THE National Assembly has forwarded copies of the fresh amendments to the 1999 constitution; do you not think that we may have embarked on another exercise in futility, given what happened under successive administrations in the last 10 years or so, on the issue?
No doubt, an effort is an effort, but are we sure of what we are really doing? That is my fear. Are we on the right path? For example, when you take a book of about 500 pages and you just open a page in it and you amend certain things on that page, how are you sure you are not acting out of context. This is because a book remains as a book; it is telling a story. You don’t just take one part of the story and amend it, are you that you have not unnecessarily gone out of context? I will give you an example; recently, they have amended the section about Local Government autonomy. Now, doesn’t that defeat the whole essence and basis of the constitution? This constitution is meant to be for the Federal Republic of Nigeria; it is supposed to be a constitution for a federal system. But, can a truly federal system have three tiers of government? I doubt it very much, because a federal system of government will have federating units. So, when you amend the constitution of a federal system of government and you create three tiers of government each, which ones are you now taking as the federating unit? Is it the local government or the state? To the best of my knowledge, in federating units, we have two tiers of government. The state can have areas, counties and centres for the sake of administrative purposes but that is also recognised by the state, not by the Federal Government. That is an example of my fear when you start to pick holes in a large booklet and you are bringing certain portions of it.
In the light of what has been happening to the local government system in the country over the years, a situation where governors have more or less, in the local parlance, pocketed or castrated the local council, don’t you think it is necessary to grant full autonomy to the local councils?
Hasn’t the Federal Government pocketed the states? Should we now say we should abolish all the states and join the Federal Government? That is not the solution to the problem. We all know that the local government, under the state as they are now, are not properly run, but that won’t be a reason to jettison the whole concept. If the constitution gives autonomy to an extent to local government, they must be democratically created. Those are checks and balances on the government, but here we are, in a country where everyone is poor, where poverty is the headline of every newspaper and every page you read, but unless they can satisfy that, you don’t get far. It is clear in the constitution that local government system must be democratically elected. If truly they are democratically elected, they will be able to decide for themselves. They will be able to stand on their own and tell the government what they can accept and what they won’t accept from them. But where the government is the one who pays the pipers, then he calls the tune. If the government happens to be the one who handpicks the councilors and chairmen what did we expect from them?
But some argue that we are fond of taking hook, line and sinker certain practices from other parts of the world whereas we need to have a home-grown system that takes into account our peculiarities as a country and people. Is it not necessary for us to key into the argument of those who believe the local council should be granted autonomy in the constitution?
I can see your line of argument that you don’t necessarily have to copy other countries like India, the United States of America; that we can have our home-grown system of government? Yes, we can have our home- grown system of government. China, Japan, Germany and others have their own home-grown systems of government. Yes, we can but it must be properly sorted out. Yes, we can, but it must be properly though-out. Our first Republican system of government was beautiful for us, the parliamentary system was beautiful. All we needed to do was to work more on it; check on the aging and grey areas; correct our mistakes and fine-tune it to make it work properly. It was when the army came and truncated it and then imported the foreign one to us that brought us to where we are now where we are. I agree we can have our own home grown, but it is for our current system that you said we should have three tiers of government that you are saying, we now sit down and say these is how we want it, these are the federating units, but you be under the states. For example in Germany I know that the local government system there is run in such a manner that 75 per cent of people in that system are retired businessmen, big civil servant and people who have achieved something in life who just want to serve their local communities. They now come and work, those who have achieved feats in their chosen careers, who have come back home to give something back to their communities and most of them will work without even collecting salaries. As a matter of fact, I wanted to go and contest at the local government councillor in Ilesa in Osun State. But, I was discouraged. I wanted to contest as a councillor and do something to show people it can be done. That was after I left the National assembly in 2003. I have not completely given up on the plan; I might try it again.
Another major subject of hot debate is the constitutional provision on two-terms of four years for president and governors, with some individuals advocating a single six-year tenure, while others insist the present system be retained.
I’m not even bordered about that, because it’s not easy to achieve much within one tenure of just four years, especially in a country where there is no continuity or entrenched institutions. When you have entrenched institutions, you can come in three years and go because the system is already there. Just come there do your own part and go, the system remains. But in a situation where you don’t have an entrenched system, it is difficult. For example, anytime I go through the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, I tell myself that this country is really in a shambles. If you could remember, we had functioning tollgates on the highway: one at the Lagos-end (Berger); another at Ogere in Ogun State and the third was located at the end of the road in Ibadan. They were functioning well and well-managed, though we heard that they were given to party people to manage, but the then President Olusegun Obasanjo said they should be scrapped. You imagine the whole amount of money invested in building those tollgates, but overnight, one man woke and said he didn’t want to see tollgates again! If the system by which that place was run was not good, you should have improved on it, not to completely discard it.
We are facing a similar situation in Lagos. If you are coming from Lagos Island to Lekki, there is a tollgate there right in the middle of the city; that is strange to me. But it is happening in the same country where the federal government said tollgates should be scrapped, another government is erecting them. It is haphazard. So, when you say five or six years’ tenure, my take is this: in a country where you don’t have established and entrenched institutions, if you come to power and just spend four years, you won’t achieve much things. The first year is to get yourself together, discovering where the system is located; the next two years is to look at what you are going to do to improve the system, and the last year you begin to think of election again. In a situation like ours, where we don’t have continuity, where we don’t have established entrenched system of government, four years might not be enough. So, the existing system should subsist.
It is apparent that governance is gradually being relegated to the background because of 2019 elections. Have Nigerians not been shortchanged by the political class?
Let me look at the scenario this way. You can observe that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting now takes place regularly and President Muhammadu Buhari wants to appoint more ministers to distribute the wealth again, ostensibly to those areas where you expect people to go and work for him. Those that he will empower are now been put in place. You remember during the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) days in the Second Republic, the administration of President Shehu Shagari appointed Presidential Liaison Officers (PLOs) in each state. Those were the people they empowered to recruit voters. That’s exactly what they want to do now, using different nomenclatures. The area they have not put people in place that is what they are doing now. How can a country, after running for two and a half years, say it wants to appoint more ministers? Does it make sense? A country that is trying to find its way out of recession? a country that is borrowing money to pay salaries and he said he wants to appoint more ministers. The ones you have already you can’t pay them and here you are appointing more? This is designed to prepare ground for 2019. Unfortunately in the last one year or so, we have been talking about restructuring Nigeria: the case of Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB), ethnic agitation in the Niger Delta, herdsmen menace and kidnapping and others are staring us in the face. With the way things are going, in the next six months, you won’t be hearing restructuring Nigeria any longer. Rather, everybody will be talking about the 2019 elections. If you want to dominate a person, if you really want to capture a man or a society, what you do is to impoverish him. What he will be looking for is survival; so whatever comes his way is what he takes. One of the leaders in Russia that was his style. He gathered his people together and brought two chickens and he pulled the feathers of a chicken such that blood was oozing and then left it. The other one he did not pull the feathers off; it walked towards another direction and they rushed towards the chicken whose feathers have been pulled because a had been subdued. When you subdue a person, the only person you can look up to is the only person who can save you; anybody who can save him is good enough.
Look at what they have done to us now; they have impoverished us; we are now in a state of stupor, so we need somebody, whatever it is. When the head of a home wakes up in a morning, he has children and realizes that the school fees has due and he looks at his bank account and it is zero and salaries are not being paid and he walks up to me and says ‘I say will your chief mobiliser of this area of our party, I will give you this amount of money, what does he do? He will jump at it; he will be less concerned about the name of the party. What the party stands for does not interest him; what matters to him is what he can get because he wants to pay school fees and he has to survive.
The scenario you have just painted seems to have fired the determination by the main opposition party, PDP towards putting its house in order ahead of 2019?
However much PDP may try, they may never be able to square up with the APC. I will tell you why. I can tell you that money plays more than 90 per cent role in politics in Nigeria. When you take money out of it, there will be no politics again. So, where would the PDP get the money to compete with APC? I doubt they can get it. That is the first issue. Two is the power of incumbency. You see when you have appointed a minister, he will want to remain a minister and he knows if the ruling party should lose, he cannot be a minister again. Therefore, he would by all means want to retain his position. So, the power-that-be have people scattered in the whole country fighting for them. Even the policemen on the street, who pays them? The Federal Government pays them. What do you think they will fight for? They fight for the government; they don’t care. So, that is how it is; it is horrible; that is the situation we find ourselves. Money plays too much a part and too much a role in entrenching this system. It is unfortunate we are not in a country where we have ideology running our political parties. In America, when someone says he is in the Republican Party, he is there, whether they are in power or not. But here, any party that is in power is what you want to belong to. Nobody wants to be a loser; nobody wants to be in the opposition. In the whole of this country, the only ethnic nationality that is used to the opposition is the Yoruba race, and we have always been in the opposition. We have always remained in the opposition in pride and that doesn’t change us. This is a fact we are talking about. The Igbo race won’t, they will always wait to see which party will win at the centre and then go there. The Yoruba race will say ‘no, this is what we are; we don’t mind.’ We find it being said among other races, ‘you better don’t lag behind, be in the mainstream.’ But, the Yoruba race doesn’t mind what we call mainstream. All other races will say they want to be in the mainstream, it is only the Yoruba that will say we don’t care; we don’t have to be in the mainstream that is where we are.
and then