EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: “I DO NOT SPEAK AGAINST GOVERNMENT” SAYS JAPHETH OMOJUWA

Lanre Olagunju: What defines Japheth Omojuwa?

Omojuwa: I’m about results, I’m about change , I’m about creating value and essentially I’m about making sure that when I finally exit this planet  I’ve the chance to look back at the things I’ve done and I’d be smiling at the things I got to do. Essentially it’s difficult to define anything because there are many ways and perspectives to define any phenomenon.  So in defining myself, it depends on where you find me but I’m essentially about creating value and solutions.

Lanre Olagunju: @omojuwa on Twitter is one handle on many TL known for speaking against government and tweet slapping the present administration with sharp and hard tweets. Same goes for your articles as well .What exactly do you aim to achieve?

Omojuwa: First of all let me clear something, I don’t speak against government, I speak against what is wrong with government because they are two different things. Government in itself is not a bad thing; government in itself is not a good thing. It’s what the government does that makes it good or bad government. So I don’t speak against government. I speak against bad government, I speak against corruption, I speak against insensitivity, I speak against lack of development, I speak against lack of commitment, I speak against lack of passion on the side of those that are supposed to make things work for us. I speak against lack of sincerity. And what do I intend to achieve? There are many sides to that. First of all, I want Young Nigerians like myself to know that we cannot just sit down and allow things to happen and just keep quiet. Without even getting on the street to do something by just saying I’m not going to take this you’ve at least started something. By just saying this will not stand you’ve at least started something because if you cannot speak what you don’t like how can you bring what you like to pass? For me it’s about making my own constituency know that if we don’t want it, we have to speak against it. Then on the other side, it’s to make the government know that the times have changed. The era of closed government and the era of secrecy are over. Now it’s about open government, now it’s about making sure that whatever goes on in there in their meetings can get out and when it gets out it can go viral so they’d better be careful, and from the people I’ve spoken with, I mean those in government, we haven’t done enough of what we’re expected to do and all that but change is not something that happens overnight. You’ve to start from somewhere, you keep pushing, you keep digging then one day you hit the gusher and the result actually gets to show. But there’s change happening right now, a lot of people might not see it but it’s happening. For me, essentially it’s about change, it’s about making people know that we can be part of change even from the use of our mobile phones.

Lanre Olagunju: Many people find it difficult to understand when you say Omojuwa is not an activist. What does that mean?

Omojuwa: Being an activist, first of all emm…somebody that goes to the hospital to treat people of their sicknesses is a doctor but the fact that I’m able to treat you…for instance say you have an injury that I’m able to give you a good treatment doesn’t mean I’m a doctor. To be a doctor you have to go through several processes. I haven’t gone through the process of being an activist. I’m just an ordinary Nigerian that speaks his mind on a lot of issues including politics and governance. I speak on other things. The first post I published today was on relationships, I speak on relationships, I speak on movies, football, and tennis name it. So are you going to call me whatever name they call all those people? So I’m not an activist. I’m just an ordinary Nigerian who speaks on several issues. I’m not an activist in every sense of the word.

Lanre Olagunju: As early as June 2011, one article of yours that went viral on the internet was “Jonathan has fooled you again” what were you thinking because the president hadn’t spent two months in office as at that time?

Omojuwa: It seems like I was seeing the future, right? Yeah because I was a fan sort of…I was a supporter of the president as at 2010. On the 18^th of September when he declared to run I was excited and my excitement was based on the fact that I felt that for someone who essentially wasn’t a member of the political class, though he was a beneficiary of the system but he’s not someone you’d see in the class of the conventional member of the political class in the likes of the who is who of Nigerian politics. So I felt this person would have the power, knowing where he was coming from and bring about change, but I started seeing from his primary process the loads of money they were spending. It was obvious that something wrong must have been done. Where did they see all of that money? What Jonathan administration spent on campaigning is one of the world records in campaign history if it was actually recorded. So I began to see a …an empty person. I personally got to find out that his campaign was built on sentiment and good luck and things like that. Trust me I’d have voted anyone, apart from somebody that says “vote for me I’m goodluck”. So as at when the government started, just two months into his administration in 2011, a boy from their camp was writing an article on his successes and he wrote fifty things he had done and that was shocking because everything he was writing was fiction because there was nothing truthful about it so I came up with ‘fooling the president’ which was my beginning of general acceptability not that that was my first time of writing. Then something happened again, and then I wrote “Jonathan has fooled you again”

Lanre Olagunju: At that point in time didn’t you feel that you were not giving him benefit of the doubt?

Omojuwa: benefit of the doubt is based on antecedent. When I discovered who this person is and I started paying attention to things I wasn’t paying attention to. I looked at his records in Bayelsa, I looked at the things he did as vice-president. I found out that he was absolutely a sham.  So when you say benefit of the doubt I actually did give him the benefit of the doubt and I discovered that he was a sham.

Lanre Olagunju: looking at the PDP and how far they have taken Nigeria so far. Do you have any hope in the PDP?

Omojuwa:  Hope! Hope is …they say when there’s life there is hope, right? Now when you’re hoping, hope has specifics. You might hope to get a job tomorrow and when you’re hoping to get a job tomorrow you are going to be looking at yourself, are you a graduate?do you have the competence? So in hoping to get a job you definitely have certain jobs in mind.  The fact that you’re hoping to get a job doesn’t mean that hope is broad and that you can get any type of job. You know as a person that there are certain jobs that you can get based on your competence, and things you’ve done in the past. In putting my hope on the PDP, I’m going from the same angle of what has the PDP done in the past 13 years? So I can only build my hope on their antecedents and their records and if you look at what the PDP has been able to do in the past 13 years. To build my hope on the PDP; is to build by hope on an empty ground, on failure, on corruption, on a group of nonentities who know nothing about creating service, about bringing about change for the people, is to put my hope on people who think the best way to govern is to distract, is to put my hope on people who see citizens of Nigeria as their subject and not their co-citizens who need the basic things of life. So 112 million poor people, we don’t have good roads, dilapidated infrastructure, people wailing and crying, penury, poverty destitution. What kind of hope do I want to put in this kind of people? There’s no hope for the PDP going forward

Lanre Olagunju: If you’re saying that you don’t have hope in PDP because they have no result. Come 2015 if Nigerians succeed at voting the PDP out of government. Will that yield any positive result? 

Omojuwa: The danger of having another party succeed PDP is that Nigerians are going to measure the success of that party against that of PDP. Which means that the bar of expectation will be very very low which is a disaster for any country. You know, if as a governor of a state I never built a kilometer of road for eight years like Igbinedion. It means that any government that comes in and builds 10km is a success. So what I’m trying to tell you is that you’d expect that whoever succeeds the PDP will succeed. But the real question is will these people succeed in the real sense of the word. Or would they just do better than PDP and people will say “wow thank God!” so we’ve found ourselves in a place where  failure is the standard so even a little bit of success gets celebrated. But I’m absolutely sure that things can’t be worse than it is under the PDP government. They can’t!

Lanre Olagunju: Do you for-see a coalition of opposition party come 2015

Omojuwa: the fact that they come together and they form an alignment doesn’t guarantee victory at the polls but that’s the starter but if they don’t do that that means they are doomed and that means Nigerians are stuck again with the PDP for at least 8 years. And from what has happened in the past you can imagine what that means?

Lanre Olagunju: as an individual and a Nigerian what political party do you endorse?

Omojuwa: I’m not going to endorse any political party….laughs 

Lanre Olagunju: but why?

Omojuwa:   there are no elections …but certainly I won’t endorse the PDP because the only thing they know how to do is that they know how to fail. So any party apart from the PDP has a chance of getting my endorsement. Though many of the parties are at the point of forming coalitions…so let’s see what happens. But you can be sure that PDP is out of the picture for me and I don’t have apologies about that.

Lanre Olagunju: like you said Nigerians don’t have a standard for measuring success…

omojuwa cuts in… our standard is poor it’s easy to succeed as a leader in Nigeria. ..

Lanre Olagunju: so in your own view what’s the picture of a new Nigeria? 

Omojuwa: the picture of a new Nigeria is not a picture you have to get from nowhere. It’s a picture of modern global realities. It’s a picture of a people that are able to produce, but how can you produce when there’s no power? How can you produce if there are no good roads? How can you produce when there are monopolies? I cannot go into the cement business today I’ll get crushed because there’s a monopoly. There are certain businesses I cannot do today because in one way or the other the government has been able to put checks around places to kill your productivity. We must begin to see our country as a part of the global village where we understand that the things we do in this country have a bearing in the world and the things that happen around the world have a bearing on us. What stops an average Nigerian from producing things and exporting? It doesn’t happen to average Nigerians.It happens to people I will refer to as crony capitalists. We need to free up the economy system, we need to put a system in place that allows people to be productive, create entrepreneurs, a system that allows us to create not just business men that depend on politics to succeed but business men who don’t need to know anybody as long as they have their head, they have the passion and interest to do what they want to do. When we begin to have such a system like that in place everything not necessarily all …but a lot of things will work well. But a system where people leave school, do their NYSC …I’ve a lot of friends doing nothing, not because they are not able to work, not because they don’t want to work but just because the system breeds unemployment. Why won’t there be unemployment when the government is the highest employer of labour? That’s an anomaly. We need to put a system in place that allows the private sector to run. How can the private sector run when the banks have exorbitant interest rates?  Why won’t the banks have high interest rates when governments’ internal borrowing has crowded the banks themselves? You can’t aid the private sector like that. These are the basics that we must look at as a nation then the picture we desire by itself will eventually fall in place. It’s not something we necessarily have to go and paint and say this is the future that we want. It’s something we can actually build by consistently doing things right

Lanre Olagunju: You sound quite brilliant with your analysis about the economy and also governance. So how soon do we expect to see you in politics or isn’t that the summary of yourlabour?

Omojuwa: politics?! You don’t expect me in politics. I’m not cut out for politics… cuts in

Lanre Olagunju: is it a no-no thing?!

Omojuwa: politics in Nigeria is not a place where you say things the way they are, it’s a place where you say things the people want to hear. And I’m interested in things that people have to hear.  So until I know that the majority of Nigerians are ready to listen to the truth especially the so-called political class and ordinary people. Until I know that they’re ready to understand that there are many things and that there’re certain things that we shouldn’t’ allow to happen, then I can say Ok politics. But I as a person I believe in processes. The time isn’t right for me to be in politics and I haven’t done enough with my own personal life when I’m satisfied with my own personal success  I can begin to think about politics. May be!

Lanre Olagunju: looking at the involvement of young people in politics today, do you feel that the time is ripe for young people to venture into politics?

Omojuwa: Of course the time is ripe…

Lanre Olagunju: yeah young people are so passionate, but how much can we rely on that?

Omojuwa: yes the time is ripe for young people to be involved in politics and when I say politics, now I mean partisan politics, more or less I’m part of the system. I have a blog that caters for well over 200,000 different people and millions of hits in a half year. Essentially I’m more or less a part of the political system. So I’d rather say young people get involved in politics in terms of not staying on the sideline and complaining but in terms of being part of the system in terms of making government and those in government know that “look things have changed we can’t just take this” and if all of those things doen’t work, then things like civil unrest and civil disobedience are things that are meant to bring about change.

Lanre Olagunju: That reminds me. The occupy Nigeria protest that held the nation at a standstill in the early days of January, you were strongly involved…you were on air a couple of times making analysis and also a mover of the Abuja protest. As that act of civil unrest achieved its all?

Omojuwa: I really don’t know why people keep asking this question. Occupy Nigeria wasn’t about regime change, because most of those who said it failed were thinking we were going to have a Nigerian spring then you change the regime. That for me wasn’t the objective. The objective for me was to get the price back to N65. As an objective, that essentially wasn’t a success. But we were able to remove N43 from the price per litre. If you calculate the effect and the direct cost of saving N43 compared to if we’d allowed the prize to stay. Analyze the effect on the direct price of goods and services. I heard the inflation unit jumped by 200 units in January if we’d allowed it to stay we’d be talking about some 500unit jump by now. From abroad the kind of attention we’re able to get in terms of saying that Nigerians aren’t going to sit down anymore and accept all that is being thrown at them. That was the first time in the history of this Nation. I mean we put the nation to a standstill for about two weeks…so one way or the other if you are not able to appreciate your small success for what they are you will not be able to value the big success when they come. It’s a gradual process. I don’t believe in instantaneous change I believe in procedural change, change process that graduates by itself. And the thing is that Nigerians are more involved in politics today than ever before. I know because before now, we dint have political blogs that have crowd pulls, people coming to read and all that. But now we have a lot of political blogs springing up here and there. So it’s a sign that Nigerians are more interested in politics and until people are more interested in the politics of their nation they won’t be part of the political process and if they are not part of the political process we are bound to have a few people run the country…but things are changing and occupy Nigeria was a part of that process. It’s a beginning in itself of a better Nigeria.

Watch out for the concluding part of this interview....