By Daniel Kanu
At 92, elder statesman, Dr. Umah Eleazu, has seen it all having also been a presidential aspirant.
The political scientist and policy analyst in this exclusive chat with Sunday Sun frowned at the way Nigeria is blindly walking on the cliff as if there is no solution.
He said if there is leadership sincerity, Nigeria can easily be restructured within three months with all critical issues addressed.
Elder Eleazu also spoke on the Igbo marginalisation, how a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction can emerge in 2023 and the poor handling of the #EndSARS panel report by the Lagos State government, among other national issues. Excerpt:
At last, the court has declared some groups including Boko Haram as terrorist organisations. Do you expect that anything will change in terms of rules of engagement in attack?
Boko Haram has always been a terrorist organisation; theoretically declaring them a terrorist organisation gives the government and other governments a different approach to those two organisations (Yan Bindiga Group and the Yan Ta’adda Group). In other words, from an international point of view and also from the point of view of our own government, they are not just looking at them as criminals, but as people who are terrorists, which I think in the language of international politics will be treated differently. For instance, now M.I.5, M.I.6 will now watch them, their finances, the flow of money to them, the American government will also be watching them, so making them a terrorist organisation helps the other countries to become aware, more critical of that group and put them on their security surveillance.
What is your take on the latest development on the #EndSARS panel report where the Lagos State government is kicking against most of the recommendations?
I think a lot of things have gone wrong in the handling of the report. First of all, I think the governor did well in setting up the panel because when this type of thing happens and you set up a fact-finding not a judicial commission of Inquiry, it was a fact-finding panel, and then when they finish they submit their report to the authorities that appointed them. The authorities will now decide what to do with the facts (quote and unquote) that the commission found. So for me, that is what the government tried to do. I have not seen a text of the white paper, but what was reported in the newspapers (I always prefer reading the newspapers because most times what you get from the social media may not be true and this is not common with the newspaper). What I read from the papers if I am correct is that in the report, the Lagos State government accepted 11 out of the 32 recommendations made by the panel, rejected one outright, agreed on six with modifications, while they said 14, fell outside its powers and would be referred to the Federal Government for consideration. I don’t think it was in the place of the Lagos State government to reject the facts that the commission said they found. It now breeds a kind of distrust on the whole thing that the commission did. If you reject one of the facts and you say it’s not a fact then how do we believe other “facts”? If I were in the position of advising the governor, he would not have treated the issue the way he did. They are simply messing the report up the way they are going.
The Southeast zone is already warming up for the 2023 presidency, former Senate President Pius Anyim and some others have indicated interest. Does the Southeast have a chance in 2023?
Well, there are so many things being said in the press. The law as of now in the process of selection is that political parties nominate their candidates; it is not ethnic groups, ethnic nationalities, or states that nominate candidates. The people who nominate candidates and process them to give to INEC are political parties, so all the people who want to run for president have to go through one political party or the other. The only thing we can do as people of the Southeast is to look at those who are emerging from the parties and decide who we want to support, who the majority of Southeast will support. Having said that, you also know that it is not likely that everybody in the Southeast will agree to support only one candidate, so the field is still open to various political parties recognised by INEC to look for candidates from the Southeast. All the other people who are shouting and making noise are to put pressure on the political parties to nominate candidates from the Southeast. The Southeast as such, it doesn’t matter how many organisations they float and shout and write on, if the man they want is not in a political party known to INEC he is not going anywhere. So, what the Southeast needs now is to strategise to ensure that their candidates emerge through a political party. It is after then you begin to talk about the feasibility of 2023. it is better to do first thing first by ensuring that they emerge from the political parties that will give them the advantage; let’s cross that hurdle first.
There is this issue of marginalisation that the Southeast has continued to raise. Some believe that the issue has been addressed by the President Buhari-led All Progressives Congress government…?
(Cuts in) The issue of marginalisation has been over-flogged; everybody knows that the Southeast is badly marginalized. President Buhari knows that, former President Obasanjo knows that and many others know it and they have written papers and papers on how Ndigbo have been marginalized in the scheme of things. That is no longer contestable; it is no longer in the argument now. What people are talking about now is: how does the rest of the country ameliorate this issue of marginalisation? People have talked a lot about it that as the election is coming zone presidency to them (Southeast), that is one way and if you are thinking about election inclusion in the appointment of people into posts/positions, that is another thing. Inclusion in the putting of projects that the government is spending money on is another way. Look at the issue of the gas line that they are doing and the gas is coming from the Southeast and you create a gas line that bypasses the whole of the Southeast. You refuse to include them, no. As far as I am concerned, I am no longer crying about marginalisation because we have been marginalized to an extent that the angels are even weeping, so what we are talking about now is that: what does the Nigerian state do to show us that we are still part of this Nigeria? And if they don’t want to do anything about it they should let us go quietly no fighting. If they have not marginalized the Southeast Nnamdi Kanu would not have been a phenomenon. Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB are just a reflection of the level of marginalisation in the Southeast. And whatever they are saying at the bottom line is true. What people may disagree with them, people like us is the method that they are using because I don’t think that their method will achieve what we want. But as for what they are saying about marginalisation they are 100 per cent correct. That is why we the elders now in Alaigbo are asking the president to please give us or send our son (Nnamdi Kanu) back, let’s sit down and sort ourselves out in our home. What they want to do let them do, if they don’t want, we keep on developing our place and remove all the dead woods and all the people they have hoisted upon us. We are capable of selecting credible leaders from each of the five states in the Southeast, not people who kowtow and backbite and stab other Igbo people at the back, no. We the elders want to take back Alaigbo and decide what will happen there if only the Nigerian state through Buhari will agree. It was backed from the message that we have done and said: release Nnamdi Kanu unconditionally and we sit down and talk about our problems in our own area. Any other zone that feels they want to go and sit down and talk about their own problem can do the same thing. We have talked about restructuring they disagreed. We have talked about division and separation of powers they said no. States say okay, let us talk about fiscal federalism they say no, what do they want us to do? You go to court they postpone cases. Look at Rivers State governor, Wike, wants to collect VAT; Lagos State wants to collect VAT, these are issues of fiscal federalism and they are now delaying it in the court because they know that those two governors are correct in what they are asking for. You can see that government no longer wants to talk about it anymore. And that is why we said, let us all sit down and restructure this country and there are four or five levels of restructuring that we can do in three months and everything will settle down in Nigeria. Number one: Restructure the geopolitical structure by looking at various zones and groups displaced under them. That can really be done by amending I think Section 2 or 4 of the constitution. Number 2: Restructure the fiscal structure that we have now, that can be done also in about two or three months. You sit down and bring out the whole issue of the Exclusive Legislative List and we know what the Residual is for the zones because once you create zones and they become the federating units anything, not in the legislative residual to the zones and to the states, it will be left to each zone to decide whether they want to keep the six states or five states or just divide it into provinces, whether they want to keep states and local governments because the more centres of power that you create the more expensive it becomes to run the system. I have said in an earlier interview and in some of my articles: if, for instance, you have a governor who has 17 local governments, 17 commissioners, 17 local government chairmen, and then you have to give each one of them a four-wheel drive every year, can you imagine how much money spent only on cars? No wonder some of them can’t even pay teachers and in my own state (Abia) the governor is saying that the woman who delivers a child in a health centre will get N500. Can you imagine that? The next one is the electoral system. Each zone should manage its own election. All we need to do after all this is to sit down revisit our constitution and provide that constitution the condition under which any zone that feels aggrieved and does not want to continue to be part of Nigeria can opt out. The same thing is written in the constitution of the European Union (EU) the reason issue like BREXIT was possible and even in the Act of Union of United Kingdom (UK) they wrote in something like that, that is why Scotland wanted to go, Wales wanted to go. You just don’t keep people together who don’t want to live together and if you are living together then there must be some complimentality of benefits. If the complimentality of benefits no longer exists and we are together killing each other it is better to separate. For me, as I am today, I will rather have a small country that is well developed, where people are free and there is law and order and there is the opportunity for people to use their energy to contribute to the public good. I think Abia State alone can stand by itself, I don’t know if it’s not even bigger than Rwanda and we get our own president, do our own thing the way we want to do it, and set our own standards, run our universities. It is better than putting these over 200 million people together and you call them the giant of Africa that cannot wake up from sleep. And this giant has been for donkey years and we are not able to achieve anything tangible.