Dr Yemi Farounbi, a renowned and veteran journalist with over 50 years experience, was Nigerian Ambassador to the Republic of Philippines. The 75-year-old ace broadcaster, who shares birthday with Independent Nigeria, speaks with DAPO FALADE on his dreams, hopes and disappointments in a country which, at the attainment of sovereignty exactly 60 years ago, was a bastion of hope for the African Continent and the Black World in general.
Excerpts:
You are one of the privileged few to witness the birth of Nigeria as an independent entity and you were very much around when the process began. How would you describe the journey, 60 years after?
The journey so far, to me, has been unexpected. I have expected a different course and a different route for Nigeria. There is no way I would have believed that Nigeria would reach a situation in which we would become a toy in the hands of the other countries; in which Nigerians would be confronted with three main problems that we ought not to have.
The first problem that we now have is the problem of unemployment. We have grown to become 200 million people, as they say. But we are a very fortunate country because 60 per cent of the population are youths. So, we are a youthful and a dynamic country that ought to be energetic. We are not like Japan which is a dying, aged country. But I never expected that, with this kind of a dynamic youthful population, we would be in a state in which some of these youths would not mind dying in the Saharan route, just to escape from the Nigeria that belongs to them.
I cannot imagine that, 60 years after, this country would be unable to feed itself. It is generally and commonly accepted that a country that cannot feed itself cannot claim to be independent. If we are so unable to feed ourselves, particularly because agriculture that used to provide more than 70 per cent of our GDP; gave employment to a large number of people; that provided food crops and cash crops became suddenly more than neglected and so we are unable to feed ourselves.
The country was born with lots of hopes and aspirations. In fact, the expectation was that Nigeria would liberate the Third World.
At what point did we miss it and what really happened?
There are two landmarks when you start talking about missing it: The first was there at independence without our seeing it. The landmines were there. One of these is reflected in population distribution as planned for us by the White. There is nowhere in the world where the population decreases from the coast; where the population increases from the dry to the wet. But we have that in Nigeria. And the British left us with a Northern Region that dominated the other regions.
So, without our seeing it, the landmine was there. Even when General Yakubu Gowon corrected it by creating 12 states-six in the North; six in the South-the late General Murtala Muhammed quickly changed it by creating 10 states in the North and nine in the South. Now, we have 19 states in North and 17 in the South.
These alterations created a lot of problems. And this got reflected in the structure of the country. You look at the 774 local government areas, more than 400 of them are in the North. You look at the senators, by a sheer number of three times the number of states, more of them are from the North. You look at the House of Representatives, it is the same. So, a landmine that has been planted made it difficult to alter the structure, Nigeria, to reflect the realities that can make the country grow.
So, where did we miss it?
When the military came. That is the second landmine. When the military came and the late General Aguiyi Ironsi took power and he, on the advice of whoever it was, suspended true federalism, the regions and their constitutions and created a centralised heirarchical federation and so, we lost it. The ability to grow at your own pace on the basis of the limitation of your vision; on the basis of the limitation of your resources or on the basis of the limitation of how hard you can work, got lost. From there, power became over-centralised.
In the 1960 Constitution, the items on the Federal Exclusive List would have been about 20 or 22. Today, they are over 88; all the powers got annexed through the military, which, fortunately or unfortunately, favoured a particular part of the country. This became a problem for us today. So, the military was a tragedy. And I always like to illustrate this with Lagos.
Lagos had always been what it is today, since when the 12 states were created. Lagos, at that time, was like one of the 12 states like we have Kano. Lagos has 20 local government areas and the then Kano State had 20 local government areas. The northern-based military rulers split Kano into two, now Kano and Jigawa. The military rulers gave Jigawa 33 local government areas and Kano 44 local government areas, meaning that the old Kano State now has 77 local government areas and left Lagos, with the same population as that of old Kano State, with 20 local government areas. That disequilibrium came as a result of the military people who took power and, through power, amassed wealth; through power amassed political power and used the power to feather the interest of their own people.
But at a point, Senator Bola Tinubu, then governor of Lagos State, tried to alter the course of history by creating 24 other local councils but his effort was stifled by former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Don’t you see this as a disservice on the part of Obasanjo to a particular part of the country?
Absolutely not. You see, those who donated the 1999 Constitution knew what they were doing. They put the list of local governments as an annexure to the constitution. For you to amend the number of local governments, you have to amend the constitution. So, the creation of local government became a constitutional matter in the hands of the centre.
So, when Lagos, under Tinubu, decided to create the 24 local governments, good as his intention was, it was an unconstitutional matter because to incorporate those new 24 local government areas, you have to amend the constitution. And you know the laborious process of amending the constitution; it will require two-thirds of support in the National Assembly and two-thirds of the 36 states must endorse that amendment.
All of that made creation of local governments difficult and that is why no new local government has been validly created. All what we have now, we call them Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs). Of course, if you create an LCDA from a local government, that local government shares whatever it used to get with the LCDA. It is not the same as turning 20 local government areas into 80 local government areas.
And, because those who interjected as military favoured their people, they planted this landmine in the constitution that made it difficult to change. How do you get two-thirds of the National Assembly when 19 states are from the North? They will be committing class and political suicide to surrender something that is advantageous to them.
And, unfortunately, we have not produced a Mikhail Gorbachev (former president of the defunct USSR) that can look at the totality of the good of Nigeria and say, “Yes, this is advantageous to my people, but it is not in the overall interest of Nigeria. We would put an executive bill in the National Assembly and we would back it with everything that is required.” By that, we would have been able to amend the constitution.
As it is, very many other states, I think almost every state in the South-West shares the view of Tinubu and created LCDAs. But then, it is not exactly what we wanted; we are just making do with what we are able to do, whereas what we wanted is a re-allocation and re-distribution of power in this country.
There is no federation that has three tiers of government; it is only two tiers, the federating units and the centre. But the Nigerian Constitution created a third tier, the local government, and entrenched it in the constitution. So, if all they have said is, this is the centre with the Federal Exclusive List; this is the Concurrent List between the centre and the federating units, any other thing not included belongs to the federating units. That is how it ought to be.
However, seasoned lawyers will also argue that we don’t really need a Concurrent List.Why?
Once you have a Concurrent List, the federal can legislate, the state can legislate and when there is a conflict, the federal will take over and when the federal takes over, the Concurrent List becomes a Federal List.
So what we need in this country is a new constitution that defines the limits of the powers of the centre. Anything that is not in the Federal Exclusive List must be for the federating units. And that ought to include creating local governments, funding them and administering them. There is no business of the centre, anywhere, in all of that.
You pointed at structural, systemic and human failures as being the major contributors to the problems of the country. The late Professor Chinua Achebe, in his book, “There Was A Country”, said Nigeria was born to fail. Do you believe in that assertion?
Yes, in some ways which I have highlighted. If more than half of the people in the House of Representatives, if more than half of the states, because of a population that does not obey any scientific or natural law, if that has been put in place, then Nigeria was programmed to fail. But it became more pronounced when the military over-emphasised and reinforced it. They destroyed the structure.
Bad as the structure was in 1960 to 1966, each region still had enough freedom to operate and there was competition among those regions. If the West started free education, the East will; if the East built a university, the West and the North did; if the West built a stadium, the North did. If the West was creating housing estates, television stations, industrial estates, minimum wage, pilgrims welfare boards, the other regions did. They had enough funds within their jurisdictions to do these.
But when the military centralised and altered the revenue sharing formula and assigned to itself 53 per cent in the centre and gave about 26 per cent to the federating units and 24 per cent to the 774 local governments, then a problem was created. And that problem is a life and death struggle to control the centre where the money is. First and foremost, they had no business, infact, including the local government, whether it is 24 per cent or whatever.
I know that the last National Conference (2014) said the centre ought not to have more than 40 per cent.
Really, I believe the centre should not have more than between 30 and 35 per cent. This is because they are involved in functions that are not really their business. They are in housing. For who? They don’t have any person; the person lives in the village or the local government. Hence, the money for housing should be there; health, the money should be there; agriculture, the money should be there. But the money is just at Abuja. Doing what? They are just sharing it.
So, they have more money than responsibilities and therefore they, perhaps, have more money than sense. You know when you have more money and you don’t know what to do with it, you will be doing all sorts; like they did in the last few days, whether to take the rail to Maradi in the Republic of Niger or we should do what we have been doing for many years, giving Niger, Chad free electricity…
But Nigeria has been borrowing money to do that...
Yes, we have been borrowing money to do that; we have been borrowing money to give freely to other countries when your own component parts have not benefitted from the borrowings.
We need to look at the structure. It is a bad situation when, as a country, we think the best has been in the past; we think the best of this country was when there was Sardauna, when there was Awolowo, when there was Azikiwe and when there was Okpara. It is wrong; the best of any country should be in the future.
So, what does that suggest?
It suggests that the structure that gave you the best is the structure that you should use so that your best can become better.
But given what we have now, do you think we can still go back to what we had before 1966?
It would not be easy, but I believe that, one day, we will get there. I believe that the enormity of the problems confronting Nigeria because of structural problems will become so much that somebody will be forced one day to correct it. That person may get there by accident but he will realise that to be a better country, we must do something about this structure.
I don’t believe that, forever, we will have self-centred leaders who cannot see beyond the gains of their people. We will, one day, have some leaders who will realise that they belong to all the people, not only those they share their religion or language. I believe it will happen, just like we never thought that there will ever be what we called a Glasnot but somebody came and restructured the former USSR and USSR is better for it now; they are tighter, they are smarter and performing better. In fact, Russian, Ukraine and many of those countries that came out of the former USSR are now growing at their own rate, faster than what obtained in the former USSR.
There is no need having an octopus that cannot move. We have to restructure the octopus so that everybody can move faster and we can feel genuinely proud. But so long as you still have this collection of people in the National Assembly who believes that it is a regular four-year ritual to lament and do marginal restructure without touching the substance of the constitution…what we need is not an amendment of the constitution. What we really need is a rewriting of the constitution.
What do we therefore have to do?
Let us reignite in ourselves the spirit that enabled the civilians to come together in 1963 and gave a constitution to themselves. It is possible. All the political parties then agreed; all the members of the then Senate and the then House of Representatives agreed and they passed it that we should have what we called a new Republican Constitution.
But if we continue in a self-centred way as we are doing, we will find out that, at the end, we will not have a country to manage and that would be a pity for the Blacks because this country contains 17 per cent of the total Blacks in the world. All the Blacks are looking forward; all the South-South countries across the world are looking up to Nigeria to give them leadership. But when, because of our own poor structure, we are unable to give this leadership, then we are a let down to the Black people; we would be letting the Third World down all over the world and that would be a shame.
Nigerians are attributing the contemporary bad leadership we have to the early leaders who are still around as being the ones that forced on us what we have now. Do you subscribe to this?
When we were talking about the structure, we also talked about the system which is: why did we have to go for presidential system, expensive as it is? This is bearing in mind the paucity of the resources we have. Why did we need a legislative system that is full time? Why should the lawmakers get involved in what is called constituency projects? Why did you abandon the parliamentary system, especially the part of it that made it part time; that made you take money only for the sittings you attend; that the Premier or Prime Minister is answerable almost on daily basis to be questioned and queried about what the government was doing? Why did you go for one in which it is laborious to remove an incompetent president? Whereas, by sheer vote of no confidence, you could have removed that incompetent Prime Minister. So, we have to look at the system.
But that is not even all the issues. The other issue has to do with the quality of the operators. In the Second Republic, we had almost the same condition that we have now, but there were stars in the horizon. You could talk of what Tatari Ali did in Bauchi. You could talk of what Abubakar Rimi did in Kano; someone that UNESCO gave an award. You could talk of almost all the UPN governors in the South-West. Why is it that, now, almost all of them are like Lilliputs, just like the Chinese that have almost the same height, with none of the governors outstanding?
This brings me to the issue of political recruitment: How does one become a councillor, a chairman, a governor, a commissioner?
The quality of such people, the capacity of such people and their vision, does anybody care any longer? No!!! This is because, from the military era, we have monetised the political system; money has become the deciding issue; how much do you have in your pocket and account? That is what now decides what you get.
Of course, politics is an expensive venture anywhere in the world, but what do you spend money on here in Nigeria? When you give the political godfathers; when you give the Christian and Islamic godfathers; the one you will give the security agencies; the one you will give to electoral monitoring agencies. That is what we spend money on. In other countries, they spend money on campaigns, the various aspects of the media and also during the political rallies and therefore, the parties are within the reach of the people. That is what they spend the money on and that is what accounted for the ‘I can’ spirit of Barak Obama, with the donations of $1, $100, that got him the US presidency. That cannot happen here; even the sheer money for picking party forms is skewed in favour of the rich; not in favour of the person who has competence or capability. Then the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would put its own money and it becomes almost an impossible thing to do.
Of course, part of the systemic problems is that we now have about 89 registered political parties and you ask people who are illiterates to make rational choices from the long list on who will be the president. Whereas, in the US, the people are bothered on a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden; if it had been the UK, it will be between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. But in Nigeria, you will take a ballot paper and it will be as long as two feet and you have so many parties there. The logos would be so small and the colours would almost be the same that you almost cannot make a choice. It is a systemic problem. We are, therefore, unable to put a good man in position.
When the late Alhaji Shehu Shagari became the president, the last public office he held before becoming the president was Supervisor of Education in Sokoto State. What are the calibre of people you put in charge of the local government?
Before the late Chief Bisi Onabanjo became the governor of Ogun State, he was the chairman of Ijebu Ode Local Government Area. So, we are talking of people who had the experience.
But now, all you need is not the experience; it is not good vision; it is not the expertise; it is not knowledge; it is not the capacity to move the state or country forward. All you need is to have money. You can buy votes on the day of election. We have, therefore, been unable to generate a set of good leaders at the state and at the local government levels. That is why, if you say ‘let us transfer this power from the federal’, they will tell you ‘those people at the local government will not do it well o’. This is because we have not put good people there.
I still say it that we have a very very bad structure. But that does not stop the governor of a state, within this structural imbalance and error, to do well with the little he has; it should not stop the local government chairman from doing well with the little he has. But everybody will be looking up to Abuja, cap-in-hand…But I think it still bothers on the issue of structure.
Few days ago, Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State talked about the mining opportunities in the state, especially the abundant gemstones, but he is seeking for the intervention of the Federal Government to stop the activities of illegal miners. Don’t you think that the apparent lack of control would hinder any genuine effort he may want to make in that wise?
Yes, I agree that that is part of the structural problems that we have. When I look at it, I feel unhappy because under the Land Use Decree, the lands are owned by the state under the governor. But then, they now put in the Nigerian Constitution something that makes the minerals under the land owned by the state under the control of the government at the centre. And because of what we called span of control, one million square kilometres, 774 local governments, 36 states and one ministry, one Minister of Mines and Power (whatever it is called now) does not have the capacity to supervise it.
If you go to the US presidential experiment, the government at the centre is not concerned about the oil in Texas or Nevada or anywhere. It is the responsibility of the state. Of course, they pay a rent to the centre because the centre lives on rents. But because, here, we have put the responsibility under the centre, you have a lot of illegal minings and the state cannot do anything to hold them because it does not have the power and the security agencies. The local government also cannot do anything. The people who have the power do not have the knowledge. Therefore, we have a lot of illegal minings and more disastrously, at least, as at today, we have 33 minerals in this country that nobody is talking about. This is because it is beyond the capacity of the centre to manage them.
When you talk about structural problems, some people will think ‘oh, it is going to benefit the people of the South-West’, but look at the situation in Zamfara State. If we decentralise, while the gold mine of Ilesa would be properly managed by the government of Osun State, the one in Zamfara will also be properly managed by the state government. The bauxite of Plateau, the uranium there, the bitumen of Ondo State, which is the second largest in the world and which nobody is touching, they will all be mined and the Federal Government would get, one, money from Excise Duty, if they are being processed and shipped out; the states would benefit because they would be able to use it to generate employment for their own people; and they would be able to add value.
A lot of the gem stones that are all over the world were carted away from Nigeria as laterites because nobody can arrest them; they belong to the centre. And who are the people doing these illegal minings? They come from that area where the dominant people in the centre come from. So, it becomes difficult, in fact, sometimes, to report them to the police because the police would have received instructions from somewhere. So, we have to look at the structure.
Then, of course, I believe that every ethnic nation ought to take a good look at itself and say, ‘while we are fighting for these structural reforms, can we ensure that we have good operators? This our computer is not good enough, but let us get a good operator’. In the past, you cannot just wake up and say you want to be a councillor. As late as 1979 in Oka Akoko, Ondo State, the UPN, dominant and as popular as it was, choose a candidate the Oka people did not want. The people told the candidate they wanted that he should join the NPN and they voted him in and he was the only NPN lawmaker in the old Ondo State House of Assembly. So, communities should take interest in who represents them; in who is the councillor, who becomes the local government chairman, who becomes their lawmaker in the House of Assembly, House of Representatives and the Senate and even in who becomes the governor.
The people should take a very active interest. We know that the structure is bad but if we have good operators, at least, if we have 36 governors, we should be able to say two out of them are excellent. Ask the people if they know the names of the governors. Most of them don’t know because all of them are the same.
Nigeria has become an object of ridicule, even among smaller countries, including South Africa, Ghana and even Guinea that recently sent us packing from our embassy building there and the Nigerian leadership appears helpless. To what can you attribute this?
Our foreign policy has lost bites and therefore, we have lost respect. They know that when they do things, all what we will do is to make noise; rarely do we take the appropriate action and so they get away with it. Don’t forget that foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy. When you are domestically weak: you cannot take care of the problem of Boko Haram; you cannot take care of Fulani herdsmen; you cannot take care of kidnappers and other criminal elements. It would be more difficult for you to take care of the outside. When you cannot defend those living in the country, how can you take care and defend those who are living outside? I think that is part of the problem; our foreign policy has lost bites over the years.
We used to say Africa is the centre of our foreign policy. That is just in name. Even when we give support to other African countries, we don’t know how to use foreign policy to our own advantage, even when we attempted to use foreign policy for economic development during the time of General Ike Nwachukwu as the Minister of External Affairs. You see, when the US, or even China, gives you grants, they bring their equipment, workers and tradesmen to come and execute the grants. So, you are going to pay the loans but they are the ones creating the equipment; they are the ones benefiting from the jobs created as they are the ones operating the equipment. That is how it is being done.
But what do we do here? When we went to Liberia with our money and men, our people died there and we came back. We helped Sierra Leone, Lebanon, South Africa and others and so we came back. There was no means to use our assistance to these countries to boost our economy. That is part of our problems.
Of course, you must give it to Nigerians; whenever they are outside the country, they are successful individually. So, they become objects of envy in those countries. Take Ghana for example: Nigerians are doing very well there; they trade. And so the domestic population begins to envy and hate them and that is why they attacked Nigerians. The same thing in South Africa. The blacks occupy the best houses, drive the best cars and run the best businesses. Our brothers from Igboland who are in the Kumasi area of Ghana are doing very well, in their trade, electronics and spare parts businesses, even here. So, they attract envy.
And all the supports we give are never tied to economic values; we give freely to countries but we don’t benefit from it. We give crude oil to countries and we also don’t benefit. On the contrary, we are faced with the problem of what we called imported inflation because we take crude oil out and bring in refined petroleum products. If we are able to change that and we are a little bit more forceful; we are a little bit more dynamic; we are a little bit more significant and important in the ECOWAS setting; we are a little bit more important and significant in the African Union setting, then we will get more respect.
Nigeria at 60, where lies the hope for the future?
Well, when people ask me this question, I tell them, because I believe fanatically that there is a better day ahead, I believe in the force of inertia. I believe in that a country as big as Nigeria, diverse as Nigeria, and with the population that we have; the economic potentials that we have, cannot continue to be ordinary. Something will give way that will make the country to become extra-ordinary; that will make the ordinary Nigerian to become extra-ordinary.
I will illustrate this with a heavily-loaded trailer. When you park the trailer, you put in gear and on arm-break and you go away for two hours, when you get back there, the trailer would have moved. Ask any trailer driver; he will tell you it is true because of the sheer weight.
Nigeria is too big not to move forward. The sheer demands of creating jobs, food, housing are enormous. And if anybody tells you that Nigerians will forever accept the status quo of non-availability of all these basic amenities, I can assure you that it will not continue to be so. So, without being violent, the trailer moves forward; without being violent, this country, Nigeria, will move forward. I have that belief and I want to tell Nigerians that sooner than they expect, the better Nigeria will come.
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