Haruna Dabin is a professor of Political Economy and one of the founding members of Peoples Democratic Party. Dabin also served as Director-General People’s Democratic Institute. He speaks with ISAAC SHOBAYO on the political situation in Nigeria, insecurity and other issues.
How did Nigeria get to this tragic stage?
The reality of the decline of a nation doesn’t happen overnight. There were tell-tale signs. The onset of the fourth republic was one of those things. The emergence of Obasanjo as president meant that the first eleven of the democratic class was thrown overboard. I was in the engine groom and fairly instrumental in the formation of the Peoples Democratic Party and the first eleven that had actually been the G18, G34, at that time, were set aside and they were deliberately coerced into giving the bureaucratic and military establishment the position of leadership. After so many years of military rule if we did not have proper democrats to pilot affairs of states, that itself is a tell-tale sign.
Obasanjo’s first fight was with the military; he tried to emasculate the military. Some of the steps were right. Though globally, it became completely not fashionable to think of coup as an option of governance and the military had to take the back stage to the extent that there wasn’t deliberate professionalization of the military even with [General] T.Y Danjuma as Minister of Defence. To me, it doesn’t produce the best of result. Looking at the situation now, President Muhammadu Buhari, who has completely trivialized the strength of the military, has completed the emasculation of the military to the extent that the security architecture of Nigeria is terribly lopsided and extremely skewed in favour of one tribe and one religion. This is a major negation in an extremely heterogeneous society like Nigeria. Then look at the structure of politics, before 2019 general election, one very clear sign was that there was not going to be any well conducted democratically viable election in Nigeria with the fact that all electoral key institutions that should guarantee and safeguard the vote of the people were extremely skewed to favour one tribe and one religion. Whether in the electoral commission, security forces, so-called dominant party at that time, everything was completely skewed; it wasn’t heterogeneous at all in composition. So looking at those developments in a nation, I knew, although I was an actor in the 2019 elections, that there could not be fairness. In fact in the paper I had written for International Conference on Democracy through Election, I had argued very clearly that the emergency of APC as a dominant party was a major tell-tale sign about the collapse of democracy in Nigeria. The infighting within APC itself was a gang up to throw away the PDP. It wasn’t as if the APC was a democratic machine to see how we can advance democracy; it was a gang-up and immediately Tom Ikimi and several people connected to the foundation of the APC fought and were thrown out, it clearly showed that APC itself as a major dominant ruling party would perfect every machinery for coercion and for emasculating democracy. This was sufficiently justified in the 2019 elections, because that election was not about one man one vote; it was about the dominant of balance of force and the balance of fraud for those who have the capacity to impose their will whether by the use of money or by force. For example, with several years of violence in the North, especially in Borno, they declared millions of votes from that state. People were forced to ask from where? Quite a lot of people were in IDPs camps, where did the votes come from? On the other hand, look at the fight in Lagos and even in South-East; they deliberately tried to set one group against the other. So the resurgence of APC in the 2019 general election, for me and for any careful onlooker, was a final sign that Nigeria was at the verge of collapse. And Buhari that had performed so badly in the first term was given more votes in the second term comparatively even more than the first election! Incumbency can work for you when you have performed well, but when you have an incumbent who has performed so poorly, there is nothing you can do about it. In the first six years of APC government, all vital economy signs show that the economy has nosedived and exchange rate of the naira is nothing to write home about. The fact that multinational companies will choose to move to Ghana rather that stay in Nigeria means they clearly see that all is not well with the Nigerian economy. Insecurity has thoroughly become an issue for the 2019 elections. And one of the issues I argued in the paper, if I may recall, was that this APC government would continue to blame the preceding government. From start to the finish, they would be blaming the PDP. After 2015 elections and up till now, they are still blaming the PDP and after 2019 elections and up till today, they are still blaming the PDP after six years in office. So why did you come into office? I don’t know where Nigeria solution lies, because we have lost it. Sincerely, we have lost it. Also, in term of our economy, we have lost it. The only staying power of the Nigerian economy presently is the unbanned small scale business by the roadsides. Those are the only things we can say are keeping Nigeria from major economic crisis.
It is like the Presidency and National Assembly are running away from electoral reform…
(Cuts in) The major weakness of the 1999 Constitution is to say that ‘No person shall be appointed as a Minister of the Government of the Federation unless he is qualified for election as a member of the House of Representatives’, meaning that they should be sponsored by party. That in itself creates loopholes. In the re-run to the election in Bayelsa State, there was a candidate who was a sitting INEC commissioner who announced his desire to run for the governorship of the state from the INEC office. I am aware as we speak, even during the PDP days, that there were many people who were PDP members but who were upgraded to INEC as National or Resident Commissioners and then, of course, APC is now perfecting it. Currently, we have a case of a very close aide of Mr. President as a nominee for INEC commissionership. So on the need for electoral reform; we don’t have a truly patriotic National Assembly that can give Nigeria the desired result. The intelligentsia has been emasculated; labour movement has been emasculated and of course the politicians in the National Assembly are completely emasculated. So who is going to do it? Which organ is willing to do it? The Senate is like the extension of the Presidency; even the recent hearing on the constitutional review was a charade. It is a waste of time.
Are you saying nothing good can come out of it?
Yes, nothing good will come out of it. At the end of the day, whatever is designed by those committees and presented by the National Assembly might not be accepted by the president. It will end up as a talk shop. The Presidency will not look at it. President Buhari is not the type of president that will want to give Nigeria any electoral system that can be democratic.
But don’t you think the president should change his stance on the 2014 National Conference Report and take a look at it for the purpose of implementing some salient aspects of the report?
In 2016, President Buhari told Nigerians that he would have nothing to do with the 2014 constitution conference, that he would not touch it even with a ten-foot pole. Imagine the efforts that went into the 2014 conference. I was not a member, but I read every discussion; it was very robust. I believe that it was one stage in Nigeria development that if former President Goodluck Jonathan was courageous to implement that report, it would have turned the tide even against him. It would be like committing political suicide, but unfortunately Jonathan did not have the courage. He had the courage to set up the panel but he was thoroughly intimidated by the power mongers in the polity and more so he was going to contest election in 2015. He felt if he did anything, he would lose the election and to put salt on injury and in addition to the failure to take those courageous steps, he lost the election. Even when [Peter Godsday] Orubebe was putting up a very bold front and accused [Attahiru] Jega pointedly because of what he saw during the collation, before they passed through eight states, Jonathan said the election had been lost. Why did Jega ask a panel to move to Rivers State and investigate and check and yet when Kano State brought humongous result nothing was said about it? Even when the PDP agents protested about it, Jega never said anything. That was an establishment where people cannot see what is in the national interest; pecuniary, religious factors, tribe have been elevated beyond national interest.
To be honest with you, I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, I don’t see any credible election in 2023, because the forces of 2019 will now be elevated more than before. The political parties that proliferated between 2015 to 2018 imagine INEC registering political parties less than one month to a general election! What magic will they do? But only for INEC to turn round and deregister them. What were they expected to do with few months to the general election? Even in the days of the military, would they have allowed that? It is now a mono-controlled Nigeria in the interest of one tribe or religious group or the other. Every arm of government whether it is executive, legislature or judiciary and even security, all of it, we at the mercy of God.
How can Nigeria overcome these challenges?
I don’t know. Let me never attempt to think, like they say, outside the box, because there is no box to think outside of. Democratic foundation has been laid by the people so that they can organize themselves. The people are hungry and they are angry; they cannot organize themselves. The control of the state apparatus has been extremely skewed in such a way that insecurity has gone up in this country. Only God can help us. On how to get out of this, I wish that we had some of those who are progressive in mind and not in name, progressive establishment like the intelligentsias. I wish that we had a crop of academics; the intellectuals even the ones outside Nigeria and approach global bodies like the United Nations, European Union and others. The other day, I saw Akinwunmi Adesina, who is presently at the helm of affairs of African Development Bank at a function. He did brilliantly well but that is where it ends. It must be a collective effort. Maybe Nigerians in the diaspora may be our help; I am talking of the technocrats, intellectuals.
Are you saying the political class has failed Nigeria?
They have failed. Let me say we have failed. Years ago, I was talking to a BBC reporter and I told the reporter that I got into politics, believing that I could make a contribution, a meaningful contribution but, unfortunately, after a couple of decades in this business of politics I realized that I had failed. We have failed, that our penchant for personal interest has been taken to another level and this thing about corruption is real. How come that over 20 years, nobody knows how much members of the National Assembly earn and they keep it as a guided secret. Even the like of Senator Shehu Sani who was trying to talk some sense was eventually silenced. Politicians in Nigeria are like Frankenstein monsters that we have created and have consumed Nigeria. I can never be an apologist for military rule. I believe that some broad-based democratic interest which in my mind would either be located at the level of technocrats or labour movement. Unfortunately the labour movement has been emasculated; we don’t have labour leaders who can truly look at issues with the interest of labour. They are looking at their own interests; they are looking at their pockets. The other day, the academics were talking and one of those politicians with verbal diarrhea spewed some of the diarrheas on them and said are they not the same intellectuals that went to rig elections as Returning Officers and as Presiding Officers and were paid handsomely? You send intellectuals to collation centres and they ended up further contaminating the system, ended up destroying the country. Where did our hope lie? But for me, I am a firm believer in God. It is the God factor that I can only look at. There is also a God factor in the rise and fall of a nation. How God will turn around our situation in Nigeria, I don’t know. But I will encourage those who fear God. It is not about religion; it is a clear understanding of relationship with God.
The agitation for secession is swelling on a daily basis and taking a frightening dimension. How do you think the government can douse the tension associated with secession?
You cannot douse tension when people are hungry and there is glaring injustice all over the country. It is a legitimate clamoring; it is inbuilt in human being that you reach a point and you notice that the man in the other part of the country doesn’t have your interest. It may be myopic to think that if I secede by creating a small land I may be better off. It may not be true, but it is an inbuilt natural cry. I have read a lot of current conversations, but unfortunately the geopolitical map of the [Gideon] Okar coup in 1992 seems to have been the issue that is on the front burner that is ‘excise the far North, let them be a country of their own, let the rest of the country go ahead and rearrange itself’ or the argument that let us go back to the 1963 constitution where the regions had their autonomy.
They [regions] were interdependent. They had the powers managing the economy of their respective region and that we could only have a loose federation. It was the 1963 constitution that was clearly negotiated; it is the only constitution that can say ‘we Nigerian people’. But since then, all other constitutional efforts, if perhaps the 2014 National Constitutional Conference was embraced that would have been another constitution, but all others were not negotiated. This attempt to deceive people by saying the 1999 constitution is an offshoot of 1979 is not true. Professor Yadudu sat with a few clique and gave Nigeria a constitution. In fact, Dr Nwodo who was Minister of Information under the Abdulsalami Abubakar military regime said publicly that he never saw the 1999 constitution. Obasanjo was not sworn in with that constitution. It was after that they repackage and represented it. It was supposed to have been printed by the government printer as a gazette. The minister that was in charge of information was in charge of the government press, yet he was not aware of the constitution. How did it come about? A few people smuggled it in. I can say that since Obasanjo was not a politician to properly understand the nature of Nigerian federation, all the efforts he made about amending the constitution were useless.
The 1999 constitution once you started operating it, it creates in itself such impossibility provisions against its being amended. So I don’t know how we can amend 1999 constitution realistically. The 1999 constitution is badly flawed. But historically we can’t go back politically to 1963 constitution because so much water has passed under the bridge as lofty as it may be. Now whether we have a patriotic government that would want to agree to a referendum to say this situation has gotten so bad and let ask ourselves realistically is yet to be seen.
I would have wished that the National Assembly would want to do this rather than all these hearings. Let us try referendum. Do we think the Nigerian constitution is a reflection of the aspirations of Nigerians? What portion can we throw away? That may even be a better step towards giving Nigerians a patriotic constitution to which everyone will have a sense of belonging and for which secession tendencies can be doused.
From all indications, there is an attempt by the ruling political party in Nigeria to jettison zoning. What is your view on this?
Zoning goes back to the second republic. National Party of Nigeria itself promoted zoning. The argument of NPN in the second republic about zoning was not necessarily about election; it was more of formation of government so that when a government is formed, various components of the country must belong and to that extent, NPN now tried to create a national government. PDP, to me, took zoning too far. Some of the arguments some raised at that point were not attended to; they felt that in order for us to get a national government, we must have a national party and therefore the components of zoning were so much inbuilt in the party machinery and electoral guidelines and stuffs like that. For me, I would have thrown up a candidate that is credible and let the electorate decide who they want. So this turn by turn arrangement cannot help us as a nation. The party structure that throws up zoning gives an impression that whoever emerges must first and foremost take care of the interest of his constituency or his section. That is, he emerges to take care of the interest of his section. But from the body language of APC, it may want to present another northern candidate and since they have the machinery to contrive election victory, they do not think of the consequences. To me, I will not subscribe to zoning as a party policy. A party should be able to throw up the best candidate.
YOU SHOULD NOT MISS THESE HEADLINES FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
We Have Not Had Water Supply In Months ― Abeokuta Residents
In spite of the huge investment in the water sector by the government and international organisations, water scarcity has grown to become a perennial nightmare for residents of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital. This report x-rays the lives and experiences of residents in getting clean, potable and affordable water amidst the surge of COVID-19 cases in the state…Six months after Six months after
Selfies, video calls and Chinese documentaries: The things you’ll meet onboard Lagos-Ibadan train
The Lagos-Ibadan railway was inaugurated recently for a full paid operation by the Nigerian Railway Corporation after about a year of free test-run. Our reporter joined the train to and fro Lagos from Ibadan and tells his experience in this report…Six months after Six months after
and then