Gyang Bere, Jos
General Jonathan Temlong is the first Commander of the Multi-National Joint Task Force in the Northeast, constituted to fight insecurity in the region. The retired Army General who contested the 2019 governorship election in Plateau State said that President Muhammadu Buhari has a herculean task of saving the country from disintegration due to multi-dimensional security challenges. He said every part of Nigeria should be seen, respected and treated equally, particularly on the zoning of the presidency.
Temlong advocated that the Southeast, North-central and Northeast should be given equal opportunity to produce the president just like the Southwest, South-south and Northwest have produced.
Nigeria is marking 20 years of uninterrupted democracy, is there anything to celebrate?
Unfortunately, we don’t have anything to celebrate in terms of democracy, we can celebrate the fact that we are still one country and some of us are still alive to talk and celebrating God for giving us the grace to remain as one. But in terms of democracy, I think what we are witnessing progressively is deteriorating from what democratic norms are all over the world. Democratic governance stands on certain key pillars, there must be constitutional limit on government, the law must be available to everybody, there must be equality before the law, that is why the lady that holds the scale and the sword of justice is blind folded because the law does not respect anybody. Some of the pillars of democratic governance is that it allows people to have an orderly change of government through a democratic process; that means people subjecting themselves to the electorate and their votes counting through the ballot box. Also, the rule of law is paramount in a democracy, some of these things mentioned are probably absent in Nigeria. It is rather unfortunate when you hear Nigerians telling you that dividends of democracy are when they construct a road to my village, or provide drinking water to my locality, then we see it as dividend of democracy.
Some people have attributed the lack of democratic growth in Nigeria to the several interruptions of military rule?
Even if you gave birth to a child 20 years ago, he would have started voting two years ago. The idea for us to continue to shift our blames to the interruption does not hold water, the value system that we have put for ourselves are negative, they are not values that are respected worldwide. For instance, the god of money is worshipped in Nigeria, here you see the struggle for money to the extent that it beats the imagination of everybody because there is no morality, there is no honour and integrity in the way people get money. Once you get money through any means, nobody cares to know your source of income, you become an opinion moulder in the society, you are worshipped, you become automatically a leader, so you have crooks and criminals parading themselves as leaders. That is why the business of kidnapping has become multi-million naira industry. In those days, when we were growing up, once they say you are a thief, you don’t move freely within the society again or if they say you have a parent who is a thief, you are finished because even your colleagues will be laughing at you because if you buy something they will say it is from stolen money. Today, thieves are celebrated, just look at the way when people are arraigned before the courts for fraud, they come to pose for photo-shooting in the court instead of hiding themselves in shame. This is because they know how to manipulate themselves out, the value system has been turned outside down, it’s so pathetic, and you see the blame game, we will continue to blame. Initially we were blaming the colonial masters, now we are blaming the military, who will we blame next because we have been in civilian rule uninterruptedly for 20 years now?
If you look at even in the civilian rule, it is still the retired Generals that are still our presidents and other retired military officers as governors and senators dominating the political scene, don’t you think that is an extension of military rule?
No, if you look at it in the history of America until very recently, if you have gone to their Congress and the executives you would have found out that most of the American presidents are retired military personnel. Some Generals were deliberately brought to come and become president at the trial moment of American history. When you reach certain level in the military, statecraft becomes part of you because the military as it were is an instrument of state policy, everything the military is doing, is for the state, only that the military culture shades off some of the bureaucracy the civil society has and it is hierarchical, it allows you to carry things in an orderly fashion because the situation in the war front is so dangerous that any uncertainty can come at anytime and a small mistake that you make can cause you lives and cause your country what you are fighting for. That is why the military believes in strict discipline, but it has rules and regulations. So, it is easier for a military man to deal with regulations in the civilian sector because they are not as straightjacketed as in the military. The problems are numerous and the system itself on how you procure leadership is faulty and that brings us to the issue of money being worshipped because it is all about money being used in the political process to procure leadership. Also, the political parties themselves are so weak and very corrupt, especially if you go down to the local level and see those who are in charge of political leadership, they are the ones who invariably elect leaders for you, they cannot go above their standard.
You talked about the American system where retired military personnel are called to govern during trial moments of the country, but in Nigeria, we had ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999-2007 and today we have President Muhammadu Buhari from 2015-date and if you look at the rate of insecurity during the periods up to now, it is getting worse, does it mean that they don’t have the capability to serve?
I tell you there are so many problems, part of it will be political will. Now, you are dealing with a political system, I talk to you about the citizens, they cannot rise above their level and it is from the same citizens with the same values that they have now that you are recruiting people into the Armed Forces, the army, the police and other security services, yet that system is supposed to break you from a civilian into a discipline personnel, but there is much you can do in that environment. The important thing I mentioned, political will, is because what is happening progressively is that we are politicizing crime, there is absence of sanction for crime. Today, people pass into law, to say, banditry will attract death penalty, armed robbery is supposed to attract death penalty too, since it started have we achieved that? Can you enforce that law? Are are supposed to pass laws that we cannot enforce? We need to build the capacity of the law enforcement agency to enforce those laws, but as it is now, the police don’t have the capacity to enforce some of these laws that have been passed from various Houses of Assembly even at the national level, so we need to call a spade a spade, call crime with its name and punish crime the way it is supposed to be punished, the only people who are exonerated are people with immunity, or under-aged children who are involved in those crime.
President Muhammadu Buhari has been re-elected for another four years, which area of the economy do you want him to focus more?
I think the most important problem that he has now is to save the country from disintegration from the basis of having insecurity, seriously. The spate of insecurity is getting out of hand, you know it’s better even here in Jos, who enters his house and rooms again like before, even on your bed you have your heart in your hand. Last Sunday, my Reverend was announcing it in the church that a family will have a fence, gate, security guard and even a dog, but armed robbers came in, neatly removed a burglary bar and went in, even with those security measures that they have put in place as individuals, those things didn’t deter them and they were robbed. God so kind they went for robbery, they didn’t do any other thing, they didn’t kidnap or rape anybody in the house, so we thank God.
On this issue of insecurity, with kidnapping, banditry, Boko Haram and herdsmen killings that are going on in the country, don’t you think these are capable of disintegrating the country?
Why not, when you cannot exercise control over an area, you are no more in control, when you cannot exercise governance…how many of those governors in Zamfara, Katsina can move freely in their states, you cannot say they are in control. If you cannot walk freely to any part of your state it means you are not exercising governance in those areas, so it means effectively those areas are not in your hands. It is when you are able to exercise authority in your area that you can say you are in control, those are very serious problems. At a time in this country before this president came in, there were so many local governments that were not under the control of the Nigerian government, they were under Shakau until President Buhari was able to roll them back, but if now that you say you have rolled them back, do you have freedom of action in those areas? We need a comprehensive approach to the security problems in this country, an approach that would be citizen-centred. Unfortunately, I was one of those who designed the defense policy that President Buhari signed into law in 2017, but honestly, I am at a loss now whether the president is implementing that policy.
Are you optimistic that if the report is implemented it will get the country out of the present security quagmire?
Definitely, it will help the security in dealing with the situation. What you are dealing with now is asymmetric or irregular, people who will work with you or sit-down with you in the same joint, watching you preparing all these things, how do you know them, they are with you, they don’t wear uniforms, they speak your language. You need a situation where the citizens will be trained to have the capacity to be able to recognize people whose behaviours are ungodly, who have criminal tendencies, people who are living within a community and do not have any visible means of livelihood, and they are living life over and above there supposedly income or status, those are people that must be closely monitored. But today, if these people go to a joint and declare free drinks you will see people worshipping them in their, they will be given new names, you will see people coming around them and nobody cares to know how these people made their money.
This bring us to the issue of fight against corruption by President Buhari in the last four years, did he really fought corruption?
That is a very difficult question because…I am not saying it is difficult to answer, but to be sincere with you, we have not gone anywhere with fighting corruption. You see corruption, we have to start fighting it from the individuals first, we have not blocked the sources of these funds, it is still business as usual. You hear budgets being announced, how much have been expended on, capital, on recurrent, but we have not seen anything on ground to justify what has been done.
There is this heated debate going on now on which geopolitical zone should produce the president in 2023, which zone do you think the presidency should be zoned to for fairness, equity and justice?
If the votes count, if our elected leaders are accountable to us, that question will not come because it will be the people who will decide, but unfortunately, it is money, money, money. We have said it here that the moment they get into office, they want to recoup for tomorrow. That is why they want somebody who will give them soft landing because they have done so much damage to the system in recouping. In Nigeria, it will mean nothing to me who the president is provided that he is there to serve, to live by his oath of office. Sometimes, when I see people taking the oath of office and holding the Holy books, I shed tears because they are not sincere, go and read the content of those oaths, they are so frightening and yet people just think it is a normal jamboree, they will stand accountable before God if they are not standing accountable before people. People laugh and get excited when taking these oaths, I think we should go for that oath-taking ceremony being humble knowing that you are going to take some serious decisions and it’s an oath that you are going to stand accountable before God and people.