A professor of political philosophy with specialty in public policies, politics and governance, Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde, is currently the Executive Secretary, Centre for Development and Policy Studies located in Ogun State. The one-time senior research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Accra, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the state of the nation, reflects on the last elections and suggests a way forward for the country.
In your recent post on Facebook, you said Nigeria is not a democracy and that what we have is “a state capture by the political class running a criminal enterprise called government, with pretenses to periodic voting exercise that is no more than partitioning and allocation of privileges to camouflage a feudalistic mindset.” Some people would call your remarks very harsh…
I won’t deny writing what you just read. What is harsh about it? Is that not the reality in our country today?
How do you mean?
What I wrote captures what has been happening in the country over the years. We had an Olusegun Obasanjo who came with do-or-die politics. From 1999, we can hardly say we have free and fair elections, including the election that brought in Umar Yar’Adua and the beneficiary himself said the election was flawed and that he would have to do something about our elections. This brought about the Justice Uwais Committee which was only recently given some kind of recognition by way of electoral reformation. Why is it that once a party has a governor in the governor’s lodge, the next local government election will be dominated by councilors and chairmen from the same party as the governor of the state? Even in areas where the opposition holds sway, they will declare themselves winners to convey the impression that the opposition elements have lost their popularity. Do you call such an election? It is purely an allocation of positions.
We saw it as it happened even in the last elections conducted by INEC. Without prejudice to whatever the court will say, the election that produced Tinubu was not free and fair. INEC deliberately disabled BVAS for presidential election. Why did it work for the National Assembly election which was held on the same day? Suddenly, they said BVAS did not work again. We have it on good authority that the result in Lagos was terribly doctored to reduce the votes of Peter Obi. That was why they went overdrive in the governorship election. In fact, they reduced my humanity as a Yoruba person with the kind of bigotry displayed in the second election. Suddenly, election turned to where we have to bring in Igunnu masquerade and oro, with people beaten out of queue. Even some Yoruba who look like Igbo people were beaten and denied the chance to vote in the election.
When I said ‘state capture’, we should know that these politicians have captured even the judiciary. Look at the pronouncements of the Supreme Court on Senators Ahmed Lawan and Godswill Akpabio, people who did not even take part in the primaries of their parties were declared the rightful candidates. Look at Imo State today. So, whoever has access to the judiciary now get the votes.
We should call what we have a civilian administration and not civil administration because there is nothing civil even in the way these people come to power. Rigging no longer has finesse as far as these people are concerned. Baales in Lagos threatened people not to come out and vote for the candidates of their choice unless they were ready to vote for a particular candidate. They did this to ensure a section of the voters did not come out to vote. So, I don’t know what you meant by being harsh in my statement. There is a total state capture. Nobody outside the political class, no matter your ideas, can win election now. Who are you to have ideas on how you intend to want to run the country better when a party sold its nomination forms for N100m? Election has been turned into lottery. The N100m is a ticket to get you into the lottery room, not even to begin to play. To play, which is to contest for the election, you require hundreds of billions of naira. Do you know what N100m is?
To tell you further that there is state capture, look at what happened in Yewa area of Ogun State. We have monitised politics and weaponised poverty. People now just go to queue behind the person who can give them food. I am from Egba in Ogun Central, but I have been one of the advocates of Yewa agenda over the years. How could you have a people, out of three senatorial districts in the state, who have not been able to produce the governor of the state? Suddenly, somebody who has played all his politics in Lagos State and whose name has never been mentioned as being from Yewa, has now become a Yewa person, maybe he just remembered the story of his great grandfather who was said to have come from Ilaro or wherever and switched over to Yewa. Immediately, they handed over the political structure to him because he has money. From being a member of the Lagos State house of Assembly, later House of Representatives and Senate twice, he is now the Senator-elect from Yewa. The people of Yewa rejected their own, tested and trusted sons and daughters who had been there for them. It is about money. He has enough money to send everybody away from the dance floor. Once a musician sees you as the one with the deepest pocket, he will switch to singing your praise. People won’t know there is any other person on the dance floor.
When you say they are running a criminal enterprise called government, are you saying we can’t find one or two of these people who are doing something reasonable in their states or areas?
In using such expression, I don’t mean that if we take a census we won’t find one or two people that are good. But the truth of the matter is that what can one or two people do? You know the rule of engagement in the parliament is that, no matter what they are doing, even if you don’t like it, you can’t criticize it because they will suspend you. How could people sit down and allot to themselves N13m monthly? Can you beat such people in an election? The political class in Nigeria has totally bought over the state. If you have a semblance of rationality in you, you can’t even talk. I don’t know how far you have travelled, but I live in Ibadan where I have a house and where my family lives. I have a place in Abeokuta where I am talking to you from and I have a country home home in Ilepa, which is between Sango and Ifo, which is the axis of the road to Lagos from Abeokuta before the expressway was built. The road has collapsed and we are supposed to have a House of Representatives and Senator from Ogun Central representing the area.
It is all about power, because the country’s values have totally collapsed. When we were growing up and I don’t know if your generation benefited from this system, you can’t take a wife home and your parents won’t know what family she is from. If you have a company and someone brings a very good first degree certificate and fails to show his secondary and primary schools certificates, will you employ such a person? Definitely, it is either he forged the certificate he presented or someone else sat for the exam that produced the certificate. How can anybody who is in his 70s say he does not have primary school testimonial? Even if the school had been demolished, he would have classmates now. In a value-structured society, such a person will not be on the ballot. That is why they tell you to go to court because they know they have bought over the court. If this is not true, how can in Imo State, somebody who came fourth in an election was made governor? His party did not have a single house of assembly member in that election.
What can be done to redeem the country from this state?
I have never shied away from saying it. You cannot redeem Nigeria through any election because your PVC does not matter again. Right now, they don’t even steal the ballot boxes again. They have now developed the capacity to say you cannot vote. The security agencies have been bought over. We all saw what happened in Lagos. The security agencies witnessed what happened there. Were there no security agencies in Adamawa State when the REC there was announcing his own result of the election? The security agencies knew votes were still being collated when he did that and they did not call him to order. Those who employed the REC also bought over the security agencies, DSS, police, army and so on. We will change the country through organised actions.
Are you talking about a revolution?
It will start one way or the other. These people need to know they cannot get away with all this mess. All what is needed is just some demonstration here and there. I don’t mean street demonstrations. One crazy person will come from the army, maybe there is a problem in the army, and he will shoot a few people here and there and begin to rebuild the country.
After this, they can now reset the country through restructuring where I don’t have to go and sell my mother to contest in an election. The presidential election is too expensive for anybody to run. The centre is too powerful because that is where all the money is and it is the reason they are struggling to go there. We can’t even talk about regionalism again because those in the Middle Belt will kick and say they don’t want to go back to the North. They will stay in their zone. We can make use of the six zonal arrangements. If they say we should run a proper federation and make everybody fend for themselves and pay taxes to the centre, we will see some states struggling to merge with the existing ones. In the South-West, maybe Lagos and Ogun are the most viable. The only thing Ondo has going for it is just because it is part of the oil-producing states. The feeding bottle federalism we are running does not allow them to know they have to struggle. Osun and Ekiti are not viable, but Oyo State might be viable if it can harness its agricultural potential. The states don’t have to pay the same salary because the workers won’t pay the same rent for the same kind of house. They can have a minimum wage, but all states don’t have to pay the same wages. There is no place in the country where there are no natural resources to be explored and exploited. A situation where somebody will have to go to Abuja to get a mining licence is not healthy. There is also nowhere in the world where the local government is part of the federating unit. Every state possesses the prerogative to create the number of local government it wishes to have.
Only people who are ignorant will clamour for local government autonomy. No state should allow it. It will further damage the pseudo-federalism that we run. Let them first of all dissolve all the 786 local government councils in the country and grant all the states the freedom to create the number of local government they want to have. And if the states so wish, they can give autonomy to the councils in their states. The whole of Western Region, at a point in time, was divided into districts. Dr Sam Aluko, who later became a professor, was the one in charge of the present-day part of Ondo State and it was on a part-time basis. It was not like the current arrangement where they use all the money to pay a retinue of aides and leave little money for development. We can’t get Nigeria back through any election.
You are a professor and one of you is the INEC chairman. When you said we can’t redeem the country through election, you are saying the man has failed to do his job of conducting credible elections. You professors teach students the ideals and have now failed to practise what you teach when given opportunities or is it the system that is consuming you the eggheads?
It is not a generic thing. A professor belongs to the professorial cadre. No one approached the university to say ‘give us a professor.’ Therefore, you cannot take the misbehavior of a specific person to say professors are incompetent. There is a professor who was the returning officer for Abia governorship election who rejected bribe from politicians. Why did you not mention that example? Look, it was very clear APC was aiming for an agenda. If you check the way INEC chairmen are chosen, they don’t choose them from the dominant ethnic group, especially where you have the chances that a presidential candidate is likely to emerge and win. Jonathan never met Attahiru Jega before he appointed him. He wanted somebody with some level of integrity to head the commission. When Jega left, nobody expected Buhari to pick from his Fulani ethnic group. But he did it, just like he did with all the service chiefs. It was an attempt to hatch the agenda. So, you can’t say because Yakubu messed up, therefore all professors are bad.
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