APC deceived Nigerians in 2015 —Olajide

In this interview with ABIODUN AWOLAJA, the Secretary General of the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), Publicity Secretary of the Yoruba Unity Forum (YUF) and secretary of the South-West delegation to the 2014 National Conference, Dr Kunle Olajide, speaks on the agitation for restructuring in the polity, the Presidency, PDP crisis and sundry issues. Excerpts:

For some time now, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) has been opposed to the clamour for the implementation of the 2014 National Conference report, saying that it had more southern delegates than northern delegates, more Christians than Muslims. What is your assessment of this position?

Well, definitely, it is an afterthought. We need to take our minds back to how the conference was constituted because there has been a lot of misinformation about the constitution and composition of the conference. Let me make it abundantly cleat that the Federal Government only nominated 37 people out of the 497 delegates and those nominated were elder statesmen for each of the 36 states in the country and the Federal Capital Territory. And I’m sure that if you go through the list of the elder statesmen, you cannot fault the selection. All the other delegates to the conference were representatives elected by either the Nigerian Union of Journalists, Nigerian Bar Association, professional bodies like the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria(ICAN), retired military officers, retired police officers, traditional rulers, sociocultural organisations from the six zones, the association of physically challenged Nigerians. These were the bodies who nominated their own representatives; the Federal Government had nothing to do with that. If it then turned out that those representatives were more of Christians than Muslims, well, that is not the fault of the government. The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) nominated people, so you cannot fault the constitution of the conference on that basis. because all the critical sectors of the Nigerian sociopolitical lives were consulted and were allowed to nominate their representatives.

I want to say that Northern delegates who were at the 2014 National Conference will be doing this country a great disservice if they now disown the document on flimsy excuses. We arrived at the 600 resolutions by consensus, there was no minority report. We in fact celebrate the signing of the report and the presentation of the report to Mr. President. For them to now go back on the report on the excuse that southerners were more than northerners would be a fallacy. I know them, they are men of honour. I don’t believe that they can disown that document to which they appended their signature. The report should be used, in collaboration with the 1960 and 1963 constitutions, to restructure the country. The Federal Government should, as a sign of seriousness, also send an Executive Bill to the National Assembly introducing referendum into our constitution. All over the world, you allow people to vote on critical issues of state policy. It was done recently in Britain through Brexit.  The Federal Government must address urgently, the increasing threat to national unity, rather than endless mouthing  the platitude: “Our unity is not negotiable, our unity is sacrosanct.” There are increasing signs of a failing state all over the country: increasing youth unemployment fuelling separatist agitations, insecurity manifesting in kidnapping and armed robbery, collapsing institutions, very poor power supply inhibiting industrial growth. All these are disincentives to foreign investment. Nigerians must not ignore these warning signals.

ACF also said in its latest communiqué that “those clamouring or demanding for the so-called restructuring are yet to define what they mean by the concept and its application in our democratic setting.”…

I don’t believe that they (ACF) do not know what we mean. The West has been in the forefront of the clamour for restructuring as far back as 30 years ago. And what do we mean by restructuring in our present political climate? Restructuring means that we should go back to the Independence constitution given to us by our founding fathers, including Ahmadu Bello.

So it is not something new?

We are not asking for anything new. We are asking for the constitution handed over to us by our founding fathers: Sir Ahmadu Bello, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. And it was not just the three of them: they went with their representatives to the constitutional conference in the United Kingdom. Their followers had representatives from the minority areas. That is what we are asking for and it is straightforward. In clear terms, we are asking for true federalism.   Number one, we believe that we must stop living in denial. We are a heterogeneous country, a country made up of different people with different histories, cultures and values. That is the reality of the Nigerian federation. We were brought together by the British without our consent. We had been existing thousands of years before the British came. We had been having inter-group trade and commerce: Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, Igbo and so on.  The British amalgamated us for their own convenience.

People like General Ibrahim Babangida and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar have been agitating for restructuring but the ACF says no. What do you think is responsible for that disparity?

Well, we are wiser after the event generally. Human beings are wiser after the event. Babangida was president of this country for eight years and with the benefit of hindsight, he now realises that most of the challenges he faced while in office,including the Gideon Orkar coup that could have perhaps taken his life and even the way he exited the Federal Government in 1993, were because of the challenges created by the type of federalism we are operating. With the benefit of hindsight, he now sees that “Oh God, if we had had true federalism, we would not have had all those problems.” The problems of Nigeria are as a result of the twin evils of military intervention in 1966 and the oil boom. Unfortunately, they came around the same time and that’s why we are where we are today.

Military intervention changed the face of politics in Nigeria. The military came and introduced its own unitary command structure. And in fact you remember that Aguiyi Ironsi promulgated his Unification Decree and that was the main excuse used in overthrowing him. But even the others who overthrew him continued with the unitary system. Then, the oil boom came and we had more money than sense.

More money than sense?

More money than sense. And it was because the oil boom came essentially during military regimes. The military were never trained to govern. They were trained to war.

Do you see any link between the need for restructuring and the quit notice given to the Igbo by some northern youths?

Such separatist statements are manifestations of the need to restructure the country. If you ask me, what the Area youths did, yes, is condemnable because they are asking a section of Nigeria to leave, but then somehow they probably were frustrated because they thought the East had been asking for Biafra and so on and felt “Well, if you are asking for Biafra, then, let your people go.” They wanted to act as facilitators of the Biafra cause but they did it in the wrong way, because the ultimatum as far as I am concerned is akin to a threat to all southerners in the North.  How do you differentiate between an Igbo man and a Yoruba man or an Ijaw man anyway? It is not written on the forehead. Anybody who cannot speak Hausa or Arabic could be exterminated by the Almajiris. In my own humble opinion, the threat should make the Nigerian authorities to restructure this country.

But the chairman of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Odigie-Oyegun, has been speaking against restructuring?

Yes, he says it is not their priority. He said that they want to address economic problems first. My reaction is very straightforward: it is because we have a dysfunctional federalism that we have this corruption, economic recession, agitations and separatist tendencies everywhere. So, to me, it should be the number one priority of any serious government. And in any case, if they (APC) put it in their manifesto, they must have deceived the people. The manifesto is your social contract with the people before they elected you.

The Senate has asked for the conference report and Speaker Yakubu Dogara has also said that restructuring has to come about through constitutional amendment. Can Nigerians trust this National Assembly to do justice to the report?

I don’t see why not. We can trust them to do it but the people of Nigeria must be clamouring side by side with them,because the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill (PIGB) that they passed recently had been in the National Assembly for over nine years. We cannot wait for any form of filibustering now because the country is almost teetering towards complete failure.

The South-West has various groups clamouring for restructuring. Is there any plan to come together?

We are saying the same thing and we have no problem with allowing different flowers to blossom. But quite soon, we are coming together under Yoruba Summit in Ibadan, the planning committee of which I happen to share. Yoruba organisations already participatibg in the Summit are YCE,  YUF Afenifere,  OPC, Yoruba Initiatives, Yoruba Council of Youths, Yoruba Assembly, Atayese,  Agbekoya, Voice of Reason and many others.  The only agenda of that Summit is restructuring. The Yoruba want to tell Nigerians, the diplomatic community and the entire world their position on Nigeria. We believe in one Nigeria, but it has to be one Nigeria that is run under a true federal system.