Would you say you are satisfied with the quality of debate at the National Conference so far?
I was absolutely flabbergasted with the
quality of debate at the initial plenary because the entire debate was
confined to grandstanding, praising the President to high heavens and
praising his speech which everybody knows is nothing but a collection of
bits and pieces put together by civil servants, (and) poorly edited for
that matter. Having finished that, when those who came because they
were nominated by the President
had said their piece and finished
falling over themselves praising him, we got down to some serious work
in the committees.
The way some of the committees were put
up, it shows they were set up to fail. I will see what will happen when
we resume at plenary. The issues that were raised have a lot of
so-called southern solidarity primarily between the Igbo and the
South-South people.
The North which constitutes about 62 per
cent of this country ended up with less than one-thirds of the
delegates. You can see clearly that somebody who set this thing up
either set it up to fail or to achieve certain predetermined political
end.
I can pronounce without fear of
contradiction that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and
Mr. President himself (are) guilty. It wasn’t by accident. Before we
even started (the conference) it triggered a reaction from the Muslim
community, who under the leadership of the Sultan, protested. Mr.
President promised he was going to do something about the imbalance,
clearly he lied. He has not done anything about it. We went into the
serious business of committee work with this imbalance hanging over our
heads. The south, particularly the Igbo, and the people of the
South-South fashioned an agenda, they have made a commitment to
themselves thinking that when they arrive here, given their majority and
the fact that it is one of them who is the President and it is one of
them who is the SGF, it will just be nothing but rubber-stamping of
whatever position they have.
They are in for a shocker of their lives.
To promise the Igbo that you are going to give them a state and you
have not told anybody where the state will be situated in the five Igbo
states currently in existence is highly irresponsible. I don’t see this
conference circumventing the process of state creation as enshrined in
the Constitution.
Another South-South/Igbo agenda is to
solidify the six geopolitical zones into some kind of rickety unity
which means if anything about federal character should come up, it
should be the zones and not the states or local governments that should
decide on it, that hasn’t worked and it’s not going to work. With what
has been happening in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, it will take a
scoundrel to say he is going to include zoning and rotation in the
Constitution.
There is the issue of what do you do with
a subsisting Supreme Court judgment which states, in no uncertain
terms, that all the oil wealth and all the mineral wealth beneath the
soil of Nigeria belongs exclusively to the Federal Government of
Nigeria.
From Gowon’s decree of 1969 to the recent
Supreme Court judgment of 2002, there was, of course, the issue of some
members of the House of Representatives in 2003 or 2004, who introduced
the onshore/offshore dichotomy and provide that money due states which
are oil producing, in the name of derivation, should be assessed based
on the entire oil production and other revenues belonging to the
Nigerian State. This is patently unjust and a violation of our own laws
as well as international law. It should be revisited.
Should the President accede to the proposal by Boko Haram to exchange the abducted girls for their fighters?
As far as I am concerned, nothing is too
much to do in order to get those girls back home. That is my primary
concern and that will continue to remain my primary concern until those
girls are safely delivered to their homes and reunited with their kith
and kin. I also believe that the government and the President himself
are now reaping the fruit of their own mendacity. They have had contact
with some of the elements of Boko Haram and they have failed to deliver
on what was agreed among them.
Secondly, they lied to the Nigerian
people by saying that they were not going to negotiate with terrorists.
Not negotiating with terrorists in my view is nothing but a cliché or a
slogan. The Russian federation and other nations afflicted by these
kinds of insurgency have had to deal with so-called terrorists and there
is no doubt that these so-called Boko Haram are nothing but terrorists.
But, you see, a government always has to take a decision on the go,
which makes it very difficult.
You have to do a cost benefit ration
analysis like “What if you have to eat your words in order to save a
life?” In my view that is worth it. Anything that can be done in order
to save these girls should be done. After the freeing of these girls,
the government will have to sit down and come up with a
counter-insurgency strategy to deal with the Boko Haram menace.
At the moment, there is no strategy; they
are more concerned about stealing from the treasury than bringing the
insurgency to a close. And I recall (Olusegun) Obasanjo saying that
given what was being taken out in the name of security; this war may
last for a very, very long time. For this one-off moment, it is worth
making sacrifices to get these girls back home. I think Boko Haram
terrorists are also taking advantage of the mendacity and stupidity of
the government to begin to negotiate with the government on the pages of
the newspapers.
We know there are foreigners of goodwill,
who are concerned about this country and are equally concerned about
this crisis getting out of hands, and they are here with their own
negotiators. If the government decides to bypass the negotiators who are
in the country and engage in trading words or insults which is what the
Nigerian Army Officer Corps will want, so that the whole thing will
collapse for them to continue making money and people will continue
dying, that to me, will be very unfortunate.
I know for one, the Americans are uneasy
about the calibre of people who are supposed to be speaking on behalf of
the government and who are supposed to be involved in the negotiations.
The Americans are concerned about the temperament, comportment,
integrity and respect for life and respect for the law our mediators
have. We have to be very careful about who we get involved.
The whole thing has to be redone; heads
have to roll because, clearly, the Nigerian Army has failed. I hope the
President will not continue to be misled by opportunists and thieves who
are surrounding him in the Presidency and who are now claiming to run
the components of the Nigerian Armed Forces in his name as
Commander-in-Chief.
We have a lot to do and we have to be
sincere about it. If we are not sincere, we are not going to get the
cooperation of the international community – the Americans, British,
French, Chinese and the Israelis will simply pack and go and, clearly,
the Nigerian Army cannot defeat Boko Haram. There is no military
solution to this mess.
What is your take on the presence of foreign military powers in the country at this time?
It is needful simply because the Nigerian
military has failed and failed woefully. I, as a matter of national
pride, will be the last person to condone or encourage foreigners to
join what is essentially a domestic terrorist affair. I believe that if
the Nigerian Army had been better led, it could have brought this thing
to an end. I am amused but not surprised that the General Officer
Commanding the ‘Seven Division,’ Maiduguri, has now been removed. If you
see an army which gets involved in an altercation to the extent that
soldiers fire live bullets at their commanding officer, you can be sure
that it is an army that has lost it, because discipline is the core of
military service.
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