Nigeria is not only living on borrowed money, but also on borrowed time —Farotimi

A lawyer and rights activist, Dele Farotimi, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the state of the country, the presidential candidates, submitting that the death of Nigeria as a political entity is inevitable without restructuring it.

We know you to have shown more than passing interest in the affairs of Nigeria. What is your assessment of the state of the country?

There is nothing normal about the country at the moment. Our situation is dire and I don’t think anybody needs to do more casual observation of our situation to arrive at that conclusion.  We just continue to hope that things will improve, not that there is any objective basis for hope. The situation demands despondency, but we must continue to hope. That is the basis of any faith and we Nigerians are pretty good with our faith. That is all that keeps us going. But in reality, there is nothing that engenders hope. Everything seems bleak. The economy is bleak and the security situation itself is bleaker. It does not require a genius to draw this conclusion. Our situation is self-evident. I live in Lagos and I grew up in Ibadan. I can’t drive to Ibadan without palpitations, without worrying about what I might find on the road.  A couple of weeks ago, my people travelled to Ibadan from Lagos, I was busy praying for safe journey for them. The Oyinbo people travel all over the place in their countries without having to do vigil and prayers. But it not the same with us here. It is only our faith that has kept us going and not that anything physical to suggest that we can get the best. It is only the worst that ever seems to happen around here.

 

Do you see any of the presidential candidates on offer being able to turn things around after President MuhammaduBuhari?

They even give more cause for depression.

 

How do you mean?

Is it Tinubu that I am supposed to get excited about for being in the race or is it Atiku?  When the two main political parties have already offered you identical twins to choose from. One is as depressing as the other. Are these the people that will give any cause for hope? As things are today, nobody can even speak with a degree of confidence that the elections will hold. I was reading the Kaduna State governor in the papers saying that terrorists have made it clear that there won’t be elections in certain places in the state.  Seven local government areas are left to terrorists in Niger State and we are talking elections. Our situation sometimes demands that we stop using our brain and just switch on our faith. If we start using our brain, it will be easier to embrace despair than hope in our situation and yet, we must hope. Without hope, what do we have left?

When you asked me to look at those jostling for presidential power, I don’t see too much hope. I know that Peter Obi engendering hope in the young and then there are people who have hope in OmoyeleSowore. Beyond those two, who are you looking at that will engender any hope? I don’t want to be a prophet of doom, giving people reason to be shivering and afraid. But let’s be realistic and tell ourselves the truth. Bola Tinubu has been the power-that-be in Lagos for the last 23 years. But Lagos State is worse today than it was in 1985 when I came into the state. It is demonstrably worse. How many people are sending their children to government schools in Lagos State today? I attended LASU from Ibadan where I grew up and came to LASU in 1985. How many of the people I went to school will send their children to LASU today? The objective bases for optimism are simply not there. We can continue to embrace illusions and delusions and thereafter comfort ourselves with this multiple illusions that we might embrace. But it does not change the fact that when we objectively assess our situations, there is nothing but despair.

 

Is there really something fundamental that either of those you mentioned as inspiring hope in some Nigerians can do without something being done to the current structure of the country and even the constitution it runs on?

When a people are shorn of hope, then danger sets in to that society. That the young people are looking up to these two in varying degrees for hope is not because the situation itself, when you critically examine it, supports the hope. But the thinking is that it has to start somewhere. Maybe if there is a leadership that is interested in change, then there might some change they might propel or crystallise. But before anybody can do any fundamental change in relation to Nigeria, there must be a root and branch restructuring of the country. The restructuring question is no longer a political issue. I would imagine that it has become an existential issue. It is practically impossible, regardless of who wins even if it is between the candidates of the apocalypse, that is Tinubu or Atiku, neither of them can escape restructuring Nigeria. Nigeria will die if is not restructured. Its death is already a tragedy foretold. Nigeria is not only living on already living on borrowed money; it is also living on borrowed time.   It has no choice but to restructure, regardless of who wins in 2023 and that is if Nigeria has an election in 2023.   Whether the person likes it or not, the structure has become manifestly unsustainable. Everything in Nigeria today revolves around the maintenance of the ruining crass. The people themselves have been ignored, social services have been abandoned and it is impossible to continue along trajectory.  If we continue on this trajectory, Nigeria will die. Whether they want to do it or not, the reality is that they cannot avoid restructuring the country. It is the content and tenor of the restructuring that might differ according to the temperament and ideology of the person who will lead it. But that it will happen is inevitable. We cannot continue to spend the bulk of our wealth as a country on the maintenance of the ruling class. We have a situation today that students have been at home for five months and they can’t go to school because ASUU is on strike. ASUU is not on strike because lecturers are looking for salary. They are on strike because education is not being funded. Whilst we fail to fund education, we manage to fund the sybaritic lifestyles of men who are meant to be serving the people. So, we don’t have money for education, but we have money for senators, House of Representatives members, governors, and for everything but the education of children. The Nigerian middle class will not send their children to these schools, let alone the rulers. It is only the Nigerian poor who are forced to send their children to these schools that have been closed for so long. When we in the university, we had children of the people who were high up in the civil service and government generally, children of Judges, and even Justices of the Supreme Court in school with us. But now, you wouldn’t find any of those in the schools that have been shut for the last five months.  The reality is that it is really not about ethnicity or religion, but about class. The children of the poor are the ones getting left with the short end of the stick. Go to our universities that are on strike, how many children come from homes that can afford to send their children either to private universities that are not on strike or send them to universities outside Nigeria whether that is in Ghana or Togo or Benin Republic. Look, our situation has become so demoralizing in the extreme.

So, if somebody is saying it is possible to gain power in 2023, regardless of his political ideology, and not restructure Nigeria, the person is a joker. The only thing that is uncertain is the nature of the restructuring. The one that calls himself Shettima [APC vice presidential candidate] that was saying ‘restructuring my foot!’ will be restructuring his throat because restructuring will happen whether they like it or not. It is inevitable.  It is a catchword for many things.  Every disenfranchised, disinherited Nigerian understands that it is the structure that has made it impossible for him to remove the choke-hold around his neck. So, Nigeria will restructure or it will die. Go and write it down. I am not even sure that it is not already too late. Some people don’t want to hear about restructuring. For some people, they don’t even want to hear about restructuring. Some people will say they a referendum. I don’t understand what they mean by that. But a lot of people are demanding a break-up of the country because it is simply not working for them and the minimum that will be acceptable to anyone who truly loves this country and is interested in its future is that it should be restructured.  Anybody who is saying restructuring their foot is just blabbing.

 

It then means you will agree with the view expressed a foremost legal icon, Chief AfeBabalola, SAN, who advised that we should have an interim government and restructure the country instead of holding elections in 2023.

I am a member of the Afenifere and the position of Afenifere is clear: restructure this country before you go for any election. But it appears that we are speaking to the deaf. The capacity to hear appears lost to this government. There is nothing wrong with the suggestion that there should be an interim government. It is also about understanding that there is an urgent task in front of us and that task is easier if we suspend the existing legal order because the existing legal order is based on a fraud. Decree 24 of 1999, which masquerades as the 1999 Constitution. It is a fraud. It is interesting that the likes of Chief AfeBabalola are speaking the way they are speaking now. But where were they when they were profiting from that same constitution?  He was Obasanjo’s chief adviser and his friend. He could have done something about it in those days. The oly thing they ever attempted to do was to scheme for a third term of office. I am not saying Chief AfeBabalola was involved in that. Afenifere was busy shouting about the fraudulent 1999 Constitution and demanding a return to the 1963 Constitution from as far back as 1998. We were ignored.

The suggestion Chief Afe has brought to the table is a noble suggestion if the interim government is to carry out the restructuring of the country. If not done, Nigeria will die. I am not a secessionist. I prefer to have a restructured Nigeria where everybody will be living in their own space and progress at their own pace based on their own philosophy, which was the founding basis of the country in 1960. Just as northern Cameroon left in 1960, every other part of the country could have demanded to leave the country at that time as well. But by 1954, there was a compromised position which set up a federal government to make Nigeria a state with federating units. Where are those federating units today? They have been bastardised and destroyed. Instead of the four regions that the military men met in 1966, we are left with 36 unviable states today. Nigeria has never been more fragmented than it is today and for us to find cohesion, we need to go back to the founding principles and the original agreement that created this country. The original agreement is not unknown: have a State based on federalism. The things that each one can do on their own, let them do. The only things that the federal government was left with were defence, currency and diplomacy and even in terms of diplomacy, the Western Region had its own embassies and so did the North and the East.  We had regions that grew at their own pace. The Northern Region even went as far as having an embassy in Sudan and the Sudanese had their embassy in Kano. The Nigeria we have today is not what we signed on for. Chief ObafemiAwolowo would never have been part of this Nigeria and if fairness to Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello, neither would they have signed on for the iniquitous place we call Nigeria today where the federal government is the one creating local governments. It might interest you to know that before the military came, the Western Region had more local governments than the whole of Northern Region combined. But because local governments are now the basis for sharing revenue, Lagos State still has 20 local governments and Kano, out of which Jigawa State had been created, has 44 and Jigawa, 27. They are using landmass and not population to share revenue. Nigeria has become an iniquitous contraption that constrains the talents and capacities of those who live within it and that is because of the iniquitous structure of the country which is a unilateral imposition of the North.

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