Right Reverend Matthew Hassan Kukah, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, is a cleric whose voice reverberates even beyond the pulpit. He speaks the truth to the appropriate authorities at the appropriate time, without minding whose ox is gored. In this interview by OLAKUNLE MARUF, he speaks on sundry national issues.
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As the general election draws closer, the issue of national unity and cohesion has become a concern. How do you think we can get it right?
The issue of national cohesion is something I have written about namely, how did national unity escape us? This is more or less a background within which to reflect on our elections. Many of us would have expected that by now, we would really not be addressing certain issue of anxieties about the coming elections. I don’t know whether it is our fate as a nation because when we feel that we have gotten out of certain issue, somehow we seem to be drawn back. When we conducted elections in 2015, everything really went beyond what all of us expected, despite our anxieties. Our prayer and our hope is that a lot of our fears and our anxieties are not well-founded.
Perhaps they are not well-founded and I think that even the anxieties we have about the elections are also a measure of our lack of confidence in our country; our lack of confidence in politics as having the ability to unite us; our lack of confidence in believing and trusting in our politicians to lead us to where we think we want to be. Here, I feel a bit of pity for the Nigerian politicians because our citizens believe that we expect a messiah who will come and solve our problems. The truth of the matter is that nobody would have expected that a kind of what we thought about what this government will do; whether it is President Muhammadu Buhari today and whether he is able to fulfill those promises is not the issue. The issue is even beyond Buhari; if we remain in the era of expectation of a messiah, every messiah will always be a disappointment.
What did you think should be the role of religion in tackling the problems?
It is a very delicate issue to talk about the role of religion in public life. But it is a matter of great concern to both Muslims and Christians, to Nigerians, to non-Nigerians, people around Africa and around the world that a country that is so religious like Nigeria will find itself unable to deal with some of the moral issues that continue to stare our country in the face. Our notoriety for corruption and inability to judiciously apply our resources for the welfare of our people are issues that will continue to bother us. This is because public life is about managing these resources for the welfare of our people and, unfortunately, so far, there is still a lot for us to worry about.
Going forward, I have received a lot of telephone calls from journalists here and beyond; people are asking again, the anxiety about this election whether it will be peaceful or not. The future is in the hand of God, but God will not come down and take over the affairs of Nigeria; the affairs of Nigeria are in the hands of Nigerians. I believe that we have the genuine majority of Nigerians who want to live in a very peaceful country. We got the political class to sign the peace accord. It has been subjected to criticisms with many people asking: “Will they keep their accord?” We don’t know. When a man and a woman come together and they say please come and see our wedding, we only attend but cannot be the one to answer the question if they will live together. We just attend as women and men with goodwill.
Meanwhile, I think it is worthy of commendation that the politicians themselves took this matter very serious and came forward. As you saw from the reactions of the key political members who were not able to turn up on that day, it was also interesting that we were inundated with phone calls, when some people said they were not informed. The next day and subsequent days, almost everybody signed. This, for me, is a commitment by the political class to say we want to have a campaign that is free of violence; a campaign that doesn’t undermine our common citizenship.
This is where we are; we believe that the world is watching us. The challenge on us in Nigeria is not to cast blame on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) or political parties or the politicians. But in the final analysis, the choices will be ours as nobody is going to come from another planet to solve our problems for us. This is the beauty of democracy: that you think you made a mistake; the system gives you an opportunity to correct the mistakes. But very often, based on the weak institutions that surround us, you find out that it is very difficult for the institutions to command the kind of respect that they deserve. Yet, we must respect them because if we don’t recognise and respect them then, of course, there is very little that we can do.
The mistrust between Muslims and Christians in the country is alarming. How can we handle it before it gets out of hand?
That is a very important question. There is loss of mistrust and it is across board. That is why when we got the politicians to sign the peace accord, what we wanted to discuss on that day was the issue of trust.
I come from Northern Nigeria and, as you know, almost 90 per cent of any conversation we have about religion centres or focuses on the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Northern Nigeria. There are questions on the fate of minorities which is a universal matter of concern and which the United Nations also takes very serious.
When we talk of minorities in Nigeria or in Africa, many people think we talk of numbers because it could actually be numerical in terms of population, from the point of view of being a minority. But it is your inability to access the media or to have what is called voice. If you are a woman in Northern Nigeria, for example, you are almost likely to be a minority despite the fact that the preponderance of the population of the area is female. But the point of view is of access to voice: what does the woman want and what is her role in the public life? In Northern Nigeria, it is a bit of silent conversation, the same way you should take a Christian community in many parts of Northern Nigeria. This is something you will hear me say over and over and very interesting that in most of the 12 core northern states, you go to the state Houses of Assembly or local government secretariats, the presence of women is almost insignificant. Most state Houses of Assembly are totally male and also there are no Christians.
Should this concern us? Yes it should. The same way if you go to the southern part of Nigeria, there are many parts of Nigeria where there will be significant Muslim population. What is their capacity and ability to have a voice? These are issues and matters of concern. You may find that in Northern Nigeria, people are more vocal because the minorities here who are Christians are educated. It is not the same with the percentage of people that you find who are from the North, maybe in Calabar or other places.
The point I am making is that a country that wishes to have an impression that it is united must go out of its way. That is why the federal character principle is enshrined in the constitution. So what has happened in Nigeria is that over time, religion has taken a prominence that it ought not to take. You hear Nigerians talk frequently, both Christians and Muslims whether it is in relations to power, or politics or whether it is relations to discrimination or whatever. There is very little in Nigeria about common citizens or common citizenship. If they tell you that there is an accident in Calabar and the vehicle was coming from Kano and that 40 people died, they are northerners, should it bother me? Or if someone says the vehicle was coming from Calabar to Kano and 40 people died, how should I react?
I think the political class is guilty with the way they have tried to manage power. Today in Nigeria, you will hear the Federal Government, the one before, the one after that the president of Nigeria must be Muslim and the vice president a Christian or there are these numbers of Christians in the cabinet as well as Muslims. The Minister of Aviation, for example, is a Muslim. What is the immediate benefit for being a Muslim to the Muslims? Does that mean that Muslims get air tickets cheaper? The Minister of Transport is Rotimi Amaechi, but how many people from Rivers State are in the train between Abuja and Kaduna? Or if you are from Rivers and you board a train, will your own fare be cheaper because you know Amaechi? You see, for me, the real problem is that we do not have a political class that can figure out how to unite Nigerians and it is the lack of ability to understand that difference can be a source of unity. There are many black people in the United States, but Americans are now focusing more on their being American citizens, though they have skin colour problem.
How could the masses produce qualitative leadership in Nigeria?
Unfortunately, social communism left us with a word “masses,” which is not a word I like to use for the common man on the street. This categorisation doesn’t explain anything. It is going to take us a long time but it is not an impossible project. So far, the way governance is designed in Nigeria, and there are many factors to explain it, the high percentage of illiterate people is being subjected to manipulation. This is why the ordinary people, because of their illiteracy and once you are illiterate, you really don’t place much value on yourself, which has made some people think that when we vote for politicians, we don’t care that they go to Abuja and enjoy on our behalf. That they go to Abuja and steal on our behalf and the helplessness of the ordinary person shows that we have actually now believed that when they steal in Abuja and bring some crumbs here for us, we should be grateful. This is part of the difficulty we have with the system of government. I wish that the Federal Government’s presence was more of an action: that it will have the ability and the institutional capacity to monitor the level of compliance with some of its high objective, as affirmed in the constitution.
Also to our politicians again, if you want to provide things for your people, you must have an idea of how many people you intend to focus on. Very often in Nigeria, many people come into power to become governors and will probably stay as governor without visiting communities that make up their state and that is why it is impossible to design what will improve the welfare of the people when you don’t know where they are or their conditions.
Another thing that I see in our democracy is the unfortunate focus on infrastructure. So much focus on road construction which is important and others. The kind of welfarist institution you can create, all the ideas and principles behind the setting up of the local government system has never been realised. So, it is a very big problem in Nigeria with the big size of the population. As you can see in Cameroon and any smaller countries, our predicament in Africa is not even about the numbers, but lack of the political will to wish for the ordinary people that you govern as you wish for yourself and your children.
Don’t you think the ongoing ASUU strike will affect the conduct of the general election?
It is difficult for me to complain to you how sad I feel about the issue of endless war between members of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the government. In industrial relations, a word commonly used is ‘workers down tools and the production stops’ and the manufacturer has to talk to you. But in this particular case, ASUU is downing tools, their employers, which is the Federal Government, are not suffering but the poor people and their children are the one suffering.
The way this strike is going, many students that graduated from a particular university will never wish to get to the door of such university again. Secondly, I sit here and for many years now, I got many young people coming to me. They went to university at the age of 17 to 19 and ordinarily should have finished between ages 21 and 22. But again, my concern is the poor who are coming from villages like mine. Before you are strong enough to go to school as there is no school in the village, you end up entering primary school at age 10 or 12 and when you finish and you are to spend five or six years in the university as against three years.
The added burden which I experienced everyday is that by the time these children finish the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), they are 28 or 29. Then you go to look for a job and they tell you that you are too old because they are looking for someone who is 23 or 24. The danger here is that we really don’t have the moral authority to worry about the criminal tendencies which our children are exposed to, whether it is prostitution or whatever. We have no moral right to fight against our children dying in the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean or whatever sea, because it is not every child that is ready to go back to the village where they came from.
I am not making a moral judgment but just to say that we are also creating another level of inconsistency that could also add to the problems of our electoral processes, because ordinarily, students are supposed to be in the university. It is difficult to say but you know we have been on this matter for so long. That proves a measure of how much government took the issues of education. I only hope that these two elephants can resolve their problems so that our children can go back to school.
With insecurity and all the vices in the country today, do you think restructuring would be the solution?
You know we are hostages in the language. What the people living in the South-West understand about restructuring is not the same with the people in the North. One easy way to kill a conversation in Nigeria is to turn it into a weapon. If we are northerners, we must not want what the southerners want and if we are southerners, we must not want what the northerners want. If the southerners want it, then it must be bad for us. This is where we have found ourselves.
The question is what do you mean by restructuring? I don’t know any other country colonised by Britain that has done what Nigerians did by creating states. If you look at what the British did before they created all these provinces, the amount of work that British anthropologists on ground before provinces were created is not a small thing, when you compare it with the arbitrary nature of state creation in which we now ended up like this.
I believe that some of the problems we are dealing with now are as a result of new identity that emerged from the creation of states. I think Nigerians believe whether you are from North, South, East or West, Nigeria is not working. Even if it is working, only an insignificant level of Nigerians are benefiting from what belongs to all of us. The question is how do we create a more equitable society? I don’t know whether what you call restructuring can answer that question, but I believe it is the same agony that people are expressing that they are not satisfied with the way things are. And the way things are is evident because of the huge number of people moving in different directions in this country.
It is clear that Nigerians are generally not happy with the way things are, so whether you think the solution is restructuring or not, it depends. Like I argue somewhere that if by restructuring it means tinkering with how our resources are being allocated, I think it is a welcome conversation and it is a conversation that the North must never be hostile to. This is because in reality, if you look at the poverty indices released by the World Bank, poverty levels at the entire South-West and part of the South-East are hovering between 12 and 18 per cent. In Northern Nigeria, poverty levels are hovering between 70 and 80 per cent. Look at the WAEC result that was just released, look at who is where and we are in the same country. From the point of view of population, there is a clear distinction. So if you have a situation where a state today in Northern Nigeria where less than 100 students may enter the university, that is perhaps far less than what a local government will send students to read Science in South-Eastern states and we are occupying the same space.
Let us not deceive ourselves, by whatever name we call it, the critical questions Nigerians must ask are: Are we going to enter the 21st Century like this? Can we compete with this constraint of manpower in which huge percentage of our population is not equipped to participate, even in their self development? These are the issues and not a question of whether one is support restructuring or whatever. But I think that the question remains, ‘how do we make the Constitution of Nigeria to make our citizens, wherever they may be, to have a sense of belonging?’
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