In this interview by HAKEEM GBADAMOSI, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and chieftain of the pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, Chief Olu Falae, speaks on 62 years of Nigeria as an independent country, the state of the nation, 2023 general election and other national issues.
Sixty-two years after Nigeria gained independence, what, in your view, has the journey been like?
I was then a first-year undergraduate at the University College, Ibadan. I was very optimistic that we were going to become independent and rise and shake the world and Nigeria would take its place in the world.
But unfortunately, almost immediately after independence, the crises began: the crisis in the Western Region, the declaration of the state of emergency, followed by ‘Operation Wet E’ in the South-West, the first military coup in January 1966, the civil war and then military government after military government and coups and counter-coups. It is unfortunate that it has been a breathless journey of crisis management. The hopes we had at independence, I’m afraid, have not been achieved largely because of the crisis of leadership, both military and civilian. We were very hopeful but gradually the hope has dimmed and I pray that the fire of hope will not finally go out.
But some people kicked against the move by the colonial masters to grant Nigeria independence at that time…
Most Nigerians are looking back, erroneously jubilating, including myself. But there were a few people, a minority of Nigerians, who thought that we were not ready for independence. They were called names. One of them is Adunni Oluwole. She had a party called ‘Egbe Ki Oyinbo Ma i Lo’ (the white-man-should-not-go-yet party). She said if the white man had to leave at that time, we would enslave one another, and to demonstrate that, she tied a big chain around her waist and got some of her boys to drag her through the streets of Nigeria. She did that to show how she thought we would treat one another after the departure of the white man. She was called a sellout, conservative, agent of imperialism. But events have substantially proved her right, sad to say. Yes, there were a dissenting minority who were abused and humiliated but events have proved that they were nearer the truth than the rest of us.
At what point did we get it wrong as a nation?
From the very beginning, the intolerance demonstrated by the then federal government against a virile opposition in the Western Region was the foundation of the crisis. The then federal government engineered, exploited the disagreement within the ruling party in the Western Region and turned it to a major issue and, within two years of independence, declared a state of emergency. That was the beginning. They wanted no other voice but their own to be heard; no other force should be allowed to rear its head in Nigeria. It is this intolerance that set in motion the events that are still hunting us.
What do you think should be done for hope not to go away?
When this government came in seven and a half years ago, we had only one major security threat which was Boko Haram. Since then, they have multiplied. We now have ISWAP, bandits, herdsmen and other violent groups which the government appears unable to effectively eliminate, and without security, there can be no development, there can be no governance.
In those days, if the military took over the government of any country and sought recognition by the international community, the question they usually asked was if the people came to power to guarantee security of the citizens. If the answer was yes, that was 50 per cent of the steps towards recognition. In other words, security has always been regarded as very important because if there is no security, nothing else can happen.
So, for hope not to disappear completely, the new government coming in next year must be able to, within the first six months, effectively eliminate security threats. In other words, candidates for the presidency must sit down with serious-minded people and meditate on what to do to eliminate security threats. I use the example of the late President Umar Yar’Adua who engaged the insurgents in the Niger Delta. A mix-strategy of accommodation and suppression negotiated with them culminated in the amnesty programme. So, through a series of strategies, he was able to substantially reduce the threat in that region. I want to hear our presidential candidates tell the nation before the election what they will do about this insecurity in specific terms and with time lines. Without dealing with that, the rest is a joke. If there is no security, the farmers will leave their farms, no foreign investors is coming here to invest, Nigerian investors themselves are scared, those who can move to other countries have done so and others are moving out. If you read the papers, almost 10,000 doctors have left Nigeria. So, in that kind of situation, hope is dying and to prevent the hope from being finally extinguished, there must be an effective programme for dealing with insecurity. It appears that there is some kind of collaboration between the purveyors of the security threats and some of those who are supposed to eliminate the threats. So, they must find a way of breaking that if it is true, because without dealing with insecurity, there is very little you can do.
If you are able to deal with security, the next major threat is the financial crisis. This government has said that 92 per cent of its future revenue would be devoted to servicing debt, not repaying the principal, leaving only eight per cent for running the government, paying the salaries of serving officers, paying their pensions, paying the police, the military, immigration, customs, send money to the embassies abroad and subventions for all the universities and polytechnics. Can eight percent do that? The answer is no. If hope is not to die, whoever wants to be president must know how we will find the money to run the government the after he has established security. So, the two must go hand in hand.
As an economist and a former Minister of Finance, the danger here is when government is hard-pressed, the tendency is first to borrow but already, we have borrowed beyond our limit. I suspect that both domestic and foreign lenders will be reluctant to lend to a borrower who is virtually bankrupt. So, that route for meeting financial needs may not be open. My fear is that the only route left is printing of currency. After all, we have a printing press and so we go there and start printing money and as you print money, the naira becomes more and more valueless.
I pray we don’t get to the point where we will have hyper inflation or galloping inflation. I pray that that never happens here because it will destroy the country completely. If it happens, the currency will become very useless as it happened in the former Republic of Germany between the two world wars. The German deutsche mark became so worthless that sailors were using the currency to sew shirts. This is a kind of situation we may arrive at unless we have committed people running our government and at that point, all these questions about religion will disappear because poverty has no religion, hunger has no party and hyper inflation does not respect zones. Insecurity and financial crisis are the two most potent threats to this nation.
How should the country handle the economic situation?
Running a modern state is not just for anybody. A state as big and as complex as Nigeria requires a team at the government level, a team that knows that the naira has an alternative, a team that treats every unit of income with respect but you cannot afford a government that just spends money without planning. Again, we have abandoned planning. When I was in my prime in the public service, we had what we called four-five years National Development Plan that set out what the government would do for the next five years sector by sector. We had that plan but there is nothing like that now. No major company in the world operates without a programme. Powerful ministers are just spending money and getting money. That is how we got to this place. I am praying and hoping that the new government will see insecurity and financial crisis as an existential threat to Nigeria.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on strike for eight months, what does this portend for the country?
The ASUU situation is a management failure. Employers and employees in all countries and through all ages argue about remuneration all the time but serious-minded employers and employees must agree after a lot of negotiations. This is not the case for Nigeria. If you arrive at an agreement and you don’t implement it, you lose credibility, and this is part of the problem. The longer the ASUU strike continues, the more complicated it will become.
Government sued ASUU recently. They wanted to compel them in a democracy. I am happy they quickly saw reason and rescinded that unfortunate order. Again, that is the quality of the leadership. They don’t know what is right in any given situation. You can’t run a country like that. That is why the next election is crucial. Every candidate must be asked to publish his programmes for addressing the problems in the various sectors of the economy, on insecurity, financial crisis, unemployment, education, poverty and political problem of Nigeria. It is well known that many Nigerians in certain parts of the country would rather be out of Nigeria. You have IPOB, Yoruba Nation agitators. If Nigeria is a wonderful country where everybody is treated fairly and equally, and there are prospects and opportunities, you don’t need to go out of a good place. But if your house is burning, you will get out of the place. Whoever becomes president must have the courage and integrity to address the restructuring of Nigeria, without which there can be no stability in the country and fortunately, for the coming president, we already have the report of the 2014 confab where I had the privilege to serve as the leader of the Yoruba delegation. It is not just the report, we already have a draft constitution for Nigeria based on that report, produced and approved by that confab. The incoming government can take those two documents and in six months give Nigeria a new constitution if they want to solve the problem. But the tendency will be that those who are happy with the present arrangement will want to hang on to the arrangement. After 62 years, we are still in crisis, clearly, this arrangement has not worked. For how long do you want to hang on to it? This is another problem that is as serious as the others. That is why I say we have a multiplicity of crises, each of which must be addressed in detail by whoever wants to be president.
Many believe that restructuring is an agenda that is being championed by only the Southern Region?
The Northern Region is divided into 19 states. In those 19 states, there are several states there. The Middle-Belt is anxious for restructuring as any part of the south. If you add that to the rest of the south, two-third of Nigeria will vote for restructuring tomorrow. We are in a democracy; you cannot allow a minority to dictate the future of this country.
If you have any doubt about the validity of restructuring, put the proposal to the people in a referendum, analyse the result zone by zone, state by state, those who don’t want can stay out of restructuring. You cannot keep all of us under a constitution we don’t want because the minority says they don’t want it. We are in a democracy.
With 2023 around the corner, do you think the people will vote for competence or along ethnic lines?
I don’t know how it is going to go but I suspect it will go according to money – how much money you spend. I think ethnicity and religion have played into the background. We have heard of money, plenty of it, not N5,000, N10,000, N50,000, $10,000 to every voter. And that is what might decide the outcome of the election. But if Nigerians insist on what I am recommending, getting these candidates to publish what they would do, you may be surprised that that may change a lot of things.
As one of those who participated in the 2014 confab, why do you think the ideas that were mooted at the conference were not implemented?
Some of us had to persuade the president through several interactions to convoke the conference. By the time he convoked it, he had about eight months to go. When the report was out, there was no time to implement it but that is not to say that the succeeding government shouldn’t have implemented the programme, for Buhari said he won’t even read it. We are all seeing the need for restructuring today because we were able to demonstrate that restructuring benefits everybody. The report was going to lead to the development of solid minerals located predominantly in the North. It is an attractive thing to restructure. And if you recall, during the colonial period, Ahmadu Bello favoured a more decentralised government and during the confab discussions, although in formal discussions, yes what you said tended to be the case but at private discussions at night, we set up an unofficial group of leaders from different parts of the country. But you will be shocked that some views were similar to those you think do not agree with it. Let me give you an example, at the open conference, those of us from the west proposed a return to the parliamentary system of government because it is cheaper.
There was opposition, mainly from the North, but in the unofficial discussions at night, I was shocked to hear them say, ‘yes, we believe that the parliamentary system is the best form of government but because Obasanjo has used presidential power for eight years, we too want to use it for eight years after which we can come together and adopt the parliamentary system of government’. That is Nigeria.
Many of us agreed on many of those things but for political consideration, we didn’t come to an agreement.
Do you see the coming government adopting that recommendation?
I don’t know those who are coming, I don’t know what they want to do but I just think that I should tell them the minimum we expect from them. The minimum is for them to publish the well spelt out programmes for dealing with the crises that face us as Nigerians. That is the basis for which I, for example, can say I will vote for this person and can’t vote for this one but not on the basis of where he comes from or whether he is a man or a woman, a Christian or a Muslim. Has he articulated his programmes which I think could address the problems? Has he got the character, the knowledge and commitment to implement these programmes? That’s the second question I would ask myself. The answers to those questions will determine my opinion on whom to vote for.
Afenifere seems to be rooting for the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, what is your take on this as a chieftain of the foremost Yoruba organisation?
I don’t know. I have told you my own position, and I want to remind you that I voluntarily retired from partisan politics three and a half years ago. I resigned as the national chairman of the SDP on my own and I held a press conference to announce my retirement. In other words, I have freed myself from the obligation of which political party to adopt. I am not a member of any political party, so I am not obliged to support your candidate but I have the freedom to look at the basis that I earlier explained to you – the candidates’ programmes; their character, their track records that would determine the person I will vote for. But if I were a member of any party, that freedom wouldn’t have existed; I must do what my party wants. So, I have freed myself from that.
Do you think the country needs a new constitution or we need amendments to the current one?
I have argued that the present constitution is fundamentally flawed and there is no way you can amend a flawed constitution to get the right constitution. Many Nigerians are persuaded that what we need is a parliamentary constitution for many reasons. What we have is a presidential constitution. How do you amend a presidential constitution to give you a parliamentary constitution? Everything is different. You have to write a new one.
Before independence and soon after independence, Nigeria had one federal constitution and later, four regional constitutions. So, there were five constitutions in Nigeria. The Northern Region, Eastern Region, Western Region and Midwest Region, all the five were operational at the same time. That was the degree of the independence of the regions. That was what we got from the British but the military came and collapsed all those constitutions into one. Each region must have its own constitution that is consistent with the federal constitution. How do you amend one single constitution to generate 36 state constitutions? It is impossible, so we need a brand new constitution based on the different concepts of the parliamentary form of government – greater autonomy of resources for the states and regions with a few strategic functions left at the centre; then you re-distributing resources accordingly. It will give more resources to the states and the local governments where the people reside. The present constitution is completely different from that, so amendment is totally inappropriate. I even argued in a book that who is to amend the constitution? I disqualified the Senate and the House of Representatives as they are unqualified to do so.
Members of the House of Representatives and the senators, we elected them to make laws and amend laws for Nigeria; we did not elect them as constituent people to give us a new constitution. They didn’t ask for such power during election. It is not included in the mandate we gave them, so they can’t smuggle it into their mandate after the election. They can’t, therefore, perform fundamental constituent functions for Nigeria. They can amend but to write a new constitution, you need a constituent assembly. If we must have a new constitution, every major ethnic group in Nigeria must be represented. I examined about 400 distinct ethnic nationalities in Nigeria and as I set out how all of them could be represented at the constituent assembly which will not be too large for decision making. The reason I disqualified the National Assembly is that out of 400 ethnic groups in Nigeria, less than 50 are represented there. In Adamawa, for example, there are about 55 ethnic groups there. How many senators do they have? Three! Those three will come from three ethnic groups out of the 55, meaning that 52 aren’t represented.
The House of Representatives, maybe they have 10 or 12. Go to Plateau, it is only in the homogeneous West, East and the core north that those three areas account for about 75 per cent of members in the National Assembly but they account for about 20 ethnic nationalities and they have taken 75 per cent of the seats; the remaining are shared. In terms of ethnic representativeness, the National Assembly does not qualify to give us a new constitution because it is a minority institution. So, I delved into it comprehensively and the conclusion is that you need a brand new constitution, giving Nigeria by truly representative national conference but the confab of 2014 wasn’t as representative as what I advocated but it is far more so than the National Assembly.
What are those lessons that Nigeria has failed to learn from the past?
Nigeria hasn’t learned any lesson at all. For example, in 1983, there was mayhem here in Ondo State when the electoral body announced that the person who lost the election was the winner. Hundreds of people were killed, houses were burnt; there was chaos. That has not stopped the rigging of election up to today. Have we learnt a lesson? In 1965, elections were massively rigged in the South-West. During ‘Operation Wet E’, people were burnt alive. Recently, the Accountant General was alleged to have stolen N109 billion, has he learnt any lesson? So, we don’t seem to learn lessons. We think we are smart. Nigeria has never been this challenged. We face an existential challenge and we must get it right this time around if we are to remain one, united country.
You once expressed fear that the 2023 elections might not hold based on current happenings, are you still holding that view?
Yes, I still hold that view. More attacks are still being carried out by terrorists on INEC offices and the institution’s facilities all over the country, so there is no basis for being more optimistic than I was. I pray that we will be able to hold sufficiently credible and acceptable elections.
We can always have elections and write results but that is not what we are talking about. The situation facing Nigeria is so critical that the country must elect the person most likely to be able to solve our problems. Some of the measures could be very critical and therefore, that person must have an undiluted mandate, clearly seen as the genuine choice of Nigerians. There should be nothing to becloud that idea. Nigeria should not have any doubt that this man is whom we voted for because the decisions he is going to take will be so difficult that we would need every support that is required to see that the person survives in office. So, the elections must be fair and credible.
Is it not possible for elder statesmen like you to come together and proffer solutions to all these problems?
We did so at the 2014 confab. I went to the confab as an elder statesman, not as a representative of the South-West. There was a young man who said people like us should be ashamed because we didn’t allow the young ones to go for the confab. I had to reply and say, no, I was nominated in the category of elder statesmen, which there were 12 in the whole country. South-West positions were shared to all categories of young people. The point I am making is that all the elder statesmen were there. What new wisdom are we going to bring there? In any case, I doubt whether Nigeria can, in our lifetime, have another conference that will be as representative as that of 2014, that would be able to reach onsensus on so many issues.
SDP was once your party, won’t you be supporting its candidate?
I have retired from partisan politics, so I am not obliged to support the candidate of any party. That doesn’t mean I won’t support any candidate, but I will make up my mind after seeing the programmes and accessing the character of candidates. But I want to say that as a former national chairman of the SDP, I have always maintained that the SDP is perhaps the only party properly so called in Nigeria because it is an ideological party. Originally, the SDP and the NRC were given to Nigeria during Babangida’s regime but following Abiola’s election, and the annulment of the result of that election, the SDP was proscribed. But I had the honour to lead the move to revive the present-day SDP. People refer to me as the father of the SDP and I can’t therefore say the child I fathered, I don’t know him. However, I am not a member of the SDP but I have an emotional relationship with my former political party and I regard it as the closest to a political party in Nigeria.
So, going by parties, it would be my number one choice as a party. That is an ideology. If you read the manifesto of the SDP which we wrote, it is crafted to take care of the welfare of individuals from the cradle to the grave. The welfare of individuals is the focus of the party. I don’t think I can find two or three parties in Nigeria with that kind of commitment. That is why I said it is the only political party. It may not govern any state but as I said earlier, governing a state is not a criterion for being a party. You can govern a state without being a party. The SDP is, therefore, in my view, the closest approximation to an ideal party. As I said earlier, the presidential candidate I will support must publish his programmes of addressing the problems of Nigeria and I said the character of that person and the ability to implement them will be a criterion. Of course, I have been examining all the candidates, including that of the SDP, but the advantage is that the SDP as a party is my choice, not the candidate. The candidate will be assessed alongside other candidates.
The SDP is the only party that is set up to take care of the welfare of ordinary persons. Others are there to enable people. I call them gang-up for power. I can’t support such. Conceptually, ideologically, the SDP will be my number one political party because of its ideological concept but whether it has the resources or structure, I am not in a position to say because I have not been in the party since I retired.
You once said power should return to the South, do you still maintain that stand?
Definitely, the two zones that are critical are the north and the south. A northerner will be going out in May 2023. After spending eight years, I think it is only fair that a southerner should follow after him otherwise, you have a situation where presidential candidates from the same north will rule Nigeria for 16 years and that wouldn’t be fair.
As an elder statesman, many of these gladiators must have been coming to you publicly and privately to tell you what they have.
Nobody comes to tell me what they have. They have not thought through what they want to do. When we get there, we will know what to do.
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