Ahead of the 2027 general polls, the governorship candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Kelechi Anosike, in Abia State, in the interview, downplayed the popularity and performance of Governor Alex Otti, describing as the weakest candidate to defeat. He claimed that the Otti spends heavily on social media promotion. He also spoke on his chances of winning and the lapses of Governor Otti, and candidate of the Labour Party. Specifically, he said if elected, his administration would increase the minimum of workers from N70,000 to N90,000.
Abia State has been governed by different political parties over the years. We have had the APP, PDP and now the Labour Party. There is a perception that the Labour Party has established itself in the state, particularly under the present administration. How do you intend to dislodge the Labour Party and return Abia to the PDP?
Let me take the issue of the governor. Otti is doing well? The presumption is that Otti is doing well. Is social media doing well? He spends so much money—some millions of naira, according to what we are hearing—paying PR and online consultants, with boys online. I call them the “data boys” pushing false narratives. False-narrative people attacking anybody who makes any comment against the governor. They attack you online. How do you know? Just tap the person’s profile page. You see it is a new account, or you see that the person has only two or three followers. Somebody—so you know that it is a fake account. There are so many fake accounts being used. So, for me, it is all social-media hype about doing well. The facts on the ground suggest otherwise. Look at the judicial workers. We are talking about workers. You don’t go on strike four times in three years. Is it social media that went on strike four times in three years? No. No other state has such an infamous record, as far as I am concerned. Four times in three years, the university is on strike. So, if the man is doing so well, why are workers going on strike? He does not want to pay anybody. He does not want to pay anybody anything. The money that comes in is controlled from Signature Bank, which is the highest shareholder, and the bank is where the money moves out from there. You understand? That is a different matter. We can talk about that another day—the complexity of using a bank in which you are the highest shareholder to serve as the state’s banker, salary account and everything, where everybody must go to that bank to open an account. That is even a different issue on its own. As the campaign progresses, we will come to it. We will look into it. For now, I am just saying that we will look into that as the campaign progresses. So, it is all about the workforce and dismantling the narrative that everything is working perfectly. Nothing is working perfectly. For me, this is the weakest incumbent I have seen.A very weak incumbent.
But the Labour Party is the ruling party in Abia. What makes you believe the PDP can defeat it?
Who is in Labour? We hear Labour party, Labour party, who is in Labour party. PDP is the strongest party in that state.
But the PDP has had its own internal problems, including infighting, disagreements and legal battles over the years. How do you intend to overcome these challenges?
It has been resolved. Even in the Labour Party, the issue of who the authentic Labour Party is has not been resolved. The original Labour Party is not with him. The Julius Abure faction has been involved in the matter. The case is in the Supreme Court. The original Labour Party candidate is Chief Chijioke Garba, who is also the governorship candidate of Labour, depending on which faction you recognise. The faction recognised by the national leadership under Julius Abure has its own position, while there is another position being canvassed in court. The people in court should be allowed to speak for themselves.
As for PDP, who is there now?
We are there. We have the people. We went round the 17 LGAs. Over 150,000 people came out to receive us. This is a game of numbers and structure. Labour has no structure in my state. There is only one PDP. And we are in that PDP. One of the challenges that may affect your chances is the people who have held the PDP together in the past and those who were responsible for some of the problems associated with the party. Who are these people now? Some of them have moved to the APC. The people who left PDP are some of the former leaders who, in our view, treated PDP badly and gave the party the wrong image.They have left PDP. But the foot soldiers, the supporters, the people who have always believed in PDP, are still in PDP—strong and formidable. We are talking about the people who make up the party at the grassroots. This is a game of structure. We are even planning a programme to show our strength. We are inviting all our ward coordinators, the ward executives and the LGA executives to the programme. The media will be there. We will see the massive number that will turn up for that event. That is how you measure structure.
It is not just about what people say on social media.It is about the people on the ground. It is about the wards. It is about the 17 local government areas. It is about the people who can mobilise and organise at the grassroots. That is where our strength lies.
Why should Abia workers vote for you in next year’s poll?
Why Abia workers should vote for me is because I am coming with a people-centric and people-centred administration. You know, some people just enter politics without ideology, and that is why you see that in the United States and even in the United Kingdom, political ideologies are clearly defined. Wherever they are, they remain there because there is a conviction that binds them to that ideology. But in Nigeria, we have no clear ideology. People say all the parties are the same. Today, somebody is in APC, tomorrow he is in PDP, and the next tomorrow he is in Labour Party. They keep shifting because there is no conviction about what is binding them to where they are. By my nature, I am a welfarist. I am a people-centred person. What that means is that I believe the whole essence of government is to take care of the people. Without the people, there is no government. What makes a government is the people, and that is even the essence of democracy—government of the people, by the people and for the people. So, the people must remain at the centre. When government carries out policies and programmes without regard for the people, I get bothered. That is why I joined politics and why I am contesting—to provide for the people and put them at the centre of government. Now, bring that down to the Abia worker. The Abia worker is one of the most disadvantaged workers in Nigeria as I speak to you. In fact, it is not only the Abia worker. All workers in Abia are suffering, including workers in the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ). He gave about N400 million to build or renovate the NUJ Press Centre. Some state governments have donated money and built such facilities, but the Abia NUJ is still operating from one small flat, one small flat in a block of flats. The government has not done what should be done. So, all the workers in Abia are suffering, and I want to restore the dignity of the workforce and create a motivated workforce in Abia. That is why I said that even though the government has given a national benchmark of N70,000, they are not even paying it properly. Some are paying N50,000, some N60,000 and some N70,000. I said I will start with a N90,000 minimum wage. Not only that, there will be health insurance for them. Because if you pay N90,000 and you do not create subsidies in some sectors and areas for the workers, it will still be a problem. The cost of medical services is very high. A family of four, for instance, could spend about N4,000 even on the cheapest anti-malarial drugs. If a family of four has to take anti-malarial drugs, how much of a worker’s salary is that? It is a problem. So, you need to create subsidies. You need to create insurance in different sectors so that life can become more bearable and convenient for the worker and his family. And I said, play by the rules. If the rules say you get to 60 years and you retire, or you complete 35 years of service, then you retire. But if you have not reached those thresholds, you cannot just wake up one morning and sack people. Because behind every sacked worker is a family struggling to pay school fees and struggling to feed. You have to have at the back of your mind that there are people behind this worker. People plan their retirement. Some people spend five years planning for retirement. Some begin three years before retirement. They start asking themselves: What will I go into after this? They start saving money. Then you become governor and simply wake up one morning and sack 15,000 workers—untimely and unduly. You have put that entire family into a serious problem of how to feed and survive because they did not plan to retire at that point. Some of them have even died in the process. So, we need to correct all of that and focus on restoring some human dignity. Do you know that magistrates in other states have official cars? Directors have official cars. But no magistrate in Abia has an official car. Even if the state bought official cars for magistrates, what happened to them? Some were making use of tricycles to attend to official duties. These are some of the things we want to correct because the money is there to do it. We want to restore the dignity of the Abia worker. We want to give them a sense of belonging. We want to motivate them to work.
All categories of workers. You know, I also said something about students. I said there will be a policy of No Abia Student Left Behind. If you are an Abia student, we have federal universities to take care of you. We have Michael Okpara University, which has a significant percentage of Abia indigenes. Are we going to leave them? No. So, that will be our policy of No Student Left Behind. Now, the same thing applies to workers. We will not have an Abia Worker Left Behind policy. I appeared before the Congress of the NUJ and told them that within my first 100 days in office, I will renovate the NUJ Press Centre. I mentioned it clearly. Within 100 days in office, that abandoned NUJ Press Centre will be completed for free. I am doing it for the NUJ, not because I am trying to buy their conscience. No. It is because a worker who has nothing to hide should not be afraid of an informed journalist. That is my idea. If you have something to hide, then you are scared when journalists are informed. But we believe we need to retrofit and equip the NUJ Press Centre in Abia so that it will be conducive for journalists to work. So, this is just one out of the many things we plan to do for the Abia worker. We also talked about building trust hospitals. All the hospitals in Abia are overstretched. If you go to the Federal Medical Centre, people are being admitted in corridors and so on. We are saying that we need to build trust hospitals where, if you are not part of the health insurance scheme, you can go directly to the hospitals, pay only 40 per cent, and the government absorbs the remaining 60 per cent.
What we want to do is to balance the effect of the subsidy. The transport system they are doing is good, but it is not efficient enough. If you want to run a transport system, it should be like what you see in the United Kingdom. If the bus is scheduled to arrive at 12, by 12 the bus comes. If it is scheduled for 1:30, by 1:30 the bus comes because it is planned. But with the bus terminal, some people stay there for three or four hours. No bus has come, so they are forced to leave and look for another means of transportation to where they are going. There should be some financing and proper planning to make the system work better. You see this kind of thing outside the country. Transport is also key. If you have a very functional transport system, most workers may not bother to come with their private vehicles. They can come in, hop into a bus, get to work, and later hop into a bus and get back home. If it becomes reliable, people will patronise it more. But when someone comes out one hour or two hours before work, plans to leave home and get to work by 8:20 or 8:30, and then gets to the bus terminal and there is no vehicle, he may eventually get to work by 10 o’clock. That affects productivity. So, what makes a system work is its reliability. Just like when somebody is dependable, you can trust that person and commit something into his hands. But if the person is not dependable or reliable, you will not want to do anything with that person. That is how it is with government systems. If the system is dependable and reliable, more people will commit to it. But if it is not, that is what is happening with the present governor, and that is why, in my view, he will not come back. He has betrayed and disappointed virtually everybody.
How has governor Otti fail because the people seem happy with his government?
They are crying. Even an Abia worker cannot even earn the minimum wage properly. The minimum wage moved from N30,000 to N70,000 as approved by the Federal government. He agreed to pay and announced it, but what did Abia workers got? Some got only N7,000 increase. Some got N10,000. Otti agreed to pay the 70,000 minimum wage and even announced and celebrated it just for the show. But go Abia and ask workers what they are actually receiving.
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If elected, how would you ensure that the revenue is available to sustain a N90,000 minimum wage?
You see, with the removal of subsidy and the higher revenue coming to the state, the state gets more than six times what the former additional cost was. Each local government area in Abia gets a minimum of about N500 million per month. That local government area, multiplied by 12 months, is N6 billion, and we have 17 local government areas in Abia. Multiply that N6 billion by 17. You know what it is. That is over N100 billion going to the local governments—not to the state itself, but to the local governments. So, in three years, the local governments have made over N300 billion from their original account, not the state itself. The state has also made over N600 billion. That is about N900 billion. So, when I say the state has got over N1 trillion coming into it, I mean it. They cannot challenge it. That is why I said we have over N1 trillion coming into the state. There are funds. There are funds to execute these things for a government that wants to do them. But a government that has baggage will not want to do them. A government that has other interests and is serving outside governing the people will not want to do them. But if you want to do it, I want to do it. For instance, the NUJ is a federal-government employee organisation. Yes, they were promoted when he came in, but they have not received the salary for their new grade. Once it is verified, we can ask Christian—you are laughing. You heard about it. How do you promote people and not pay them the corresponding new salary? I don’t understand it. It is not even the promotion allowance I am talking about. I am talking about the new salary attached to the new level. You are not paying it. That is another issue that needs to be corrected.
You said you are going to recall some workers—about 15,000 of them. Looking at the possibility that there may have been reasons behind the downsizing of the civil service, are you going to ignore all that? Or are you going to do something to ensure that the public service you inherit has the right size and capacity to deliver?
You see, the way it works is this: there will be a committee that will review each of those workers to determine the circumstances that led to their sack. The committee will determine what they were earning when they were sacked and also determine whether they are still eligible to continue working. Like I told them earlier, some of them would have reached 60 years of age by the time we come into power next year. Some would have completed 35 years of service. For those ones, it would be injurious to the system to bring them back into active service. So, what do you do? The salaries for those four years they have been out of work will be paid to them because they are the people first. The people always come first. In serving the people, we don’t short-change the system. The people come first. If somebody is now 60 years of age, we can no longer bring that person back into active service. But the provision for the salary arrears for the four years will be made. So, there will be a committee that will harmonise all these cases to make sure that the right thing is done. What is important is that you cannot downsize and sack all the people employed by your predecessor simply because they were employed by your predecessor. That is political witch-hunting. So, if tomorrow I get in there and see everybody employed from 2023 to 2027, and I sack them and bring my own people, then the same thing continues. If you want to punish somebody, you sack them and bring those ones back. You see, the thing continues. That is not how the government should work. Government should be about continuity, fairness and service to the people, not about using public employment to settle political scores.
You are coming from the PDP that many people have blamed for the problems of the past. How will you regain their trust and convince them that this is a new PDP and not the PDP they rejected?
Let me start with the aspect of those who voted for Labour. PDP voted Labour. PDP made Labour politics. Who is in Labour? Labour has no structure in my state. Labour is not strong. PDP remains the most formidable and strongest party in my state, having ruled for 24 years. You see, it was an anti-PDP protest vote that brought Labour in. The former governor finished eight years. He knows what I am talking about. Instead of taking power to the centre or to another zone, he took the replacement from his own side. So, Umuahia and Old Bende were saying, “Ah, rotation of this? You can’t finish eight years and look for your brother from your clan to hand over to, as if other people don’t have a vote, as if other people are not a strong voting bloc, as if their votes don’t matter.” So, let us see what happens. It was an anti-PDP protest vote that brought him in, plus a small aspect of the “Obidient” wave. Those two factors brought them in. Now, I am emerging, and I wasn’t part of the past administrations. There is a new mindset, a new focus and a new direction. All those people who gave PDP a bad name have come out. The former leaders who gave PDP a bad name are no longer in PDP. They have left PDP. So, it is a new mindset, new focus and new direction, even though it is the same party. Abians are aware of this—that all those past leaders are no longer in PDP, and you cannot associate me with those past governments.
Even the current governor was in PDP. He was part of the PDP establishment we talked about. So, the message is going out there, and people are saying it is true. They say, “Anosike wasn’t part of it. We never met him. He was not there when those guys did what they did.” So, that message is already out there, and that is why we are confident that the next government will be PDP taking back its state. Abia is PDP. PDP is Abia State. We have got the numbers. I think across the 17 LGAs, over 15,000 people came out to receive us. So, we are not worried about it.
Based on the current economic realities, do you think N90,000 will be sufficient throughout your tenure?
I actually started off with N90,000.If one of them had met me. one of their leaders and said, “Why don’t we just do N100,000? Let’s start with N100,000,” I would say I can start with N100,000. But I have already said N90,000. Let us get in first and check what the total wage bill will be. Then we will know how to scale it appropriately to accommodate a living wage. Because even the N70,000 is not really a living wage. How much is school fees?
You know, so I am aware of that. I am aware that it could also be adjusted. But the thing is, I cannot come here and say I will pay N150,000 or N200,000 and then you ask me whether it is sustainable. One of the things I learnt while in the United Kingdom is sustainability. Before they embark on any project, any policy, any construction or project management initiative, what is at the back of their mind right from the conceptualisation of that project is sustainability. In Nigeria, we first finish the thing before we start thinking about whether it is sustainable or not. They don’t take the cost of maintenance into consideration from the beginning. They finish the project and then start thinking about maintenance and sustainability. So, sustainability is key. That is why I said N90,000, because I know how much comes to the state. There is a policy we call “Let Your Money Work for You.”Each LGA in Abia has received about N18 billion, some even N25 billion. If you look at the last three years, can you see that money translated into the welfare of the workers or government employees? No, you can’t see it. Is their living condition conducive? Is their working environment conducive enough to justify the fact that that LGA has received N18 billion? You don’t see it. You see the condition in the offices.
That is why we say Let Your Money Work for You. Each LGA’s money should be used to develop that LGA. Abia is beyond Aba and Umuahia. Abia is 17 LGAs, and what it means is that their money should be able to work for them and be reflected in how they live, how they work, how they move and so on. Workers’ welfare, workers’ accommodation and housing are important. Housing is a serious issue in Abia. Just a two-bedroom apartment now is about N2.5 million. Why in Abia State? It is because of the shortage of houses. So, if you create layouts and more houses become available, you crash the cost of accommodation. When you have 100 people struggling for three available spaces, do you see the problem? There are only three flats available, but you have 100 people applying for them. So, we also need to look at what we can do for workers as some of them are retiring as tenants. Directors and permanent secretaries, who are always going to work, also need proper accommodation. Will it be wrong for government to create a mortgage scheme for them, a housing scheme for them and get a proper layout? So, when you talk about the total package of the Abia worker, you are talking about their housing, medical care, their children’s education and their relaxation. It is a total package for Abia workers, and that is what we want to do. The government is saying, as if it was yesterday, that this is a populist agenda, and the government is saying that it cannot be done. They just want to whip up the sentiments of the people. But the workers are already calling us. If 50,000 workers come to us and each has 10 votes, is that 500,000 votes?
They know what they are saying. They say it is not sustainable. I know it is sustainable. It is sustainable. It is just a populist agenda aimed at whipping up sentiment.People talk about it, and I say no. A lot of the governor’s statements are on record. The governor said he would not sack anybody. I have a video clip of him saying in 2019, when it was rumoured that he would sack people, that he would not sack anybody.
It was a rumour, though, that he would sack people. I I can play it for you. He said he would not sack anybody, but when he got into office, he did.He sacked them.
There are also concerns about multiple taxation, with different agencies collecting money from traders and other informal-sector workers. What would you do differently to reduce the tax burden on the people?
You see, multiple taxation is everywhere. Heavy taxes. Even the truck pusher is taxed in Abia—N2,000 per day. The woman selling vegetables, and I can give you examples, is also taxed. They give her a receipt and call it daily tax. They are charging her N500, N1,000 per day.What did she do? She did not use your electricity. She did not use your diesel. She did not use your gas. She is using raw energy to push her goods, and you are charging her N2,000 per day. I said we will abolish all those things.We will open up the state.When I open up the state, I will bring investments. I will bring investors.You build factories.For three years, you did not build any factory.In fact, the worst is that the factories that were already there were shut down. The workers were laid off.So, you build factories, bring investments, increase foreign direct investment and improve your internally generated revenue. Like I said, you collect from the rich and service the poor. That is what I will do. I collect from the rich and service the poor.
So, I will abolish all those taxes imposed on people like truck pushers and petty traders. You can pay your personal income tax. There is nothing wrong with that. Tax is as old as human existence. Even from the Scriptures, Caesar was a tax collector. You need taxes to run the system. So, you can pay your personal income tax. It is okay if you want something from a government office and you are asked to show evidence that you have paid your tax. There is a way to regulate it. But we cannot say we are taxing everybody for everything. Take the truck pusher, for instance. If it does not pay you, you seize the truck. That is what they do.
Ask them. That is what they are doing. They collect the truck from there until the person pays. So, we will regulate it and make sure that we abolish double taxation. Double taxation is not good. It is not healthy for the system. We need to work on it and ensure that people are not subjected to multiple and unnecessary levies. Wut at the end of it all, it is about the welfare of the Abia worker. And I said it is not just those in the civil service. It includes those in the civil service, those in the public service, workers in the private sector and even members of professional associations. Once you are a worker in Abia, your welfare will be paramount to the next government.
