(POLITICS) Confederation better system for Nigeria’s survival – Bisi Adegbuyi, lawyer, activist, former postmaster-general of Nigeria
...Suggests bipartisan method to solve the country’s problems
Rights activist, lawyer, a politician of progressive extraction and Convener, Pro National Conference (PRONACO), and frontline member of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bisi Adegbuyi has expressed the conviction that the desired restructuring of the polity in Nigeria can only come after a thorough political reform in the country.
Adegbuyi, who was a former postmaster-general of Nigeria asserted that nobody can succeed as president with the system in operation in the country, insisting that good intention cannot do any magic with a faulty system.
He bared his mind on national issues to a select group of editors in Lagos, charting a roadmap for the country to reach the Promised Land. Razaq Bamidele was at the interview:
To start on a lighter mood, what would you say was your greatest achievement when you were the postmaster-general of Nigeria?
I don’t like to blow my trumpet, but I succeeded in getting the people in NIPOST to embrace technology which is the soul of any postal administration. Any business that does not embrace technology will naturally die.
Because I am an entrepreneur, I simply decided to approach the business of postal administration from the private sector point of view and I am happy to say that the Deputy Director General of Universal Postal Union, Mr. Chivas said and I quote him, “Bisi Adegbuyi is one of the people that we would like to see running the African post because of the private sector initiative that he brought in.” That was what he told Minister Pantami. That to me was confidence in what I did in NIPOST.
On a more serious note, taking a look at Nigeria today, what is your impression about the country and where do you want her to be in the nearest future?
Doing some critical analysis of Nigeria of today and where we want Nigeria to be in the nearest future? Okay, if I want to behave like a typical politician I will be interested in the next election and who will win or who I hope or prefer to win. Nationalism is a part of life that nobody can wish away. So, if I decide to support the candidacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as I have publicly declared and endorsed him, that, however, should not be strange because as I have said nationalism is a way of life.
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Let me quote the late prime minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher. She said; “the blessing of this century is that countries that have been artificially put together shall fall apart, that identities politics, and nationalism can never be eradicated.” Yes, you can’t push it away. And that has been the bane of Nigeria, trying to reinvent the wheel and mismanaging diversity. So, the earlier we recognize the fact that different people occupy Nigeria and try to forge a union out of this disparate country called Nigeria the better for us.
Please, can we put that in proper perspective by asking that if the United States of America finds itself in Nigeria’s shoes, what do you think would be the system it would adopt to pull out of the mess?
If the United States of America were to be confronted with the challenges that Nigeria today is facing (existential challenges), their approach would have been bipartisan. Recall when the USA was attacked by terrorists; when the World Trade Centre was attacked, it was America first. How do we get America out of this situation? So the Republicans and Democrats closed ranks (bipartisan approach) to solve the problems in America. That is what is presently lacking in Nigeria. Therefore, I believe that to get Nigeria out of this precarious situation, we must find a way to work around the bipartisan intervention.
How do you mean by that in clear terms?
What that simply means is that we must find a creative way out of this presidential system of government that we currently operate. I submit with due respect backed with cogent, credible convincing evidence that it is ill-suited for a multi-ethnic and multi-religious diverse country like Nigeria. How do we ensure that if we go for the next election, some candidates that are representing critical tendencies are not shut out? Because the moment the president emerges from this presidential system of election, all other candidates are completely shut out. Don’t forget I have said this is the time to approach Nigeria’s problems using bipartisan binoculars, so to say. Statesmen think about the future of their country, politicians think about the next election and that is why we have the political gladiators talking about 2023 without thinking about what will happen thereafter. Why are statesmen in short supply in Nigeria?
So in my view, please let me enter a caveat. I have publicly endorsed and hereby endorse the candidacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the presidency of 2023. But I hastened to point out, without any apology to anybody that neither Tinubu nor Atiku nor Peter Obi alone can solve the problems of Nigeria going forward. Consequently, we must find a creative way of getting the leading presidential candidates to work together.
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Don’t forget Nigeria has been presented with a golden opportunity of having three of the four leading presidential candidates representing very strong geo-political zones. I don’t want to offend the sensibilities of the minorities but we all know the major tribes in Nigeria: We have Bola Ahmed Tinubu representing the South-west, Atiku Abubakar representing Hausa/Fulani region, and Peter Obi from the South-east, and having a critical section of the public rooting for him demographically. I mean, make no mistake about it, they may be trending on social media, the youths of Nigeria are tired of the way the country has been governed, they want a new deal. Let me quickly point out that Peter Obi is not a new deal because he has been part of the old order.
Old order…..
(Cuts in), Yes, old order. (See) how he has successfully navigated the political water from the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and from PDP to Labour Party (LP), doesn’t make him somebody who is new or has not been part of the problem. So, we quickly need to put that point on the table.
In your estimation going by what is on the ground now, who do you think would carry the day in the coming general election?
If we conduct an election in 2023, demographically speaking and having regard to what we call psephology of election which is the (science of election) using data and statistics to predetermine who would win, the odds are in favour of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Go and check the history of Nigeria, I said it during the run-up to the 2015 election and I think he bears the reputation that when you have a presidential candidate who is very popular in the North-west and is also popular in the South-west, he has invariably done half of the job in emerging as the president.
In other words, there are some states in Nigeria where if you don’t win them, you don’t have any pathway to the presidency and those states seem locked for two of the presidential candidates. So in my view, this election is for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to win. However, talking like a statesman not being selfish, and thinking about the future of Nigeria, I believe that the next government should be a cocktail of the leading presidential candidates representing the major tribes in Nigeria. I know this may not go down well with some people, but then, we have to say it as it is.
Another issue that I believe we all should look at is having regard to how we have mismanaged diversity, and that is why I am very sympathetic with President Muhammad Buhari who has good intentions. I mean somebody who ran for the presidential election four times before winning, who is determined and has good intentions, and wants to do well in office, he has done his best. But what we are seeing is that good intention alone does not guarantee office success. You have to put the right systems in place and I dare say President Muhammadu Buhari was or is a victim of the system that we currently operate.
Therefore, if we don’t change the system we may continue to elect a president who will have good intentions or will want to deliver on all the fundamentals of democracy (education, health, shelter, etc). But if the right system is not put in place, it will always be very difficult and at the end of the day, it will just amount to scoring an own goal or committing false errors.
I had a conversation (I think I can make it public) with Chief Bisi Akande that I share my first name, and we some kind of belong to the same ideological ways. I said to him in one of our various engagements that if Chief Obafemi Awolowo is waking up today to come and become president of Nigeria if he doesn’t change the 1999 Constitution, he will fail.
Baba Akande simply retorted that Bisi you are a joker, that if they make prophet Muhammad (peace be on him), the presidential candidate and you make Jesus Christ his running mate and you want to run Nigeria based on the 1999 Constitution, both of them will fail. It is just to drive home the point that it is the system. Nigeria’s problems are systemic and no amount of people with good intentions or how determined you are, you might end up performing below the bar which is not your fault.
What exactly are you advocating now?
I have always advocated and I am again seizing this opportunity to still advocate a return to the golden years of administration in Nigeria. Ask an average Yoruba man today, he will be nostalgic about the Awolowo years, ask an average northerner, the Ahmadu Bello years were golden years for them, ask an average Igbo man, he will be nostalgic about the years of Nnamdi Azikiwe! Now, that simply tells us that the system of government that our founding fathers negotiated with our colonial overlords, which the military establishment mishandled under decree 34 of May 1967 is the beginning of Nigeria’s problems.
You said that the system of government is one of the major problems of Nigeria and people have identified that the 1999 Constitution is the problem, why can’t we then go for a constitution we think will make things outright better rather than keeping amending the one considered as faulty?
Well, elections are fast approaching and so, it’s practically impossible to do a complete overhaul of the 1999 Constitution. We can only make do with the constitutional amendment being pursued by the leadership of the National Assembly. If we don’t get what we like, we will have to like what we will get in the circumstance and then make political reforms one of the issues that should occupy the front burner on the agenda of whoever emerges as the president in the coming election.
I believe Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will emerge as president. And if he doesn’t want to fail in office, he must prioritise political reforms. I believe the time is ripe to put some issues in context or proper perspective. I have always advocated within Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG) of which I am a proud member that it is about time that we should begin to change our communication strategy regarding our advocacy for restructuring.
Can you make your point clearer on this issue of communication strategy?
Let’s not make mistake about it, if 350 ethnic groups in Nigeria are fighting for the soul of the country, it behooves people who are advocating for restructuring to take on a second look at how far they have gone and change the narratives to political reforms. After all, you can’t judge a book by merely reading the cover, let us communicate what we are advocating for in such a way that, other contending forces will listen to us and will be able to address the affairs. Those who are vehemently opposed to restructuring believe it’s a recipe for disintegration. Whether they are right or wrong is a different thing all together. If that is the mindset of people who are opposing restructuring, should you continue to make your advocacy more difficult by not changing your communication strategy?
Hence, I believe that the way to go is through political reforms. In the 1778 Philadelphia convention where the people that laid the solid foundation for America met, 58 of them, half of them lawyers, what they simply did was to embark on political reforms to resolve the conflict between north and southern America. They did not discuss anything about the economy, it was after putting the right political context in place, that a Secretary of State for the Economy was appointed to look at the economic implications of the articles of confederation that had just been re-configured or replaced by a new constitution. Reforms are ongoing all over the world. No institution is not undergoing reforms.
So Nigeria, in my view is due for political reforms and I want to put this on record that Nigeria of today because of the mutual suspicion, distrust, ethnic cleavages, and the fact that we have done a very poor job of leveraging on our diversity, it is now time for Nigeria to consider confederacy as a system of government. Nigeria is by far too divided now for any federalism to resolve, what is more? Nigeria is tailor-made for a confederal system of government, and I will strongly recommend the model that they operate in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E). Who doesn’t want the progress being recorded by the Arabs in UAE where you prioritise development, you set agendas that are dear to you and make progress without standing in the way of the progress of some other people.
And I think that the next president is lucky in the sense that he has built a network of friends and political associates who can easily relate with him. We can constructively engage people like Governors El-Rufai of Kaduna State, Governor Inuwa Yaya of Gombe State, and Governor Ganduje of Kano State and let them see the reason we should consolidate on what they struggled for because these were the people that stood their ground and said the Presidency must revert to the South. To consolidate on that is to go further and ensure that we embark on political reforms that will engender a confederal system of government which is a win-win situation for all the geo-political zones of Nigeria.
And we are lucky that we have built consensus around the six geo-political zones, those zones should become our federating units, under what I will simply refer to as the United Regions of Nigeria, in the mould of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). And I bet anybody, if we do that and couple it with a parliamentary system of government or any hybrid between parliamentary and presidential systems of government, Nigeria will begin to call for progress in a matter of four years.
I repeat that we should behave as the Americans would behaved in the circumstance (of our crisis). I mean if Americans were to be confronted with the problems of Nigeria today, the Republicans and the Democrats will drop their partisanship and come together in the interest of the United States of America. That is what should happen.
(We should also) ensure a return to the political structure of our founding fathers who knew Nigeria more than anyone of us, who worked closely with our colonial overlords and negotiated for an agreement with a system of government that worked for Nigeria. We simply committed political suicide by the act of the gladiators of the 1966 school who we must point out didn’t understand the intricacies of the multi-religious nature of a country with so many ethnic groups. They had good intentions. They thought that by imposing a unitary system of government, unity can be engendered. But it was erroneous. These were armed forces personnel who were not knowledgeable, with due respect to them, about how to forge a union out of a country consisting of disparate tendencies.
Can we have an insight into your final submission on the constitution matter?
(On that), all the works have been done: just the report of the 2007 Political Reform Conference of Obasanjo or we may go back to the 1995 Abacha Conference, add it to that of 2007, add PRONACO Conference Report to it, and add Jonathan’s 2014 National Conference and then add APC’s Committee on Restructuring led by El-Rufai which I believe is a cut and paste of 2014 Report National Conference of which I was a proud delegate. Even after President Muhammadu Buhari got elected there was a clamour that, APC Manifesto or not, President Buhari would have to revisit or take a look at the Conference Report of Jonathan’s 2014 National Conference. May I inform you that I’m not one of the people who will criticize President Buhari for not looking the way of that report. That is a man that has the courage of his ambition. You may not agree with him but he said that he never believed in it.
And how do we rationalise that a person who believes in a Conference, funded it, got 462 delegates to attend, and come up with far-reaching resolutions mostly written by consensus, who had powers to implement some of the resolutions that did not require National Assembly interventions, failed and or neglected to do so? Why would anyone be blaming President Buhari for failing to do so saying that he will not implement what he did not believe in?
Recently, I had a conversation with one of the Nigerian leaders I respect so much; Chief Ayo Adebanjo. I asked him that of all the zones in Nigeria, which one requires political reforms or restructuring? So, why would you have an Obasanjo, a Yoruba man who will not embark on any restructuring?
He answered in the affirmative that it was Yoruba, so why would you have an Obasanjo a Yoruba who never embarked on any restructuring? Why would you have a Jonathan from his zone where restructuring has been their song until he became the president and restructuring was no longer necessary for them when it was their turn to eat as they say in Kenya? Again, I ask the question where are the statesmen in Nigeria?
Do you subscribe to the notion from some quarters that whosoever wins the 2023 election must have the support of the owners of Nigeria to perform? Who are the owners of Nigeria if we may ask?
(Laughs) Don’t we all know them? Anybody who had ruled Nigeria twice whether as a military head of state or civilian head of state, as a dictator or otherwise, the various chiefs of army staff, etc. They are not more than 500. See, very few people affect fundamental changes anywhere in the world. Whether such people will behave like statesmen, live above board, and forget about their interests (is another ball entirely).
People who benefit from a union don’t want to leave that union, they become centrifugal when they see that the union is not in any way taking care of their needs. An example is insecurity.
Okay, mention any country that is more united than the United Arab Emirates (UAE). They have forged unity without compromising the affairs of their people. That, to me, is a test of how to figure out Nigeria’s problems. I was postmaster-general for three and a half years and I made friends across the length and breadth of Nigeria. Nigerians want progress and when I watch the interview of a gentleman who I later found out was a commissioner under Governor Ganduje of Kano State.
I was almost shedding tears that this is coming from a Northerner. People should try and watch the viral video again. I do not have anything to add to what the man said regarding Nigeria, because Nigeria is not working now, not because President Muhammad Buhari does not want it to work, but it is beyond him. He has done his best in the circumstance. And he is about to complete his tenure in the race to forge a united country out of Nigeria. But the system that we run in Nigeria is a journey to nowhere until we take a critical look at the system.
It is very clear that if you expect that fundamental changes in the political space of Nigeria can be achieved by the present National Assembly, that will not happen. What they can do is what they’ve embarked upon: Incremental amendment of the constitution to take Nigeria to its destination. But we are in a hurry to get there and piecemeal amendment of the 1999 Constitution cannot take us to that destination. Constitution amendment is time-taking, time-consuming, and requires deep thinkers to be involved. Without patronizing the present Speaker, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, all the issues are clear to him, but he is alone and that is a major challenge. Nigeria urgently requires a reset, and whoever tries to do that will have his name recorded in gold. I believe Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the right man to do that because all the issues are clear to him. In that journey of trying to achieve unity in Nigeria, he should continue to engage his political associates in the North who are the heroes of democracy by insisting that power must be returned to the South.
I am unhappy with former vice president Atiku Abubakar. He should have risen above partisan politics and become a statesman, thinking about the future of Nigeria and not contesting the 2023 elections. If he had done so, a roadmap to the unity of Nigeria or a path would have been created and history would have been very kind to him.
Do you have a road map for Nigeria’s economic problem?
An economist would tell you that foreign direct investment follows political reforms all over the world. Nigeria is where we are because we have prioritised our so-called economic reforms without prioritising political reforms. How do you justify a country where you spend 70% of your resources on recurrent expenditure? And the only way you can achieve economic progress in Nigeria is to first and foremost sort out your political problems and then you’ll bountifully gain the benefits of the economy that will follow reforms invariably. The cost of governance is Nigeria’s Achilles’ Heels. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, my hero would use 24.6% on recurrent expenditure and would earmark the remaining substantial part of the budget to capital expenditure. So I agree that we must talk about the economy. But my submission is this: take the political reforms out of the way and economic benefits will come.
On education, how best in your view can we resolve the crisis within the education sector with our university students at home now for over six months due to the lecturers’ strike?
We have short, medium, and long-term approaches. Let government look for money from anywhere and pay the lecturers, reducing the cost of governance to save money. Is it not better to take money away from politicians and use the money to pay lecturers? Politicians have too much access to free money in Nigeria, money that we are supposed to be spending on education and they are contributing so little to the socio-economic development of Nigeria. Without education, the country perishes in ignorance and no sustainable economic development can be recorded. Your country’s progress is based on what researchers do. Universities are supposed to be learning centres where a new style of governance, new ideas, and innovation incubate. You need to invest in them to benefit.
