The Secretary-General of Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), Dr Kunle Olajide, in this interview by SAM NWAOKO, speaks on the issues that rose from the communiqué issued by the Southern Governors Forum after a recent meeting in Lagos, and a number of other national issues. Excerpts:
Sir, there is growing tension in the country and people are worried that those who should help douse the tension don’t seem to care.
We should not be worried; it is a question of time.
The country is drifting dangerously going by the opinions among various leaders in the country. What do you think is the cause of this considering the strong opinions held by various ethnic groups in the country?
The major problem is the 1999 Constitution which makes it almost absolutely impossible to have right people in the right places in the first instance because it has completely commercialised the political process in this country. It has commercialised it and put it far beyond the reach of people who are very well meaning but have not at any time had access to the public treasury or do not have godfathers who have had access to the public treasury. There is no way people like that can achieve any success in politics now. In the first and second republic, we had principals of secondary schools becoming governors. We had journalists, editors of newspapers becoming governors journalists like Lateef Jakande became governor, Bisi Onabanjo became governor, then Adekunle Ajasin became governor. I cannot see any school principal now or any journalist, no matter how brilliant and committed and patriotic becoming governor. They cannot because the entire system has been heavily monetised. So the root of our problems and our calamities is the 1999 Constitution which put wrong people in right places. That is why we don’t have good leadership in Nigeria as we speak.
This constitution is going through the process of amendment, although some of the propositions in the amendment don’t seem to be going down well with the northern part of the country. How do you think the constitution amendment will pan out and how successful do you think we would be in this process?
I make recourse to my own faith when commenting on serious issues that affect human beings, because I believe that human beings are created by God. My faith says there is no way a bad tree can bear a good fruit. No matter how much trimming you do or dress that tree, once it is a bad tree it will produce a bad fruit. A constitution in its first sentence says “We the people of Nigeria” whereas we did not sit anywhere to write this constitution, it was written by only 20 handpicked sycophants of military dictatorship. No matter how much you amend it, you are amending falsehood and it cannot make falsehood the truth. So, for people like us, mere amendment is postponing the evil day. This is the fifth amendment that we are doing since 1999 and the situation is getting worse. I should think that should be sufficient enough to show well meaning patriots of this country that amendment will take us nowhere.
The National Assembly is a product of this fraudulent constitution. Do we ever believe that the National Assembly can amend themselves out of their opulence and comfort and their obnoxious salaries, for the sake of the Nigerian people? Do we believe that they can ever do that? They can never. Who says we need about 400 people in the National Assembly? Only a small number of Nigerians reside in Abuja, so why should we have a large National Assembly which collects such a substantial percentage of the earnings of this country as allowances and so on, living in opulence. I heard the Senate President say that Nigeria is very poor, we are very poor and I wish I had the opportunity to ask him this: Is the lifestyle of our National Assembly legislators reflective of that poverty when you compare their salaries and allowances with those of their colleagues in the United States and other parts of the world? So, me, we have to discard everything that has to do with this constitution and start a new process that will give us a people’s constitution that will think more of the people and less of the political leadership.
So, it cannot work. Because it is what we are operating now, let us use the National Assembly to give us a Constituent Assembly Commission that will organise elections of the various peoples of Nigeria to the constituent assembly; to look at past reports of conferences and give us a people’s constitution. Then the constitution now will be adopted through a referendum that the National Assembly would have imputed into our constitution. So, we would disband all these evil fruits of this evil constitution and start afresh. But merely amending and amending will take us to nowhere, I don’t have any doubt in my mind – we are just postponing the evil day. Amending the constitution to solve the problems of Nigeria can never work.
However, one small good out of the last six years of the Buhari administration is that the administration has made us realise that we are different peoples brought together and that we are not yet a nation. While he is concentrating on taking care of his own people, he has raised the consciousness of others to realise that we have been living a lie in this country by saying ‘one nation’. Now that we see this clearly, the wise thing for everybody to clamour for is a brand new constitution written by the peoples of this country. To do this is very simple. We have a basis for our union in the 1959 Constitution. The basis of our union was a federal structure where everybody did his own thing his own way.
You sad the Buhari administration has highlighted the fact that we are different peoples; some are being pampered while some are being subjugated. You thus support the contention that the agitation of people like Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho is according to these highlighted fault lines?
Let me state here that initially I had clamoured that the agitation by these people was probably unnecessary. But in the last four – five years, I have seen that the young men were in fact visionary. They were visionary because they saw ahead that the way this country was being run would completely destroy their future and destroy their destiny. This was why they decided to seek another way out. The way they are seeking out was what we had literarily in the first and second republics in which the West ran its affairs, the east ran its affairs and the north ran its affairs and we just had a centre that had just 16 items on the Exclusive Legislative list. But what do we have now? We have 68 items on Exclusive Legislative list. Nigerian people reside in the local government and in their various states, they don’t reside in Abuja, and you go and give all the powers to Abuja… and depending entirely on the quality of leadership that we have in Abuja, the entire country would be in pains because I don’t know what part of the country is enjoying Nigeria today. The North is the most challenged and President Buhari comes from the North. So the quality of leadership again is important. For leadership, you need knowledge, for leadership you need intellectual depth, for leadership you need capacity – full appreciation of the situation. But where you have a leadership that is apparently deficient in all these qualities, the quality of governance will be extremely poor. So, there is no part of the country that is rejoicing today under the Buhari administration except for those that are benefiting like political appointees and their cronies, and they are less than 20,000 people out of a population of 200 million people.
So, what you are saying is that if they eventually subdue Kanu and Igboho, there would still be more Kanus and Igbohos, given the extant situation?
Let me tell you that there is no way you can suppress the truth. You cannot successfully suppress Kanu and Igboho, you cannot. You cannot because their agitation is rooted in the principles of freedom, equity, unity and justice. So, you may get them imprisoned or hamstrung, but what they stand for can never be subdued. Kanu and Igboho stand for truth and freedom. These are young people who believe that their future appears very bleak under the present system of government. This is why they are agitating for self-determination. Whatever effort you do to suppress the truth, the truth will rise again. So, for me, I think the leadership must see reason and reality and ensure that we sit down to write a people’s constitution where each part of this country will determine its own destiny. We are different peoples with different cultures and different ideas, even our diet is different. So, why do you now want to compel us under a dictatorship, that we must all behave the same way?
You are insinuating a dictatorship that has refused to listen to or welcome what people are saying…
… In my part of the country, we say that young have wisdom and the elderly have wisdom too. A lot of us have been shouting, we have been shouting for years, long before Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu were born. We have been agitating for a truly independent Federal Republic of Nigeria where there would be healthy competition among the federating units that would lead to progress and development of every part of the country. It will be to the mutual benefit of all, not to the exclusive benefit of a particular group. So, we have been championing it before Igboho and Kanu were born. What we are saying is that the leadership must be attentive to the cries of the people and they must go round consulting, listening to people. We have leaders all over Nigeria, being president or being governor is merely a privilege, it does not mean you are the best of all or that you have all the ideas. So, you must listen to people and take good ideas from right, left and centre. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo benefitted from the sound, quality minds that they surrounded themselves with, who advised them and they listened to their advice.
Governors of Southern Nigeria met recently and reiterated some of the things they stated when they met in Delta State, including their ban of open grazing of cattle. However their decisions have irked the North, especially on the 2023 elections. What do you make of the latest communiqué by the Southern Governors Forum?
For me, I do not see anything wrong with the communiqué of the Southern Governors Forum. Anybody who loves this country knows that there is nothing wrong with that communiqué. I know some governors from the north who have repeatedly insisted on the same thing. I’ve listened to Nasir El-Rufai a few times; Darius Ishaku has said for the sake of Nigeria, it should go to the South. This is coming up because the leadership has not succeeded in welding us together as a country. If they had succeeded, nobody will bother where the president comes from. At a time in this country, when I was in the university, I was saying I don’t give a damn if the prime minister of Nigeria repeatedly comes from a hut in Sokoto as long as the Western Region, Eastern Region and the Northern Region were doing their things. Nobody stopped the other. Chief Awolowo introduced free, universal primary education in Western Nigeria in 1955. Balewa did not do that, when Azikiwe saw that it was good, Okpara introduced it again in 1957 in the East. We had the first television here in Africa South of the Sahara; we had the biggest stadium, the first housing estate in Bodija and the first government secretariat and we had our embassy (the Western Nigeria House) in London. So, the communiqué of the southern governors was quite in order. It is merely echoing what patriotic Nigerians believe will be in the best interest of this country. That’s all.
The Northerners are postulating that the position of the southern governors only highlighted the fault lines of Nigeria the more, rather than unity of the country. If you were to advise, what would you advice such northern leaders stating this?
You must not forget that there is freedom of speech, freedom to hold opinions in this country. So when one, two or three people mount opinions in this country, don’t take it as the opinion of northern leaders. No. I was happy with what the director of publicity of the Northern Elders Forum was saying in the television recently. He said the governors should not have said that before convincing their political parties first, that if the political party he belongs or sympathises with chooses a candidate from the North, he will have no option than to go for that candidate. He was talking about process. But I can tell you that anybody who believes in this country sincerely will not know that the way the current administration is handling national affairs will further polarise if not totally break Nigeria if we insist on having another president from the North because human beings will think that he is coming to perpetuate the Buhari agenda. But if you have a president from the South, it will considerably water down this polarisation. We have never been this polarised in this country. However, I am not even interested in the 2023 presidency, my concern is for a brand new constitution to give us a new foundation of truth. The 1999 constitution has made politics a commercial business wherein you put in a lot of money. We have had governorship aspirants collecting forms alone at a cost of N25million. How many Nigerians in their whole lifetime can afford N25million? So, you are putting politics beyond the reach of the people and put it in the hands of unscrupulous people mainly or people who, at one time or the other, had taken advantage of the porosity of the treasury of Nigeria. We are recycling them and we will continue to recycle unless we change this constitution.
If the YCE should call the relevant people together and advise on how to move forward, what would your advice be? As YCE sir, what is your position?
Our position is that there is no way you can order, instruct or compel anybody to listen to you or come to you because we have no power of sanction. The governors of the South West invited their legislators recently but quite a good number of them did not even show up; and those are the leaders of their political parties in their respective states where they represent. How much more would they disappoint people like us if you say come, we want to tell you our position. We have no power of sanction. So, for us, it is only people who have conscience that would listen. My faith tells me that the love of money is the root of all evil. Once you have too much money you don’t see any reason why you should respect age or respect anybody anymore. You think you are in a world of your own until you eventually collapse ultimately. We have been mouthing our position to governors, to legislators, to political leadership elite but the temporary transient power appears to have deafened the listening ear of the political leadership.
and then