Emphasis should be on restructuring, not where 2023 president should come from —Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, NEF spokesman

Director, Publicity and Advocacy, Northern Elders Forum (NEF), Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, was Secretary to the Kaduna State government, a long-term permanent secretary and Secretary, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) In this monitored interview by our Head of Operations, North/Abuja Bureau Chief, SANYA ADEJOKUN, he spoke on attitude of the north towards calls for restructuring, Igbo Presidency project, the role of a clique in the Buhari administration, among other issues.

WHAT does restructuring mean to you?

We’ve been in the forefront of supporting restructuring long before any group in this country made the case for restructuring. We believe that restructuring represents a recognition of the fact that the current system is not working optimally. There are basic issues about how the federation functions. There are genuine needs for addressing those areas that present limitations to optimum utilisation of resources, devolution of power, innovative approaches to dealing with problems like security and improving national cohesion. For us, this is what restructuring is all about.

It is nothing new as Nigeria has always been restructured from the very day the British took over the territory and named it Nigeria. This country has gone through restructuring almost on a routine basis. There is nothing new about restructuring and it shouldn’t scare anybody. The Northern Elders Forum is in favour of restructuring, and we believe that there is a national consensus as we speak in support of restructuring and we believe that it serves northern interest to support restructuring.

The Northern Elders Forum has collaborated with many groups from the southern parts of the country on restructuring to see if we can create a national consensus around what the concept of restructuring is. We have done some very productive things. Two months ago, we sat with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Abuja with groups from the South where we began to discuss the outlines for creating some kinds of elite consensus around restructuring. We’ve released core key statements saying we support restructuring.

You were quoted as saying there are attempts to weaken the North before 2023. What is the basis for this?

We did make the case that there is an attempt to weaken the North in the context of the post-SARS protests. It has nothing to do with restructuring. We said that we detected a political motive in some of the things that happened during and after the EndSARS protests and also statements that have been made subsequently and we suspected that there was an attempt to weaken the North with a view to 2023 but the statement has nothing to do with restructuring.

Could you be specific about those attempts to weaken the North towards 2023 and do you believe that the EndSARS protests were an attempt at regime change?

I have no position on whether the EndSARS was an attempt at a regime change. We welcome the investigation over what happened, what motivated it, what happened at Lekki. The fundamental questions that need to be answered include: was the Nigerian state accountable; was the Nigerian state properly responsive to the protest? We welcome that and we believe that these are issues that need to be heard. We believe that the Nigerian state needs to be more accountable to citizens. We believe that citizens also need to be accountable to the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We didn’t see evidence of a regime change. Regarding the earlier statement, we issued about attempts to weaken the North towards 2023, it wasn’t limited to the EndSARS protests. There were other related issues that we saw in statements being put out and in the language of other groups principally from other parts of the country, who consistently demonise and vilify the North and create the impression that the entire North is already taking a position about opposing restructuring, supporting the fight against rotation, being negative to zoning, and all sorts of threats that if you don’t zone the presidency to certain parts of the country, Nigeria will finish. You hear all this kind of inflammatory rhetoric where people say it is the North that is constituting an obstacle to change; that the North wants to retain power and so on.

What we see is evidence that some people are already jumping the gun and our suspicion that we have very strongly that some people think the North can be put into a situation where it forfeits its right to compete with the rest of Nigerians to everything that the democratic system provides. We are not going to have that. We do not believe that any arrangement that a political party has is superior to the constitution. What the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria says is that there shall be elections; there is a democratic system in the country. Nigerians should vote for the candidates that they want. Political parties can come up with their own arrangements and as we speak, there is nothing on the ground that says to us that we should come forward and say that the 130 million northerners must, of necessity, submit to the demands of a few people; that we should all line up and say that the presidency must go here or there. We don’t even believe in the principle that we should take ethnicity and geopolitics as a factor for deciding the next leadership. How does a president who is from Bayelsa only be as a criterion for being a president better than being an Angas person from Plateau State? We believe that we’ve learnt a lot of lessons about leadership, failures of leadership, the tendency to ethnicise Nigerian politics, the tendency to minimise Nigerian politics that compromises the quality of leadership. It ethnicises it; it creates the impression that the presidency must belong to particular community and therefore, it doesn’t belong to the rest of the country.

We want the next leadership that will emerge be based on competence. We want it to be based on an assessment of the capacities of people to deliver. We believe in a new leadership that will deal with the challenges of the country: a failing economy; a bulging population. Sixty-five per cent of Nigeria’s population is under 30. This is an extremely young country. The challenges ahead of Nigeria is immense. We cannot play new politics with old politics; we cannot solve new challenges with old politicians. So, all these talks about zoning, ethnicity will not take us anywhere. We believe that politics must take our diversity, pluralism and justice into consideration but we also believe that we need to assess what the nation needs and find a way to produce the best leadership and not all these arrangements that people are now using to see if they can corner the political process.

You were one of the staunch supporters of President Muhammadu Buhari before he was elected in 2015 but you have since parted ways. What went wrong?

I supported the candidature of President Buhari and worked for it like many other Nigerians because at the time, I thought that he represented a better option than President Goodluck Jonathan. What we saw on the ground in 2012/2013 was a lot of incompetence, evidence that governance was weak; security was swamping the North and by implication, likely to swamp the rest of the country. The Boko Haram insurgency was ravaging the North and I decided that I needed to throw my heart into the President Buhari’s campaign, hoping that if he becomes President, first, we are going to have a decisive and stronger president; people will be more serious about security in the country, dealing with the economy and fighting corruption. We were fortunate that the campaign was successful and in all humility, I am happy that I participated in that campaign. There is no regrets at all.

But a year or two down the road, it became very clear that the administration of President Buhari was more interested in power than governing. There was very little evidence of the ground that the president recognised the fact that he needed to approach governance with a sense of emergency; need to do things different from the way it was done and treat this country as a constituency that he needed to address properly: to tackle corruption decisively; to deal with the Boko Haram insurgency for which he was elected, and sometimes, to address some of the issues that are peculiar to the North. I didn’t see evidence of that. There was very little avenue to influencing or contributing to ideas and suggestions. Initially, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) had access to the President on a number of times; we interacted with him; we gave him suggestions but by the second year of his governance, it became very clear to me personally that President Buhari was not the messiah and I felt it would be irresponsible to continue to be part of the party that brought him to power and continue to be a member of APC when clearly the party was failing the country and I resigned publicly and properly, my member of the APC and I have not joined another party since then.

Presidential spokesman, Mr Femi Adesina, has described you group as a body of irritants and a one man-body around Professor Ango Abdulahi. What is you comment on this?

Since I resigned from the APC, I have remained an active member of the NEF, which, as you said, Femi Adesina called a one-general army.  It doesn’t bother us. At least, he recognises Professor Ango Abdulahi, not that we need his recognition. The NEF is a formidable group of eminent northerners, very responsible northerners, accomplished northerners, people who have done tremendous work for the nation, and are very committed to the interest of the North and Nigeria. We know ourselves; we know who we are; we know what we can do. We don’t need commendations from people like Femi Adesina or Garba Shehu to do our work. When you see spokesmen of the President- and I worked in the Presidency for many years- hit out with this kind of rather childish language, you know fully well that uch group is making an impact.

In the aftermath of violence that erupted in parts of the country following the endSARS protests, you group has been canvassing for compensation for northerners who lost valuables. Don’t you also see that it would be a thing of justice to redress what the Igbo lost during the civil war and also ensure that a president emerges from the group since they have never had one?  

I think it is wrong to draw a parallel between what people lost during riots with losses suffered during the war. We didn’t have a war during the EndSARS protests and what happened after that. I don’t really feel that I should be dragged into the issue of whether the Igbo should be compensated for the losses they suffered during the civil war that they were also as guilty as other Nigerians in triggering and in fighting. We did make the case that northerners in the southern parts of the county, who had suffered like a lot of other people huge amount of losses. Northerners are our primary constituency; we advised them to stay put, not to leave the South and come back to the North; to compile an inventory of their losses and then to try and see which authority is going to redeem some of the losses. We also said we believed that southerners, who live peacefully in the North, who make their living in the North, should stay put; they should be protected by northerners; no southerner should leave. We will continue to welcome people from the southern part of the county to the North and we demand that communities and governance in particular should protect northerners in the southern part of the country.

On Igbo presidency, the position of the NEF is that the case for any ethnic group to make a case for a competent person from among them or outside them should be paramount. This is the time for the country to focus on what kind of leader or leaders should assume responsibility. People say justice should be the prime concern;, that you can only get justice if you take the presidency to the south eastern part of the country. I think we should learn a lesson from what the North is going through. President Buhari came to power in 2015 brought in largely by northern votes. Other Nigerians voted for him obviously because he wouldn’t have been president without the votes of other Nigerians. The North has never been poorer; has never been more insecure; has never been in the state where we are. We’ve never seen the kind of insecurity that we are witnessing. Yet, this is a northerner who was voted by northerners substantially and the region where he comes from is the worst for it. Yet, other Nigerians still say give us the presidency if you want to see justice! It’s not just justice to ethnic groups we are looking for; it is justice to Nigerians. If a competent Igbo person emerges through the political process and is better than all the other candidates that come; people who know about the economy; people who know how to pick the security people; people who know how to get jobs for young people, northerners would vote for them.

What we do not accept is a situation where people would say to the North: ‘you’ve done your eight years, okay, you’ve suffered for it; your so-called man has dropped the ball on you and you are poorer, you are more insecure, the presidency should go somewhere now where the people there should also run the country’ as they like as if the presidency belongs to a particular ethnic group. President Buhari, with due respect, doesn’t represent the North. He is the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He was elected to represent Nigerians. Nigerians voted for him across the whole country.

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