Nigeria under dictatorial government, people are struggling to survive —Afenifere leader, Adebanjo

Acting leader of the pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, speaks on the country’s 22-year journey into democracy in this interview by BOLA BADMUS.

How do you think Nigeria has fared since 1999 when it returned to democratic rule?

We can’t talk about democracy under this government. We have changed from military rule to civilian government but there is little or no change. We have a dictatorial system of government because the people are barely able to survive. What they are just doing is to show that there is democracy. Before (Muhammadu) Buhari, there is no doubt that we had some freedom of speech, but now the draconian government which we had under Abacha is what Buhari has come up with again. On freedom of speech, there is limit to what the press can publish otherwise they can close down your organisation. We are under a civilian dictatorship. That is the only difference.

Before now, we enjoyed better freedom of speech, of movement, of everything, whereby anybody could say anything against the president and get away with it.

What do you think is wrong with Nigeria? Is it the constitution or the people at the helm?

Principally, it is the constitution. It was even Obasanjo that should have changed the system. He had the opportunity. He was the first person who had the opportunity to change the system because he was brought in to persuade people of Yorubaland. He could have used the opportunity if he really realised what the people were complaining about. Unfortunately, in my view, he too took the advantage of the defect in the constitution to do certain things he shouldn’t have done. He didn’t rule as a civilian person, but to a large extent, he was a better president than what we have now. We at Afenifere believe that a lot of radical things should have been done.

Take the questions of revenue allocation and devolution of power, for instance, he could have done something about them, because all we have now is arbitrariness. The constitution we have now is a military constitution and that is why the problem is there and that is why I am saying that we must go back to the constitution we had at independence, which was agreed to by the leaders of the country at the London conference – the constitution agreed to by the Sardauna, agreed to by Awolowo, agreed to by Azikiwe. That is what we had. That was the system that established true federalism.

People don’t know why we are having these crises. The people who started the secession move are now the ones condemning people that are asking for secession. It was Sardauna who first said he was not going to be in Nigeria in 1953. It is on record that when the McPherson Constitution was unitary and Enahoro, as an Action Group lawmaker, moved the motion for self-government and the Eastern Regional Government supported us, the North opposed the idea.

And when the House adjourned at that time, all ministers in that government were members of the House. When they left the House on that day, after that motion, the crowd outside the parliament booed the Sardauna. That was what angered him and he said ‘Araba’, literally meaning ‘we are going”, and the nine-point programme came.

When that crisis came, the Colonial Office under Littleton sent for all the leaders of government at that time to the London Constitutional Conference in Lancashire House where they had that constitution. That was in 1954. That was when the country was established under a federal system. That was when premiership was included in the constitution of the region and each region was autonomous. The constitution of each region was written separately. That was what we carried on to Independence.

That is why some people still say that Buhari couldn’t be more educated than Sardauna; he couldn’t be more Fulani than Sardauna; he couldn’t be more religious than Sardauna. The constitution we all agreed to before we came together, why don’t you want to go back to that? What we are saying is that let’s go back to the constitution we all agreed to at Independence. It is what we are demanding. It was the military that changed the constitution in 1966 and that is what we still have today.

When they said they were going to go back to democracy in 1998, Afenifere demanded that they should send us back to the constitution you met us with and we said if you are going to do that, there must be a sovereign national conference. The sovereign national conference agitation was a precursor of restructuring because people are confusing things. We are not latter-day federalists.

That was the agitation we were making before Obasanjo came into office. We said if you are not going to send us back, we must have a sovereign national conference to agree on whether we are going to stay together and on what condition we are going to stay together. And the word sovereignty, Obasanjo translated it to be sovereignty affecting his office, saying that there could not be two sovereignties because of his office.

But I told him then that the sovereignty we were talking about did not affect the incumbent president. It is the sovereignty of the conference we want to call and that whatever we decided there was the sovereignty. You have no right to subtract or add to it as you did to the 1979 Constitution by putting the Land Use Decree.

So, I was specific. Whatever that conference decided is sovereign, only subject to a referendum. That was the agitation we had with Tinubu, Osoba, Adebayo, Akande and others before we contested the elections under the Alliance for Democracy.

So, when I say these people have sold out, this is what I am referring to; that they didn’t keep to that. We took part in the 1999 elections on the condition that there must be sovereign national conference. We made it an election issue to get the mandate of the people and that was the basis on which they were elected. I want to emphasise that. I want to let Tinubu, Akande and others know that that was the campaign issue for which the Alliance for Democracy was elected into office. And to back it up, after the elections, Papa Adesanya led the Afenifere and the Alliance for Democracy leaders to each House of Assembly to pass a resolution on sovereign national conference with Tinubu in the Lagos House of Assembly, Osoba in the Ogun State House of Assembly, Akande in the Osun House of Assembly, and in all the six states under the Alliance for Democracy. It is on record and it is not a question of Adebanjo just deceiving anybody. Go and check the record.

We told our governors not to go to Abuja for anything. Now we have got the mandate under the campaign for a sovereign national conference. This was how they sold out. This thing has been on and on until the question of restructuring came in, that we want to go back to federalism. It was the military that destroyed the structure of Nigeria.

Would you say the country has had some gains under this dispensation?

I don’t see the gains we have achieved. We have the chance to change but we have the wrong people to drive our cause.

With the present situation in the country in terms of insecurity and other problems, as well as agitations for self-determination, what is the way forward?

To move forward is to change the constitution. I must emphasise that neither Afenifere nor anybody in Yoruba land is interested in session. We want to be in Nigeria but on the terms which our founding fathers agreed to stay together. It is no to anything short of that. We want to be in Nigeria, but we would not beg to be in Nigeria. We would not be in Nigeria where we would be the horse and then a group of people would be the riders. We would all be in the Nigeria we all agreed to before Independence and nothing short of that. That is why I said that the Igbo and all that are crying for secession, it is Buhari that is encouraging them because they are young men who are tired of all this oppression and they believe that it is because they are in Nigeria that they are doing this to them. That is what Buhari can’t understand.

How has Buhari been encouraging these agitations?

He has a hidden agenda. He is not interested in the unity of the country. If he is interested in the unity of the country, the whole country is saying that these are the conditions under which we are going to stay together, you say no. And you think you are deceiving the people by asking the legislature to go and do the amendment of the constitution. Which legislature? The legislature is a product of this fraud. How can we amend a constitution we were not privy to? Abdulsalami has confirmed that he did the constitution. We are no fools, a constitution where you have rigged everything and created more local governments in the North than in the South. On what basis? And you use these local governments for revenue allocation which gives you more from the kitty than the one you put there, which was not the case at Independence. So, these are the injustices in the constitution. You contributed a penny under the constitution, you take N20,000, and those who contributed N20,000, you give them three pence. What injustice! And you want us to continue like that?

But the people in government never fault the constitution; they would rather accuse enemies of the government and of the country of not allowing what they are trying to achieve to manifest. What do you say to this?

The government is trying to change the narrative. We say this constitution is not our own, you say you set up a body under that constitution to amend it. The constitution is a fraud. What illogicality! We haven’t got cattle brain, that is what they are saying.

Buhari and his cohorts know what the problem is. They are only pretending and that is why I accuse him of trying to ‘Fulanise’ the country. If that is not so, why do you refuse the suggestion of going back to how we came together and you have not provided us any other solution other than the situation we are complaining about? Does that show any good intention? Does that show sincerity? Does that not show that he is just paying a lip service to claims that he loves Nigeria? All sections of the country are saying we don’t want violence, let’s sit down and talk, has he said anything? If he doesn’t know what to do, he should resign. He is part of the evils of the constitution.

Concerning the security of this country, all the state governors under this constitution are lame-duck governors. They are the chief security officers of the states without the instruments of control over the police. That is what we have under this constitution. That is what we want to change. I don’t believe it is about the enemies of this country.

Buhari’s government must be honest about keeping this country together. They want to keep us together by force because under the present constitution, the entire architecture of the country is in the hands of the Muslim North. That is the bottom line.

What do you make of the presidency’s pronouncement that southern governors did not offer any solution by opting to ban open grazing and calling for restructuring?

They are saying that because of this constitution. What they are saying is that they (the governors) can’t bite; they can only harass people because the power to bite is in the hands of the Federal Government, which they acquired under this constitution we are complaining about. By the time we go back to federalism and restructure, that power would go. They know but they are pretending.

They are saying, ‘All right, go and implement what you have said. After all, the police and the army are in our hands’. That is the secret. That is why they can do that. That is why I say Buhari is not honest. He is not sincere about keeping this country together. All this harassment of Nnamdi Kanu; that he is going to fight against secession is pretence. He knows the solution. They have told him.

The moment he says he is going to restructure the country and as a first step, he gives governors authority over their areas in terms of security, state police, then all these crises and tension would go down. We have told him this but he has refused to accept.

You are obviously disappointed about the situation in the country despite 22 years of democracy.

Of course, a lot. The leadership has not performed the way we hoped it would perform. After all, the people there are not the ones that fought for independence; they are just the beneficiaries of what we fought for. The way I can talk because I fought for independence, Buhari can’t talk like that. Who in his government can talk the way I talk? How many of them were present at the London constitutional conference? The only ones among them that would have heard about it are those that were then in primary school. I am talking about something that happened about 70 years ago. So, they are just the beneficiaries.

That is why some people say it is the British that caused all these problems because we were not together; that it was they who amalgamated us by force in 1914; that we don’t want to go back to that. We have seen the advantage of coming together as a big country but we say, well, we can do that on amicable terms.

People who brought us together should let them know that they didn’t bring us together for them to dominate us; that we are resisting. All the West and the entire South are saying is that we were not amalgamated without our consent, but we agreed to be together on terms that would be beneficial to all parties, not on the terms that one party would dominate the others.

So, all the opposition Buhari is having now is resistance against domination by people we persuaded to be part of Nigeria. We persuaded them because by the time we said we wanted self-government, they said they were not ready. When the East and West had their self-government in 1957, the North said they were not ready. We had to wait till 1959. The British granted us Independence in 1960. They (the North) delayed our independence. We made the constitution to accommodate their backwardness. When you hear of quota system in the constitution, it is to take into consideration the backwardness of the North, because if we were going to do everything on merit, they didn’t have any chance.

YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE HEADLINES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE

Fake Website Asking N-Power Candidates To Verify If They Have Been Shortlisted For N30,700 Grant

CLAIM: A viral post on WhatsApp is asking N-Power candidates to verify if they have been shortlisted to receive ₦30,700 Batch C grant

VERDICT: FALSE. Registration can make you lose your WhatsApp account to scammers.

FULL TEXT: A viral post on WhatsApp is asking N-Power candidates to verify the status of their application and see if they have been shortlisted for the batch C cash grant…

Killer Herdsmen: Untold Story Of Ibarapa’s Worst Nightmare + VIDEOS

“Please do not talk to my father. He is yet to come to terms with the death of his son. It is a most tragic experience. How does one quantify the loss of a dear brother? My brother was killed like an animal by two herdsmen. His offence was that he asked them to drive their cows off his already cultivated farmland,” Bisi Olaosepin, whose brother was hacked to death, struggled to hold back his tears as he relayed to Sunday Tribune the horrible experience that culminated in the passage of his brother…

Pollution, Deforestation: How Ignorance, Unclear Environmental Policies Influence Booming Fish Smoking Industry

Rays of the afternoon sun pelted her head as she fanned the embers beneath the half-cut iron drum with the smoke permeating the air. “This smoke is unbearable, Iya Maria,” said one of the three neighbours conversing under a makeshift shed about five meters away. Their voices rose and fell intermittently…Nigeria records 63 new COVID-19 infections, total now 166,254