for Nigeria, I joined Buhari’s Presidential project to oust Jonathan, PDP from power – Lauretta Onochie

*Says PDP players will mess up any party even if they are put in “Integrity Party”

*”Let’s assume we voted for Jonathan, which is not true, but he got there and went to sleep”

*How Buhari’s presidential campaign was funded – Presidential Aide

*Says appointment to public office not reward but call to sacrifice for nation

Ms Lauretta Onochie, Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Social Media, no doubt is a woman of substance, an independent mind working with a President that is all his life known for integrity, probity, transparency and accountability, whether or not he is appreciated by the same country people for whose cause he is power.  In the first part of her interview with The DEFENDER, she spoke about need for inclusiveness in Nigeria’s democratic pattern to allow for traditional rulers of Nigeria to play role in State matters, constitutionally. She also advocated for upliftment of culture, even as she warned seriously against those asking the then ailing but just recovering President to disclose his health status and warned against their being disrespectful of Buhari’s leadership.  In this part of the 50-minute interview at the Presidency, the United Kingdom-based body language expert told how she, as a Nigerian in the Diapora, was helped by her children to return to Nigeria and support the General that was then newly elected as Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC).  She told why she started campaign for the removal of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and how the Buhari Support Organisation (BSO) became a reason for her not being ignorantly pushed back to the UK by some Nigerian party players, who did not appreciate quality contributions Nigerians in Diapora were capable of making to the successful politicking for the emergence of good governance in their home country.  The new grandmother spoke more.  Excerpts:

“And I said to myself that here we had a chance and I started holding Goodluck Jonathan to account since the year 2012 and when I did that, most people on the social media started attacking me saying, ‘You don’t know he’s our leader? You have no respect.  You have to respect him.’  And I said, ‘I don’t know about him being your leader but I know about him being our servant’, that is what we call a public office holder just like President Muhammadu Buhari is our current servant and thankfully he is serving well.   And I thought and said, ‘This man (Jonathan) is not serving us.  He is serving a few people.’  They then said, ‘Oh, it is his turn.  When it gets to your turn you can do anything you like.’ So, I have been taking a lot of bashing and therefore I am used to it so much that there is no bashing now that would compare to what happened when I was trying to introduce Nigerians to holding their servants accountable.”

You came back to Nigeria during the campaign, especially immediately after General Muhammadu Buhari had emerged the Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and we do not have record as to whether you were not comfortable so that one would say it was because of that you decided to leave abroad and come to join politics in the country.  What exactly can we take from such decision of yours at a time no other Nigerian in The Diaspora was conspicuously thinking in that direction of returning home?

I think you would add, too, that I was very comfortable abroad.

Yes, I knew you were very comfortable abroad and it was what I meant by saying “and we do not have record as to whether you were not comfortable so that one would say it was because of that you decided to leave abroad and come to join politics in the country”.

Yeah, of course but the election was coming fast and our nation was slipping into decay under a government that had made so much money through so much oil.  Corruption had gone to the rooftops, looting was the order of the day and I must say the looting trickled down because somebody looted a billion, maybe he gave 5 million to his wife and the wife gave one million to her own brother and her brother gave to others and so the looting trickled down, and so it (the government at that time) built a false economy.

But while I lived in the UK, I made it a point of duty that I visited Nigeria at least twice a year and each time I came, the poverty that I saw at the grassroots was heartbreaking.  I was seeing poverty.  At the top, some of the elites were flying in private jets, their families were spending their holidays or doing shopping abroad, their women travelled overseas to do their hair and nails, again their women took their children and they went shopping for food items overseas while ordinary Nigerians were left in abject poverty.  So that, essentially, the middle class was wiped away and what we then had was a situation where we had very stupendously rich and very stupendously poor class system.  A situation of the so rich and of the so poor!  This idea of the need for the Buhari government to help bail out the poorest of the poor, therefore, is possible due to the decadence created by that PDP administration of Jonathan so that money that should have been used to do new things for Nigerians is now being used to start things that should have been done in times past from scratch.

And I said to myself that here we had a chance and I started holding Goodluck Jonathan to account since the year 2012 and when I did that, most people on the social media started attacking me saying, “You don’t know he’s our leader? You have no respect.  You have to respect him.”  And I said, “I don’t know about him being your leader but I know about him being our servant”, that is what we call a public office holder just like President Muhammadu Buhari is our current servant and thankfully he is serving well.  And I thought and said, “This man (Jonathan) is not serving us.  He is serving a few people.”  They then said, “Oh, it is his turn.  When it gets to your turn you can do anything you like.” So, I have been taking a lot of bashing and therefore I am used to it so much that there is no bashing now that would compare to what happened when I was trying to introduce Nigerians to holding their servants accountable.

How then did you make most Nigerians appreciate your argument about Jonathan not serving Nigerians well?

I said to them that man was our servant; he went to collect a form from People’s Democratic Party (PDP), he completed that form by himself, he paid the fees that went with it and then he came out in what we call campaign, he went around the nation begging us to vote for him.  Let us assume that we voted for him and that he won the election but he begged us to say, “I know all the problems that this nation has.  Please vote for me and let me go there and solve them.”  That is what election campaign is all about.  Let’s assume that we voted for him, which was not true, but he got there and then he went to sleep.  That’s what he (Jonathan) did.  He got there, looked into the Villa and then called his wife and said, “PP, We ain’t never gone a leave yet because this place is very beautiful.”  And he went to sleep.  That’s what he did leaving our people in abject poverty.

“The money Nigeria made under Jonathan should have built safe villages in the Niger Delta.  It could have stopped a million of lives that were lost in the North East while Boko Haram was raging.  It could have given our youths a better lease of life to make them compete favourably with their peers across the world.  Nigerians are very smart people.  We are very intelligent people.  When McZukaberg, the Facebook inventor to Nigeria, he didn’t come here because Nigeria is Africa or because Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa. No.  He came to Nigeria because of the potentials he saw in Nigeria’s young entrepreneurs and IT gurus.  These people had no support they were doing it on their own under a government that had so much to give but gave little or nothing.”

But how come you are so convinced that Jonathan was responsible for the truly abject poverty that was conspicuously displayed in the face and lives of the people at that time?

The money Nigeria made under Jonathan should have built safe villages in the Niger Delta.  It could have stopped a million of lives that were lost in the North East while Boko Haram was raging.  It could have given our youths a better lease of life to make them compete favourably with their peers across the world.  Nigerians are very smart people.  We are very intelligent people.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook inventor, came to Nigeria, he didn’t come here because Nigeria is in Africa or because Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa. No.  He came to Nigeria because of the potentials he saw in Nigeria’s young entrepreneurs and IT gurus.  These people had no support they were doing it on their own under a government that had so much to give but gave little or nothing.  I ran for the Local Government election as a candidate for the Conservative Party in UK in 2010 and after that, I began to think, “What can we do? How are we going to remove this PDP?”

(Cuts in) But you party eventually removed the PDP and the APC government began to make some changes that Nigerians loved, hardship or not, the defeated PDP leaders and their sympathizers began to claim the glory saying PDP that people vilified were the ones doing good in APC now being praised…?

(Cuts in) For me it is not usually about the party but the people because, it is the people that make up a party.  Take the same people in PDP and put them in say JTC…

(Cuts in) Even if that party they are put in is called Integrity Party?

Put these same PDP people in Integrity or Beautiful Party, it is going to be messed up and our nation will still be messed up under them because when the nation was under them, they ran it on deceit, selfishness, self centeredness, self egocentricism, and so, everything is centered about me, me, me.  No other person.

And then the coming together of efforts to achieving the goal of ousting the self based party people?

I began to think, write and say it would be good if the opposition parties would come together.  We ran a similar campaign for Uganda and the opposition leaders came together for an election but at the last minute, some of them pulled out and sold out.  That was why the opposition in Uganda could not push it to the end.  So, I thought, well, we failed in Uganda but we shouldn’t fail in Nigeria and so, we began to push that.

I am not saying that was how APC was formed but that was my idea.  And when APC was formed, I felt like I had just given birth to a baby.  Then I wrote a piece that went viral and said, “APC, a pill that Nigerians must swallow”.  In that piece I called on Nigerians and said, “Young people, move in before these big people move in and hijack it.  Move in, it is number, let us all move in.”  That was my party in how APC was formed.

So we can be right to call you a founding member of APC?

I did not join APC at formation but I was supporting them that each time a committee was formed in the UK, I was included and I played my role until the party’s presidential primary election was held.  And that presidential election was a clean chance for me, not just because a man of integrity, a man of honour, an incorruptible man won the election but because the process was very transparent.  We stayed all throughout the length of it and I was watching like a hawk to pick even one fault.  There was no single fault.

And when then General Muhammadu Buhari won the primary election, I had just become a grandmother and they were with me there in the UK.  I thought I was not going to go for the campaigns and that I had to look after my daughter as the traditions demand; help her press her body with hot water and all of those things new grandmother do.  But after about three weeks, my daughter called me and said, “Mum, you need to go home”.  I said, “What is going on at home?”  She said, “You need to support the General (Buhari).  I can’t leave you and your baby alone.”  And I said, “But I am supporting him from here doing my Facebook thing and all of that”.  And she said, “No, no, no.  You are no longer here.”  Before I knew it, she and my other children had bought my ticket and they shipped me down to Nigeria.  They knew where my heart was.  That was how I came down here.

And when you came the General had emerged as APC Presidential Candidate.  In recent times due to his anti-corruption fight, some politicians and their sympathizers among Nigerians are asking him to disclose his campaign funding, accusing him of being corrupt and funded by corrupt APC leaders and querying why is he prosecuting them, especially recently when they said the now known to be inexistent NNPC $25 billion contract scam was way by which the President “steal” Nigerian money to executive his 2019 campaign?  Although all of those, many have said, are coming from a people known to have spent no more or less than Nigerian public fund for their own presidential campaign and are therefore under prosecution by the President.  Due to your level of involvement in Buhari Support Organisation (BSO), what could you tell us actually about the funding of Buhari’s presidential campaign?

Shortly before I arrived from UK, I wasn’t in the know of BSO.  I came to support APC but when I came, what I met on ground was not palatable because I found it difficult to join the APC campaign.  But I later found out that it is the tradition and that that was how it is done in Nigeria.  I was following the train and everywhere I had gone and introduced myself that I had come to join in the campaign, they said, “Oh, go and wait, we will contact you.”  But nobody would contact me.  But I was flying around with them on my own arrangement and at my own costs.  In fact it got to a point when I got to a place where they were praying and they asked a woman to pray and she said, “May God not allow these strangers to take what we have worked for.”  And after that, one person said to me, “You are the one they were referring to as stranger.”

BSO prevented my return to UK

And I said, “How am I a stranger?  I am just a Nigerian in the Diaspora that has only come home to support in the project of making my own country work.”  And I again said, “Had they known what a bundle of hard worker, what a bundle of experience and knowledge I have!”  And it got to a point when I now decided to return to the UK and I said “Let me go and look after my grand baby.”

That was when somebody I knew from the UK, who is grand patron of the Patriotic Solidarity Front (PSF) and he said to me, “No, no, no. You can’t go back to UK at this time.”  He gave me the number of one of the leaders of BSO.  It was at that point I knew about BSO because I had never heard of BSO before that time.  And I called the man who said I should come to see him in Abuja and I said I was going to be on my way because I had already gone to Delta State to say bye to my people that I was going back to the UK.

And when I got to Abuja, I walked straight to him.  They, the BSO people, were working.  But Baba (Buhari) had a long table there and nobody was using that.  See very many Nigerians, so busy working, volunteers!  We had a press conference that day and what we had as the content of the press conference I put straight on social media.  Using the social media was something that was natural to me and they all went viral.  The BSO couldn’t believe it.  They said, come!  Because at that time there was no money but I put everything through the social media and the next day it had gone viral and was everywhere.  They even accepted me and gave me a seat and said, “Do whatever you think you are good at.”  They wanted me to do what I am best at.  That was how we carried on.

Truth about Buhari’s campaign funding

After that I came to learn about how they launched the crowd funding for President Buhari’s campaign.  And that made me excited because in the UK you don’t leave one person or two people to fund political campaigns.  We do fund raisers.  The party has registered members and, one of the members, I pay 25 pounds every year.  And every week or so, one of the party’s principal officers will write a letter telling us about something we have just achieved and the problems or challenges we have and in the end he will write, “Donate 10 pounds, 15 pounds, 20 pounds…”

(Cuts in) Just like shareholders in a company and the company’s management reporting back to them?

Thank you.  So, that was what Buhari Support Organisation (BSO) did.  They did this crowd funding and what happened was that Nigerians wanted to be shareholders in President Muhammadu Buhari’s Campaign.  They used their PVC to register (as member of the organisation) and then BSO had membership strength of close to quite over 19 million people.  Every member paid at least a hundred naira.  Some paid N200, some paid N1,000 some paid a hundred thousand naira, some paid two hundred thousand, some paid a million and some paid five million naira.  This was what they did and that was how President Muhammadu Buhari’s campaign was funded.

Is that all?  Because we also heard of how somebody in the party allegedly said the bailout fund he was said to have taken from his state’s Paris Club refund was in repayment of the money he borred and spent to fund Buhari’s campaign.

I have not confirmed that.

Yes, but we also have people who lay claim to how they funded Buhari’s campaign and became the ones that brought him to power therefore.  Things like this informed why even people, who Nigerians have said milked the nation dry through their “wicked corruption-driven administration in recent past” have the gut to challenge Buhari to disclose his campaign funding.  What about that?

Anybody can lay claim but I contributed what I knew I could best afford.  But I also contributed my own hotel accommodation, my feeding and my transport.  I contributed a lot sum.  It was my choice.  Nobody said to me to do so.

So in essence, are you bold enough to challenge anybody who says he knows how President Buhari’s campaign was funded to come out and say it?

Nigerians know a lot of things that they cannot prove.  But what I know is what I am telling you now.  I know that ordinary Nigerians and the elites contributed to the crowd funding.  It was open.  It was an open platform and Baba was the signatory to that account.  Anyone who contributed to the fund, it was called crowd funding, it was voluntary.  You brought what you have.  Nobody forced you.

Just like you said Baba was the signatory to the account of that crowd funding, somebody would say how was the General able to know that this or that money being contributed voluntarily did not come from a corrupt source?

If you have close to 19 million people paying N100, N200, N500, N1,000, N1 million, N5 million, you are not going to go through 19 million names.  You are not going to do that.  Let me tell you, if somebody contributes a hundred billion, the way that person sees his hundred billion is the same way the poor man who contributes a hundred naira sees his own.  So, they are both stakeholders.  But I hear some people saying “Oh, we have contributed so much and he has abandoned us.”

Okay that is another one.  Was anybody who contributed so much ever abandoned and if so, is Baba that kind of person?

No.  Baba is not that kind of person.  It is not about Baba being that kind of person.  If you contribute to a campaign fund, it is voluntary.  You are not supposed to be rewarded.  But you know here they call appointment a reward and so that they have to reward the person with an appointment.  The truth is that, appointment is not a reward.  It is a call to serve.  That is why I said if we are uprooting the democracy in America and we have to uproot it and bring the whole thing here, let’s not just take what suits us and discard what we think does not.  If you are called to serve, it is a sacrifice you are making.

For instance, I haven’t had breakfast today.  Under normal circumstances when I wake up in the morning, everybody who knows me will tell you that the first thing I do is to take my breakfast.  And because I had an early morning meeting, I said okay I would eat later and it has been from one meeting to another up till now that I have to be with you in this media interview meeting; for how much do I get paid?  So, it is a sacrifice.

It is just because in the era of looting, people got appointed and they looted.  So that is why they call appointment into public service as reward; the looting.  But here you don’t loot any more.  There is no money to be looted.  We are all focused on making sure that the poorest and the most vulnerable in the society are taken care of.  The N5,000 conditional cash transfer that is given to the poor people, not all of them have been receiving yet but it is going round gradually, you and I cannot understand how  much the N5,000 can go.  You could just go into a restaurant and spend N5,000.

But there are many Nigerians that have not seen N5,000 together as their own; and that is in a nation where private jets became the order of the day; in a nation where Jonathan’s people were dying because of environmental degradation when he could have pulled them out, built cities or towns and villages outside the dirt where they had been and helped them to exhume their ancestors so they could  move on permanently.  How much was that going to consume?  A lot of less than what they looted.

What does someone do with 57 houses?  You are not an estate agent.  Billions of dollars being recovered here and there, what were they doing with it?

But even at that you could still here the same Jonathan and his party men saying Buhari was running a failed government based on propaganda and lies, despite all these revelations here and there.  There is something which suggests therefore that they and some Nigerians may have agreed that those loots being recovered here and there are not true?

Nooo! I think nobody should take Jonathan seriously.

Is that so?

Yeees! Nobody should take him seriously.

But he is a former President.

Yeees! He is a former President sadly!  But, oh ye educated, intelligent Nigerians!  How did you elect a man like that to lead Nigeria?  How did it happen?  Jonathan should have no business getting to Port Harcourt let alone Abuja.  He should have stayed in his village; that is where he belongs.  I have said it many times.  See what he has done and see what he is doing to his own friends.  He now wants a billion just to testify in court for Olisa Metuh.  For Jonathan, everything is money.  He wants to be paid to come and testify.  As a former President he has all the security personnel around him allocated to him.  So, what does he need a billion naira for?  He doesn’t even care about the men and women that he used who are now in trouble as a result of the instructions he gave them.

When you remember the way people called wailers have made such information fly when it favours this same man and his party but that up till today, since after Jonathan demanded the N1 billion to testify, they have not either condemned or asked questions as to why a former President with all security personnel around him needs a billion naira just to go to court and testify for his party man, are you by any means disappointed?

No, I’m not disappointed because it is the lowest of the lows.  A court of the land has summoned Jonathan but he has no regard for our court.  That is what he has done.  What can you say to such a man?  You now want to be paid to testify for an aide…

(Cuts in) In a case that you, yourself, are even supposed to be in the accused box?

That is right.  In fact I don’t even think I want talk anymore because, he has just proved us right that he has no integrity, he has no shame.

Yes, we have heard you say all of these.  But a whole party that used to be the “biggest party” in Africa continues to queue behind this man, Jonathan, eulogizing him as their leader, who will lead them back to power in 2019.  How do they connect?

The money!  They are not queuing behind him.  They want his money and that is why they are queuing behind him.

But Ma, don’t forget that they are so sure, using especially the Mainagate to say it is sure game that PDP will use to take power from APC in 2019 as they claim with that Maina issue alone, Buhari is no longer popular.  What do you say about that?

Eeem! You know, if wishes were horses, then, fools will ride.  I can assure you that in 2019 they will not even win one state.  Well, let us even face it now: There is no PDP.  Where is PDP?  Where is it?  Other smaller opposition parties are coming up and they are doing a better job than them.  Which PDP are we talking about?  Is it Fayose’s or Femi Fani-Kayode’s PDP?  Which one?  Just look at them.  There is no PDP!  In 2013 that APC was formed I said it then that by the time we finished with the PDP, there will be no PDP.  There is no PDP I can assure you.  The number of PDP moving into other parties across the nation is unprecedented.  And so who are the PDP?  They are just a hue of them who are still trying to get some money from the former President, Jonathan, and that is why he needs to replenish what they are getting from him.  And he wants to start from Olisa Metuh and he probably has information that Olisa Metuh does not have.

Ordinarily, don’t you think that Jonathan has an answer to give?

He has.  He will start by apologizing to Nigerians and I have said this many times.  I have said this many times.  He needs to offer an apology: apologise to Nigerians specifically, then apologise to the people of the Niger Delta and then he will apologise to the people of the North East.  He also owes a direct apology to the Nigerian youths for impoverishing them and putting them under.  That is his starting point.  That is where he needs to start.  Thereafter, I think he needs question to answer about what he did to this nation.  The hardship we are going through in this country – thank God it is getting better now – the foundation of the hardship we are grappling with today, the blocks on it, built until it became a skyscraper, it was under President Jonathan.  So, when President Buhari came he had to dismantle it and that what took him long to appoint his ministers.  That structure of pain, of suffering, of anguish, of looting took him long time because what he met nearly killed him.

But I said it before President Buhari became President that when we win and President Buhari opens the books, that the jaws of Nigeria will drop and that they will not be able to pick it up, at what they will see.  Even I envisaged the depth of the decay we met.  It was under Jonathan that a civil servant would pay a tithe of N60 million.  Tithe of N60 million?  How much did you earn in a month and how much did you earn in all the years that had worked in the service?  It was under Jonathan that civil servants had estates littered all over the place.  It was under Jonathan that Igbo youths protested at Onitsha and nearly 50 of them were arrested and up till today we can’t find them.  They disappeared but later on bodies were seen in a Ezu River.  That is the picture you have seen going round as if it is now that it happened.

Okay, you mean the picture that was being shared around as if those bodies were caused by Operation Python Dance?

It was under Jonathan!  A lot of such had happened.  Under him our educational system went further into decay.  If he built on the reforms started by Obasanjo and Yar’Adua, President Buhari would have taken us to the sky and back.

Because we would have had less challenges?

But here we are; he destroyed what he met, dug us even deeper and buried Nigeria.  For this reason, he owes Nigeria an apology and he deserves to answer a few questions.

But Nigerians at the grassroots do not understand this thing the way you have said it.  As a social media practitioner, how do you intend to communicate this message to this set of people, who are largely vulnerable?

There is hardly anybody who doesn’t have a mobile phone and we haven’t been able to communicate with grassroots the way we really want to.  But we are working on it in this office and we will unfold our plans.

Let me give you an example, if you observe the level of commitment to information and awareness among Nigerians of North and South, you will see that Northerners are better informed than Southerners yet they have necessary information regularly but they keep saying they are not aware.  How do you tackle problem of this nature associating with information dissemination among Nigerians?

Thankfully people in the North, like you rightly observed, have that awareness.  That is why we still have this nation because if they working on ignorance not having that awareness, the kind of thing that went on with IPOB a few months ago, if they (Northerners) had responded with the same magnitude, you and I won’t be sitting here.  Abuja would have been on fire.

So, what we need to do and I keep doing that to our people is to encourage them to read and get acquainted with happenings in their surroundings and in the country in general.  In the past people used to read but these days they don’t read anymore and that is why newspaper are using screaming headlines to deceive our people.  The one who has a radio will receive exactly that message.  But the one who doesn’t read anyone but just the screaming headline goes to town with it like the one which says, “Lauretta Onochie says defectors from PDP pulling APC down”, that is the headline today (November 1, 2017).

But if you read that report you will find that there is no place that I said such a thing.  And that is what the one who doesn’t read but stick only to the screaming headline will pick and he will say, “Hen! Look at her, see what she said!”  But he didn’t read the inside story.  So, that is what many of our journalists are capitalizing on but we need to continue to educate our people to go beyond the headlines.  You need to go beyond the headlines.  Everyone is in a rush and so he just sees the headline and picks it and that is all that he takes to town.  It is really sad but I am just delighted that in the North there is more awareness.  And it is even getting much better because if the awareness doesn’t come in English Language it comes in Hausa Language.  So, I think we also need to do that in the South.  We need to encourage our people.

Although, in the South, there are radio station stations that are using Igbo and Yoruba Languages.  But when you also listen to those radio stations, there is a lot of misinformation going on there!  So, that is the problem.  But we are working hard to continue to educate our people so that awareness about the truth of situation in the country.