Senator Eyinnaya Abaribe, former deputy governor of Abia state and now Minority Leader in the Senate, in this interview with Emmanuel Iriogbe and Andrew Asemota, posits among other things, that the Nigerian nation must urgently restructure for it to function optimally. He also makes a strong case for president of Igbo extraction in 2023. Excerpts…
You once made a comment calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign. With the recent End SARS protest by our youths, do you still hold this view?
That call that I made at that time was a call for the president to be far more sensitive to what Nigeria was going through and you know that call was made a couple of years ago and you could see the nonchalance with which complaints about how the country was being handled. It’s sad that a couple of years down the road after, people are seeing that nothing has essentially changed. The EndSARS protest actually exemplified the frustrations not just of the youth, but most Nigerians, with the level of governance in the country.
Are our youths still lazy?
Let me just say that it’s a euphemism that simply shows exactly the fact that we cannot get anything out of the president, the only way anybody can get anything is a complete change in the manner that the president is running the country.
The original protesters before hoodlums hijacked it, everybody saw how organised the youths were, is this a call for a youth party in Nigeria?
Everybody can form a party, even elders, but the essential thing is, all the people who are in office today whether ministers, senators at a point at which they joined politics were they elders? They were not. In fact, someone pointed out that Rotimi Amaechi who is now a minister spent eight years as a speaker, another eight years as a governor and going to spend eight years as a minister. That will be 24 years. If you subtract 24 years from his age now, then he was in his early 30s when he was the Speaker. Go around the country and see speakers who are also in their 30s.
When Dimeji Bankole was Speaker, House of Representatives, he was in his 30s. If you check the ages of people who are mostly in their 50s they have been in politics since twenty-something years ago. That tells you that it’s not whether you are a youth or not but what’s inside you that is most important. The EndSARS protest, each and every one of us endorsed it. It overcame religion, ethnicity. And all they asked was good governance. The way people in government were running our lives and the SARS of the police were epitomizing impunity.
They see you on the street and arrest you for no reason. Actually, they were carrying POS machines about, asking for money aggressively and killing and maiming people for nothing. So that was just emblematic of the totality of the problems before the sad thing that the hoodlums were introduced by the same government elements in order to break up the protest. We have videos showing where they were being dropped and told to attack people.
The next thing was an attempt to ethnicize it. So we always would say with regards to the question of party, nobody goes away from politics. Someone described it as being in a dance hall, those tired would leave the floor others will come. Every party has its wings – youth, women et al and of course gives opportunities to people.
In Chinua Achebe’s seminal discussion, he said the trouble with Nigeria is simply leadership. The youths can form a party but can they provide this? As patriotic Nigerians we won’t want to have simplistic solutions because it would not lead us to anywhere; a good person is a good person, no matter the age. The real problem I think is lack of punishment for anyone who breaks the rules in Nigeria. Where there is that lack, it’s because you are highly connected or you come from a particular area.
Yes, talking about punishment, what kind of punishment would you want meted out to corrupt leaders?
Everywhere in the world, if found guilty of corruption, you will pay the price by going to jail. In China, they execute you; in other parts, they do not let you go free. What goes on here is that even those who have their hands soiled still come out to say they want to be president of the country, which is senseless. It sends a wrong signal. I mean such people should hide their faces and bow their heads in shame.
If you are a youth and sees someone who has corruptly enriched himself and has made away with it and still tells you that you are a nobody; and goes around with lots of policemen, you’ll just think that it doesn’t pay to be honest and law-abiding. The natural law is that it doesn’t pay to be corrupt. But when those who break the laws now end up being eulogized and left to enjoy their loot, any impressionable person, what would be in his mind would be that it doesn’t pay to be honest.
That’s just the situation we find ourselves in.
Now the Igbo feel highly marginalized over the years. After 40 years of the civil war, an Igbo man has not been president of Nigeria. Do you subscribe to the agitations that the Igbo from the Southeast precisely, should produce a president come 2023 for Nigeria?
I subscribe to the fact that Nigeria is a flawed nation. And to get it right is to restructure the country in such a way that merely occupying an office won’t give you anything. There was something written, those who posted it said it was from Ahmed Joda, which says that despite the north having struggled and doing everything to hold onto power, what does that power mean for the north; that it has not changed the lives of the average person living in the north. It still leads in all the indices of poverty, health and others within the country. So being president is good for your psychological feeling but we want being president to be an effective thing for you. In other words, why would you want to be president and not be able to affect anything that is meaningful for your people?
So, I subscribe to what Ohaneze Ndigbo said: can we renegotiate the contraption called Nigeria? Can we have a conversation among ourselves to know actually who is a citizen of Nigeria and determine for ourselves how our commonwealth will not be shared in this lopsided manner? Can we determine how some people will not be seen as second-hand citizens, which is most important because you are looking for a president, you should be able to give it to the most competent person because that is what will help all of us. We need a president that can pull us out of this despondency that is in the land today; we need a president who can bring us out of the economic doldrums, a president that would look me in the face as a Yoruba man, Hausa man or a Benin man and see me as a Nigerian not as a Christian or as a Muslim.
That is where I want to locate the person who would be president. And finally, the Igbo man has been the person that has made the biggest investment in Nigeria as a Nigerian, because there is hardly any place you would go and will not see an Igbo man living with the native and will make all the investments within that place, live with the people, develop wherever he finds himself. So, if you are now looking for that president that would be able to glue Nigeria together you should go to the Igbo race. Because they are the only people that are not hung up on the successional basis that we used to look at ourselves. But I would feel that the first thing to call should be restructuring; if we do not get it right, we may not have a country for you to come and be president of.
The riots, the looting, the whole thing that has taken place has shown us exactly two things that there can be a new Nigeria devoid of anything which is the EndSARS protest, and second that there can also be an end of Nigeria which comes from the hoodlums and the criminals’ acts. We have to make a choice between the two – whether destruction or rebuilding. And I feel that our leaders today have a choice to make, they cannot just run away from that choice.
We had a national confab under former President Goodluck Jonathan. All the is- sues you raised concerning the problems in Nigeria were treated and sorted. What is stopping Nigeria from executing all those issues that were raised, is it because they did not go through the National Assembly?
I think it is just ego. There is a tendency in Nigeria that any project started by another leader when the next leader comes he jettisons that and wants to do his own. So when this government came into being in 2015, they just jettisoned what happened in 2014 because they said it was done by another party which they supposedly defeated. Therefore, it didn’t hold any relevance. Now the chicken has come home to roost, which shows that as at the time President Jonathan was convening the confab and ensuring all the things were done, he foresaw that there was a need for us to go along a certain path. But those who came after him, in arrogance, felt there was no point in doing it. It had nothing to do with the National Assembly.
I think it was rather late because the elections had come and the former president being a gentleman and believing in the good wishes of the people coming after him felt that he should leave it to the next person to see the good in but the next government in their arrogance felt that they had nothing to do with it. Where they are now is: ‘okay I have made a mistake already, let me continue sticking to it.’ That is one of the things that we have to contend with the government in Nigeria. Anything good because it comes from another party you jettison it. That is how you have failed projects, uncompleted works and so much money go down the drain across Nigeria.
You stood as surety for Nnamdi Kanu and now he is on the run. Why are you still a free man because the law says if somebody jumps bail anybody that stands surety is supposed to go in for the person?
It is because most people are not following the sequence of events. The bail for Nnamdi Kanu has been revoked by the court and asked the police to arrest him anywhere he is. Secondly, we are in court challenging the decision of the court to revise the bail conditions. We feel that legally they ought to have consulted us and give us the option because bail is like a contract.
If there is an imposition of a term in the contract it is up to you to decide to accept it or not. So that first imposition of the condition we were able to accept but the second one when the bail terms were now changed by the court we now said no; more or less like shifting the goal post in the middle of a game. That case is still ongoing but the current position today is that the bail has been revoked by the court that granted the bail.
Some stakeholders in the opposition are of the opinion that the President should have given Nigerians a new electoral act before appointing Prof. Mahmood Yakubu as INEC Chairman for a second term. What is your reaction to this?
I think the two are separate issues, whoever is the chairman of an electoral body will simply implement the laws that we pass as an electoral act and we have not sat in plenary or seen anything in respect of his appointment. So, I can’t comment on anything that has not been brought to the floor of the Senate. At best, it’s speculation.
What is the update on the electoral bill?
We are working on the electoral bill at the moment and what we are asking the committee on electoral reform to do; I think they have been given a time frame, and by the first quarter of 2021, we should be able to pass a new electoral bill. There are so many things we have slated for the first quarter of 2021; the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), the Electoral Act and so forth.
The opinion in some quarters is that the EndSARS protest and the anarchy that trailed it all have everything to do with power shift or zoning of the presidency, come 2023. What is your perception of that?
The EndSARS protest has nothing to do with 2023. Anybody who wants to tie it to that (2023) is being very, very mischievous. It has nothing to do with it. The point really is simple. The SARS unit of the police had become totally notorious; the operatives were laws unto themselves and assumed the powers of even the court.
They were the accusers and judges, the juries and executioners at the same time. How would a unit of the police be able to accuse somebody, judge the person and prosecute the person? That was the reality that youths had to face. At a particular time, even your rights as a person may have been violated. For example, it’s a court that can grant the right to say submit your cell phone so that it can be checked but they would stop Igbo traders going from the East to buy things in Lagos and check their phones. If they see the amount of money that was in the accounts because people are no longer carrying cash but transferring money, they would detain the traders and sometimes murder them, bring out POS machines and transfer their (victims) money.
All sorts of things were going on; people were settling their personal disputes using them and nobody could walk around safely. If you are a youth, the mere fact that you had dreadlocks just as wearing afro when I was 15 years old was seen as something else. Of course, youths of today choose their style as dreadlocks and that is up to them. It is the fundamental human right of anyone to dress and feel the way he or she wants.
Before SARS were disbanded if you had tattoos, all of a sudden that made you a criminal. So many things were just going on with impunity to the extent that even other policemen were scared of them because if you report them to other policemen, they would say “they are SARS, they are being controlled from Abuja” or somewhere nobody could fathom. So, as they continued killing several youths, it was one too many that led to the tipping point and people poured out into the streets. The reason was that each and every one of them had suffered from brutalities in the hands of the SARS and if you really meet families that were brutalized, you will really feel very, very sad.
EndSARS protest, initially, was good but later everything crept in and what crept in was first the effort to expand the frontiers of what they (protesters) were seeking and it was at that point that things broke down. Of course, I went out with the Senate leaders to speak with them (the protesters) when they came to the National Assembly gate the first day. I asked: “Who do we talk to?” Some of them said: “No, we don’t have a leader.” That was a tactical error, when you have no leader, then you will have nobody that can say let us do this and that. It meant that we could not have whom we could bring in and talk with about their demands.
By saying that they had no leader when the government was giving in to some of their demands, the implication was that anybody could bring up another issue and if other protesters agreed with it, they continued with their action and that was why it was impossible to stop the protest. When one of those who was seen as part of their leaders or founding fathers pulled out, he said on the day he pulled out, that the protest was being overtaken by other things. That meant that they had started having cracks in the movement.
What is your hope for Nigeria and the Youths?
Actually, the EndSARS protest provided hope for Nigerians. If you remember, I said at the beginning (of this interview) that it transcended ethnicity, transcended religion and transcended all that kept us down in Nigeria. They (the protesters) had also, by the use of social media and other media tools, brought us into the new economy of the world. The new economy is simply the knowledge economy. It is no longer the old economy that we had and that means that they have also shown that Nigeria can compete in the 21st century at the same level in the comity of nations.
It was at that same time that a couple of Nigerians were selling apps for millions of dollars. Those were a couple of Nigerians who had now brought us into the new economy and you could see there was hope and the hope really was on the young Nigerians and I make bold to give an advice: Use the same tools that you used to mobilize people to get everybody mobilized to come out and vote in the people that you want to be in office because if the youths go back without utilizing this opportunity they will still get the whole bad leaders and they will come back complaining.
So, if the youths’ votes in Nigeria can vote out the bad leaders, the man who comes in knows that you brought him in and will be dependent on you to do the right thing. Part of what happened in past elections that made our leaders so arrogant was that they rigged themselves into power; they felt that they didn’t need the youths, they didn’t vote them in but they brought themselves in. So, let us utilize the power of the youths to now make sure that the youths bring in new leaders. If they want to form a political party and bring in youths, let them go ahead. The only thing that I see is that there are still a few good people; not everybody is bad. Therefore, not everybody was targeted in the aftermaths of the EndSARS protest.
