By Kenny Ashaka and Abdullahi Hassan
BISHOP of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Matthew Hassan Kukah in this exclusive interview with Sunday Sun scrutinized the much touted formation of a mega party in Nigeria and concluded that another Mega party was not the solution to Nigeria’s myriads of problems. He, therefore, called on those nursing the idea to concentrate on fixing what he called leaking roof rather than “build a new house.”
Kukah who served as a member of the Nigerian Investigation Commission on Human Rights Violations between 1999 and 2001 lamented that Nigeria was yet to achieve the desired democratic gains. According to him, we should be at the cruising level and actually talking about descent in terms of having sighted our destination, but that almost two years of the APC’s victory at the last elections, Nigeria was yet to gain altitude.
The Chief Shepherd of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, an expert on Peace Studies who was also chairman of the Ogoni-Shell Reconciliation Committee between 2007 and 2009 also spoke on the agitations of the IPOB, MASSOB and Niger Delta Avengers, noting that their struggles were legitimate as they are a measure of the frustrations with a government that was not making impact. He said President Muhammadu Buhari allowed his military reflex to cloud what he considered the fact that the agitations were taking place in a democracy. He tackled other national issues of interests like the president’s economic team and policies, the accusation of enunciating policies that favour the North among others.
Let me start this interview with the feeling in some circles that you have always criticized every government that has come to power in Nigeria, that you have not even spared those governments that appointed you to committee positions. Why is that so?
Well, if you say I criticize every government, I think it is something I should feel very proud of and I really appreciate it. And if that is the image people have, then it speaks to the issues, my personality and my convictions. I have loyalty to Nigeria, but I have no loyalty to any individual in terms of his position. And I will support anybody whom God has placed in a position to help to build our country. And if I sense that things are not going the way they should go, it is actually my duty as a priest and as a citizen to air out my views. But I also think it is important to understand and I think I feel very happy that despite the criticisms, successive Nigerian presidents and I think opinion moulders have felt that I have something to say. And I think anybody who wants to be fair will know that there is nothing I have said that was as a result of ill motive. I have never said that what I want done should be done, but I have an idea about what this country ought to be and should be. And I think everything I have had to say or two have always been in support of what I consider as the fundamental objectives of why Nigeria exists.
In that case, has this government any direction it is going as far as you are concerned because that is one of the criticisms against this government?
I don’t know, but I am sure that I have already expressed my views. Wherever it is this government is going… and I said it from day one that it has not given us a road map that we can all sign on to. There is a very clear feeling that policies are not being well digested, they are not very well coherent and the result is that the present predicament of the APC as a party suggests that our problems are huge.
What is the predicament of the APC?
The predicament of the APC is not something that is new to you. It is something that you yourself know. It cannot be possible that a party that came to power has not been able to weld the various tendencies together. You would say in a marriage, for example, that perhaps it’s just that God works the way He works, otherwise, the best marriage would have been that of brother and sister because they are from the same father and they know one another, from the same blood. But God brings two different people, different backgrounds and different convictions together and together a man and woman manage to melt their differences and hopefully build a family. For me, this is what politics is all about. And I am not being critical because there is nothing I am saying that is strange, even to them except those who wish APC the worst. If anybody were to come out now to say that all is well, I think that person himself will be the one who will look awkward. So, for me, that is the beginning of the problem; that the party has not been sufficiently able to hold together and it has in less than two years almost faced the kind of problem that it took PDP more than 10 years to be able to face.
I think it is relevant at this juncture since you talked about the policies of this government to hear your view. Some Nigerians are calling on the president to disband his economic team and look beyond his party and associates for competent, credible and inspired Nigerians that can help fix the economy of the country. Yet, others are saying the president is on the right track with his economic policies because to fix an economy that had been damaged for 16 years is not a tea party. What do you think?
Please stop this nonsense about the economy has gone bad for 16 years. We have never had any ideal period in this country. So, the idea that people are playing politics … unfortunately for…when I speak, small minded people begin to talk about PDP. Now, go through the records and read my speeches. I had the opportunity to address the PDP, not once, not twice. Go and read the things I had to say to them. It’s not about party. So when some Nigerians…of course, I am happy that even the president and the APC itself which ran into a ditch too early with all these obsession with the last 16 years, the last 16 years…for goodness sake, this country was there before PDP came and like I have said several times, it is the reason why PDP is no longer in power. You cannot continue to excuse your inefficiency by talking about the PDP. Nobody expects a miracle. As for the president’s economic team, where we are now is where the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria believes the kind of Nigeria he is leading should be. The people he has chosen, whether as people say he didn’t know them is not the issue. He has a team. He is responsible for team selection and as you know in a football match, the coach doesn’t play, but when the team loses, he takes the blame. So, I am not going to sit here and tell the president whom he should have put in his team. It is left for him. If he wants to bring all the members of his family, all his friends, pull out retired Generals, have a team that is made up of only men or women or Muslims or Christians, that is his prerogative. That is why he is elected as president. But he must squarely take full responsibility for what happens. So, it is left for the president to decide what kind of economic team he wants to set up. I am not in a position to make the point. But as you can see very clearly, even the most…I don’t want to use the word fanatical…even the greatest supporters of this government have been most eloquent in their criticism of the economic direction of this country. I don’t have a superior argument to make, but when I listen to…you can’t get better than the Emir of Kano in terms of convictions about this government, in terms of convictions about the principles of the APC, you can’t get…I don’t know; people like Obasanjo and all these other people who had their own convictions about where we were going. So, for me, it is that where we are, if this is where the president is convinced that we should be, well we elected him, we have to remain here. If he thinks there is something he needs to do to advance us to the next level, then it has to be the level that only he and his advisers understand. But I am not in a position to say that. You know we Nigerians always like to change.
I was really going to ask you what your recommendations would be to the president about the economy.
I cannot make recommendations about the Nigerian economy…
I asked this question because there are those who would say it is not enough to criticize, what is your recommendation? Why don’t you offer solutions?
I can offer solutions in areas I am competent in. I am not competent in economic matters because I don’t know how economy is run. But whatever may be the principles, whether they are Malthusian, Maxism, capitalism, whatever it is, I think the final summary of everything comes down to: is there food on the table? And the truth of the matter is that whatever it is that anybody may want to say there is no food on anybody’s table. There is no food on the tables of almost 80 percent of ordinary Nigerians. So, what this says about the economy, I don’t know.
Would no food on the table be the only indices to judge a government?
Well, let me tell you; if you go back and read Nelson Mandela’s speech at his inauguration, do you know among other things what Mandela promised the people of South Africa? Do you know what he promised them? Use salt as a metaphor. There is nothing…without food, there is nothing else that is important. And a government that does not make up its mind about how it wants to feed its people is heading towards a disaster. And I also appreciate that this government is trying to deal with those problems. But the aggregate of factors you need to bring together…it is possible to be hungry but to be hopeful. And this is where effective communication with people comes in and this is where applying the right metaphors becomes important. After all if there is no food on the table and a mother wants to get on with the business of cooking, she can put a pacifier in the mouth of a child. The pacifier doesn’t have milk, but it keeps the child a little bit quiet. You cannot be hungry and be facing the serious security issues that Nigerians face now. I have just come from Jos and have been in my village for the last two or three days. So, I have an idea about how people feel. The sentiments are not too different about how people feel insecure. It’s not different from what is going on in the North-East. Zamfara is in my state, I mean it is in my Diocese. I know what people have gone through. So I know the business of government may not necessarily be to provide security for everybody, but I think the issues are huge and it’s a question of picking the battles and ensuring that we don’t necessarily get distracted. Government is not going to feed everybody, but the truth of the matter is that there is a lot that needs to be done to inspire confidence in people and to keep people hopeful.
It’s like you believe this government has so far failed the people. Would that be right?
I don’t know about failing. I am not one of those people saying that government has failed. No; no government fails. That is why I have very little respect for people who become so obsessed with the past. Jonathan, Yar’Adua, Abacha, everybody made a contribution. And if you cannot separate a few issues that people did well that you can build on…I am sure this government has realized the disadvantage of an obsession with the past. So, for me, it is not a question of a government failing, but it is to realize that no government, as it were, passes; every government is an effort. There are things this government will do well; another may do well in security, but in the overall objectives, a government has to continue with certain principles that its predecessors may have done pretty well. The government that doesn’t take advantage of that reality runs the risk of ending up where we have ended up now, where, like I said, the people of yesterday must be laughing. I mean I run into people who tell me you must be taunting us and I say what do you mean by taunting us? They say because the things you said last year for which you were savaged by the media, everything that you said have come to be. I wasn’t prophesying, but I think I have a little bit of an idea about how this country…I understand the history of this country, but I also understand a little bit about governance and the consequences of certain actions.
Can I have your thoughts on complaints from Nigerians about what some of them see as lack of respect for the rule of law by the executive branch of government?
There is a Public Complaint Commission and I am not the chairman of that commission. So if people have complaint, they should take their complaint there. But I think we must also come to terms with the reality and these are some of the consequences of military men being in power. They hold difficulty about developing democratic reflex. I say this about Obasanjo. They are all good people, but having spent 50 years or so of your life as a soldier, you can’t just wake up and become a democrat because you are holding a ballot paper. I think that this government has had the advantage of having a spectacular intellectual of the caliber of somebody like the vice-president. And ordinarily, there are many things that you can say legally that this government cannot afford to put its foot wrong. But it depends if it runs some of these things by those who understand. But there is still a lot left to be done to inspire confidence in the ordinary people in terms of respect for the judiciary, respect for due processes and so on and so forth. That is why I have said in an interview that I pray that Buhari will be the last Nigerian military man to govern Nigeria because we are just…personally, I am a bit sick and tired of the fact that we are not democratising. And if you are not democratising, you cannot develop because if you cannot manage diversities and differences of opinion in a country that is so diverse and full of extra-ordinarily brilliant people such as Nigeria, the president is not a Headmaster. There are people who understand the country better than a president. I am not talking of President Buhari. They are in the classes, villages and many places. You just hold office on behalf of other people in trust.
But we have countries that are doing well even with retired military men as presidents. Why should our country be different?
Like which country?
Like Burkina Fasso. There are other countries with former military men as heads of government.
Well, the other countries don’t have the Nigerian population. Other countries don’t have Muslims and Christians fighting every day; other countries are not weighed down by the distortions and contradictions of ethnicity and other cleavages; other countries are not depending only on oil; other countries have not produced a criminal class that focuses on just appropriating a single resource base; that you just have a group of bandits who have just come from one generation to another in the name of government. It’s one of the greatest tragedies in Nigeria.
Did you say bandits?
Oh, absolutely. Go back and look at the records and see. For me, I have said it several times; governance in Nigeria is, at best, a criminal enterprise. You cannot get away with the kind of things that people who govern Nigeria get away with. It’s not possible. It’s not possible where nobody has respect for accountability or transparency. Nobody believes they owe ordinary Nigerians anything. And it is actually a measure of the cumulative impact of this whole thing. That is why I would have preferred that rather than this government being obsessed with the last 16 years, it is to actually diagnose how this criminality got insulated in the system. Then you can understand why trying to fight corruption can be such an uphill task. And this is exactly the point I made at the beginning when I said to the president, listen, don’t focus on what you call probe and so on. Even if you are going to probe, you shouldn’t be talking about it in your first week in office. Focus on, first of all, mobilising the Army and giving this country a sense of direction. Focus and apply the little resources that we have to develop this country. In that way you will inspire confidence. Now, after almost two years, who is in prison? All the noise you had, is it not the case now that people whom we were told, who were paraded on television, some we were told about the billions they had stolen, aren’t they now preparing to run for office in 2019? Aren’t they laughing at you and the rest of us? Indeed, it is a measure of the failure of the Nigerian media that it forgets to bring back, to rewind and let us know where we are because after these two years, all the noise, all the chest beating, how many convictions have we got? Which of the criminals is in prison today? When some of us said listen, there are many ways of killing a cat; it doesn’t necessarily have to involve drowning. There are many ways. Now, some of the things we talked about are the things that probably are happening because all we are hearing, although we have not been told, is that people are returning money or have returned money.
That also leads me on to the next question. When some Nigerians look at some of the policies of this current government, they come out with the impression that the president is pro-North. The indices, they say, are there for all to see. They talk of appointments that are skewed in favour of the North; sponsorship of the search for oil in the Chad region, laying of 1,000 kilometres of pipeline from Niger to Kaduna, relocation of an institution from Lagos to
Zaria, among others. Are their thoughts misplaced?
They are not misplaced. There are really, really serious issues of concern about where this country is going. The hegemonic tendencies that are manifesting, whether it is in regional terms or religious terms, the evidence is there. And it is verifiable. But it is also important to note that this is not just about Northern Nigeria and Islam. It would be a mistake to spend so much time talking about the North and Islam because the most vulnerable people in this country today, may be Northern Nigeria. We are posting all the negative indices in every sense of the word in development, whether it is stunting or hunger, illiteracy. That’s the reality. So you cannot therefore correlate the nonsense about the North holding power with a distorted landscape that is Northern Nigeria, where we are flooding the streets of this country in almost every index. If you read the report about girl-child marriages, the North is responsible for about 65 to 70 percent of child marriages, not only in Nigeria, but across. So, these are the issues. But it would also be a mistake if you focus more on the North and don’t address the fact of where all these are coming from because if it were for the ordinary people of the North, then the monopoly of power in the last 50 years by the North would have made northerners rich. If you focus on religion, then Muslims would have been the richest people in this country. So it is a question of the manipulative fingers of this tiny group. Whoever they are, I don’t know. But clearly what is on ground now neither benefits the North nor does it benefit Islam and Nigeria. But people are genuinely, genuinely, genuinely disoriented as to the kind of feelings people had for this country and how those feelings are now. So, we are at the moment that is quite dangerous, to say the least. But I don’t want to reduce it to issues of Muslims and Christians and North. The issues are huge. If you are doing a pipeline from here to Niger and if you are buying your weapons from Pakistan and…you know, there are quite a few things that from the point of view of how people perceive certain realities that are troubling.
Concretely, do you consider President Buhari a sectional leader from these descriptions and all you have seen so far?
I don’t know what you mean by sectional. Again, like people say… you know, JF Kennedy appointed his brother Attorney General when he himself was president. People, probably were not too worried because he had the capacity to get the job done.
Castro just ended up now and handed over power to his brother. Bush, literally, finished and his son took over. Hilary Clinton would have taken over from her husband. So, intrinsically, there may be nothing wrong, but when you have a diverse country like this with a deluded landscape of poverty, then you have to figure out…the greatest challenge, to me, in Africa is how to manage diversity. How do you create a country or an environment where everybody has what you call…even the Constitution of Nigeria makes the point. Everyone has to have a sense of belonging. It doesn’t mean everybody will necessarily be in government. But if you are managing a country of this nature and you got votes not only from Christians, Muslims, men or women, it is a bit of a pity that we are having this conversation now. As I said, I convened a peace committee. With the kind of accolade that we received and Nigeria received after the elections, we have not been able to gain altitude. So, for me, we should be at cruising level and actually be talking about descent in terms of having sighted our destination. But after almost two years, I don’t see that we have gained altitude. If the APC doesn’t get its house in order and you start talking about creating new political parties and so on, don’t forget, the conflict we have in Nigeria is also largely manufactured by politicians because political loyalty has consequences. In a country where people just vote because a big man has said this; so a big man moves from this party today and he feels that all his supporters have to suddenly, overnight, after he has collected money from those in power, all his followers must now join that party. Those who stay behind are considered traitors. So, for me, the solution in Nigeria is not about creating a new party and I see people are getting excited about mega party or whatever. You cannot have a mega party that is better than the APC and different from the APC. So what is it that happened to the APC that will not happen to the mega party? And parties cannot become platforms for the realization of people’s ambitions. The very fact that you cannot be president today doesn’t mean that wherever you pitch your tent, if it begins to leak, instead of fixing the roof you want to go and build a new house.
Some people will say we are suffering the consequences of being ruled by the whims and caprices of the perception of what is good for the society by a single person or a tiny group of persons. Would you agree with that averment?
This is the reality of military dictatorship or any dictatorship for that matter. These are, again, the consequences of…if you want to analyse what is wrong with this country, keep Jonathan where he belongs, but also go back to the scene of the crime and ask yourself where did all this start from. Then you will discover that what was the logic of military coups and the logic of killing people for staging coups. It led to the institutionalization of banditry. Forget about what you may call the legitimacy of the military which arose from the fact that people stage coups successfully. A rape that leads to pregnancy doesn’t automatically legitimize the rape itself. And we refuse to name the notion that if you decide to stage a coup, you are not different from a bandit because those who stage coups just come to power by the barrel of the gun. And then if you stage a coup against a particular person that you didn’t like, you are staging a coup against Nigeria because the individual’s life became the life of Nigerians and Nigeria. Those who kill those who stage coups against them kill to preserve themselves. So, these are the consequences of what we are reading today. This is why the governors have not opened up to political space because until recently, they were holding tight to resources belonging to the local governments. I hear some governors saying we are not able to do something because we are security officers only in name. That you cannot control the police does not mean. What about the resources that you are controlling? So this obsession with one man rule, you are spot on. You are right. But these are the consequences of being under a military dictatorship over such a prolong period of time.
Could I have read your lips correctly if I say you mean we are under a dictatorship?
No, that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is…he is not a dictator. We are having people with dictatorial tendencies because of the inability to manage contrary opinions and the inability of government to deal with the voice of opposition which is a legitimate institution in a democracy. And I don’t like to talk about just an individual. It’s not about Buhari, it’s not about governor X, Y or Z. But you can see very clearly the governors, the National Assembly, tell me where we have any semblance of openness in terms of how resources are shared and distributed. Almost everybody in power in Nigeria is presiding over a distribution agency. He gives to whom he or she likes. It is this that spins the country into the convulsion. And this is why you often find the country, permanently, on the boil.
Are Nigerians really too much in a hurry like those in authority and their supporters are saying? They say in our haste and impatience, we forget that it took most developed countries about 100 to 200 years to get to where they are. Is that a correct reading of
Nigerians?
You used two words that actually don’t mean the same thing; authority and power. They are very important words and they have often cropped up in our conversations. But power and authority are not the same thing. You can have power without authority. And that was what military leaders had and that’s what people who stole elections had. They had power but they don’t have legitimacy. Legitimacy is another word for authority and it is that you have capacity and ability to command obedience. So when you use the word power and authority, they are not necessarily the same.
All the same, have we been impatient?
Well, I will say that Nigerians are very impatient people and we can take the conversation to a slightly different level. We are a people that are at best making personal sacrifices. We are impatient because we expect governors to do a miracle and we also have the illusion that the only solution to where we are now is change and then you change and discover that it is not exactly like that. And that’s why I repeat what I have said before that pastorally, the solution to a bad marriage is not a new marriage. The things are a bit more complicated. But I can understand where we are in Nigeria because of the disruptive nature of military rule and the consequences on the democratic process which is this intolerance of the opposition, the determination to win at all cost and the zealous disposition to holding power. Most of this is still largely the mindset. Don’t forget we have only been on this road for only half of the time the military took. So, yes they may be right to say that we are impatient and that it took others 200 years. That may be the case, but those who took 200 or 100 years had no internet, no highways, no aeroplanes and things were not the way they are now. There is a definite sense of urgency now. Even managing that urgency is important because again if you get back from work and you tell your wife you want to eat beans, you cannot eat beans in 30 minutes. But your wife will say to you, oga, beans will take about two hours o, can you manage gari for now; just find something to hold your hunger. You have opened a conversation. So, it is not enough to say that we are impatient because, you see, like the beggars in Northern Nigeria will tell you, largely the Muslim beggars, they tell if Friday is going to be good, you will see it on Wednesday. So if we have any evidence that tomorrow is looking promising, we should begin to see the foundation now. And I think this is where really I feel very sad about where we are now because we ought not to be on this road, given the coalition of goodwill, the motivation and the excitement. I mean most of the people that were excited about the Buhari project, yes there was excitement in Northern Nigeria, but the southern elite, young people in their 40s and so on who really had an idea and vision about where this country could be going to, now everybody is just looking because people have become so wary when the journey has not even started. So it is not about the fact that whether it is that we are impatient. I spend some of my time even at night when I want to relax I just go back to Youtube and watch JJ Okocha and his dribbling skills. I can’t wake up now and simply say I want to do the kind of things JJ Okocha did because it took a lot of energy and time and so on. So, it is important to know that yes, we admire this skill, but this is how it takes to get there. Nigerians will fall in line if they find somebody that believes in hard work, but also is able to mobilise them by using different strategies to say this is where we are going. We will be more than happy to make the sacrifice. But like you are saying now if you have the situation where people are complaining about the nepotistic tendencies in government and the overconcentration of power in the hands of particular elements and so on, psychologically, people will disconnect. And when they disconnect, discontentment fits in. This is what you may refer to as restlessness. But frankly, I have said this several times if we have the right policy decisions, we won’t be talking about Biafra, Niger Delta Avengers.
We have what I will prefer to describe as symptoms of a sick arrangement, talking about our distribution of powers which does not sufficiently motivate each constituent part of this country to make their contributions and derive benefits from it. Don’t you think we need to restructure in order to derive maximum benefit?
I wish I had…I read an article, actually it was two days ago in one of the national dailies, somebody who argued, quite persuasively, this whole idea that the North is producing nothing and it is taking everything from everybody. The good thing about the article is that it is written by a Yoruba man and he is a data expert. He was able to illustrate with statistics who is getting what and percentage wise, how people living in Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom, Rivers Ondo, Delta States should, literally, in every sense of the word live in paradise today That evidence and statistics are there, drawing from even just the 13 percent derivation. So, it’s not enough to talk about…I hear all these stories of we are producing the resources, therefore, we must…these people talking about producing, are they just putting bucket in a well and fetching the oil? How did this whole thing come about? Do you understand? I can understand how people feel now. But again, it is a measure of the frustration with this journey going nowhere, because if the people of the Niger Delta, some of whom voted out their son, President Jonathan, have gone back to the trenches now, what does that tell you? We have blown an opportunity. There is no doubt about it. The agitations of the people of the Niger Delta are legitimate and they will always be legitimate.
There is nothing wrong with your son telling you at the age of 10 he wants to start driving a car. Like I said, the agitations of the people of Niger Delta are legitimate. It’s a question of how you manage them. The president seems to have allowed his military reflex to cloud the fact that these agitations are taking place in a democracy. You cannot say in a democracy, you are using military solutions to deal with issues that are quite legitimate. If you ask the question what is criminal; what is legitimate and what is illegitimate? How should people process these resentments? And by now, I am convinced that many of these things wouldn’t have been totally resolved, but by different policy options such as…I mean, if the president meets Niger Delta people in Abuja, the pipelines are not being bombed in Abuja. For me, there are political strategies. Bush would have stayed where he was when September 11 happened. But if you remember, the defining moment for Bush as a president was by him going to Ground zero in New York. By chance, whoever directed him climbing that truck and taking this megaphone and placing his hand beside a fire man and addressing people, that was what changed his presidency because people had a sense of affinity and affection. So if you are going to resolve the issue of Niger Delta, it does not matter how many chiefs you called to Abuja and keep at the NICON Hilton. It doesn’t matter because these people are already privileged people. You have to find a way of talking to the people. They may be the ones who are out there. There is a language. So, for me, it’s a question of options, but government cannot continue to say you are going to resolve this issue and that it is a military thing. As long as government continues to see all these security issues in terms of guns and bullets, we are just going to continue reproducing different circles of resentment. This is because as you are turning on the volume of violence, you are also helping the small people to appreciate that ruling with guns cannot solve the problem.
But are you sincerely convinced that the current agitations by MASSOB, IPOB and the Niger
Delta Avengers are actually motivated by the same situation that gave rise to the unfortunate war almost 50 years ago?
Whatever may be the motive, if you are president, you must make sure that you have control…look, oga, if you got married today, you may be lucky, but if you are not that lucky, it could be you the husband or the wife. If you don’t manage your husband well, other girl friends are still hanging around there, in-laws, bad friends are still out there. If you don’t take care of your wife, other past boy friends are still there. So, it is that we can’t transfer these responsibilities to anybody. And I used to say this to Jonathan. You are not president of the safe part of Nigeria. You are not presiding over just the money in Abuja. You are presiding over even the most convoluted place whether dead bodies or fire is burning. You are not president of the peaceful part of Nigeria. Your business is to bring about peace. How you do it is the issue. But you are president of the troubled parts of Nigeria. So, it’s not about safety.
If people want to live in comfort, they shouldn’t be in the kitchen of power. This is my conviction. So you cannot solve this problem by remote control because if a president is distant from the scene of the crime…we are all human being. Under Pope John Paul 11, you can say people who had affinity and affection for the Catholic Church were, probably, over two billion. What do I mean? Muslims, non-Muslims, all kinds of people became interested in the Catholic Church because some saw the Pope. If they didn’t see the Pope, they saw somebody who saw the Pope. If they didn’t shake the Pope, they shook the hand of somebody who shook the Pope. That is what presidents need. No matter how bitter…I believe, for example that were the president to enter Anambra, Abia, Enugu, Ebonyi or Imo States today, he would not be received by the agitators, but that will be one way of blunting the cutting edge of these agitators because there is a vacuum that these people are exploiting. And if a government decides to outsource its responsibility, then it has to leave with the consequences. For me, these are the issues. You know…may be I better not go there.
From your analyses and conclusions about the Nigerian people, the economy and the people in government, would I be safe to say that Nigerians are worse of under this government?
I don’t want to focus on …I don’t know…Nigerians are…I don’t want to focus on that. There are a lot of good things this government has done.
Like what and what?
This government has at least dealt with the issue of Boko Haram to a level that is reasonable. This government has attempted to give everybody the impression that…and the president’s convictions are clear that it wants to fight corruption. We might disagree about strategy. My basic disagreement is in the very limited intellectual content in the fight against corruption and the limited perception and interpretation of what constitutes corruption and the lack of clear benchmarks of how might a corrupt free Nigeria look like. What are the ingredients? How do you really deal with this problem? To the extent that we have outsourced this responsibility and we just believe that Buhari is standing there and is just going to come and clean up this country. Look at where we are. Like I said to you, dealing with the issues of corruption…I repeat what I have said several times and at the risk of boredom that, philosophically, I don’t believe that we have gotten the diagnosis right because we are under the mistaken notion that the only thing you call corruption is stealing money. But if a man in authority gives jobs to members of his family or his friends, whatever the case may be, I don’t know what you call that. So, our inability to understand the multi-faceted nature of corruption and to deal with the issues of the consequences and the antecedents and what really leads to corruption…you can look at corruption as sociology, economics, politics, theology and so on, but the lack of this diagnostic area is what has brought us to where we are now. That’s why we have taken the economic angle, but also forgot fighting corruption as a legal option and in a democracy because people talked about we voted for Buhari because of what he did in 1984. But like I have said ok he might have done whatever he did in 1984, but what he did in 1984 has not been subjected to public scrutiny. What he did in 1984, did it make this country less corrupt? Or how is it now that those people who were rounded up and locked up are now back in the APC and PDP and they are actively in politics, despite having been sentenced to a hundred years.