High Chief Higgins Peters is a chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, in Cross River State and a stakeholder in Cross River politics. In this interview with NSAN NDOMA-NEJI, Higgins is calling the Barr. Alphonsus Ogar-led state executive council of the APC to step aside, following the abysmal performance of the APC in the 2023 elections where an APC sitting governor in the person of Prof. Ben Ayade lost senatorial elections to candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. As if that wasn’t enough blow to the APC, the Ogar-led also lost some seats in the rerun elections in most constituencies in Yala and Obanlikwu local government areas of Cross River North senatorial district where the state party chairman hails from, among other salient issues. NSAN NDOMA-NEJI brings you the excerpts:
The All Progressives Congress, APC, chairman in Cross River State, Alphonsus Eba Ogar, granted an interview that was circulated in several social media platforms, where he purportedly insulted your person and several people felt uncomfortable and displeased with it. What is your reaction to the interview? Do you feel insulted as alleged?
No, I don’t.
Several people sent it to me and I listened to it and what came to my mind immediately was sympathy for his limited knowledge and ignorance about me after about 18 years of being around me and also sympathy for the lack of knowledge of his Yala ancestry.
Okadigbo, as I would call him, was brought to my office in Wuse 2, Abuja, in 2006, by one of my very close boys, Barr. Godwin Offiono, who is currently a member of the House of Representatives, and I saw prospects in him and took him in as close as I would take any of my younger brothers or boys.
If within this length of time and closeness to me, he still does not know me enough and could still speak at that level of shallowness and ignorance about me, then I should rather be worried for him or worried that the party chairmanship has affected his morals or conduct, yet he remains my younger brother.
I have consistently insisted that I don’t want to speak about the party chairman in isolation of, the party exco because he is just the chairman of the exco and not the exco.
I am not the kind of party stakeholder or leader that will see things going wrong and keep quiet because I want to be politically correct or does not want to be insulted or because my younger brother is involved. No, I will speak.
I am a very fulfilled person but I don’t have control over what anyone says or does about me, but I do know who I am, what I do and what I will do at all times.
But a chieftain of the APC, Chief Okoi Obono-Obla, who is a lawyer, has said party chairman can’t be removed, except constitutionally where structures of the party have to meet to ratify his removal, how do you react to this?
Chief Barr. Obono-Obla is a tested and seasoned lawyer aside being a very senior APC party stakeholder in the state and nationally.
I am not a lawyer, but he is and so he might have superior legal knowledge of what the party constitution says than I do, but I am confident that you and I know that most times, in the interest and welfare of parties, state excos have been dissolved without finishing their tenures, state party chairmen and national chairmen have been removed in line with exigencies of the times.
Ndoma, most times in life, it is not what is okay that might be exigent. That was why a certain ‘doctrine of necessity’ was introduced by the Senate in the case of late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and former President Goodluck Jonathan.
