Why there is instability in PDP, APC, others

Former Nigeria’s Ambassador to the Philippines, Dr Yemi Farounbi, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the state of the country, Buhari’s presidency, the call by Chief Afe Babalola for a transition government instead of holding 2023 elections, the presidential candidates, among other issues.

As an elder statesman, how do you see the state of the country?

Nigeria is in a very tragic and delicate situation, delicate in that we are not even sure of its survival and we are not taking action to guarantee its survival. That is why I say it is in a very delicate situation. From the point of view of security, it is in a very delicate state. Government is unable to perform its very function of guaranteeing the safety and security of lives and properties. That is a major failing. From the point of view of the economy, we have never had it so bad. We are now a debtor-debtor nation, borrowing money to service our debt which, at the end of March, stood at N41 trillion. Politically, we have not got it at all because, while there is the clamour and noise for 2023, those who are parading the streets appear not to give attention to the problems of Nigeria nor are they providing solutions that can be workable or debated or discussed. All we are seeing is display of personal ambition to acquire power. If you look at it educationally, the federal public universities and many state public universities have been shut since February 14 and we have an indefinite strike of the university teachers on our hand. When you look at the primary and secondary education, you will see a lot of degradation in the quality. Again, this is because we don’t seem to understand our problems. Sometimes, we are running around trying to build mega schools when there are no mega teachers and there are no mega books, no mega facilities to occupy the mega schools. So, you look at agriculture and you see that we no longer can feed ourselves. The prices of food items have gone haywire. Farmers can’t go to the farm in most parts of the country because of the insecurity problem that the government has not been able to address. So, when you look at all of these, you come to a very painful conclusion that Nigeria is in a very delicate situation that we can’t say with confidence that there is a tomorrow.

Another statesman like you, Chief Afe Babalola SAN, after observing the situation you have talked about, called for an interim government to see to the restructuring of the country and the postponement of the 2023 elections so that the country can be reset. Do you agree with him?

First, I want to look at who Afe Babalola is. He is about a 95 years old Nigerian who has seen it all; a legal luminary internationally recognised and is not a flippant person that talks without having given it a serious thought. He is a proprietor of what is the best university in Nigeria today and in most of the public universities in the South-West today, you can see what he had done there. So, he is a very responsible citizen. And when a responsible citizen and elder statesman like him talks, then he deserves that we should stop, pause and think about what he is saying.

In my own examination of it, I find that he is talking sense. The problem of Nigeria can be classified into three. One is structural. It is like having a house that is defective structurally and you find time recruiting new tenants into it. The house will collapse one day and when it collapses, it will kill the tenants. So, the thing to do, therefore, is to look at the structure. And in doing that, we may think that the fault is on the 63rd floor, but you are going to find out that the structural problem is at the foundation. So, I look at Nigeria as having a foundational structural problem which, no matter how many tenants we put into it, because of the structural problem, we will be repeating the same problem and facing the same difficulty. What are these structural problems?

We have a constitution that is supposed to be federal, but which is not federal at all in everything. We have a constitution that is monolithic, entirely unitary because the military that donated it to us are used to centralized governance. We have a constitution that gives the central government 53.6% of the total revenue of the country. There is no other country that has that. We have a constitution where the functions of the federal Exclusive List than are longer that than the functions of the federating units. So, we have an overburdened centre that is not answerable, not manageable by all. It is, therefore, important that we look at the structural problem and that is why people have been clamouring for restructuring, which just simply means we should have a negotiated consensus on the distribution of functions. Advocates of restructuring are not saying there will be no Nigeria. But they are saying we should have a better Nigeria that will fulfill the dreams of the founding fathers of Nigeria. When we were going to be independent, the founding fathers met and negotiated a federal constitution. They did not negotiate a monolithic, centralized unitary federation as we have today. They asked for a federal constitution in which each of the federating units had its own constitution and functions. At that time, the federating units controlled 50% of our revenue and the centre had 20% and remaining 30% was put in a pool in case there will be emergency or difficulty for which we need urgent fund. Now, we have abandoned the original dreams because of the intervention of the military in 1966 and the unwise decision of the Aguiyi Ironsi government to abolish regions and create centralized military governance. What we have been having since then has just been a slight variation of it. You will recall that the presidential system we are doing now was not based on any negotiated consensus. It was what General Murtala Mohammed inflicted on the Constituent Assembly in 1977 and said it was a no-go area. How do you run a country on a structure that is not negotiated by the people but was dictated by a temporary occupant of power? So, we need to look at the structure and make it convenient for ourselves so that very significant elements of governance will be put at the levels that are nearest to the people. I always like to use an example. If I go to the United Kingdom, I will be looking for a local government council flat. In Nigeria, the Federal Government will be building houses. For whom? Functions of local government for education, agriculture, trade and commerce and health have been usurped and even put at the centre. Ridiculously, an issue like ordinary marriage that you go to do in the registry is under the Federal Government. So, we have to look at the structure of the country and this is a convenient opportunity to do that because once we bring government to be governed by the subsisting constitution, the new people in government, like most human beings, will not want to decentralize their empire.

The second problem of Nigeria is poor system. Why is it that the National Assembly and the state assemblies should be full-time? Why is it that legislators will have constituency projects and be executing projects? Why is it that, sometime, a state governor, and there was one before, will have about 108 special assistants? We have so many ministers, commissioners and so many special advisers. We are running a system that is too burdensome for our economy. That is the second problem we have to look at. And once you do an election, the incumbent government may not be charitable enough to want to dismantle its own empire. It is not every leader that has the foresight of [Mikhail] Gorbachev. It is not every leader that will be like de Klerk who insisted that unless blacks are incorporated into governance, South Africa was not going anywhere and they had a negotiated consensus with the blacks. Today, South Africa is better for it. So, we need an interim transition that will allow us look at the structure and the system

The third problem we have in Nigeria is that we have poor operators. When a vehicle is defective, it does not matter how good the driver is, if the chassis, the suspension and the brakes are not good, is going to end up in a bush or in an accident. So, election is about choosing operators. This transition that Afe Babalola had asked for is for us to look at the vehicle and come to a decision whether to refurbish the vehicle or change the engine or buy a new chassis, panel-beat the body or paint it or change the seat? When we have done all that, we can then begin to look for new operators. That is why I agree with him. Given the situation that we are and this is probably the situation that the defunct USSR or even South Africa found itself and realised that they needed to get together and reason together and reach a negotiated consensus about a structure that will be authentic, if you like, indigenous to us and allow us to run our country better and allow us to operate our system better and even if we have a poor operator, the country can move forward on its own. I think this is what Afe Babalola is saying and I agree with him entirely.

You seem to be saying that if the politicians ignore the advice and go ahead to have elections next year, nothing fundamental can happen in terms of governance and improvement of the welfare of the citizens.

What you will just see will be differences in smiles, dressing of the operators. The vehicle called Nigeria is structurally deficient. I always remember what Aare Ona Kakanfo, MKO Abiola, said in February in 1993, that no occupant of power will want to dismantle his empire and, therefore, when somebody is elected and he looks at the enormity of the powers of the president, the perquisite of the office, how many appointments he can make, he will take the hoe and begin to pile everything towards his ethnic nation, even when he says he belongs to everybody. There is no way that such an incumbent will change the system. This is the same reason why, since 1999, we have been having constitutional amendments that are just cosmetic. Nobody has been able to address the substantive issue because the politicians will not want to commit class suicide. They will not be willing to reduce the enormous power and the largesse and perquisites of office that they enjoy. This is why it has been unlikely to get the kind of restructuring we are talking about, the kind of systemic rehabilitation we are talking about through any National Assembly. Is there a National Assembly that will sit and ask why there are upper and lower houses? Can they look at that and say they need to abolish one for the other? In the United Kingdom, the upper house is for senior seasoned citizens, same as in the US. But in Nigeria we have a senator that was abusing somebody in a shopping complex because the senator is just a little bit older than a teenager. We have a Senate that has also become a retirement haven for governors who did not even perform well as governors and are carrying their incompetence into the National Assembly. Do we need that kind of National Assembly to be full-time? Is there a Senate that will sit and abolish itself or reduce its own power? Is there a House of Representatives that will sit and do same? Will the parties be faithful enough to mobilise their own members in the National Assembly to support restructuring? In 1963, the political parties gathered together and wrote the only civilian constitution we have had in this country since 1914. All the constitutions, including the 1960 Constitution, were done under the colonial administration. All the constitutions since 1979 were donated by the military. But in 1963, the parties wrote for themselves a republican constitution that was essentially and thoroughly very federal. Again, that was because at that time, we didn’t have a monolithic, centralized party structure. But what do we have now? We have a national chairman of a party that is almost competing with the president. Do you know who is the chairman of the Conservative Party in the UK or the national chairman of the Labour Party in that place? UK just elected a new leader for the Conservative Party and she is not the national chairman of the party. Do you know the chairman of the Republican or Democratic Party in the US? There are too many things that are wrong with us as a country which we need to look at. It was not always like this. We have sued medicines that are good for us. We all talk about the days of Ahmadu Bello in the North. He laid the foundations for whatever you have in the North today. The agricultural revolution that [Michael] Okpara did in the East remains the best that they have seen there. In the West, we always look at what Chief Obafemi Awolowo did with nostalgia. So, there are too many things we have to do.

Among those running to be president next year, do you see any off them with the trait needed to at least bring about some great changes?

I don’t see anybody going into power to do any meaningful thing. They are all products of the decadent system. Tinubu has been there since the old SDP days and Atiku [Abubakar] too in this same decadent system. Peter Obi has been there since he became governor under APGA for eight years and Rabiu Kwankwaso of NNPP too. All of them have been migrating from one party to another, forming new parties and dissolving old parties. Do you think these people who have been nurtured and who are beneficiaries of the inanities and the contradictions in the system will be courageous enough to commit class suicide and reduce their own power? This is why sane leaders who love this country a lot are saying we should have an interregnum of say three or six months to allow us do a restructuring of the country and go back to what we think is best for us. It will be better for Nigeria, West Africa and for the Black race. Nigeria’s population is 17 per cent of all the black people worldwide. So, if we have problems here, we are going to create problems for the black people. We are 20 per cent of the population of Africa. When we have problems, we are going to create problems for the whole of Africa and we are more than 50 per cent of ECOWAS population and so when there is a problem in Nigeria, where will the people be displaced? So, we need to look at the problem and be honest with ourselves. Let us all make Nigeria better than our own individual ambition.

Going into the 2023 elections, why do you think there is so much instability in all the major parties, PDP, APC, Labour Party and even ADC recently suspended its own presidential candidate? Shouldn’t parties have experienced some level of stability for 23 years that we have had civilian administration in charge?

It is the structural problem of the country that has been transported into the parties. For example, why is there instability in the PDP? From G-17 to G-34 and to the evolution of the PDP, the party was conceived as a party that will be an umbrella for all Nigerians where each and every Nigerian will be treated as equal and have equal access to power. PDP was conceived as a national bastion that will make sure that the military can no longer come back to power. It was conceived as a platform to confront the Abacha dynasty of that era. And so, there were basic things they agreed to, one of which was that power would rotate from South to the North and vice versa. It is like the Catholic doctrine which is essential to their structure. But what have they done? They have negated that very principle and power, as PDP sees it, should still remain in the North for another four or eight years. They have violated their own foundational agreement. They have created a situation in which there is no longer equal access to power by all Nigerians. There is now a privileged access to power by a favoured section of the country. So, when you breach your covenant, you are going to have instability because other people will not take it. And not only have they broken their own covenant, there is now a concentration of power in the North. They will have a president, if he wins, and their national chairman also from the North. This has created a breach of trust and it becomes difficult to restore the trust in a situation where there is a constitution that puts 53.6 per cent of the revenue in the hands of the Federal Government. So, people from the South are saying you mean for 12 or 16 years continuously, we in the South will just be looking because we know that given the temperament and attitudinal behaviour of leaders in Nigeria, they are going to aggregate most of the resources to their own area. So, the southerners are not happy, hence the instability in the PDP.

Come to APC, the party has not violated the rule of zoning, but there are unwritten conventions. People will say rotation is not in the constitution. Yes, that is true. But there are unwritten conventions, just like the six geopolitical zones we talk about, but which are not written in the constitution. The concept of six geopolitical zones evolved during the Abacha national conference and we have all accepted the concept of the six zones as a basis for distributing political power, authority and largesse and all of that. Another unwritten convention is that in this country of multi-religiosity, there will always be a balance. But somehow, the presidential ticket of the APC has not reflected that. So, there are people who are unhappy. As a party, APC has been unable to assemble all the presidential aspirants since their convention to a meeting for reconciliation and to have a merging of minds and a collapse of their structures so that they can create a formidable platform. So, the seed of instability, because of a breach of an unwritten, but accepted convention, has been sown.

Taking about the Labour Party, the presidential candidate of the party was in APGA as governor for eight years. He was running mate in PDP in 2019. In fact, he was in PDP until almost a week before he became the presidential candidate of the Labour Party. Can you imagine the problem between him and the office of the national chairman of the party who said he could not be setting up campaign council without the authorization of the national chairman! This came because they have no ethos and Obi has not been part of the party and does not understand their system. He is shopping for a platform to actuate or implement a personal ambition. So, it is nothing in the interest of the nation. So, as it were, can Obi, in the name of all that is good, aggregate what Labour Party is, a party that he does not understand? When the Conservative Party in the UK wanted to change Boris Johnson and they just went to look for somebody from the Liberals to be the new leader, would such a person understand the history, the nuances and unwritten convention in the party? That is the basis of the instability in the parties.

Talking of NNPP led by former governor of Kano State, Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, we have seen that he started off with so much fanfare. But now, the party is dwindling into nothingness. Another former governor of the state, Ibrahim Shekarau has just migrated from the party to the PDP. So, there is so much instability because the leadership and membership of the parties are unstable. They are migrants, moving across boundaries, even sometimes on the same day. There are people in those parties that have expectations, but these migrating politicians don’t understand the expectations and hopes of those in the parties. They just come into the parties to take leadership. That is why there is so much instability. The parties have been appropriated by people who are using them for their own personal ambition.

Where do you stand on the argument that, for equity and fairness, an Igbo man from the South-East should be allowed to be the next president?

First of all, let me start with the unwritten convention again, which is that there will be a rotation of power between the North and the South and vice versa. It is understood that there are three zones in the North and three in the South as well. Now, let us look at the distribution of powers since 1999. You are going to find out that the North-Central, the North-East and the South-East have not produced the president of the country. Unfortunately, the convention has not been laid that when it is the turn of the North, it must be rotated from the North-West to the North-Central and the North-East. Similarly, when it is the turn of the South, it has to be rotated from among the three zones there.

Why has that convention not been laid? In 1999, everybody believed it was the turn of the South. Why did they believe so? They had seen an Awolowo who is reputed to be the best president that we never had from the South. They have seen MKO Abiola who won the freest and the fairest election. So, they thought that if we would have a stable Nigeria post-military, power should come to the South. But when they got to the South, there was a national convention of the PDP and the contest was between Alex Ekwueme and Olusegun Obasanjo. So, it was not that the PDP said because it was the turn of the South, South-West should go and bring a candidate and when next power rotates back to the South, it will go to the South-East or South-South. Power alternates between the North and the South. So, they went into a primary in which Ekwueme gave Obasanjo a run of his life.

The South-South, which has been there too, stumbled into it and not that they got it definitely. Goodluck Jonathan was vice-president and unfortunately, Umaru Yar’Adua, who was president, died while in office. You know what it took this country, the social democrats, the pro-democracy people, journalists, NGOs to force on this country the concept of doctrine of necessity before Jonathan became the president. He became a president from the South-South by accident, not because it was agreed that it was the turn of the South-South.

So, when you look at all of that, if in 1999 for example, an Igbo person did not contest against Obasanjo, then you would have said that a tradition had been set that when it is the turn of the South, it would rotate within the zone. I understand the feelings of the Igbo and I sympathize with them, but we have to go by the convention that we ourselves had laid. We have agreed that when it comes to the South, we will try to field our best hands based on our wisdom or lack of it. If it also goes to the North, they will field their best hands based on their wisdom or lack of it. That is why all the candidates that have come from the North have been from the North-West, Yar’Adua and Buhari. So, the convention is that when it comes to any area, all those who are interested will compete and someone will emerge. The person may not be the best and that is the problem of democracy. It does not produce the best, but favours the emergence of the most popular and in Nigeria it ends up with the emergence of the man with the fattest bank account. So, we are not necessarily getting the best. That is the complication the South-East has to face. It is their duty to negotiate support in such a way that the entire South will align with them, realising that in the past they too had competed with aspirants from other southern zones.

The issue of Jonathan being the last PDP president from the South is the argument that some leaders of the party are canvassing to justify the emergence of Atiku as the standard-bearer for 2023 elections. They even go further to say the North deserves four more years to make up for what the region lost in Yar’Adua’s death.They are silent on the military era which has been described as an interregnum.

In the South, the only zones that voted predominantly for Jonathan were the South-East and South-South.

Is it intellectual honest, therefore, to say the South clamoured for Jonathan to continue? As a matter of fact, what people are not recognizing is that the southerners who supported Buhari thought the North should take power. The northerners in PDP who are making this argument must also be honest enough to say that in 2015, they were in the PDP and they are northerners and voted for Buhari and not Jonathan, including the national chairman of the party then, Adamu Muazu, ministers and members of the NWC and NEC of the PDP broke party discipline and voted for Buhari.

Jonathan appears to have become a bride that everybody wants to court now. Being one of the leaders the ruling party chieftains are sprinting to, Tinubu’s visit to Jonathan’s residence, a man he once described as clueless, sparked debates on social media …

They even described him as a drunken fisherman and that is to tell you that, in politics, nothing is permanent. What is permanent is their ambition. We are talking about politicians here, not statesmen. It is only statesmen who think of the future of the country. Politicians think of how to win the next elections. And the person they abuse today, they will go to his house tomorrow to seek his support. How do you explain the action of somebody who professed to love PDP so much and he was minister in PDP and the next thing is that he joined APC, the same party he spent years abusing? We have a political system that is built around individuals, rather than national, corporate goal. So, Jonathan has become a bride and, of course, he was wise enough to have rejected the bait of those wanting him to be the presidential candidate of the party. I had to write an article at that time that he should run away from the presidential ticket of the APC, that it will destroy the image he has built as one man who voluntarily walked away from power when he thought he lost and it was obvious to him that if he did not walk away, there would be so much bloodshed because the incumbent president had threatened to make the country ungovernable for him. And we have the evidence of Alhaji Kawu Baraje, who was a member of the APC then, that they imported people from the Sahelian countries and who are today the bulwark of the insecurity that we have. If Jonathan had accepted the ticket of the APC, he would have destroyed the reputation he has built. Now, he has become a statesman that everybody must court the way they court Obasanjo, IBB and Abdulsalam. It is by his own comportment that he has shifted from being a drunken fisherman to a statesman that must be consulted.

What is your assessment of the Buhari presidency almost eight years after he came to power?

It is one presidency that everybody voted for without knowing what it would do. One presidency that never told us its vision, goal, but we relied on what the advertising agencies said on billboards and it is, therefore, one presidency that has let everybody down. It is a presidency that promised us a refinery per year, but has not even succeeded in doing half a refinery in almost eight years. Buhari is a president that promised not to travel abroad at all, but has spent [months] in hospitals abroad. One presidency that in their banner promised that one naira would be equal to one dollar, but which ended up turning one dollar into N720. One presidency that told us it would fight corruption head-on but under whom the Accountant General has been able to walk away with N80billion. One presidency that promised it would fight insecurity and even said it has technically defeated Boko Haram only to admit that ISWAP has taken over, such that even in far away Owo in Ondo State they could strike on a Sunday. So everything the Buhari presidency promised Nigeria, it has failed to deliver. The only thing that has not failed is that people think that the person of Buhari is not corrupt and we have not found any evidence that he is personally corrupt. But we have found evidence that he is unable to manage the economy, leaving for us N41trillion debt and we are going to spend N18.6 billion daily as subsidy for petroleum products when they told us it was a scam during the Jonathan years. Why is that scam going to gulp so much on a daily basis? So, Buhari has let us down. This is a president who set up the Nasir el-Rufai committee to look into the restructuring of the country, but later said he did not understand what restructuring means. So, in every fashion or form, they have not lived up to their promises at all.

convention that we ourselves had laid. We have agreed that when it comes to the South, we will try to field our best hands based on our wisdom or lack of it. If it also goes to the North, they will field their best hands based on their wisdom or lack of it. That is why all the candidates that have come from the North have been from the North-West, Yar’Adua and Buhari. So, the convention is that when it comes to any area, all those who are interested will compete and someone will emerge. The person may not be the best and that is the problem of democracy. It does not produce the best, but favours the emergence of the most popular and in Nigeria it ends up with the emergence of the man with the fattest bank account. So, we are not necessarily getting the best. That is the complication the South-East has to face. It is their duty to negotiate support in such a way that the entire South will align with them, realising that in the past they too had competed with aspirants from other southern zones.

I call that argument sheer sophistry and intellectual dishonesty. If you can pass the 28 years of the military as an interregnum which we did not bargain for and since we also did not expect Yar’Adua’s death, why then can’t they also pass the period of Jonathan as an interregnum. It is intellectual dishonesty and that is the problem in this country. We are not honest with ourselves and we don’t love this country. So, if the dominance of the first 30 years of the military rule and the subsequent 16 years of military rule by northerners was an interregnum, the Jonathan years should also be seen as an interregnum. That is the first thing. Now, let us now take the political reality. Would Buhari have emerged relying on the votes from the North alone? In the 2015 elections, the South-West voted for Buhari, not Jonathan. In the South, the only zones that voted predominantly for Jonathan were the South-East and South-South. Is it intellectual honest, therefore, to say the South clamoured for Jonathan to continue? As a matter of fact, what people are not recognizing is that the southerners who supported Buhari thought the North should take power. The northerners in PDP who are making this argument must also be honest enough to say that in 2015, they were in the PDP and they are northerners and voted for Buhari and not Jonathan, including the national chairman of the party then, Adamu Muazu, ministers and members of the NWC and NEC of the PDP broke party discipline and voted for Buhari.

I had to write an article at that time that he should run away from the presidential ticket of the APC, that it will destroy the image he has built as one man who voluntarily walked away from power when he thought he lost and it was obvious to him that if he did not walk away, there would be so much bloodshed because the incumbent president had threatened to make the country ungovernable for him. And we have the evidence of Alhaji Kawu Baraje, who was a member of the APC then, that they imported people from the Sahelian countries and who are today the bulwark of the insecurity that we have. If Jonathan had accepted the ticket of the APC, he would have destroyed the reputation he has built. Now, he has become a statesman that everybody must court the way they court Obasanjo, IBB and Abdulsalam. It is by his own comportment that he has shifted from being a drunken fisherman to a statesman that must be consulted.

What is your assessment of the Buhari presidency almost eight years after he came to power?

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