CHAIRMAN, Presidential Advisory Committee for the National Conference held by the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, Senator Femi Okurounmu, has stirred the hornet’s nest in his assessment of the state of the nation’s economy in this interview. According to him, the inability of the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led administration to make the lawmakers in the National Assembly flow along with President Muhammadu Buhari on some thorny issues of national interest is tantamount to absence of government in the country. Excerpts:
BY OMONIYI SALAUDEEN
What’s your assessment of the state of the nation as at today?
I will not say we are a failed state as of now, but I think we are drifting almost irretrievably towards failure the way we are going. Nigeria is not moving in the right direction. Regardless of the way anyone voted in the last presidential election, the general expectation of majority of Nigerians was that once Buhari gets to power, things would start to take shape, that corruption would be wiped out, that people would rediscover those values we have lost as a nation. But unfortunately, these expectations are not being met. Let me start with the economy. Clearly, the economy is going further into the doldrums. Oil which is the main source of our foreign exchange is now below $34 per barrel in the international market. Our foreign reserve is now about $38 billion. Production at our refineries has almost grounded down to zero. We still depend almost exclusively on imported petroleum products to meet our domestic needs. The stock market is almost collapsing. There is a lot of divestments going on right now. Foreign investors are taking out their investments. That is why the prices of stocks are going down everyday. All this does not give one hope about the economy. In spite of all these problems in the economy, our politicians are still behaving as if all is well. They still indulge in the same excesses as before. Look at the issue of cars they are saying they want to buy for members of the National Assembly. They want to buy super luxurious SUVs for 109 senators each of which costs almost $18,000 at a time when most governors cannot pay the minimum wage of N18, 000.
The National Assembly has come out to say that the cars are for the committees to perform their oversight functions. They equally claimed that the car loans had not been given to them.
(Cuts in)…. I am happy they said car loan has not been given to them. If the car loan has not been given, certainly, it has already been budgeted. Each of them as senator is going to have a car and these cars are for their official functions. Why do they need separate cars as committee chairmen?
Unfortunately, they have so multiplied the committees that almost every senator is now a committee chairman. That means every senator is going to have an additional SUV to his official car, presumably for his committee membership. It’s an unnecessary luxury. The reason they gave them official car is for their oversight functions. Besides, most of the committee assignments are within the premises of the National Assembly or at least within Abuja. And whenever they want to travel out of Abuja, they make special provision for their traveling whether it is by air or whatever means. So, I don’t see any reason why each senator needs an additional SUV. It is the most luxurious cars they are trying to get for this committee assignment. They are oblivious to the fact that Nigerians are poor. Most Nigerians don’t have the means to eat three good meals daily. The take home of each senator is going to be in the neighborhood of about 200-and-something thousand dollars per annum. Can you justify that with the kind of economy we have in the country today? Who are they making laws for? Shouldn’t they look at the people they are making the law for?
The lawmakers are insisting that the executive cannot regulate the way they spend their budget because the legislature is a separate arm of government. As a former senator, do you share this sentiment?
We have only one government and there is only one man at the helms of the affairs of the country and that is President Buhari. So, the three arms of government do not constitute three governments. This is where we have to put Buhari to test about his so-called promises that he is going to fight corruption. If he cannot control what legislators are doing, and allows them to live like billionaires while the rest of the country is wallowing in poverty, then what kind of president do we have? They are in the same party, and the ruling party has a clear majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. So, if the president cannot control the legislators, if he cannot make them dance to his economic programme, if he cannot make them abide by his philosophy of governance, then all his promises to the nation are in vain because he cannot alone fulfill all the promises. It was assumed that the President would have the support of the legislators when he was making those promises. If now he does not have the support of the legislators, it means all his promises are hollow promises to deceive Nigerians. I remember before his election, he promised that one dollar would exchange for one naira. Today, we all can see that one dollar is N280. He also promised that once he got there, we would buy petrol for N40 per litre. Why should we be buying petrol for N85. 50k per litre? If the President does not agree with what they have passed as appropriation budget, he can refuse to sign it. Even Obama refuses to sign the budget when he doesn’t agree.
Can’t they veto it if the president refuses to sign?
They need 2/3 majority to veto the president. And if they have 2/3 majority, it shows clearly the legislators are not swimming along with him in the same current, it means we don’t have a government, it means Nigerians have made a tragic mistake electing Buhari thinking that they were electing a government, it means Buhari is not heading a government; he is just there as one man talking for himself. He is not talking for his party; he is not talking for the legislature. A president is not just there talking for himself. If he cannot carry his party along, that means there is no government in Nigeria.
In your own time, were you not given official cars?
Each of us had only one official car. We didn’t have cars for committee chairmen. We were all given Peugeot 406 as our official cars, except the senate president. In fact, initially, we were given 504 but later they upgraded it to 406 about our third year. It’s just that we have a very docile electorate. In a different country, people will stone them, if they ride those cars to their constituencies.
You have heard about the involvement of two elder statesmen, Alhanji Tanko Yakassai and Chief Olu Falae, in the sharing of $2.1 billion arms money. What does this portend for the leadership of this country?
If it is true that Falae got a N100 million to campaign for Jonathan, that is less than expected. But I will say that is not unusual given Nigerian politics. I have always said it that our political class is rotten. I have been saying this since the beginning of this Fourth Republic. Obasanjo promised to fight corruption but his regime became more corrupt than the previous one. So, it will be hypocritical to say that corruption started with Jonathan. I was one of the critics of the Jonathan administration for failure to fight corruption. I began to support him when he changed his mind on the issue of national conference because this was what we had been fighting for more than three decades. We felt that if he can have national conference and effect restructuring of the country, it will solve even the problem of corruption. That was one of the reasons I went out of my way to support him for the presidency but I criticized him for failing to fight corruption. I will only be convinced that Buhari is fighting corruption when he throws one, two or three people into jail for corruption. It is not enough to ask corrupt people to return part of their loots to the government and allow them to go and be spending the rest. If that is the way to fight corruption, then it is profitable to be corrupt. And that means you have to steal big because you know you are going to pay the judges to get off the hook.
If elder statesmen like Falae and Yakassai are found to be involved in this kind of scandal, then who is going to reinvent our value system?
I have always said, there is no hope with the present political class. APC and PDP are one and the same. I think you have also read that Jafari Isa, former governor of Kaduna State, equally got $2million from this Dasukigate money and he is one of the closest people to Buhari. So, where do we start from? The problem is that most of the people whose names are being bandied around are anti-Buhari. There are some supporters of Buhari who are even more enmeshed in this corruption saga than those being prosecuted. Our political class is corrupt and rotten. We need the young men; we need a new generation of people to come into politics with determination to change the whole system. The system must be changed because corruption has become systemic. From the way parties are formed, the way candidates are nominated to the way elections are conducted, everything is embedded in corruption. When people emerge through that kind of process, they are bound to be corrupt. In the First Republic, we had decent political parties and we had committed leaders who wanted to serve Nigeria and they devoted their lives to serving Nigeria. Leaders of the Action Group, NCNC, NPC, may have different political disagreements, but they were all committed to serve. They served the people throughout the First Republic until the army intervened in our body politics. It was the army intervention that derailed the whole political system. It particularly started when Babangida banned all politicians calling for the new breed. That, in fact, was what ruined Nigeria, because he wanted to be president, he wanted new politicians that he could fund. This is where monetization of Nigerian politics started. From that point on, politics became monetized.
It means you elders have failed the nation. Not so?
Yes, the elders have failed you; the elders are now running a corrupt system, a system that is going to grind Nigeria to a halt. There should be enough young people now who are well motivated to say this is not the country we have in mind, we don’t want this kind of leadership. In every country, it takes some young, determined men to lead a radical change in the society. This is where a radical change is needed. Fortunately, the youths are in the majority. I am not talking of a revolution by guns but revolution by ideas. We need a revolutionary movement of young people determined to overthrow the old established rotten class to establish a new order where we can have proper political parties based on principles. Of course, the path to such a change is not easy, but it is the only rewarding thing to do today. We must change the present lack of value. If you are honest, you can’t make it to office. That is not a mark of a decent society.
Can you dare Buhari to expose you, if he has any evidence of corruption against you?
I am sure if he has any evidence, he would have exposed me already because I am one of his critics. I didn’t support him and I didn’t hide it. I even took out a full page advertisement against him. So, if he has any evidence against me, nobody needs to beg him to bring it out.
You took a front position in the last national conference and by the time the confab wound up, many people were beginning to suspect that delegates were adequately mobilized to campaign for Jonathan. What is your take on this?
The APC mounted a lot of propaganda against the confab. The National Conference consisted of a cross-section of Nigerians. You think all of us could be mobilized to campaign for Jonathan? Up till the time I was made the Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee for the National Conference, I was one of the leading critics of Jonathan. I never met Jonathan face to face before he appointed me the chairman of that committee, but I was very trenchant on the demand for national conference. I was never a pro-Jonathan man, but when he finally succumbed to the pressure to organize a conference, many of us felt the need to support him because the APC said it did not believe in the national conference, Buhari said he did not believe in the conference.
What in your opinion accounts for the sudden resurgence of agitation for Biafara?
Buhari is trying to make the situation of the country worse. We have taken a look at 36 key political appointments made by Buhari as at the end of September 2015. Of these 36, 25 were from the North, 11 from the South. You can see the disproportionate tendency. The North had more than two times of what the South had. Out of the 11 that went to the South, the Southwest had five, the South- South had 4 and the Southeast had only two. If you were from the Southeast, you would not be happy. Yet, we want them to be contented as Nigerians. In a similar manner, we looked at all the permanent secretaries that Buhari appointed. Again, by coincidence, he has appointed 36 new permanent secretaries. Of these new permanent secretaries, 21 are from the North and 15 from the South. How do you justify this? I am sure a lot of people from the Southwest are seeing this but because they supported him as their candidate, they could not complain. If the Southwest can swallow, do we expect the Southeast to swallow it too? If only Buhari will implement resolution of the national confab, a lot of these problems would be solved.
Are you saying the agitation for Biafra is a reaction to the marginalization of the Southeast?
I haven’t talked with them but it is my guess that it is a reaction to it. It is easy to guess that this is their reaction to it. Buhari carries a tag of a Fulani ethnocentric and that is why he cannot make a good Nigerian leader. Even when he was military head of state, his second in command was Idiagbon. Idiagbon was also a Fulani man. So, it was the first time we had a ruler from the North both Fulanis. When you also look at what Buhari did to politicians in the Second Republic, when he detained them, I don’t think it is arguable that he is ethnocentric. By all standards, the five governors of the UPN performed best in terms of free education programme, free health programme, integrated rural development, and so on. They were the most efficient governors even though they were not part of the ruling party at the centre. In spite of their limited resources, they were the most efficient governors. I was part of Onabanjo’s administration in Ogun State and I know what we did. But in spite of this, we were the most persecuted, the most imprisoned for the longest number of years. A lot of NPN governors and ministers were just detained just to say that he detained everybody. He made sure that very little happened to them. Again, when he was Chairman of PTF, we saw the distribution of resources under him. His hands were not clean under the PTF.
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