Jay Osi Samuels: I Single-handedly Built ANN to Where It is Today
Dr. Jay Osi Samuels recently returned as the National Chairman of the Alliance for New Nigeria, ANN. With recent moves by some forces to hijack the party and the controversy surrounding the party’s presidential nomination, he speaks on how the party got to where it is today and moves by some people to reap where they did not sow.
There has been a lot of controversy regarding the formation of your party, Alliance for New Nigeria (ANN). Please, can you tell us a little bit about how and who are those people who founded the party?
Well, ANN came about with the meeting of young and patriotic Nigerians, professionals, Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers, etc, who were been concerned about the state of decadence of governance in Nigeria and we felt it was right for us to play our role, hitherto even though most of us have not been involved in politics. We felt that we can’t just sit on the side line and be complaining instead of being part of the process. So, a group of us started coming together. We were initially 10 in number, but with time, we expanded with the original founding members of ANN, we are 10 and we cut across all professions and age. I happen to be one of the oldest among our group at that time.
This 10 people who founded ANN, can you mention their names?
The 10 founding members of ANN are myself, Dr Jay Osi Samuels, Dr Dale Ogunbayo, Dr Nkatachukwu, Victor Odoeme, Aesosa Osaghae, Thompson Nsima, Sunny Famojuro, Adebola Adekoya, Amos Musa and Steven Odesomi.
I read the piece you published and a lot of people are asking questions about what led to the current crisis in the party, starting from the August convention. If you recall, it was since that August convention that we have been hearing a whole lot of complaints. Please, can you tell us what led to that controversy?
The crisis or the controversy that we are witnessing in the party right now actually predates the August convention. It actually started last year. The gentleman that I just mentioned his name, Adebola Adekoya sometime last year, without my knowledge have been making some underground moves, which actually came to the open in January this year. And it all boils down to the fact that, he has been laying claims to be the owner and founder of ANN, which was against the tenents and purpose of the party. There was never a time that we said ANN belongs to anybody and if at all, ANN was to belong to anybody, I should be the one to be laying claim to own ANN, but ANN belong to nobody and he has no right to claim ownership of ANN. Along the line, we found out that he was being pushed by some people in the background. They are sponsoring him and making him cause all those troubles. He tried to divide the party, but by the special grace of God, we manage to arrest that process at that time. However, some of these things were still lingering by the time we did our convention last August, but one thing that we didn’t reckon with is that the people, the powerful forces that were behind him were not relenting, because what became very obvious was that his own style or the way he went about executing the mission that he was sent was very crude and brash and maybe they decided to re-strategize and use a more subtle way. But without bragging, I have been responsible for 90% of the funding of ANN. Apart from the financial resources that have been put in place, my time, my everything was involved. I am like a one man battalion running ANN. So, in the lead up to the convention, I was tired, weary and I didn’t think I was ready to continue as chairman. That was why in the build up to the convention, when a certain gentleman called Emmanuel Dania came forward and said he wanted to be chairman, even though I had some misgivings in the back of my head, in terms of, are you sure this guy is not coming from that same source of the wahala that we have been having, I was kind of happy that at least somebody was coming on board to take over from me. That’s why I gladly stepped down. But subsequent events after that have come clear to me that he was actually planted in the party by those same forces with the aim of hijacking the party and that’s what led to the crisis, or controversial issues of whether or not we had our primaries, but by the special grace of God, we have intervened and those things have been arrested and we are moving forward as a party.
Those forces you are talking about, why do you think, right from the onset, they want to hijack or take control of the party?
Because they have their own agenda and even though I have an idea of what the agenda is, I don’t think I am ready to go public with it at this point.
Coming to the issue of Fela Durotoye, they have been laying claim to the party now and claiming to be the presidential candidate of the party. We also saw some press releases that they claim that some Board of Trustee (BOT) members are upholding their primary. Who are these BOT members and are they really BOT members?
Well, we have members of Board of Trustees (BOT), but why I don’t want to join issues is that these are my colleagues and friends, some of them are fellow founders that we started the party together, but why I don’t join issues with the board of trustees members that have been supporting or issuing press releases in support of Fela Durotoye is because, apart from the fact that some of them are supporting FD, some of them are acting in ignorance, half of the things I know, they don’t know. So, if they know, they won’t be acting that way.