Impression about the attendance at recent campaign flag-off
I was happy on that day by the quality of people that attended the flag off. Looking at the people who were seated right there, I felt very humbled that I am seeing the way people look at me and the way they see me and that projection, I can tell you, I owe to MARAN because the first day I had the assignment to come to MARAN, I know that we have never left our relationship, sometimes it might be a bit cold because of the distance or because of the difficulties in which we found ourselves in ANLCA, but you see, rather than MARAN tackling ANLCA down, they will rather not say anything and that’s why they have been able to manage us until now that we are finding our self out of the woods and we need their torchlight to show the road. So in one simple sentence, I will like to thank you very much from the bottom of my heart that I have brothers not colleagues and very much more than brothers for what you people have done. At the end of the day, I was asking whether the flag- off was meant for the press or for ANLCA members. I will like to quickly add that the people you saw there on that day were our target audience, we are not inviting elders and godfathers that have been in ANLCA for years, and the people who have the power to decide this election were the people you saw on that day, so it is not the crowd that we are really talking about, but the people who answered our call, but people who came because they wanted to identify with us were the people you saw on the other side and they constitutes 80 per cent of the electoral votes. So, if they can rise up to our calling then it means we are on the right track and I pray to God that with your prayers and support, we will get there.
ANLCA, ASECO, Shittu and Elochukwu
Between 2005 and 2008, I was conducting elections into the chapters, but somewhere along the line when Ernest Elochukwu’s tenure expired in December 2008, as soon as he stepped aside at a national executive meeting which I could not attend because of ill health, the first assignment of the board of trustees as soon as they came in was to replace me immediately, without consultation, without even as much as a phone call. People felt that I will be bitter but I was not born with bitterness in my mind, what I did was to kindly step aside and I handed over all ASECO materials that were with me right in Port Harcourt to the chairman board of trustees and I never got a single letter of thank you, but I went my way. But meanwhile when that was going on, I was looking at ANLCA with a lot of wonder because I was expecting that as soon as I stepped aside maybe they will conclude elections quickly and then have the national elections and we would move on from there, I was anticipating that Elochukwu may want to come back and if you cast your mind back I had wanted to be the deputy national president of our association, but I was prevailed upon to step down for late chief Olumide Adebayo, may his soul rest in peace, I stepped down voluntarily for him because I felt that anybody can do the job, it doesn’t have to be me, and I can tell you that is the way I have ever looked at any assignment given to me in ANLCA. While out there, I saw ANLCA heading down, because the board of trustees that took over never had an agenda; the constitution says that within 90 days of taking over, national elections must be concluded and then it started going to 180 days and then one year, and one year and three months and we are already breaching the constitution by that extension. The excuses were that without the chapter elections there will not be national election, but somebody else was saddled with that responsibility. One interesting thing came up, when I conducted elections in the eastern zone at the port Harcourt airport where I belong, the boy I brought up who was serving me wanted to stand up for election as secretary of the chapter and I told him he did not have a license that the standard we are having now which I introduced is that if you are not a owner of a license, you can not stand for election. He created a lot of problems for us, but we stuck to our guns that we must maintain that standard but this guy went and spoke with the general manager of our company and they gave him some documents in Skelas name, when he came for screening, I disqualified him; that he can not stand for elections because we are laying a standard. It would have been easy for me to say he is my boy and therefore allow him to go in, but he was disqualified and people never believed it. As soon as they asked me to step aside because by then we had a new ASECO headed by Inua Mohammed, the chairman board of trustees called this my boy to his office and said ‘you see I told you, you are just serving a Yoruba man for nothing, he will disappoint you anytime, now see he couldn’t allow you to enter, but don’t worry, I will make you somebody’ and through Inua Mohammed, the guy emerged vice chairman of that chapter today. I was now asking myself that will it be possible for this association to ever progress if this kind of thing happens, if that guy had not thought of the way I had brought him up for more than 20 years he probably would have regarded me as an enemy for life because he came to me and told me everything. At that point, I just felt that well, let ANLCA go wherever they want to go, and that was why even in Kano, the election that was conducted in Kano some of the people who won got there forms at the election venue, paid for by an ASECO official and made to win election immediately. So when I saw all these I felt that was not my own problem. When the crisis of the western zone happened which you are all aware of, election could not be held, there was too much violence and all that and they called upon me again, the same board that never bothered now wrote a letter to me to please come and take over ASECO. Naturally, the first expectation will be that I will not go there and that would have been the natural reaction but I was looking at the excuses they were giving that they need to have democratically elected officials in office before they can conduct national elections. As at that time, I was not interested, but the demand for me to come and join the race came after the elections into the western zone when out of nothing, I just felt that for the sake of ANLCA, let me go back and re-introduce what we did before and gave a condition that the new ASECO that I am going to head must have at least two members of the past ASECO so that we can keep that standard and the wish was granted. The board even wanted to tie my hand by saying that they want to choose a vice chairman of ASECO, but I put my foot down and said no, because if I am not around the vice chairman might now want to take certain decisions that could compromise the process and I want to tell you that every step of the way, I participated. It was the success of that election and the calmness that followed and the peace that everybody was experiencing in the west that people started calling on me to come out.
My opponents and I
I will be very unkind to him if I mention the name of the man that came to my house by 11pm, naturally I don’t do night meetings, but he insisted on phone that he must see me, he is an Igbo man and well placed in our association, he is a former national officer and he knelt down to say that: ‘I was a small boy when you were in NPA, you are the one to help this our association to come out’. I did not give him an answer that day, I just felt that ‘well I have heard it before’, it was then I started thinking that who are the people coming out to be president. Last year; 2009 around March, Fleming Momodu called me and asked where I was, when I told him I was in Port Harcourt he said he wanted to come and see me and I asked over what, because we don’t swim on the same side, he said look Elochukwu must not come back, that if it’s the last thing that we will do, we must not allow Elochukwu to come back and along the line, he now said ‘Shittu, if you know you are coming out, I will be ready to support you’ but I said you are warming up to become president but he said no, once you come out I am going to step down, I didn’t give any response but I filed it for future reference. And when I decided that I was going to go for this election, one of the things I did without consulting with anybody was that I called Peter Okocha on phone that I will like to come and see him; we all know that he is our former president and I was aware that the Managing Director of his company; Mr. Tope Ogungbemile is also one of the people who are to come out as president, but I decided to go and see him, when I met with him, he received me with cordiality, we talked about his election in Delta state and the last time I saw him at Abuja and he told me it was because he was exhausted. I am telling you all this to show you that we received ourselves as old friends; he said he heard that I was ill. But the key issue there is that by the time I explained to him that I want to come out as president because ANLCA needs somebody with experience, he paused for a while and then he responded that ‘if not because I have brought out Tope Ogungbemile, I would have given you my 100 percent, but I will not stop you, please go ahead, you people should go about your campaigns free and fair and whoever emerges, I am ready to support’. And I told him that I am not doing election of bitterness, if on that day I am not elected, I will congratulate whoever emerges because it means that is what ANLCA wants and there is no bitterness. The man warmly shook my hand and he saw me all the way down from his office as an old friend. So, it was based on this that I decided to campaign, to see how people will respond. What I first did was a small flier and I sent it to the world to say that I am interested in becoming ANLCA president, it was meant to see their reactions of the people, but the reaction was so overwhelming as if they have been waiting for somebody to come and that gave me more impetus. I have had phone call from Fleming Momodu harassing me that why must I come out and I reminded him that this is a game for everyone and that I am not against you, lets see if any of us can do something, if you can do it better let them take you, and that was the last time I spoke with him.
Morality?
People talked about morality and one question that came to my mind is that at what level of politics does morality come in? Number one, the people who were elected into the chapters, I don’t know many of them as friends, you all know that I used to be in the east before I decided to come back home, individually I used to recognize many of them not by name but by faces when they come for screening and because I felt that everything was done which allowed the right person to emerge democratically, they don’t owe me anything because it would have been easy for us to take money and just sit back, fortunately today among those of us gunning for this election, Alhaji Wakili was in ASECO and the reason they came up was because they said I agreed to come and serve and that is why they want to serve. What people don’t know about stooges is that half of them are still living in the past, many of them have called me by phone asking me for money, even to go and paste the posters we had to send money so it is not that rosy, the pressure I am having is not even from the people, it is those who live on ANLCA for survival and we are saying that people should live for ANLCA in order for it to survive and that is the thug of war that we are having now. When I was passing through Tin Can, I discovered that all the posters that we pasted have been removed, the information came that people where paid that anywhere they see my poster they should remove it, but that does not matter to me, I will not print another poster because I have already made the statement that I am interested, if I am elected that’s fine, if they say no, I will still go back to who I am. But one thing that I know is that organizations go through periods and no organization gets it right immediately, we might go into another period led by another president apart from myself and then it will get to a time when people will reason that this man that we refused before, please come. It is a matter of honour for me; just like the accolades that I am receiving now. So I am responding to certain genuine voices that say that ANLCA needs to survive, that’s why if I start listening to people who are talking about morality, we can as well let it be business as usual. Politics that I know is politics of interest, if not, Fleming and Tope Ogungbemile will not go ahead and address a joint press briefings because, before they used to be enemies, I have had where Fleming had attacked the personality of Okocha, but when they now see somebody else coming out that threatens the way they think it will go, they came together which is still part of democracy, there is nothing wrong in it. If Fleming turns around now and says he wants to work with me, I will ask the people if we can find a role for him to play but one thing is that it should not be business as usual. We have lost a lot of grounds and if ANLCA gets it wrong this time around it might be difficult to get it right. I not only enjoy the support of the elected officials, even the godfathers and the opinion leaders that we sidelined deliberately in ASECO so that they won’t have any influence on those who are emerging, have also come round to say by the grace of God we are going to support you, the man who lost to Ofobike and created a scene on the day of election has asked me why he is not in POSCO and that I must have hated him and that tells us something.
Welfare of our members
I remembered I laid emphasis on our members and by that I mean the means of livelihood of our members, talking about empowerment and how to make our people restore their dignity. One urgent thing that we need to do for ANLCA today is to restore the dignity of the average licensed customs agent, you will agree with me that the gate man who is at NPA gate or terminal gate does not respect an agent because he believes himself is an agent. I have said it before that the most attractive accolade or name for anybody who suddenly falls from the sky and finds himself in the port is to call himself an agent, that was why I dedicated the better part of five years to the emergence of the Council for the Regulation of Freight Forwarding in Nigeria. I know how much it cost me even if its just being in Abuja and sleeping in a hotel, but I know how much I spent, the reason is because, we wanted to find an identity for an average freight forwarder, why should our people not have respect, if you have respect, even if you ‘soak gari’ in your house as soon as you step out of your house, there is no difference between you and the man that went to a Chinese restaurant. I have never done an ‘MO’ in my life, those days we call it money order because I worked in NPA and we thought it is money order until I learn that it is called machine outside, you don’t have to machine outside or perpetrate fraud for you to make money, but because that is what people have been doing, they are used to it, they even go to church and pray for them to have a job and do MO in order to have money, that’s why we lost our respect and our dignity. I have said it before that I was going to start with the elected executives of the chapters, that the first thing we are going to have is a retreat to let them know that this is the right way to follow, our constitution of 2008 has given provisions on even how elected officers can be removed. There are customs officers who after their years of service don’t have more than a three bed room, I don’t know whether you have come across any of them; I used to know an officer who retired as an Assistant Comptroller and three months later wrote a letter to the CG of Customs listing the property he now believed that he acquired illegally and that the government should come and take them; the man is late now. So I have been asking myself how can I not survive without doing fraud, the reputation we built in Skelas is what is helping us today, if we set up a container for examination, the officers will get there and say let it go because they know we don’t do fraud and then they don’t disturb our importers because they know that they don’t do shady deals, maybe, I am lucky with the kind of importers that we have, they are importers who don’t want to do deals with anybody, and even when we are now quarrelling about how much they will pay us, there are some of our importers who are paying us five percent of CIF which is about the highest in the industry today and that is enough for us to take a little to facilitate documentation because you can’t run away from it. Let all our people even declare to all the security agencies that for one month we want to do the right thing by paying our duty and let us see what the response will be, it has never been tried before, but if we know that it will enable people to respect us then let us declare the war that no more ‘MO’ and under declarations, importers go and pay your duty and lets see if they will not endorse our document, we can do it, That’s why we are starting from the executives and any of the executives no matter who when we come into office and is found wanting he is going to be expelled, in ANLCA we have never heard anybody was sacked apart from Amiwero and what did he do, he brought up Council of Managing Directors, so I know what it takes to carry everybody along but we need to start from our people and four years is more than enough.
Alleged Endorsement of Tope Ogungbemile
At no time and God is my witness and the Quran that I live on is my witness, the only time that I have seen Tope since he declared his intention was at the outing of CRFFN outside with other people, he came, prostrated, I greeted him and he left, nothing more. I don’t tell lies. If I told Tope Ogungbemile to go on while should I now bother? It means that I have brought ANLCA to the level where somebody who have never attended any chapter meetings, who does not belong to any chapter, who has never participated as a committee member and who just sits somewhere and becomes our president and you want me to say please go ahead? You should know me better than that, I won’t do that, I will rather not give him the go ahead in the first place; if somebody asks you, you should have told him that that is what Shittu would say. I was the only person that Peter Okocha did not talk to because every other person tells me he had spoken with them and do you know why it did not bother me, my director is here and he can confirm, Okocha had an embarrassing and humiliating experience at Lillypond Terminal, he was trying to go in and see the MD of Maersk Line but the gate men kept him there, they refused him to enter and he felt humiliated and he complained that what kind of association are we running now that people like the past president cannot go in, that if there is no body to go in, he will go and bring Tope, its not that I am not aware that Tope is going to run for president, but I am saying that it has never crossed my mind that somebody like Tope will come from the blues irrespective of what he is to become the president and I know that he was following the foot step of his boss. Okocha came into ANLCA, six months later, he dropped off and faced his political life and Tope also is being positioned to become a member of House of Reps, so that he might still use the same stool in order to have a better CV. What I am saying is that to say that there is nobody in ANLCA who can be president was one of the things that challenged me. On the part of Momodu, when people like us were chairmen in those days, Momodu was an errand boy, I know them, Kamba used to send people like him messages, the question is : what have you contributed, what committee have they asked you to be the chair and this is what your result is? I want to tell you honestly because I love my integrity, at no time have I had a one on one discussion with either of them, and the one I did with Okocha I told you how it went because I phoned him, and let me go a step further because there are other things I didn’t want to talk about. Okocha himself has descended from the high horses to come and play little politics and it shows the way he holds this ANLCA in contempt. I called him privately that I will like to come and see him, after that I left his office for the national coordinator’s office, my phone rang and I said who is it: it was Austine Kelly, he said he wants to see me and I told him I was at Alhaji Hakeem’s office, as soon as he came, he asked what did Okocha tell me? I was surprised; he said he knew I was coming from his office, I told him Okocha said he is supporting Tope and what he said was that Tope has lost that they thought Okocha will persuade me not to come out, after that incidence I thought within myself that this is how low ANLCA has gone and that was what motivated me at the flag- off to let you know the differences and the nomenclature of every body who says they are interested in protecting the interest of our members.
Elochukwu’s endorsement?
Sir Ernest Elochukwu is like the elephant and the blind men, so wherever you are touching him is the way you feel about him. I have never worked for him; I hope he said it at the flag – off that we fell out more often than anybody. I used to remind him that I did not stand for election, let him carry his headache. He wanted to do a reform in the association but he did not start from the chapters which was the mistake he made, so every step he goes, and because our former constitution does not give room for proper discipline of an elected official so once you are elected you feel God has answered your prayers, so because of his own character traits, people saw him again as a man that is arrogant, who proves that he knows so much. Another issue is that if Elochukwu calls for a meeting here and he needs you to make an input, be rest assured that if you spend 30 minute he will speak for 20 minutes, so people say that why does he need to call us now after all, he knows everything One of the people who raised war against him was the chairman BOT, when he came in he sowed the seeds of distrusts in the mind of many in the western zone that Elochukwu is a devil, that he is the problem of this association, because he being the chairman of the board while Elochukwu is the president its like it happens more in their own regional areas that there will always be this competition, and he knew that Elochukwu was about going so he saw Elochukwu off and the people now realized that Elochukwu was even better than the man and that is what they are realizing now. It is a human issue but Elochukwu as a person has contributed to this ANLCA to a lager extension than all the other presidents combined, including Kamba. It’s not a matter of taking us to see Obasanjo after all I followed Peter Okocha to see Obasanjo, but when you discover that majority of the committees that were being set up by federal ministry of finance, customs, ministry of transport, ANLCA members are always there quietly contributing to the policies and decisions, it takes a man who knows what he is doing, so if he gets up to endorse me it’s a plus but if he does not, the way its going now majority of ANLCA members can say: Shittu go ahead. But I called it a plus because he also promised that he was going to be there and we need all the support when I become president.
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