Patriots should gather and save this nation —Abaribe

Former Deputy Governor of Abia State, Eyinaya Harcourt Abaribe is a vocal member of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). The Minority Leader in the 9th National Assembly spoke on burning national issues with SANYA ADEJOKUN.

You seem to have become a little quiet in recent weeks. Why is that?

What happened is fairly simple. Late iconic musician of Nigeria, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti produced a song titled Confusion Break Bone, which is one of my favourite songs from him where he also expressed the same type of frustration that I feel today. In the lyrics, he said “if I sing corruption, if I sing mismanagement, if I sing stealing by government, all that people will say is “na old news be that”. In other words, the frustration he was feeling is similar to what I am feeling now. That I have been talking and shouting and screaming and nothing seems to being done. As if the authorities are saying “let them just be speaking”. So as not to sound like a broken record, and for the citizenry not to also say we have heard it before, I then decided to take some time off for introspection. That is what I am going through now. But what would I say? That you brought an interim management committee (IMC) to solve the problem in Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and they started stealing more than those who were there before? Na old news be dat. That I have been shouting that they should change the military service chiefs because they have outlived their usefulness? That as people are killed daily and we complain, the reply is always that the President has had a meeting with the service chiefs and he has given them the order of changing the security architecture? Na old news be dat! That is why you are not hearing so much from me. Like Fela said, na old, old news be dat o! It has now come to the stage where patriots should gather and save this nation because there is nothing the present government can do. When they came into office and we saw the trajectory, at every point that you complained, government’s spokesmen will fall into a default mode: after all, PDP… Right now, they are one year into the second term and citizens are tired with hearing excuses that PDP didn’t do better.

Yesterday, somebody asked me the difference between the 8th and 9th Senate? My answer was that government claimed that the 8th Senate was impeding them from doing their job because the Bukola Saraki regime was against them. The 9th Senate therefore came as a supporter and enabler of the Presidency. Now they have all the support they want yet, things are getting worse, which means that the problem is not from the national assembly anymore. You said the national assembly didn’t let you work but now you got the people you want; national assembly is supporting you even those of us in the minority also decided to watch so that government can concentrate on the welfare of the people, yet, there is no welfare. Everything is totally bad. It goes back to what I said on the floor of the Senate that the President is the person that has the responsibility and he must own up to his abysmal failure. When you have failed and own up to your abysmal failure, the only thing that is left is to go away because staying inside that office continues to bring us to the brink of the destruction of the country. That is why the #RevolutionNow people also woke up yesterday calling on the president to resign and go. Of course, their call is belated because I made this call long time ago in 2019 and everybody thought it was PDP just playing brinksmanship. PDP itself has also woken up calling on the President to resign. Everybody has told President Buhari to resign. It is obvious. It is obvious that he can no longer do it. His government is riven into pieces. Everybody takes a chunk of the government and hangs on to it and there is no coordination in the government. The Minister of Justice is fighting with an agency under him, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), FIRS is fighting NIPOST, Minister of Communication is fighting Diaspora Commission, Ministry of Niger Delta is fighting NDDC. It is a fuji house of commotion that we now have. And no patriot can be comfortable with the state of affairs that we found ourselves.

#RevolutionNow protesters were violently suppressed by soldiers and policemen. Should that happen in a democracy? Are Nigerians enjoying the dividends of democracy 20 years after?

An interesting story was told to us when the present Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, GodswillAkpabio was the Minority Leader in the Senate as a PDP member and they went to see the President. Akpabio told me that as they were bantering with the President, he then told them “I wish I was still the military Head of State. I would just have locked all of you up and then you will prove your innocence to be released. In essence, somebody cannot give you what he does not have. It means that you can’t have democracy without democrats. What you are looking at called APC starting from the President all the way down are not democrats. I watched an interview on TV between the President’s spokesman, Mr. Femi Adesina, and some young lawyer. Adesina was enraged and actually berated the Channels’ crew for bringing him on the programme to debate with such young person. He said if he had known, he wouldn’t have come. In other words, these people sitting down there in the Presidency do not look at themselves as people who were hired for a job by the Nigerian people. They sought for our votes, got it, and therefore we are their employers. But the man sits there and said “I don’t even need to talk to you.” How more imperialistic can it get? That is the mindset of somebody who is supposed to represent the Presidency in a democratic setting, who should at all times be ready to answer every question even the very inane and stupid ones because that is their job! We now have these people feeling high and mighty. They are feeling like that because they look at the rest of us as second class citizens. Let me go back to Fela again. Towards the end of his life, I used to go to the Shrine and he sang a lot of songs. He did a song titled Akunakuna where he sang “e no easy to be citizen of Nigeria. Armoured car will be in front, soldier will be right and left. Helicopter will be on top”. In other words, it is Buhari and his people in the Presidency that are now the citizens, the rest of us are slaves. Fela could see the future and that is what we are seeing today. We don’t have democracy, what we have at best can be described as civil rule. Otherwise, President Buhari who organized and participated in a protest march against the Jonathan government personally will now send people to go and arrest those who were protesting against himself.

So what should we do? Should we then return to the 1963 Constitution as being suggested by some Nigerians who argue that the 1999 Constitution is not legitimate and that the Presidential system places too much power in one individual?

The argument for the presidential system and parliamentary system can go either way. I come back to the persons who run the system. The same 1963 constitution also underwent challenges leading to coup d’etat in 1966 and it was also blamed on the fact that people were not running what was there properly. Like I mentioned, this is a period of introspection for me and I have wondered if it is the words of the constitution or is it those that operate the constitution who deliberately do the wrong thing? We may just find after making a 360 degree and return to the 1963 constitution that it will not stop the destabilization that is caused by the operators of the system. I had cause at a particular time to address the Bar Association in one of the meetings they had in Abuja. In that paper, I explained that the Constitution created joint state/local government account. The purpose of the account is for the state to add 10 percent of its internally generated revenue to local government revenues coming from federation account for the running of local government councils. But the state has rather taken over the states/local government joint account, does not contribute any 10 percent but rather takes over local government funds and gives mere pittance to the third tier of government that is closest to the people.  Is that now the fault of the constitution or the operators? We should check ourselves and ask who did this to us? That at every point what we look for is the aberration.

There is a raging debate going on today in the South East. People are asking if we say that our problems have always come from the centre, and that we are being marginalized, which is true, what about the funding we get ourselves? How is it being utilized? That debate is on now. You understand? So if we cannot manage the little that we have in the best possible manner for our citizens, why do we have to blame others? I tell you this: definitely, there are areas of this constitution that must be amended. All they did was to import what was there before and simply ‘federalize’ them. And so we have an exclusive list of 60-something items and areas that we ought not to go into, should not be discussed and then of course that leads to conflict with states. States cannot build a railway and so many other areas that you say states cannot get into. States cannot even wake up today and there’s a gaping hole in a federal Highway that is passing through you without recourse to the federal government and when you ask the Federal Government, it would take months for you to get answer and the Federal Government can even say don’t even touch it. At every point, you are constricted and constrained.

It means that there is a gaping need to amend the constitution. I fully believe in the facts of restructuring, of redoing this whole thing. Part of what people also arguing about in saying that we should go back to the 1963 Constitution is that the cost of governance is so high and that is not true as far as I know. I’m in the National Assembly; I’ve looked at the budget. The budget of the National Assembly is 2.7 percent of the total national budget. So when people say oh they’re too costly and all that, I just wonder. So the point really is that the revenue formula gives the Federal Government more than the combined revenue that should go to states and local governments. And so, the centre becomes too powerful and now becomes a means of everybody struggling to go and seize the centre and then the federal government finds a way of putting their nose in every little thing. So we need to sit down and comprehensively think through it and I think that a very good job was done in the last constitutional conference that was organized by Jonathan but jettisoned by this administration. Maybe we should sometimes, after spending all this humongous amount of money, when we bring all our people together, we need to implement what they arrive at. What I suggest is that we should simply get that report. I understand that the report was in three parts: those that could be implemented immediately by the executive without any hindrance and those that will need the National Assembly to pass those particular laws and those that the states will implement on their own. The essential thing is Where is the welfare of the people in and around all this? That is just the essential.

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