Re-ordering of elections: You start from smaller elections to larger ones —Ex-minister, Idika Kalu

A former Minister and renowned economist, Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, in this interview with KUNLE ODEREMI, speaks on the rising number of political parties in the country, ongoing voter registration, formation of political coalitions/movements, as the country prepares for another election year, among others issues. EXCERPTS:

 

THE tempo of horse-trading is on the rise in the land with less than a year to the 2019 election? Do you think there is any lesson for the political elite in Nigeria inherent in the seamless change of power in South Africa even though that country operates a parliamentary system of government?

I think so, and you can look at the South African scenario from so many levels. I think one must have a sense of pride because the whole continent of Africa has been shown in the sense of people who are not building any institution; in the sense of people who are not building any system. So, it very heartwarming to see that systems are being deepened in which they should be after the exit of late President Nelson Mandela. The African National Congress (ANC), with all its powers, is being made to be accountable by the opposition. And in democracy, the toleration of opposition is important because that’s also what helps to build the system because this indicates that underling every robust political contestation is the abiding acceptance of the import of the rule of law. You have to stay with the Constitution, no matter how much they disagree. I mean, look at what is happening in Nigeria; how there has been so much violence; sporadic violence. We didn’t put our fingers on the violence. We can’t even seem to know that it is the law that should determine sanctions against the violence. The rule of law means the protection of individuals’ lives and property. This is the most important thing in any realm because you can imagine if there is no basic protection of law and order for individuals, from wherever the people come from, from whatever religion, from whatever trade, once that thing is shaken, in the way it is being shaken in this country, we really have cause to wonder! We have to immediately make sure that we don’t allow it to be aggravated because when it gets aggravated, we have seen what has happened in so many societies. Nigeria is too big; Nigeria has so much to look forward to; there are so many expectations of us as Nigerians. We have such a long record of helping other countries; politically, legally, militarily, economically, socially and in fact, you can see that even in our great tradition in arts and culture, impacted other countries too. So, we cannot allow our society, with the number we have, the rich culture we have and with the potentials we have, to degenerate where you can no longer depend on the rule of law from the Police to the courts, and to the government to the legislators. We can’t allow due process to just take a flight from the land. Those are the lessons I think for us concerning what has happened in South Africa.

The issue of accountability is very important. As you are aware, the new South African president, Cyril Ramaphosaemphasised it on his own without anybody telling him, that he is not leaving parliament; that he is going to be coming to the parliament to be accountable to them; to answer questions. These are traditions; it is not a matter of East or West; Christian or Muslim. This is a matter of the rule of law and accountability to those who elected you. When you are elected, you become a servant of the people. That’s what he said. It is not just to say it nicely on that first day and the next day, you begin to do something to the contrary. It is not like some of the ridiculous cultures we build here! The day after you are elected, you enter a Jeep where nobody sees you. You expect the people who just voted to elect you to clear the road for you instead of making sure that the road flows normally, so that nobody knows whoever is passing. But you don’t do that; instead you splash flood on them; you see them in the scorching sun waiting for vehicles.

 

Do you blame such leaders for behaving that way, given the readiness of those who vote to be compromised before and at the polls?

It works both ways. Our people have to be active and do the right thing. In the days shortly after our independence, there were big jokes about how we were just proud; we will buy expensive Limousines and we are happy; we wave at our people; they buy expensive limousines whereas we are on foot. I think it was the late Dr Tai Solarin, who was making some of these; we go there in the rain, without a pair of slippers, no protection; and we are so happy to see our leaders in expensive Limousines that we should be paying for primary schools and clinics, it all goes into buying Limousines and we are there and we are just happy. We didn’t tell such leader what he should have. We ourselves confer this stupid postures on our leaders, and we lose the right to hold them accountable. They mouth these things once they get elected, but once they are elected, their immediate aides also help them to put them in an iron cage farther and farther way from the people who they just promised to be accountable to. How can you be accountable to people who can’t come close to you? You can’t.

Nobody should belittle the relevance of the electorate; the people and those that they elect because many of them, instead of holding the people to be accountable, actually like to stay outside the quest for accountability because they want to get payment upfront in whatever way. So, whatever one says, the blame is not just on the leadership; it is also on the followership. It is not just on those who govern; it is also from the governed. They have to show to be active rather than passive; they have to demand accountability. But the two have to do this together. When the leadership encourages sanctions of the leadership; that also encourages the followership to exert themselves. The followers don’t have the police; but the police are part of the people. The army also forms part of the people. The leaders are part of the people. There should be no watertight separation. Once that is the case, then both sides are working because that is the way the whole society can be wholesome. When you talk about a comfortable nation, it is because the two sides are working together. So, you can’t blame one and leave the other; you can’t blame the leaders and leave the followers, neither can you blame the followers and leave the leaders. Each has to know what is best for the society and live in a manner that encourages that.

 

Both former President Olusegun Obasanjo and former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida have passed a vote of no confidence in the two major political parties in Nigeria: the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). What do you think are actually wrong the current parties?

It is not a simple question you can answer over the phone. There are so many problems in the parties. All the things I have been talking about are the things wrong with our parties. I have encouraged us that we should to try and be patient; to try and build up two alternative systems; the two alternative system does not mean there has to be two parties. It does not also mean that there has to be 68, as we have at present. Something is wrong there! There could be local parties for special issues like you have in some advanced countries who are interested in the environment; they are not interested in other things, but by and large, who are still pursuing the basic needs of the people. So, we should be able to have at least two strong opposing groups and the opposing group could be people who agree on what needs to be done but maybe based on fairly different approaches to doing them so that they will be ones pushing those who have the powers, by the dint of having been elected through popular election—they have the mandate—somehow are able to convince the people that they can achieve the same goal better.  When we start having the proliferation of parties that we are having now, people should be patient enough to work together so that those parties can be viable alternatives to the ruling parties or to the ruling coalition; a coalition of opposition that should be a viable opposition to the ruling coalition. That is what is wrong with our parties. There is a lack of patience; parties not focusing on the needs of the people. If we say education is our problem; health is our problem, manufacturing or agriculture is our problem, these should not be things that are so varied in terms of objectives that we need to have 70 political parties. If you have two or three visions of this, then that makes the smaller groups powerful enough to challenge the major groups. That is when opposition is effective. So, one can say that part of our problems is that the opposition is not effective.  The opposition is not seen as a viable alternative. Now, we are getting the APC and PDP to be viable parties, we should all encourage it. Everybody does not have to belong to the same political party. But surely, when you are talking about 70 parties, then the Nigerian people, as a whole, need to sit down and review their situation because if you don’t have an effective opposition to the government, that’s when impunity, when lack of accountability, when the misuse of funds and the breakdown of the rule of law, reign.

 

With the elections less than a year from now, the number of registered voters presently in the public domain has been a subject of serious contestation in major political circle, with some claiming it is curiously skewed against a section of the country….

The most important is that, first, all eligible voters are registered. All eligible voters should not necessarily be going back to their states of origin to be registered. They should be in their states of residence; that is how it is in other clime. You should register where you live and where you reside, you should have all the citizen’s rights to vote and the rest of it. It is when we start allocating voter registration to state of origin, and so on that’s when we start introducing all sorts of things. But having said that, obviously it is unthinkable if any effort is being made by whatever is a national institution to not register people in a particular state or so because of the feelings that maybe, they belong to a particular party or they to vote for this candidate or another candidate. That should never be the case. If so many voters are in State A, they should be registered. They should not register less in State A because they suspect; that means that the registration authority is not independent and fair. If it is not independent and fair, as I said, register all eligible citizens in every state and by the time you start analyzing the distribution and thinking that there is some wrong, then you know there is already a problem  because the important is not whether each state has all the people who are from that state are registered.  It depends on where they live. So, we should not exercise so much contestation until we really find out whether registration was free and fair the way it should be. Once that is achieved, that’s all that is required. It should not be that in Ondo State, for example, somebody didn’t register certain people because the state would be voting APC, rather than the PDP or some other parties. Or to start going to the issue of ethnic groups as a measure of whether that registration was proper and complete and fair.

 

Another issue that is generating intense political discourse is the decision of the National Assembly to alter the sequence of election outlined by INEC. Why do you think this should be an issue, as the lawmakers recommended that the election into the National Assembly should come first with the presidential coming last?

That is the way it works in most free societies. When you start manipulating the sequence, it means that there are some undue pressures; it means that there is something more than the voters’ wish. That is the usual thing: you start from the local to the federal; you start from the smaller election to the larger elections. The question to ask is: what were we doing when we attained Independence? Wasn’t it the way we were going? The federal election was held last. If we decide to reverse it, then we must have some administrative reasons. It certainly would not be based on how the president’s election would influence governors’ or how it would influence elections into the Legislature. It should not be about such influence but on administrative or some sort of internal logic in the selective political process that everybody that can accept regardless of all these other political influences. When it is influence that is being used to determine the sequence of elections, then something is wrong.

 

Some individuals have come up such initiatives as coalition for New Nigeria and Movements, having lost confidence in the main political parties. Do you think we really need such movements as alternative platforms to railroad the journey to the 2019, taking cognisance of the fact that the brains behind the new pressure groups, were, themselves, part of the PDP and identified with the APC in the past?

What do you mean movement? Do you mean like the Third Force?

 

Yes, such as the Coalition for New Movement (CNM) being championed by Obasanjo?

Some of these things have positive and negative aspects. The positive aspect is that living political entity should be able to come up with ideas. We cannot kill ideas because of we don’t like the ideas. If somebody comes with an idea and people buy it, so be it. That is the basic point. If such ideas can come up, that should also be a check and balance to those who may consider themselves as dyed in the law or in practice. In other words, you cannot say because you belong to a party therefore, a movement cannot come up. If you have not taken action to make sure that you did not absorb the various ideas into your fold and people feel that the only way they can exercise those ideas is by starting a new movement. So, it connotes a living political entity. But they should not be trivialized because by the time you transform a movement to a political party, then there should be requirement of what we need to have; the minimum requirement to have a political party. But there is nothing wrong with a movement if people buy it but if they don’t, it should not be forced. It should be another way of checking the political process that if you are governing properly, the chances are that those movements should be reduced. For example, in the United States, I’m not saying they govern properly, the gun-law thing is becoming so patently ridiculous such that the whole America cannot control gun because people seem to be frozen in the ‘wild West period’ when you have to buy gun to protect your family and your friends. They got everything into the American Constitution and now the society that is supposed to be a law and order is afraid to take gun way from people. So, children are not being killed in the way they are being killed in America. These are some of the things we have to look at because we always tend to copy a lot of things. In our society, people don’t have to be carrying guns like this. We better make sure that those social constraints subsist on authority obey the rule of law so that people do not feel that they have to be taking laws into their own hands.  That’s how it starts. If those who are supposed to exercise the proper authority to carry arms do not use the arm to protect everybody, then people feel that they would have to start carrying arms to protect themselves. People are already talking about it with all the spate of killings all over the place.  America started up with the Wild, Wild West, where you move out to the West and you go and grab land because it was there for everybody subject to minimal laws and the only way you can guarantee the protection of your wife and children was to carry gun and it was the law of the land in the US. But fast forward, 21st Century, how can you allow people to be buying guns, the way they are; buying guns that are used for warfare? So, we have to keep an eye on some of these things we emulate. As far as the federal structure that gives protection to heterogeneous society like we have, the kinds of separation of powers, the kind of balances, the kind of financial and legal accountability, those are the things we should look into and how we adapt them into our society and make sure that they work, and when they do, Movements can come up, movements can go. Issues can drive moments but once issues disappear, those movements go and the society continues to build on the gains.