In this bare-it-all interview, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, one of the most respected and fearless voices in Africa, paints a mixture of fear and hope for Nigeria. The cleric says President Buhari has failed while the political elites have taken all from the people.

He pleads that a window of freedom and liberty be left for Nigerians to live, insisting that insecurity has made life worse for all. On rotational presidency, the Cardinal believes it is not the answer to a free and democratic society. He spoke to IGHO AKEREGHA, Abuja Bureau Chief

How has Nigeria fared since the country returned to democracy in 1999?
I feel the same way as most Nigerians feel and as most commentators express their minds. Perhaps, the only good thing in Nigeria is that no matter how bad it is, people can still talk freely and say whatever he likes.

People can still disagree with what they don’t like. It seems some people are not free like that, but at least, we have enjoyed that kind of freedom and liberty to express our minds. And I think nobody should stop us because we don’t have the wherewithal to enforce what we are saying. We cannot stage a coup and we are not interested in winning elections so, we are just interested in telling the truth and they should allow us to speak the truth.

How do I feel about Nigeria? my brother, it is sad. If you take your election as an indication, it is my clear conviction that since 1999 when we started the experiment in democracy, as far as I am concerned, one election after the other has been worse than the one before it. You just take that indication of an election.

If anybody says the election we had in 2019 was wonderful, well as for me, I don’t know where they came by a wonderful election.

For me, it is not. Most of the problems we are having now and the inability of the government to cope with the problem of the nation are largely because it has not been a government that is chosen by the people. But Nigerians are patient. The politicians are interested in power, they have taken it, let them rule, but let them allow us to live. That is the situation we are in now.

So, if you ask my opinion, I would say we cannot continue like this. My hope and my prayer are that every New Year, we make resolutions, but Nigerians should decide that things just have to change.

The people that are ruling us are giving the impression that they are doing very well. When I hear my president say, we shall continue the way we have been doing, I say for goodness sake, please don’t continue the way you have been doing.

He ought to realise that many of us don’t want him to continue the way he has been doing. It’s as if he has been doing very well, and the Nigerians who are complaining are just ingrates who have no sense of decency and gratitude, which is a pity.

We have a very high opinion of this country, and where we are is not where we should be. Let nobody tell us that we should be satisfied with where we are. We should be much more than where we are now. We cannot have regular electricity, it’s not working well. In terms of our economy.

Were it not for the resilience and resourcefulness of Nigerians, we would have been nowhere, not to talk of the areas that the present government made a priority namely; security, corruption, and economy. Look at it now, we are seeing it every day. It’s not a matter of people just wanting to criticise. I love my country, and I want a situation where I can go all over the world to praise my leaders as models for the rest of the world. I’m afraid since I can’t tell lies, I can’t do it now.

You criticised President Muhammadu Buhari for saying that he will continue with what he has been doing. Putting this in context, do you think the president is far from the people and cut off from reality on the ground?

I did not listen to his last interview on one of the television stations. One thing to know is that it’s not so easy to read a text that somebody has written for you. He must believe that he is doing very well, but how he cannot see that things are not going well.

That is what I cannot understand. That bandit can occupy territories in Nigeria, do whatever they like, demand ransom, and expect it to be delivered, sometimes even by security agents? The police deliver ransoms. Is that a country?

We are not free anymore to move around. Every time I have to travel by road, I have to go to the chapel first to commit my soul to God because it may be my last journey. That’s not the way things should be, and it has not been this way. I still remember very well that Nigeria was not like this.

We didn’t have so much money and we didn’t borrow so much money, but we were doing fairly well. Education was moving well, Universities were well run. I don’t know we can just forget that things can be done better. I don’t also believe that we have to wait another 15 years before things can be turned around, no.

Things can be turned around in a couple of years if you have the right person with the right mind, especially somebody who gets all Nigerians to come together and work on our nation. The biggest disservice that the present regime has done to Nigeria is that maybe without knowing it, they have simply partitioned us and made Nigerians be looking at each other with suspicion.

I don’t see any clear effort on the part of the government to bring all Nigerians together because we do have the resources to solve our problems; if only we can be allowed to do it together. But when you have a situation where the government seems to have a clear idea of those they can work with and those who they cannot work with, and those they consider important and those they consider not important.

I hear that even the government is determining who will get what based on election results of where they thought they got more votes. When I heard this, oh God! I knew we were going down the drain that way.

That’s not how to run a nation. We are not going for election. That may be the period when people throw stones at each other. But when the election is over and some people are declared winners, they now become the rulers of Nigeria.

They are no longer party people. The president of Nigeria is the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He is not the President of APC or PDP; which is why he should not be putting people who are his close associates in important positions and think that because they are loyal to him, they will perform well.

They are not there to serve him, they are there to serve Nigeria. And there are many Nigerians out there who are not part of his team, his party but who are very good and have very good answers to many of our problems, and we ignore them and allow them to sit at home rotting. Now that we are in the New Year and Mr President is not fighting for re-election, he should just face helping this country to put our heads together and make sure there is no reason for Christians to think that the government is partial to Muslims against Christians.

There should not be a situation where some tribes are considered first-class citizens and others are disposable. These kinds of things we are hearing are not without reason, but it is not good for the nation. From the beginning to the top, governors are complaining, not to talk of poor people like me.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was quoted recently to have said that Nigerians should be prepared to wait much longer if they expect President Buhari to offer anything new. Do you agree that the President has reached his limit?

Well, I can imagine that Obasanjo knows Buhari very well. They have been colleagues for more than 50 years. So, he is in a position to say that.

He is probably saying that based on what he knows of the man. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of his knowledge of Buhari, so I don’t know the limits of Buhari’s ability. All I do know is that anybody who goes around parading himself as the President of Nigeria should perform as a President of Nigeria, and there can be no excuse for non-performance.

On a scale of zero to 100, if you are to score the performance of Buhari, what will be your mark?
(Bursts into laughter), if I were a teacher and I am to score him for his performance, certainly, I will not give him a pass mark. I don’t know what the pass mark is now. In some places, 50 is no longer a pass mark, and in some places, you have to score more than 70 to pass, whereas, in some places, 30 or 40 is a pass mark.

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But whatever the case, I certainly cannot say he did well. He has not done well, maybe he has worked hard, and perhaps he has had sleepless nights, but the result has not come. We have not seen the result in the economy. We have not seen the result in corruption containment, and we have not seen the result in security.

And we cannot blame anybody else but the people in government who have taken on the responsibility to care for the nation and they should do it. Unfortunately, it is not easy to say if you cannot do it get away, it’s not so easy. You have to wait for an election to be able to vote people out. Even at that, you may want to vote people out and they will not allow you to vote them out.

The system is so skewed that election doesn’t mean much. That’s what I was talking about in the election. All these stories about primary, our political parties are also part of the problem because they are the ones who generate candidates who would-be candidates to vote for on the morning of the election.

And when the parties themselves don’t even believe in democracy, then they generate individuals who are not democrats. And I am told that on the morning of the elections, voters are then to choose between two or three brigands and rogues.

Then they would say the elections went well, and we have done a free and fair election. We must challenge the political parties because, as it is now, only about one per cent are the politicians, and they are the ones determining who is going to be what.

This is supposed to be a democracy. Can’t we see that there is something wrong and this is right down to the local government, even to my little village? Nobody can be a councillor unless somebody has put them there.

The people are now used to that and they know that there is no point going for an election because that is not going to make any difference. If we don’t want democracy, please let’s say it and let us go back to our traditional form of government of how our kings ruled us.

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is blaming the huge rot it met in government as a major challenge to its performance. Do you have a different view?

If they are not able to clear the mess, why do they want to rule? They cannot claim that they did not know what the situation was when they were bowing and fighting to win the election. If you are fighting to win an election, it means you know what to do and how you intend to make things better.

That is the beautiful thing with democracy. There is no particular regime that can solve all the problems, one regime does its best; maybe it fixes a bit of mess here and there, and a new regime comes and faces the mess on the ground.

They should not be complaining that they met a mess. If there was no mess, they wouldn’t be there. If everything was perfect, then every Nigerian would have voted for Jonathan. In 2015, a lot of people believed that Buhari had what it takes to turn the country around. Well, six years, seven years running, we are still waiting.

There is a raging debate about which region should produce the president in 2023. If you find this debate interesting, which region should the president come from at the expiration of Buhari’s term?

This whole discussion that it is my turn, it is your turn, it’s all part and parcel of a game that is bad. If things were running very well, every Nigerian should be able to present himself, and we size him up and vote for him if we believe he can deliver.

Not saying it is the turn of this place or the turn of that place. This way, we have thrown competence to the wind. We have even thrown democracy to the dogs. We no longer choose who is best but whose turn it is.

I am from Kogi State, so who is my candidate? Is it the Northern one, or that of the South? If Katsina people are happy that they have gotten their man there, I’m sure many people in the North say they have not seen their own man there.

Those of us who are Yoruba will say we have gotten our eight years with Obasanjo, but Obasanjo was not a Yoruba President as far as I’m concerned, but he is being considered as one.

(Goodluck) Jonathan became President by default, and because he emerged President that way, they are now telling everybody from the South-South to forget about the presidency for the time being, even if they have a wonderful candidate. This is not right. The Igbo are saying they have been kept out all along.

They joined a game and if they have not been able to play the game like other people, they cannot blame anyone.

The point I’m making is, this whole debate about the turn of the North, the turn of the South, in my opinion, is not even a democratic discussion. Until we reach a stage when any good person can rule in Nigeria, we have not arrived.

Two years ago, the United States designated Nigeria as a country of particular interest over alleged persecution of Christians and the church, but this was lifted last year. Are you concerned that there have indeed been increased attacks on Christians in Nigeria?

When you say Church in Nigeria, I ask you what church are talking about; and if you say Christians, which Christians are you talking about?

There is a lot of differences among Churches in the way we run our affairs. So, it is very difficult to make a general statement about the church in Nigeria and whatever general statement made about the church in Nigeria, the same statement should also be made about the state of religion, including Islam and the Mosque.

Let us just say that the evil and the problems have affected everybody in Nigeria, including those who go to church. As there are good people in other areas, so are there good people in the church, including those who have ideas of what is to be done.

Some are working hard to help in the common good and some are also busy going about their interest. It is all across the board, and I don’t think it is only in Nigeria. It is everywhere.