Why OBJ’s third force’ll not work —Falola

WALE AKINSELURE caught up with the celebrated Professor of African History at the University of Texas, Austin, United States of America, Toyin Falola, at a conference held at the University of Ibadan to mark his 65th birthday. He speaks on the options available to the Federal Government and Nigerians on the issue of herdsmen attacks, why Nigerians are pushing for restructuring, the third force and the fate of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.

HOW will Nigeria benefit from this conference?

It will in a substantial way. You will notice that the conference comprises close to 90 per cent of the contemporary generation of university teachers, young men and brilliant women in their 20s. We call that intellectual empowerment. And many of the ideas from this conference will get to the classrooms. These ideas include those on politics, development, youth empowerment and from the classrooms, they get further circulated and there are policies dimension aspect in which people are talking about development, issues about political restructuring, the current issue of Fulani herdsmen and farmers conflict and how to resolve them.

You mentioned how the conference would address the issue of herdsmen/farmers’ clashes. Do you think the cattle colony proposition of the Federal Government will resolve this problem?

Cattle colony is a very dumb idea. And I think they will not do that. This is because you cannot go to other people’s land and say the place will be turned to a colony for people who are not from the place to stay there. Rather than do that, they can ask the Southern states with the land; they can plead to the farmers, with incentives, to plant grass and those interested in trucks can create a transport industry to move hays to the North. That is a win-win situation in which the Southern farmers benefit and the Northerners keep their cattle there. There is no power in the world that will say I will create a colony for other people to live on your land. Traditionally, land in Nigeria is part of our identity. They are part of how people develop themselves. I cannot just go to the Bunu people in Kogi State and say I want to give your land to the Fulani. I can’t go to Ogbomoso and the governor of Oyo State will say they should give their land to other people. That is recipe for disaster.

The second thing they have to do immediately is disarming people with AK-47. The government has the power to disarm them. The police and the army can disarm them and that has to be done fundamentally. Third, there must be the enforcement of strict regulations. You and I cannot carry gun and be moving on the streets. Why are these small boys allowed to carry guns on farms and they are not being arrested? And we have what we call the nuclear option in politics, you can control the nuclear option or citizens can engage in their own nuclear option. If the government does not take control, the people in Benue will buy AK-47 themselves and turn themselves into militia to protect themselves. We then get into a state of anarchy. You ask whether the Tiv, Igala, Igede will continue to allow the herdsmen to kill their people. So, instead of going that way of people arming themselves, the government should disarm everybody. The ultimate nuclear option is called the boycott option. In three months if the people refuse to buy beef, refuse to buy suya, the businesses of the Fulani will collapse.

You talked about the people taking to arms to protect themselves. Is this one way by which the people can push for restructuring?

Two things will happen. You can manage it in which the state itself gets involved in that restructuring or the people will do the ultimate thing to restructure themselves. You don’t need permission to restructure. You can restructure on your own fundamentally in which citizens or group of citizens determine how they want to live their lives. It is either they manage it carefully or fundamentally. The system will restructure itself. The most peaceful one is for the state to do that as an agenda or clever programme. Bear in mind that Africa’s history is full of people taking over and doing the restructuring. You are talking to a high school dropout who is now celebrated today. I spent two years in high school and joined the Agbekoya movement. I was part of the Agbekoya rebellion as a teenager, which was a restructuring agenda. We asked why they were giving our cocoa money to politicians. You saw how Agbekoya and the civil war restructured Nigeria. There were warnings to restructure, but they didn’t listen and people said if they won’t listen, they would do it themselves. For three years, we made the Western region ungovernable and that forced them to abolish tax to farmers. There is no farmer that pays tax anymore as people’s revolution has taken over. And, if Buhari’s government is not very careful, he will find himself in a process difficult to manage, as the people fundamentally begin to take these laws into their [own] hands. We should appeal to him not to allow that to happen.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo recently wrote to President Buhari raising current challenges facing the country. He clearly asked Buhari not to run for a second term. What is your take on the statement, bearing in mind the next general election?

Fundamentally, two things culminated in this anger and the Buhari government brought it upon itself. The Fulani herdsmen attacks in which the people said the government’s policy of using only his people for security and not talking about the issue, showing that he has a political agenda. And, during December, when people wanted to go home for Christmas, there was fuel scarcity. The combination of both just unravelled. There is nothing that Obasanjo said that people have not said: whether about reckless devaluation of the currency, unemployment or political mismanagement. So, the only thing Obasanjo said is a policy statement that the APC and the PDP are not working, let’s find a third party. Now, the way he structured this third party resembles the APC and PDP; that is not going to work. Talking about selecting another leader, Obasanjo himself has had three opportunities to do this. He selected the dying man called Umaru Musa Yar’Adua; he selected the weak guy called Goodluck Jonathan and was part of the selection process of Muhammadu Buhari. Why should we trust him to select another person? We do not know what Bola Tinubu will do, because if Tinubu decides not to support Buhari, the South-West is gone. The South-South is already gone; the Middle Belt is already gone; the Kanuri are gone. Once Tinubu leaves, Buhari is gone. Part of what you call Boko Haram is the deep anger among the Kanuri against the Fulani that has merged into the pre-existing Boko Haram issue. The Kanuri anger against the Fulani dates back to when the caliphate was established. When Dan Fodio established that caliphate, and wanted to conquer the Kanuri, they refused, which led to the collapse of the dynasty and the emergence of the current dynasty. It was an anti-Fulani dynasty and an anti-Fulani movement is also building in what you now call the North-East. So, that place will be gone, the South-South is gone, the Igbo people are gone, the Benue people are gone. Once Tinubu leaves Buhari, that is the end of his administration. The second scenario is if you control the entire security apparatus, and Mahmood Yakubu is the INEC chairman and you drop electronic voting, Buhari will win the election. You don’t have to ask me why, you just stuff the ballot boxes and he is back at Aso Rock. So, he also has his own nuclear option to say, if you don’t want me, I can rig the election. And he has the power to do that. In the next 12 months, there will be no governance again; governance will end now. What you will have is politicking; nobody will be talking about development. They will be talking about development as fake promises which they are very clever at doing. We are in trouble.

At a time when the APC seems to be failing Nigerians, the PDP as an opposition party has also not been living up to expectations, leading to talks about a third force. The question, however, is what are intellectuals and academics like you doing about a third force that can provide a platform for you to implement your various propositions for a better Nigeria?

That is an idea which has been nursed, but Nigerian politics is about money. On the day of a presidential election, if you don’t have up to one billion naira, you cannot win. It’s over for you. You man all those small posts with police and thugs; you pay electoral officers. You cannot just say I am Professor Falola and run for governorship. Politics is over-monetised. Even the media, I have friends who have set up newspapers and journalists are not being paid. If you say you are going to Toyin Falola at 65 conference, they tell you to go and make your salary there. So, the entire space has become monetised. So, I can’t say that because I am a brilliant person, I will call my friend, Wole Soyinka; where is the money? When my former student, Dr Kayode Fayemi, became governor, they were bankrolled. Part of what revolutionary teaching of history in schools will do subsequently is to remove money from that process, such that we can have a local government chairman that young people endorse who will not spend any money and will win. We have to build a movement that will demolish that monetisation. In the US route, which is also monetised, you see how Barack Obama cleverly used the media, raising $10, $5. I don’t know whether somebody will be so savvy to do it here. In Nigerian politics, to become a senator, you know that what means. It is so expensive.

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