Nigeria’s is a failed state–Ango Abdullahi

—–says country suffering from banditry leadership

Our Editor

In this exclusive interview with Saturday Sun, Professor Ango Abdullahi, former spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum laments the current suffering in Nigeria, attributing it to leadership failure.  The Octogenarian recommends that the only way to salvage Nigeria from its current doldrums is to go back to the drawing board.

Excerpts.

First of all, how do you feel at 86 years old and still going strong?

I thank God for his great mercies, for sparing my life to attain this age of 86 years in a country where the life expectancy has been fluctuating between 48 and 55 years. I think this is a great gift from almighty God and the only thing you can do to almighty God is to thank him. So I thank God for his mercies, his grace for keeping us alive, and to a large extent also keeping us healthy and still active in one way or the other at this age

Talking about relevance, not only are you still active, but you are being sought for by individuals and organizations at this age. What is the secret?

I suppose there could be several factors to explain this. First, I have already explained how grateful to almighty God we are for keeping us this long. We also have to thank almighty God for giving us the opportunity to engage in various activities that have to do with the Nigerian state in various ways, in education, to administration, politics and so on and indeed  that’s a great opportunity for you to interact in a country as big as Nigeria and as diverse as Nigeria. A great opportunity to interact and this opportunity to interact is probably one of the key areas that explains the relevance you are talking about. At one point or the other one’s name is mentioned as being able to do one thing or the other or participate in one meeting or the other. For example I was fortunate to have participated in three constitutional conferences -1987, 1996 and 2005. So you see the explanation is simply that one has been given an opportunity to engage in public service and in the course of engaging to socially interact with a large range of Nigeria’s diversity and that explains why you see us where perhaps where you don’t expect to see us by virtue of age of relevance. But it’s a stake.

Nigeria has so many abundant resources-both human and natural, yet we are still struggling in all aspects of life. Where did we miss it?

This is where I feel the most pain I must admit. Having left University of Ibadan in 1964, and this is talking about 60 years ago and given what one has had from teachers, pioneer fathers, and leaders of this country ranging from the Balewas. Azikiwes, Awolowos and so on, as students we come out to the campus and they say please study hard because you have lots of responsibility to move this country forward after you graduate and so on and so forth. So we were looking at this number of years and the number of people who have gone through tertiary institutions till date and for us to look at the material achievements that Nigeria has been able or unable to achieve certainly it should give me pain at my age, especially when I look at Nigeria in the context of other countries who probably started as we did, perhaps started earlier than they did, and for them to have achieve so much and for us to have achieve so little, is very painful. This is part of my pain for what remains the rest of my life. You can give so many examples. Of course you are very right. This country is one of the most endowed countries in the entire world, in terms of anything you can think of in terms of materials resources, and human beings, we are now over 200 million and talents everywhere yet within and outside this country and yet you look around and say today Nigeria is only able to produce 3600 megawatts of electricity. Not enough for a big house in Europe or somewhere else. Not enough for a big monastery or a big church. Not enough for 200 plus people, in a country with this vast territory and people to look after 3600 megawatts of electricity. Just imagine small countries like South Africa 50,000 megawatts. I just returned from Cairo and there is a mosque in Cairo that requires 15, 000 megawatts of electricity powered daily. So for Nigeria with all these things you mentioned, just mention anything, is it water, land, what is it that we lack and yet this is where we are. In terms of human development indices which you can count as negative and when you hear some agencies say Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world and it angers you but it is a fact, very true. So those of us who saw Nigeria 60 years ago and continue to see Nigeria in even worse situations than 60 years ago is a painful experience. So I feel so sad that I thought that with people, and the kind of background that I have, we are so many, thousands of us. In fact there are more engineers in Nigeria in terms of paper qualification than there are in Britain and here we are. I am just coming from the hospital now to see a patient. There is no electricity in the hospital, there is no dialysis machine in the place and so on. It is so sad. The next question perhaps you will like to ask is why are we in this position? Is it we human beings who have failed? Here the answer is yes and no. The reason why the answer is yes and no is that Nigeria is 200 million plus and of course no matter our numbers we need leaders. So to my mind the first place of failure that has brought Nigeria to its knees today is lack of leadership. I always try to make this comparison. It pains some people but it pleases me to do so. Our founding fathers, those who worked for Nigeria’s independence and a few years after independence have done far better in terms of quality, honest leadership than the kind of leadership we have enjoyed since them. What we have here today, given my experience and what I have seen today and at my age, is just a crisis of leadership. Banditry of leadership if you like. This is my coinage of terminology. Leadership banditry is what we have in Nigeria because if we have no leadership banditry we cannot be where we are today. We read about corruption and all sorts of criminal things that are happening in our country and nobody seems to be held accountable for it. So this is the crisis. But the public is also guilty in a way in that the public, in terms of the political frame, gives the followership an opportunity every four years using the current constitution to examine the leadership of the country to see whether they are doing enough for them to be elected or re-elected as the case may be. But you find the same set of people, or set of political parties that have failed this country coming, recycled all the time. So we don’t expect anything new in terms of moving forward. Very unlikely because we are recycling things that have failed over and over again and we cannot expect to move forward using recycled materials that have failed us before.

Can you also pinpoint external factors behind Nigeria’s stunted development because some have argued that because of our hosiery with colonialism, imperialism till this day..(Cuts in)

This is absolute nonsense because Indians have suffered from imperialism for so many years. Many countries have suffered from imperialism for many years. Malaysia, even South Africa with apartheid and so forth but they are doing well and Nigeria is doing badly so I don’t accept his excuse that our failure has to do with our colonial and post-colonial experience . This is nonsense and we have to ask the question for an honest answer: why did you fail? We failed because we have failed ourselves and at what point are we going to accept that we have failed this country? And at what point are we prepared to redeem ourselves? The country is so poor and people are suffering in every aspect of their lives from lack of food to lack of shelter to insecurity and so on. Everything that you try to mention is wrong in Nigeria and yet we say we have leaders. Where are they?

President Tinubu’s administration removed oil subsidies and the ripple effect has seen the majority of Nigerians groaning under hardship. Was it the right policy?

Yes and no here. The question is if you are going to introduce a policy, you have to screen that policy. Really analyze its pros and cons of the policy and the modalities of its implementation are all part of the discussion that precede the implementation. I think this is where so many things have failed us in Nigeria. The last Devilment Plan in Nigeria was 1972. I happened to be a Commissioner for Economic planning for North at that time for North Central States. Professor Adedeji used to be our Chairman because he was a federal Commissioner for Economic development. No planning. We have resources but no plans and unfortunately we are not doing enough to ensure that the correct leadership is selected. The process of selecting the leadership is faulty, the political frames are not suitable and if they are suitable are not being used and are being abused. At the end of the day Nigeria ends up with leaders that are not serving the Nigeria interest and this is the real problem. Subsidy, yes. Subsidy was used and abused before but that abuse should have been the basis on which the subsidy is removed and when you look at the various area of abuse and clog, then you remove the subsidy and the accruals that will come out of the removal should then be directed to positive areas that will affect positively the lives of Nigeria. I remember more positively, I am not a fan of Buhari, he was not the one that really did the Petroleum Trust Fund. Abacha did and Abacha did a thorough job of adding cost of fuel, and then using this additional revenue in a special account that would address some of the critical areas in the Nigeria state –Education, health and so on. But now the subsidy has been removed. Where are the accruals? Perhaps there should be billions because billions have been stolen from subsidies and these billions are being recovered, but where are the billions going? At the end of the day, all these policies mean nothing unless you have people in place to really implement the good side of these policies. If you say the country is suffering from poverty, cost of transport, insecurity and so on and we are supposed to have leaders, we have president, we have governors, we have members of the national and state assembly and so on, and a country which admits that it is broke, what do you expect? The sacrifice should first be from the leadership, not the followership. The sacrifice should be from the leadership by example. Instead the leadership as we can see are from what we read in the papers. The legislators are looking for cars and each one costs about N160 million while some people cannot cook one meal in their house and so on and all sorts of expenditures. If you analyse the 2024 budget and look at the allocations that went to the various sectors and sub sectors you know that the leadership is not really there to address the challenges that are facing ordinary Nigerians. It is sad.

Would you advice President Tinubu to borrow money to fix the country

Well he came at a time when the county was broke. We know why the country was broke during Buhari’s administration” stealing. Outright stealing. Buhari was burrowing heavily and if you look at it and analyze the level of bowering vis-a-vis interest rates , all the revenue accruals of Nigeria, 10 percent should  go for debt services so is it five percent that will develop this country? It is the same now and unfortunately for Tinubu he said he is going to carry on with the Buhari administration policy whatever and so on. Of course that announcement itself is a disaster because Buhari’s administration to me was a disaster in this country. So for Tinubu to carry on along that line definitely he is carry on disaster and this is already what we are experiencing

What is your take on the proposed student loan?

If the country’s resources are being harnessed properly and directed in the areas of needs then we shouldn’t have problems in the key areas of education and health that will necessitate students’ loan and so on. We shouldn’t have it if the resources of this country are addressed in the true priority areas of needs. It won’t go far. How many students do you have? If you give them loan on how to pay their fees who much difference will it make? I was a Vice Chancellor of ABU I should know what impact all these idea of loan will make to students trying to get through the university system. Many Nigerian students are studying outside the country as near to us as Ghana and their fees are quite heavy but these are being paid by Nigerian parent and so on. I think that something is just wrong and what is wrong is policy that is wrongly framed and poorly implemented and as long as we are not going to retract it and begin to plan national development and implement development meticulously like our parents did, I don’t think we are going to get out of this situation.

If you meet Tinubu face to face what would be your advice to him?

Tinubu is my friend. Unfortunately he by his own words said he is going to carry on with Buhari’s administration which was declared a failed administration as far as we are concerned by some of us and we didn’t hide this, we made it public. From every sensible social economic analysis people agreed that the country was in difficulties, socio economic indices were negative and so on. Nigeria does not produce much. See our foreign exchange. When I was Vice Chancellor of ABU it was one dollar 80 kobo. This is just about 40 years ago. Currencies in good countries don’t change in years but 40 years and I used to buy a dollar for 75 or 80 kobos but today if I want to I have to spend N1300 to get ne dollar. What happened is simply that Nigeria is not a producer and if you don’t produce you can’t sell any and cant earn foreign exchange and that won’t leave you with a respectable foreign exchange and people who see things will determine how much you have to pay for their products and that is what happened to Nigeria. We buy everything, produced nothing. I don’t even want to use these figures because it is so shameful that today that to buy one dollar you have to go and sought for N1300. So I feel sorry for my friend Bola Tinubu. We met once at the airport before the election but since he took off I have not seen him personally but I have sent a direct message through a mutual friend.  I wish he can set up a team that is seriously objective. Forget about these sentiments about constitution and so on and so forth. For me I feel that Nigeria has to go back to the drawing board and start afresh. The damage that has been done is going to be extremely difficult to repair without going back to the drawing board

Some also argue that our undoing is the presidential system of government which is wasteful. What is your take on this?

Of course I have always argued against presidential system of government. It does suit our situation. It was forced on us by the Murtala/Obasanjo administration at the post Gowon constitutional discussion. They said we shouldn’t even discuss the pros and cons of Parliamentary system of government vis a vis any other system that we may wish to use. They just abandoned parliamentary and borrowed Presidential whether French or American. Even the Presidential is not being followed the way Americans are following their own. In the American presidential system there is law and order. The Outgone president Trump was brought before a Magistrate in handcuffs because the judge say if he must appear before her he must appear in handcuffs and that’s what happened, so his handcuffs were removed in front of the judge for a social case that he has to appear in New York. Here the political frame is not working and the operators are not working well and there is virtual breakdown of everything more or less. Recently I issued a statement on judgments that are coming from our Supreme Court. Similar cases elsewhere, different judgments and so on. This shows that we are not following strictly our laws, we are not following certain things that are difficult to pinpoint but in most cases they have to do with corruption in the system and so on

There were attacks recently in three local government in Plateau State where over 100 people were killed just few weeks after NAF accidently dropped bombs in Kaduna killing over 100.  What is your reaction to banditry and killings?

Very sad indeed. Again an indication of failure of government and failure of leadership. In countries with good systems and good leaders you don’t find this. So this is another sad chapter in the history of Nigeria. You have military dropping bombs on civilians in a ceremony. Not just once, when people were rescoring the victims, another bomb was unleashed on them. How can you explain this? Accidental means the system is not working. In a system that is working the intelligence will be extremely accurate as to who are on ground and what they are doing before you take that final decision. The decision process in this case, without prejudice to the inquiry they say they are going to do, somebody must have given instruction for somebody to pull the trigger based on what information, either a failed intelligence in the system most likely in this case. And in the case of the recent killings in three local government in Plateau State this is not new, this is recurring story every day in various parts of the country where people are being killed whether on religious or ethnicity, it is there, every day.          The questions still remains, you have a system that is not working for Nigerians. As long as the system is not working for Nigeria, Nigeria will continue to produce criminality in the form that we are seeing on ground today. It is our children mind our grandchildren that are in the bush called bandits. They are the same children and so on that are Boko Haram, they are the same children and so on that are IPOB and so on and so forth. So system failure and that is why I believe and hop that President Tinubu will agree and tae Nigeria to a drawing board to look at itself once again. It is important that Nigeria should go back to the drawing and re-examine itself and see whether over the last 60 years we are said to be managing our affairs well and the honest answer is no. Let’s go back to the drawing board to find out the things we need to do, restructure or re correct or reframe to get something for our children and grandchildren.

Some have argued that Presidential power should rotate to the South east for equity and justice after Tinubu’s tenure. What do you think of this argument?

I don’t agree because it is democratically irresponsible. If you are practicing democracy of one man one vote you don’t talk about power going to one area or region or soothing. You are looking for leaders who will take us out of the woods. The search is going to be for good leadership in Nigeria, not allocating a leadership that you are talking about. If Nigeria is going to practice democracy then it must throw away this nonsense called allocation of regions or tribes and so on. To do that is to go back to ethnic cleavages. There are 500 ethnic groups in Nigeria and if we have to do it in the name of Igbos, then we have to do it in the mime of Itsekiri next time, and in the name of these tribes that are scattered across the country in it is justice in the name of allocating ethnic groups and with about 500 ethnic groups, then four years times 500 ethnic groups and so on. So it does not make sense and will complicate our issues the more. Igbo politics, there is none. All this hullabaloo about Muslim-Muslim ticket, there is nothing as such. There is no Muslim party in Nigeria, there is no Christian party in Nigeria. So Nigerians are either Christians, Muslims or undeceivers so they should choose which party is on the ground. The only thing I keep quarrelling about that this constitution must allow independent candidates to contest elections. If I am not happy with the political party i should be to stand or an election whether I win or lose based on my own programmes. There should be a place for independent candidates as well.

The Sun