Celebrating Nigeria’s independence diverts attention from wickedness of our ruling class —Professor Olorode

Professor Omotoye Olorode is a foremost activist of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). He is a prolific author, an accomplished academic and a profound intellectual. In this interview by SUNDAY ADEPOJU, he speaks on Nigeria’s journey since independence in 1960.

Nigeria attained independence in 1960. How would you describe the journey so far?

Nigeria, like the world, is in very deep crises. But the country specifically has remained in the crises of what is happening in the fringes, the margins, or peripheries of what we call neoliberal economic ideology. And this is what has been happening since independence in which the major powers of the world and the major economic hegemonies: the multinational corporations and big organisations cornered a lot of wealth from colonial rule, from major wars that the world has fought and so on.

Public organisations and enterprises should be privatised, instead of collectivism. What we need is individual entrepreneurship. There should be withdrawal of subsidy from provision of water, education, health, and so on; privatisation as much as possible; withdrawal of public service employment; withdrawal of subsidy from health; withdrawal of subsidy from education; and all that. That is the core of neoliberal ideology. Simply put, less government. That is what it means. It is about profit-oriented enterprises. And you will see that in the last 30 years or so, what has characterized the world is the huge inequalities that have happened between developing countries and the developed ones. I am saying that the neoliberal ideology caused the crises that pervade the polity called Nigeria. The inequality that we often talk about is a product of that ideology.

Interestingly, the wealth of four richest men in the world is equal to the wealth of about 50 countries of the world. In the last five years, anybody who believes that there are political parties in Nigeria is fooling himself; there is just one party that has many factions. That is where we are and it is a fact that, today, we are faced with different kinds of inequalities, uncertainties. In fact, it used to be better because the nationalists had some ideas because of the pressure of the student, labour, and independent movements. They made some promises which they had to deliver on. We enjoyed all of these in the early 60’s and 70’s. So, the crisis of neo-liberalism in a new colony, the way Kwame Nkrumah puts it, is really what we are facing now at the eve of the 60th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence.

Going by all these challenges that you pointed out, does the 60th anniversary call for a celebration?

In Nigeria, there are two groups of human beings: the one per cent and ninety-nine per cent. The former decides what happens. They are going to spend a lot of money for the celebration, especially at the federal level. They will give speeches and speeches. The rulers will claim they have achieved so much. The ordinary people in their own organisations ought to decide on how to commemorate it. They can have rallies as the celebration of their struggle for a better society in the last 60 years. People, young people, women have died. Labour leaders have been imprisoned. People have lost their jobs. Recently, people were trying to express their dissatisfaction about fuel price hike. The ruling class will spend public money trying to persuade us that so much has been achieved. These celebrations, to me, are a strategy for diverting popular attention from the wickedness of the ruling class and of the system and also from the myriads of challenges bedeviling Nigeria.

Beyond the crises caused by neo-liberalism, how did Nigeria get it wrong over the years or is neo-liberalism the sole reason?

As a corporate entity, we won’t say Nigeria got it wrong. This system profits some people. They want to own the failure, the wickedness, the thoughtlessness, and the crimes of the ruling class. That is part of what the ordinary people need to begin to reflect on. We need to interrogate these things. The ruling class imposed a system. We can’t be saying Nigeria got it wrong. They are implementing a programme from which they are profiting.  Buhari told us that fuel subsidy is a fraud and that it doesn’t exist. They are borrowing on our behalf because of COVID-19. They are devaluing our money. And they still need to impose these things so that they can get more money. The problem is the one per cent is profiting from putting more and more burdens on the ordinary people.

When I was growing up in Ogbomoso, there was water about 200 meters from our house at Ijeru. I mean running water in public taps. When I went to live in Lagos, every block of about six houses had running water at Isale Eko. But now, we drink water from sachet.

When the past government wanted to remove subsidy from fuel, we took to the streets in Lagos and other major cities. Politicians will not join us because they are now regrouping for 2023. Femi Falana has been raising a lot of issues on the fuel price hike. The government sits on us after increasing the price. They don’t want our voices to be heard. It is not the entire society that will move in the beginning; people must organise. 10 people in Ogbomoso can change everything. Get people to know why things are the way they are.

How would you assess the nation’s security apparatus, post-independence?

Let us start from the question of crime. It is not God that created crime; it developed. So, the question should have been ‘how did this develop?’ People think it is the army and police that secure a society. Yes and no. The army, the way we knew it, was to fight foreign invasion. Then, they went for peace-keeping. I never saw a soldier until 1959 when elections became war. And soldiers had to be posted to polling stations. Now, everybody sees soldiers. The police have become the only way we know that government exists. So, crime rate rose. Why? Inequality. There are many reasons. When you see a rise in crime, the answer is that there is something wrong with the way a society is organised. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, and so on, are to be solved.

When we talk about crime, we need to clarify it. Very many people are committing crimes but they are using state powers to cover up. What we call insecurity is now largely about ethnic clashes, herders-farmers clashes, Boko Haram evils and so on. Now, once you create economic insecurity in a society, there will be people who want to exploit that situation for their own cause and they would try to justify it. There is a huge line of contradictions in our society after 60 years of our alleged independence. If we are not allowed to understand all these things, we would not be able to understand how to address the Nigerian question.

Tribal ideologies are as dangerous as religious ideologies. This means that we are saying all the other people are enemies. All these things are there. Organised crimes at that ideological level of religion, tribe, region, and so on, have their roots in situations where people try to justify righting wrongs by invoking these ideologies.  If we don’t deal with some of these problems openly, there may not be any hard and fast solution. Now, look at the Amotekun Security Network. Some people have become rich for supplying the vehicles for its operation.

In all of these challenges, failures and problems, insecurity, electoral system, and so on, can you highlight other practicable solutions to Nigeria’s avalanche of problems?

Like what? We are saying now that the increase in the prices of fuel, power, and the likes, will increase the cost of production. Nigerian products will be less competitive. We are asking the Federal Government to reverse the prices because it is against the people. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) claims it is giving money to some people to cushion the economic effects of COVID-19. We said, ‘Let us know these people that you gave money to.’ Femi Falana wrote them. We don’t have the list of the claimed beneficiaries of the money up till now. You are asking for practical solutions? Which kind of practical solutions? We are saying that government policies are wrecking our country for XYZ. Look at the issue of Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) that has caused the closure of the universities since March. The IPPIS is fraudulent. Even, where they are paying people, we see that there is so much distortion in the payment which is the fear of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). We have a government that is not even able to tell people the truth about anything. I have the World Bank’s document on IPPIS. Many people think that the IPPIS is a creation of Buhari’s ingenuity. It didn’t originate from this government. It has been said that the universities cannot be funded. The government has been advised to charge more fees in schools. It has also been said that those who cannot afford university education should stay home. The World Bank has been saying that. We went to prison over this issue in 1990. We were jailed for 91 days. It was over the World Bank’s instructions to universities that there were too many universities, too many people in universities. So, when people say practical solutions, what are going to do? To go and take over their government, which is another crime?

You are talking about reduction of the workforce in the universities….

You don’t just allow universities to employ people; even, they have a new programme. Somebody in Abuja must vet it before they can start new courses/programmes which will require more lecturers. If payment is being made from Abuja, it could take you one year if the government is going to approve it at all. There are lecturers that have not been paid since February. And it has nothing to do with strike. The Accountant-General’s office sends your salary to a bank that you are not using. They send your salary to Aso Savings. These are the people who cannot distribute the COVID-19 pandemic relief materials. Funny enough, they give one kilogramme of rice to a street of over 300 people and they want to control universities from Abuja! These are the universities that we have been running since 1948 or so. Buhari wants to run them from Abuja. It was Buhari in April 1984 that removed catering services from universities, stopped feeding of students in the universities. They put us into prisons over this for agitating at that time.

Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, once said Nigeria should close universities for one year. If that had happened, would it have brought any significant change, paradigm shift to the system?

Well, I don’t know the details of Professor Wole Soyinka’s proposal. I have heard before, though. But, there are problems with that. He has a right to his private opinions. But, I am a member of ASUU. If you want to close universities and sack everybody in the system and start them anew, I will like to see the rationale for that. If you want to close universities for one year and then rebuild them, I want to see the proposal. What kind of universities do you think will emerge after that? Now, they are saying that schools should re-open. They have been playing around this thing for three months. I was in a webinar about two weeks ago. All the unions in the universities came together. These people said that we don’t have universities that can re-open under the guidelines that the government has given. Hostels, classrooms, basic facilities, infrastructure, and so on are not in place. In 2013, ASUU forced the government to set up what they call Needs Assessment Committee. The committee went round and estimated that in 2013, Nigerian university system needed N1.3 trillion to be able to revitalise the infrastructure. Now, multiply that by three due to the ‘death’ of the naira. That is part of the struggle that ASUU is waging – revitalisation of the universities that led to the strike before they imposed this diversion called IPPIS.

We have universities where students are defecating behind their hostels, where hostels and lecture rooms are overcrowded. Now, they are saying they should go and reopen. Almost 7 months now, nothing has happened in any university. So, half of Wole Soyinka’s one year of closure has gone and nothing has happened, even just to address the question of COVID-19 pandemic. Just to produce water, toilet facilities, physical distancing facilities, and so on. The government will be very happy because their children are not schooled here.

Medical doctors have been yelling about the state of our hospitals since 1984. The inability of the Nigerian state, the health system, to respond to COVID-19 arises from the crimes of the past committed by the ruling class. The same is true of education since 1979; ASUU has been saying that universities are being underfunded. In my hands now is a collection of ASUU’s public statements on many issues. This was a 1984 document – How to Save Nigeria, ASUU and the 1986 education crises in Nigeria. The government sent us to prisons under the regimes of Buhari, Babangida and Abacha.

The crises that the university system faces today are as a result of the crimes committed in the past. That goes for everything: security, farmer-herder clash, and the likes.

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