Politics
AS one of the pioneer senators in the present democratic dispensation, what is your assessment of the progress so far? I would say the parliament has matured over the last 20 years. There is a number of ways in which this parliament has grown in unique ways. In the history of Nigeria, this is the longest parliamentary session we have had. The First Republic had a short tenure, the Second Republic was barely four years and the Third Republic was truncated. This is the longest run we have had about democracy, so I hail Nigerians in general and our political elite and the National Assembly in particular for running the Fourth Republic for 20 years. The second is that a lot of learning has taken place. ADVERTISING When we first came in 1999, there were people who were not too sure of what the roles of the Senate and the House of Representatives were going to be. We also had a President who was unwilling to concede that he had to share powers with the National Assembly and the judiciary and, to some extent, the media. It was a tug of war at that time but we managed to survive. Today, although that tug of war is not completely gone, it has taken a situation where it is not seen as absurd. I think that a lot of learning has taken place in terms of presiding officers. We started with presiding officers who personalised their offices and paid for it dearly. Now presiding officers are aware that they are only first among equals and I think that was well demonstrated by Senator David Mark who always addressed his colleagues as his bosses. Although that sounded like a joke, that is the reality. That maturity has come. I also think a certain maturity crept into the National Assembly in a unique way during the era of the Doctrine of Necessity (the late President Umaru Ya’Adua era). There was a lacuna in the law and by, default, one of the officials of the executive who was presented with a letter to the National Assembly did not deliver it, and it appeared as if a President had gone on leave without due process. The National Assembly stood up through the Doctrine of Necessity to correct that anomaly which was done in a mature way. I give credit to the National Assembly for these acts of unique intervention in the system. I also will like to commend the press which did not allow the National Assembly to rest at all. It (press) has kept them on their toes, criticised when it was necessary and even when it was not necessary, so the National Assembly had an extra time of vigilance. The civil society movement became more active and very interventionist during this period, not only arrogantly guiding the National Assembly but also contributing creatively in financing workshops, seminars, especially during transition from one assembly to another. There has been a mature growth in the polity. Jonathan Zwingina I have not even mentioned the number of legislations passed, the highest being by the immediate past Senate. They passed the longest list of laws. I think that is a wonderful thing. Also of significance is the fact that the National Assembly in 20 years attempted and successfully amended the Constitution in several areas and restored normalcy to a point that I feel the issue of restructuring can be addressed. There is no piece of legislation that the National Assembly cannot do with the cooperation of Nigerians. I would like to call on Nigerians, especially our older elites who feel that restructuring is a presidential affair, to have a rethink. It is not a presidential affair. If the necessary cooperation is there, the National Assembly can achieve it. They can create the kind of balanced federation that we are looking for. Despite the progress made, there is this nostalgic feeling that the quality of representation began to degenerate from 2007. Do you agree? To some extent, yes, the observation is fairly near reality for a number of reasons. The fourth Senate was made up of senators who were largely independent of the governors in their various states. They were mature people who came in their own right; some of them even sponsored their governors’ election. But, subsequently, from 2007, we found that governors began to take pre-eminence in how they shape the National Assembly by sponsoring their proteges to the Senate and House of Representatives. The quality tended to decline because they were sponsoring people who were safe and reliable in terms of being supporters of the governors. The consequence was that this crop of senators became short on creativity, short on criticism, short on proactivity, short on independence, short on depth of analysis and, sometimes, short on honesty. I do agree to some extent but I also want to say that there were individual senators who performed excellently beyond the expectations of the time. I know of a state where the governor sponsored his own driver to come to the Senate. That affected the quality of the Senate and the House of Representatives. From 2007 too, the Senate became the retirement home for governors who had served out their terms. Is this a plus for the parliament or a distraction? It ought to be a plus for the parliament but, unfortunately, it is not because when a governor comes to the Senate, one expects robust contribution from his experience as governor but the reality is that it looks like the post of the governor does not look like the post that encourages the occupant to work hard. What they excel in doing is sending aides around, having people write papers for them to read. When they got to the Senate, they discovered that it is not a place where somebody writes a paper for you. Even when they write the paper for you, you must internalise the content in order to debate it with your colleagues. The Senate is a place where no matter who you are, someone is better than you. Most governors went to the Senate and found out that it is not a place where you shout and somebody shakes. You are all equals and if you want to throw tantrums, there are other people who could throw louder tantrums. If you came from a comfortable position, there are other people who are more comfortable or as comfortable as you are, and you just have to work hard. You have to let go of the executive arrogance and come down to earth. You have said that there has been progress made in the parliament but we cannot say same about party politics. What do you think is responsible for the lack of ideology and principle in our party politics? Ideologies are viewpoints on how society should move. If the society is not sophisticated, the ideology also will not be sophisticated. If you have a society in which the basic rudiments of growth and survival and basic needs of the human population have been addressed and food, water and electricity are no more issues, then debates in that society move to issues of climate change and other sophisticated issues. Here, our needs are practically the same. We are looking at things as basic as food, roads, water, electricity and security. These are the things governing the political space. You don’t expect the current political parties to address something different from what is disturbing the people. That accounts for the absence of differences in ideology. We have the same problems. This is the confusion that let African countries to adopt one-party system during independence. They felt that our problems are the same, so why do we have to have different parties? Ideology is not abstracted from the political culture. It is tied to the needs of human beings playing the politics. If the needs are the same, ideology will be the same and that is what we have in Nigeria. We were at par during independence with the so-called Asian tigers. While they have moved on, we seem stagnated. What do you think is responsible for this stagnation? Three things were responsible. They had longer political culture than we have had. Our First Republic was short-lived, five years at best. While they did their best, they did not have time to grow. While they would have resolved the problems of 1965 politically, soldiers did not allow them to do that. These were young soldiers of 25 to 30 years old, very inexperienced. There was no way the society would have developed when you had such military intervention. It was a serious handicap in our political evolution. The second is the issue of tenure. Most of the Asian tigers we are talking about had long tenure of government that was developmental. They were in office beyond 20 years and they maintained a certain stability of governance. They created fundamental structures. The greatest tragedy of our political development is the tenure system. If you are President in Nigeria and you want to invite a very reputable electrical company to come and invest, you can’t sign any agreement for 20 years because you can’t guarantee that the agreement will be honoured after your tenure, which is four years or, at best, eight years. The Asian tigers had the opportunity of long tenure of stable political development. Do you think it is late now to remove the cap on tenure? Yes, it is late because there will be a serious problem. We have found the habit of turn-by-turn and when you run a system like that, it will be difficult to push though amendment. Secondly, there is no guarantee that a long tenure will not lead to misappropriation of funds. When that happens, it will bring a lot of disquiet and disruption of the political system entirely. I think what we need to do is to look at the Constitution and create a basis for legislating continuity so that when a new government takes office, it is bound to continue with the project it inherited. We have to build that into our system in order to encourage foreign investors. You were part of a very epochal moment in Nigeria’s political history. You anchored the campaign that brought in Chief MKO Abiola in an election that has been adjudged freest and fairest but unfortunately annulled. Recently, the President recognised that epochal moment. What came to your mind when that announcement was made? I was happy that President Buhari engaged in a very major historical correction by admitting what other Presidents before him failed to admit for various reasons, and recognising the victory of June 12, with all the limitations. The most courageous was that he even apologised to the family of Chief MKO Abiola. Secondly, on this particular June 12, he made it institutionally the day of democracy in Nigeria and it has entered the political calendar in a most dignifying way. I am very happy about that, especially naming the National Stadium after Abiola. My prayer is that they will renovate it so that it will reach the level of beauty and cleanliness that Chief Abiola would have been proud of. What the President did is very wonderful and I am very proud of it. As the DG of that campaign, I know that role will be permanently in the history of Nigeria and I will be a footnote in that. Aremo Olusegun Osoba, in his book to mark his 80th birthday, alleged that some people jumped ship because they were making unsustainable financial demands from Abiola. Were you aware of this? I was not aware of that. People can write what they can write with the benefit of hindsight. Anybody can be an excellent book writer if you have 20 years to think after the main event. But what we must realise is that June 12 comprises of two main planks: Those who made June 12 and those who defended the mandate through struggle with the military. If people didn’t make June 12, there would have been no mandate to defend. We must recognise the two. Someone will not come and safely stay on the side when people had made June 12 and then criticise them. That would be very unfair. I have not read Chief Osoba’s book but if I read it and feel there are areas that need comments, I will approach him and make it appropriately. You struggled to defend what some people had created. You must recognise and respect that. If the people in Kano did not abandon their son to vote for Abiola, there would have been nothing to be claimed as a mandate. There were also people in many places who struggled to vote for him. We must respect them. We never had an experience of annulment before then, so we cannot claim to be smarter than other people. The annulment took everybody by surprise. It was unprecedented. The people who could have struggled seriously to reclaim that mandate had already joined government. We had a meeting at Chief Abiola’s house which he chaired and I took the minutes where we all agreed to join the government of General Sani Abacha. I took down the names of ministers nominated. In some cases, we had to consciously decide which minister to drop. With the approval of Chief Abiola, we submitted the list to Abacha because we were assured that that government was going to discuss in six months how to hand over to Chief Abiola. We may have been naive but at that time the key people in government assured us. We came with our first 11 in order to move the government from Abacha to June 12. Nobody can accuse anybody them of having abandoned anyone. The person that has been singled out for accusation of abandoning Abiola is Babagana Kingibe… (cuts in) Kingibe didn’t go into that government alone. We sat in a meeting and agreed that in order to realise June 12, we must stuff it with our first 11. In fact, at a stage we were looking at what then – NRC was bringing. We had to go round to look for our own quality people. For instance, we had to go to Chief Lateef Jakande where Chief Abiola pleaded with him to join the government. Lateef Jakande said no. He recommended Femi Agbalajobi but Chief Abiola said no “egbon, if you are not there and they are discussion June 12, who will speak for me?” With that plea, Jakande acquiesced and went on his own instead of sending Agbalajobi. Nobody went on his own into Abacha’s government. It was the turn of events that began to show that we were taken for granted and outplayed. Even Chief Abiola was taken aback. It was in that period of being taken aback that some people began to talk about betrayal. There seems to be bigger division in the country now more than ever before. What do you think is responsible for this sorry state? I think it is a generational thing. We have had a situation where the progressive forces have not been allowed to develop on their own, so that we can downplay ethnicity, religion and such issues. Secondly, there has been a certain regressing in the political culture of the country. The government is too slow in tackling security and patterns of appointments. Maybe those appointments were based on merit but merit is found everywhere and if merit keeps tilting to one area, some people will be worried. I think the division is also caused by economic circumstances. Each time there is recession, people tend to look into their groups for advantage. I think with time, we will outgrow the challenges. Will you say government is handling it well? The government is handling it in accordance with the circumstances of the times. I think there are areas that the government has done very well but that very well has not become very apparent because it has not eliminated the problems. I also think a lot has been handed over to the government to handle. States have abandoned their responsibilities. We have depended too much on the issues of security and I think the Federal Government should decentralise the issue of security. Are you advocating the creation of state police? Oh yes. I have always argued that there must be state police. There must be. A government that does not have an agency to enforce its laws is not a government. All the 36 states government are, strictly speaking, not governments because they do not have independent agencies to enforce their laws. How do you address the fears raised by opponents of state police that they will become militias in the hands of state governments? The state police will not be independent of national police. State police will operate under federal police with various lists of duties in the law. There are different courts with different jurisdictions. We have to outgrow the fear of state police. We can never grow with one police. Any person defending one police is naive and not conversant with history. Every federation has separate units with its own law enforcement agencies. In the United States of America, they do not only have state and federal police, they also have country police and even university police. If we have a federal police and it comes into a scene, the state police hands off. We should not shy away from an unavoidable historical shift which is addressing the issue of security as a national emergency. We should handle it as a ‘Marshal’ plan. We just have to address the issue of police as a national emergency. This country should have nothing less than two million policemen. One security challenge that has remained unresolved is the issue of farmers/herders clash. That is because it has not been regulated. In the past, there was regulation and whoever was wrong paid certain penalty and normalcy was restored. Today, there is no single authority in the rural areas. The farmer and the herder are left to cater for themselves, so the survival of the fittest creeps in and who is the fittest in this context? The herder has enough money to buy a gun and he has no house that you can search for the gun. The farmer has no place to report to because government is very thin in the rural areas. This is what accounts for the rampant violence in the rural areas. People have suggested that ranching will solve this problem while the Federal Government is talking about creating Ruga settlements. What should be the solution? The most ideal thing to do is to ranch. Modern cattle farming communities in the world do ranching. There is no option to ranching because there is no place to roam. Roaming does not even produce healthy cows that will produce healthy milk. What we need to discuss is how government can come in without making it look as if it is using its money to finance private business but there is no way you can avoid using government money to finance infrastructure for its citizens. If government money is loaned to cattle rearers at concessionary rates and it provides basic infrastructures, that will solve the problem. The problem between farmers and herders is not a religious problem. People who do not have business in these activities get involved and politicise it. Secondly, foreigners who do not know our culture of cohabitation have crept into our country. They do not understand our cohabitation. They have created complications. We need to engage this in a massive way in order to reduce the carnage. We may end up with huge food crisis this year because of what is happening. Do you think government is doing enough to check the involvement of foreigners? It is not doing enough. The government should sit up. There should be training of manpower to check our borders. Our borders are too porous but we must check this. Employ more people to man the borders. Recently, a northern group threatened the Federal Government to restore the suspended Ruga settlements plan or incur its wrath. What do you think of such threat? I think we should not take such threat serious. I think they just want wanted to be heard. What we need is ranching. If you have Ruga without infrastructures, it will collapse. The name should be ranch. A ranch is an area defined for raising cattle.
-vanguard
– July 28, 2019 @ 15:40 GMT |
Tags: Still on June 12: Reasons Abiola begged Jakande to join Abacha cabinet – Senator Zwingina
