Following his outburst against Governor Adams Oshiomhole of
Edo State a member of the the Presidential Advisory Committee on
National Conference/Dialogue, Col Tony Nyiam (rtd), was yesterday
forced to resign by the Senator Femi-Okurounmu-led committee.
It was gathered that members of the panel were embarrassed by Nyiam’s perceived partisanship and had to apologise to Oshiomhole.
However,
in a telephone chat with Vanguard last night, Nyiam refused to confirm
whether or not he had quit the job. Asked if he had resigned, Col Nyiam,
in a combatant tone asked Vanguard to question the source of the report
that he had resigned.
“Who told you that I have resigned? Ask the
person who told you to tell you his authority or how he learnt that I
have resigned. Thank you!” he said and hung up.
Another member of
the committee firther clarified that the committee had to force him to
step down in order to redeem the panel’s image.
“
The governor, Oshiomhole was our host. It was unbecoming of a member of
a commiitee that was set up to listen to Nigerians to now want to stop
Nigerians from talking, no matter what they had to say. We faulted him,
he didn’t like it; we told him he embarrassed the committee; he admitted
his outburst was wrong and we demanded his resignation.
Authoritative
sources told Vanguard that Okurounmu led other members of the panel to
apologise to the governor and showed him a copy of Nyiam’s alleged
resignation letter.
Oshiomhole reportedly accepted the apology.
This
came as suspected thugs disrupted the proceedings of the Committee on
national conference in Benin City, when they stopped Governor
Oshiomhole and others from making contributions to the ongoing talks.
The disruption came after a member of PAC, Col. Tony Nyiam (rtd) had shouted down the Governor while making his contribution.
The
thugs believed to have been imported from neighbouring states heckled
the Governor as soon as they realised that his contributions would be
different from the expected opinions.
The governor who took the
stage to make his contribution after the Isoko Ethnic group had made its
contribution said he objected to spending huge public funds on a
wasteful venture, saying, during the tenure of President Olusegun
Obasanjo, money was spent on a similar conference and at the end,
nothing came out of that conference.
While the governor was still making his speech, Col Nyiam stood up to challenge the governor and shouted him down.
But
Oshiomhole who had earlier told the crowd that his views about the
conference may not be the views of the people of the state but “my
personal views” insisted that he must be allowed to air his views
publicly and he continued despite comments from Ijaw groups at the
conference.
“I will be surprised if anything changes. Sincerely, I
have no business to deceive or mislead anyone. I believe that the
outcome of this conference will not be different from that of other
conferences we have had in the past.”
But as soon as Governor Oshiomhole made this statement, committee member, Col Nyiam jumped up and shouted at the Governor.
He
was restrained by other members who were taken aback by his action.
Even while the Governor was still making his contribution, Nyiam started
screaming at the Governor to shut up and sit down.
Thereafter by
the PDP thugs who disrupted the whole proceedings and many scampered
for safety as a result of the unruliness of the committee member and
thugs.
The governor who insisted on concluding his remarks however left the floor when the thugs were getting violent.
However,
the Governor had, at a courtesy visit to him in his office by members
of the Committee led by Senator Femi Okurounmu, said he had no faith in
the whole process.
Oshiomhole said: “All I owe Nigeria now is to
speak my mind. It could be error of my head but certainly not of my
heart. As much as I wish you well, I just want to say that I have no
faith in this process and I do not think it was necessary at all. I am
unable to find any basis to give me some illusion that this exercise
will not be different from the others. And I honestly think that in
terms of the private sector, when a country keeps debating how we can
live together that cannot be one of the basis on which the outside
community will invest in Nigeria. They may well wait until we know how
we want to live in Nigeria.”
He lamented that fifty-three years
after independence, Nigerians still preferred to look at themselves from
their ethnic origin rather than being Nigerians, saying, “for me, I am
just a Nigerian. I do not think that more than one hundred years when we
have set aside billions of naira to celebrate centenary celebrating the
fact of amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, and we have
lived together as one country for over a hundred years, and we have gone
through independence, we have been free for fifty three years and we
are coming back to ask the question, how could we be there.
“I
think Nigeria needs to address very serious issues. When I see eminent
Nigerians discussing this issue, I am sure they know that Nigeria’s
problem is not this politics of sharing which the national dialogue is
all about, who is getting what, who has this natural endowment, who
should do this or not do this. For me this is the act of perfecting
poverty. The real challenge is getting Nigeria back to production. The
real challenge is creating industrial base and this cannot be resolved
through conferences. We have moved from parliamentary system in our own
wisdom to the presidential system. We have test-run it and it was
aborted by the military and it has re-incarnated in the present form.”
“Nigeria
does need a serious reflection about how to return to those core values
that made Nigeria work before. Those healthy competition between the
governments, visit the whole question of attitude and unless that
changes, I do not see how any dialogue can work. I was discussing with
somebody last week and he noted that this is the eleventh conference and
I ask what ten conferences could not do, how would the eleventh one do
it? Why do we think we can continue doing the same thing the same old
way and think that this time the outcome would be different?
The
Governor said nobody convened a meeting without stating an agenda and
asking others to draw up an agenda for the meeting, saying “one would
have expected the Federal Government to make an outline and allow
Nigerians make additional input, instead of saying there are no no-go
areas and giving the impression the exercise will end nowhere, at which
point the governor’s security aides formed a ring around him, just as
the arena was getting very rowdy, with shouts of no, yes, the only words
that could be discerned. ’Then the issue of fashioning a new political
system came up in the past, a lot of money was spent, transporting
people all over the whole country and expanding more on related issues
but at end, what did we get. To me, this is not meant to work and it
will not work. Fconception we know we want to talk but we do not know
what we want to talk about.”
Earlier, chairman of the Presidential
Advisory Committee on National Dialogue/Conference, Senator Femi
Okurounmu said they were in Benin as part of their tour of the six geo
political zones to get their input as regards the content of the agenda,
the duration, choice of delegation and legal framework. States of the
South-South zone and different ethnic nationalities, including the Ijaw
National Council, Urhobo Progress Union, Benin Forum, Ijaws of
Gbaramatu, Itsekiri Leaders of Thought, Isoko Development Union, Midwest
Consultative Forum and many other groups made presentations.
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