Daniel Kanu
Prof Sheriff Folarin, head of Department, Political Science and International Relations, is first an activist, cerebral scholar, researcher, and writer of international repute who has won many awards in academics, including US Commanding General’s Award for Excellence, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, lecturer of the year, Covenant University (2007), 2014 Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Host-Scholar, best graduating student in History award (University of Ibadan 1997), Oba Lipede Prize in History for Best undergraduate (1994). He is passionate about building a great Nigeria, but is disappointed at the situation so far in this encounter with Sunday Sun.
As a Professor of History and International Politics what are some of your random thoughts, especially reservations about Nigeria?
It is a catalogue of reservations, call it worries; it is indeed a plethora of challenges that make me begin to lose faith gradually in the Nigerian project. You see, we were initially managing our economic situation, you remember in the 1990s, but that collapsed totally and we now began to have eruption of security challenges and a potpourri of one form of crime or the other particularly, we started with Boko Haram terrorism which some people prefer to call Islamic insurgency and that took away so many things from Nigeria, apart from taking away peoples’ lives, taking away their livelihood, taking away the peace of the people, it took away our image, our prestige, our reputation, that took away a lot from Nigeria that smaller countries like Chad, Cameroun, Benin Republic, Niger Republic, etc will be coming to our aid, they are now claiming that if not for them Nigeria wouldn’t be what it has always been. That is a major worry but then we were still trying to manage that under the President Jonathan administration when we began to have very serious series of ethnic militia and the ethnic militia thing has now been overshadowed by the Fulani herdsmen crime, violence, and attacks here and there. And this one is a very serious because… you know that Nigerians are people who always want to be happy, they want to be free, they want to relax and enjoy themselves in the evening after work, and they want to be in an enjoyment spot, but today it’s sad what we are witnessing. Over time now the government has not been able to tackle security situation headlong, so the insecurity has permeated the nooks and corners of Nigeria that we are now sitting on a keg of gunpowder. This is the most worrisome part of it, now you find that they are operating not just in their core Zamfara, Katsina, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Gombe or just in the Northeast, North-central or Northwest, but they are now operating right here in the Southwest and indeed in the South-south while the Southeast is not exempted. So, the Fulani herdsmen challenge is a major challenge and then we are now contending with kidnapping. This is one terror that is a stark reality to all of us. Remember that recently, a former minister’s son was kidnapped, it was in the papers the other day that a governor’s convoy was attacked, the way it is going I hope it doesn’t reach a point where a deputy governor or a governor will be kidnapped, and probably the vice president or president kidnapped someday, you think it’s impossible? The way we are going, something urgent needs to be done to arrest the situation because no one knows who is next. That is how bad it is and it is because of the fact that the security apparatus of Nigeria has been totally mismanaged, it’s not professionally handled and indeed not with discretion and the kind of lack of patriotism and focus of the so-called Security Chiefs because all of them are, sorry to say, just lining their pockets at the expense of Nigeria’s security stability and peace. Are we even talking about our roads that are very bad? Nigeria probably has the worst roads in Africa. I have been to a number of African nations; I don’t want to talk about the European, Asian and American nations I have been to. The world seems to be leaving us behind. Let’s just talk about the African nations, Nigeria has the worst roads in Africa, which is sad, we don’t have a reason for that given all that abound in our land. The federal roads are just death trap, in fact, each time I travel out and comes back I always imagine if we indeed have leaders piloting our affairs, we are not getting it right if the truth must be told. Aside from roads, social infrastructure, including education, health sector, the aviation industry are doing badly, but look at the state of our airports in terms of social infrastructure, etc many things seem to be really appalling, but if you go to small neighboring countries like Benin Republic, Togo, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Kenya, Uganda, etc (I have been opportune to be in all these countries) and you will be wondering: where is the oil revenue in Nigeria, you will be wondering in spite of all of the budget what is going on? More than N700 billion was assigned to road infrastructure; you will be wondering where is the money going? What is happening? So, these are the things basically about this country and I wonder, sorry I have not even mentioned electricity, the power sector, there is still darkness despite all that has been sunk into that sector. It is one blame game or the other, no cheering result, in fact, the worries are in a catalogue, plethora of challenges and this sincerely makes one’s spirit to be dampened, it kills one’s morale, makes the morale really low and you will be wondering whether Nigeria is ready at all to take off.
Where is the point of departure when we started getting it wrong?
It is really sad that Nigerians now say: in the old good days rather than saying: now is better than before. I believe the frequent changes of government or administration, accounted to a very large extent in what has happened to Nigeria. Let’s look at it from 1970, you know after the civil war things started getting very stabilized in terms of putting infrastructure together. We have gotten the oil money and we had so much that we didn’t even know how to spend it or what to use the money for, but good enough, we were able to pump the money into power, into infrastructure, into schools, into our health facilities and infrastructure, etc, we had probably the best infrastructure in terms of medical having one of the best in Africa in the 70s with the UCH, and long we had the OAUTH, then University of Ife teaching hospital, we had the UNN teaching hospital and the rest of them. Now, we also had LUTH, so we were growing, we had the best airline in Africa; things were getting better by the day, now the point of departure: as one government comes with a lot of animosity against the one it’s taking over from, whether military or civilian, it just abandoned all of the projects the others started. You know there was this era of abandoned projects all over and you will begin to imagine what is wrong, the Ajaokuta Steel mill is there abandoned, a lot of road infrastructure abandoned, bridges abandoned, and factories. Some were completed like the Nigerian Grains Board and some marketing boards etc. We saw one government coming and saying: this is not their vision, that they don’t want it that way, they say let’s continue to import rice etc. My father was a zonal accountant in the Grains Board in the North Central then and I can recall we were eating rice that was better than Uncle Bens Rice that we were importing, but the government then came and scrapped it and established Agro Miller and that prepared the death for the production of rice in Nigeria. So, that problem of one government coming in and changing everything started by the previous government even when it’s a good initiative was wrong and part of what we are suffering today. Once a junta kicks out another one, he changes everything, it is sometime probably military school animosity that they had or a kind of rivalry that has been there. Look at the case of Vatsa and Babangida and how Babangida was able to overcome Vatsa and he eventually ensured that Vatsa tasted the wires, he was executed. Now you can imagine if Vatsa had succeeded in that coup, you can imagine what he would have done to Babangida’s legacies whether for good or for bad. That may have perhaps been the end of all the multi-billion dollar projects that administration was putting in place. So, that is a major problem, animosity. We are in this era of PDP and APC, APC is in power and they don’t feel that the PDP did well and they feel they should start afresh. But I think to an extent we can give President Buhari some percentage in terms of continuity. I have seen a number of things that he has continued, he didn’t abandon them: like the second Niger Bridge, for instance, which was started by President Jonathan, he did not abandon it, like the Central Bank Governor who was appointed by Jonathan, he allowed him to continue and even re-appointed him, at a point he sustained the security architecture that Jonathan had put in place when he took over, remember he left the Security Chiefs for some months before disposed of them and brought in his own. Some people would have disposed of them the very first day they took over. I wouldn’t know whether that is an art of smartness or otherwise, but somehow it provided a kind of continuity, but all in all there is myriads of challenges of the country, which are not moving. You will see that in the last few years the percentage of young people that want to leave the country has tripled from what it used to be in the 1990s and in early 2000, everybody wants to look for any means now to leave the country. People are not just looking towards the USA or the UK again, but now they want to go to Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa, they want to go to even Ghana, Kenya, Vietnam, etc, in places that were considered impossible before for Africans, Nigerians are there, even in Island, the only African there is a Nigerian, so things are really, not looking good.
What do you expect the government to be doing now if the danger that you observed confronting the country is to be averted?
First and foremost is it the government that is willing to take advice? Is it a government that is complicit in what is going on? If the government is complicit in what is going on in terms of security challenges then our advice will be a wasted one. However, let us pretend that government is neutral, let’s pretend that some things were already bad before this administration came in and then they are trying to tighten the nuts and all that, let’s pretend that they really mean well for Nigeria. What we simply ask is first and foremost; sack those security chiefs with immediate effect. The reason you must sack them is that when people stay for too long in a particular position they either get weakened or they get compromised or they get totally enthralled by the kinds of peck that comes from the office, and they are carried away by it and don’t care any longer. When they stay too long in a position, it’s either of two things: either they get weakened or they get stronger with more experience, but if the results are not showing that these ones are doing their job and that they are up to the task, what do you do? You give them the kick because they are no longer delivering. That is the first thing to do on the security situation. The second thing to address is that the president himself must show the will, he must show that he has a presidential will and that indeed he is a man of character, strength and indeed a general who has a pedigree of having served meritoriously in the army, who had fought in the civil war, who indeed was even the one that threw out the Chadian rebels that took over some parts of Borno in the 1980s, he has to show the will that indeed he is an anti-terrorist person, that he belongs to everybody and belongs to nobody, he has to make statements that are effective and must be followed to its letter, statements that are strong to show that he is a very strong-willed leader, to come out and condemn killings, to come out and give instructions like he has done recently that look: enough is enough, maybe give death sentence or execution or shooting on sight for anyone caught in the act of terrorism, kidnapping, he should work his talk. When the terrorists struck in the September 11, 2001 attack, you can see how George Bush Jnr, known to be a quiet, merry-go-round president, cracking jokes here and there, came out and said: it’s enough, that look; these ones are our enemies, that they have this premeditated idea to attack America, their sovereignty and people, but that they have resolved to fight it to the very end, that they either take justice to them or bring them to justice. This was an encouraging, stimulating address that gave hope to America and, of course, the terrorists themselves knew then that whichever hole they entered that they will be smoked out, that America will go after them. This is what the president should be doing and saying, but he is not doing that, he is not inspiring hope on Nigerians.
Has the nation’s decadence also entered the education sector, your area of primary assignment?
You know society is a system and no particular part of the system is insulated from the other components. The reason is that in a system all parts work together. The relationship between systems is contrapuntal, they work together, it’s like a sound system, and everything just connects for the good sound to be produced. So, the education system is not insulated from the rest of society. We have people who are coming in here with warped orientation either as a student or as a member of the staff except the school goes the extra mile like what we do here at Covenant University, to try to remold them, remold the character of such people and give them new orientation. Unless that sub-system tries to do that it will still be the same kind of people that will be in there. Remember, it is a town-gown relationship.