Dr. Uma Eleazu is a man of many parts. He has made sterling contributions towards building the Nigeria nation. In 1976, he was appointed Director/Coordinator of the National Policy Development Centre (Think Tank), a post he held until the body was transformed into the present National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, Jos and became its pioneer director of research.
He was a member of the 1979 Constitution Drafting Committee as well as a member of the committee that drafted the present 1999 constitution. In 2006, he served in the committee set up by former President Olusegun Obasanjo to look into the constitution. He had also served as Executive Director of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and a former chairman of Petroleum Product Marketing Company (PPMC), a subsidiary of Nigerian national Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). In 1993, he ventured into politics and aspired to be the president on the platform of Social Democratic Party (SDP).
In an interview with Saturday Sun, Dr. Eleazu said Nigeria has failed and what remains is its fragmentation. He called for sovereign or national conference to halt this dangerous trend. He also revealed how the military forced what it wanted in the constitution by rejecting what the people actually wanted.
What is your view on the state of the nation?
It is like a ship in an ocean being tossed about by the waves and the captain and all the handlers of the ship appear to be in the drinking room not realising that the ship they are supposed to be piloting may capsize. This is the image of the nation I see in my mind today.
Where did we get it wrong?
It is a question of leadership. People who are in leadership positions must have a burden to help the nation. It is the burden that they have that will lead them to establish the kind of policies that could help the nation. We have problems on the leadership side. When people talk about leadership, it is a kind of amorphous term. It includes the people, who, for the time being, hold office. It includes the political party that put them in power. It includes all the people who have been appointed at various points in the course of policy making. It is not the reflection of the president alone. It is a reflection of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that is manipulating what is happening in Nigeria.
The leadership group in this country has not got it right and so the ship of state is being steered into turbulent waters. Those in government don’t even seem to accept that Nigeria is a failed state. The definition of a failed state is one in which the state no longer has the monopoly of the means of violence in the society. Nigeria does not have it. Boko Haram can decide to strike anytime, anywhere and the government appears unable to do anything about it. MEND can decide that they would block pipeline and they just do it and nothing happens. Other armed gangs are likely to come up and say we must revenge and nothing happens.
Gradually, you find out that there are pockets of people who own means of violence to challenge the monopoly of the means of violence of the state. As these pockets are growing that’s one definition of a failed state. On the economic front, when you have a state in which the distribution of its wealth is skewed against the majority, that also shows that the state has not got the capacity to redistribute its wealth equitably to its people. For example, all the money we make in oil, if you divide it by the number of people who live in Nigeria, you find out that they are people who live below two dollars a day and we have over one million multi-millionaires. You should know that something is wrong. Our productive middle class has disappeared because we have not conducted the kind of policies to create the kind of environment in which people can develop their own initiatives.
All through Nigeria has failed its population. There is no electricity, so if you want light, you have to buy your own generator, buy diesel or petrol. We used to buy diesel between N70 and N80; now it is more than N160 per litre. For petrol, you are a living witness of what has happened. All that our government does is to squeeze the people more and more. I don’t get anything from my government, not even protection. I worked in the US for few years after my doctoral degree, but toady, they are prepared to pay me social security even if it is N70 dollars (I’m not telling you what it is), but I’m entitled to it because I worked there. In Nigeria, I worked more years and I have no pension. They said I didn’t merge my working days before the civil war with my working days after the civil war. I couldn’t get the documentation any more and they said bye-bye!
I have an uncle, who joined the civil service in 1943 and he worked until he was Principal Accounting Officer in the Ministry of Establishment. He is in the 90s and they stopped paying his pension many years ago. Every three or four months they would ask them to come to Umuahia for verification. Last time, I was in the village and I asked him, what’s happening. He said if I were around that I would have given him a ride but he couldn’t go to Umuahia again. This is a country where he put in his best days. He is not alone. There are many like that in Nigeria, who are old and the government has nothing for them. So, as far as I’m concerned, on the social sense, Nigeria is a failed state, a state that has nothing to do with our lives except to tax us and get their tax.
What should we be doing to arrest this dangerous trend?
People should be given opportunity of making input into the decisions that affect their lives, which is what, in those days, they referred as taking the government nearer home. Today, local governments don’t exist and the state governments are incompetent and if they are doing anything, we don’t know. As far as people are concerned, the way we need to go now is to give people back their government and let them govern themselves.
How? We have democracy, elected representatives at ward, state, zonal and federal levels. What do you mean?
Most people don’t even know their representatives at the various levels. The constituents have not even seen their representatives. Do they even have constituency offices where you go to meet them? How do you take government nearer to the people? I’m from Ohafia, in Abia State, where many villages make up the community. Each of these villages has its sovereignty; it is only when there is a threat that the villages come together. We cooperate, where it is necessary. We have a system of government that people understood; it is evident.
In the modern type of system we are having, even when they have created a local government that includes people who ought to cooperate, but the intervention of political party politics has destroyed the cohesion, which was there before colonial or modern type of politics.
That is, why when we talk of leadership, it includes the political party machinery that stands between the individuals and the points of decision. Once they foul up the system, there is not much we can do about it.
A friend of mine was asked by my community’s development union to come and give them lectures on how to get things done in the country. He just went on the internet and added up all the money that was supposed to have been given to my local government. Up till that point in 2008, we received about N3.2 billion, if you go to that local government does it show where that kind of money has been spent or used judiciously? It doesn’t. This February, the allocation is N117 billion.
Supposed, government gave my local government N117 billion this February and the component villages gather and share the money, to go and do what will benefit the villages. There will be more development than what is happening now. Why? They are dealing with a level of government that they understand and where the issues of politics are relevant to their daily lives. At that point they will be able to tell you what affects them.
Every development union I know in Igbo land are the purveyors of development in their areas, not the local government nor the state government, and therefore, we need to revise the constitution of the country and state how we are to be governed. We need to restructure the whole system for effectiveness because with what we have now we can’t make it.
Are you among those canvassing for the sovereign or national conference?
When we have a serious issue like this, people begin to leave the main issue to discuss the aside issues. Whether sovereign or non-sovereign, we need a conference where we would sit down and ask ourselves, is this Nigerian project still viable? The people who are in the National Assembly can’t do it for us because they are interested parties.
They are not likely to face the issues the way other people who are not members would face the issues. I read David Mark, Ekweremadu and others saying, no, no, the National Assembly is here, you can’t have another sovereign? Who told them that? Sovereignty belongs to the people and it is the people who elected you and gave you part of this sovereignty.
The other part, they gave to state Houses of Assembly. The other part they gave to local government councils and retain the others. If local governments, state governments, national government failed them, they say, no come back. The issue of sovereign or no sovereign is red herring that people are dragging.
The sovereignty of this country is being challenged from many quarters. Why? It is because they are not happy the way things are. Former Zamfara State governor Sani Yerima was the first to start this thing in this dispensation by introducing the Sharia law. Unfortunately, former President Olusegun Obasanjo didn’t put his feet down and say, you can’t do that, this is what is in the 1999 Constitution and that is where we stand. It was negotiated between Azikwe, Awolowo, Sardauna and the colonial office in London that Nigeria should be a secular state. You can’t change that because it is a desideratum in the whole thing.
How can one young man become a governor and decide that Nigeria has to have Sharia? Since we didn’t deal with that issue at that time, other states in the North started becoming Sharia and now Boko Haram said they want the whole country becoming Sharia and nobody is trying to see the root of all these. There is no time we said the Nigeria federation should be theocratic. It was meant to be a secular state where everybody has every right to worship the kind of God he wants to worship.
If we wanted theocracy, those of us who are Christians, God is our King and then we can set it up. So, that is first challenge to the sovereignty of the country. The next are the splinter groups, which are saying the distribution of economic wherewithal in this country is against them and they took up arms and you dialogue with them and gave amnesty.
Biafra had done it in a clean way and they went to Aburi, Ghana and discussed and they came here and the decisions were toppled. That was when everybody got there and said let’s dissolve the whole thing; even the northerner said so. The July counter-coup, which General Yakubu Gowon led, the shout of the North was, “Araba.” They wanted to go. Also, Gideon Orkah, during his coup broadcast, also cut off North and said we should go.
In other words, people are not happy on how Nigeria is constituted. Personally, I’m not happy with it, but I’m prepared to sit down on a table with others and agree on the conditions and terms we should exist. Should Nigeria continue as a country or should Nigeria go as a confederation? If we are going as confederation, what countries are coming together? Can we redefine the boundaries within Nigeria, since we have six geo-political zones? South West is homogeneous.
South East is homogeneous, in terms of ethnic nationalities. South South is not. North Central is not. North West is almost, and North East is not all homogenous. There is an area where it is not easy to know who will be in one state. People should first of all be asked where they want to belong. Idoma is in Benue State now, but they are Igbo. Ochidoma is Ukpabi. He is from Arochukwu. Idah has relationship with Onitsha. So, we have not really sorted out ourselves since the colonial people came and drew lines on the map of Nigeria.
I’m for a national conference based on ethnic nationalities to decide what is the constitution of the Nigeria people, what powers to yield to a central government, what powers we want to retain among ourselves. People don’t know how United States started.
They started first of all as a confederation before they drew up the current constitution after about 13 years. That is why they said, ‘so that we may have a more perfect union.’ So, they drew up this current constitution. If we dissolve into confederation and each one developing along its own line, the force of economic integration would bring us back together in the future.
Lamido Sanusi woke up one morning and said Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has donated N100 million to Kano State for victims of bomb blast. Since when did CBN become a Red Cross? Yet nothing happens.
You were a member of committee that drafted 1979 constitution, 1999 constitution and part of the 2006 constitution reform Obasanjo set up. What was your experience?
Rotimi Williams was the chairman of the 1979 constitution drafting committee; the military gave him a blue print of what they wanted. Even the speech by Murtala Muhammed at the inauguration showed that they wanted the kind of constitution we drew up in 1979. Creation of states in Nigeria was a weapon of warfare.
The first creation of states into 12 was done only to break the back of Biafra by cajoling what you have now, Akwa Ibom, Cross River and Rivers State in order to squeeze Biafra into Igbo heartland, which was politics. In order to make it appear it is something that has happened in the other areas, they carved North into three places.
When it came to writing a constitution, they did another thing. They changed the fiscal basis of the federation by taking over the oil tax, and oil royalties, which is supposed to have accrued to the owners. They created federation account, so that even though they have states, the states were not autonomous because they have no source of income of their own. Taxes go to the federation account.
Customs duties go to the federation account, and royalties go to the federation account. So, what remains? That is why all the governors and everything have to go cap in hands, even till today, to the Federal Government to get money to run their states. You never run a federation like that.
In the 1979, the Gowon regime and Muhammed had started what it meant to have centralised power and centralised funds. In addition, from 1970, we have the ballooning of oil and they started seeing money flowing in and nobody wanted to leave that and so, they wanted a centralised system codified in a constitution and that was why they asked Rotimi Williams to steer the committee, even when people opposed it.
There were many voices that said let’s go back to the parliamentary system based on the memos sent. In fact, majority of the people from the North wanted to go back to the parliamentary system. East also wanted the parliamentary system but this couldn’t agree with the military blue print. What we did in 1979 was to codify the military command when Aguiyi Ironsi was killed because of the Unification Edict and Gowon took over.
They said Ironsi was trying to put together Igbo domination. The Unification Edict and what we eventually put in 1979 is the same thing, provided the North, whether in Babariga or military uniform, are on top, there is no problem. That carried us to 1999 constitution of General Sani Abacha. Abacha wanted to tighten it up more. You have not seen the draft, which we debated in 1999. He called people together and they all came and made their impacts, but still they went back to Rotimi Williams to draft what they wanted.
It is one thing when they call these conferences and people come and talk and send memos; it is another when they get lawyers to sit down and draft what they wanted. Over 90 per cent of what people wanted never got into the constitution.
If I sit down to bring papers (as the memos come they are multiplied and given to members), you find that what people wanted is not in the constitution. In 1999, when Abacha died, Abdulsalami said, go and ask people to debate that thing. We divided ourselves into various zones. I conducted the debate in what is now South-South.
We got people together in a big hall in Port Harcourt, River State; we received memos on what they wanted. They wanted the oil royalty back to the owners of the land. There was an old man that called me aside as the leader. His name is Dapriye. He showed me agreement between his grandfather and King George V, after Queen Victoria. He said whatever they are doing if they didn’t allow them to get the royalty from the oil in the littoral area, the country will not stand. I dutifully relayed that to the chairman. This is the situation.
I know the people that covered North-West said the zone wanted a return to the parliamentary system. In the East, the same thing from the papers, but when the chairman, who is a Professor of Law, went in with the military people, what they brought out as 1999 constitution has nothing to do with the result of the debate that we conducted.
To have national or sovereign national conference, the difference is that in the case of sovereign national conference, what the people decided they want is what stands; you don’t go about redrafting it; at best you conduct a referendum to make sure that is what they want. It is not the kind of thing that you start amending.
If you do that, then it is no more what the people want. We can solve the problem by saying that we are not going to submit whatever that comes out of the sovereign national conference to the NASS, but we would allow the NASS to stay on until the end of their tenure and the next NASS would be elected along the line of whatever we agreed. That way, they can still retain their constituency allowances within the period.
Let us have a conference; if we don’t there would always be people who are going to challenge the existence of Nigeria. Nigeria is already a failed state; what remains is for it to disintegrate. It will just take a small thing to happen that nobody knows and you wake one morning and find out that one section of Nigeria says they don’t want to be part of Nigeria any more.
Two years to 100 years of Nigeria other nations that we started with are ahead. What would be your advise to the government?
By 2014, we should have had a conference to now agree whether to stay with the amalgamation or deamalgamate the people who were brought together in 1914. That is why a conference is necessary at this time. The root of amalgamation in 1914 was economic. The colonial administration in the North didn’t have enough money to run the territory they had acquired them.
In the colonial report in the 1913 sent to the secretary to the colony, the cost of administration of Southern Protectorate showed a surplus, whereas, North showed a deficit and Lord Luggard told the colonial government that it was better to amalgamate the two parts of Nigeria in order to have enough money to run the whole place. You can check that in memorandum written by Luggard when he was the governor. It is a big book. I have it. You will see the root of the amalgamation. Nobody asked the people whether they wanted to be amalgamated.
In the first legislative council, in which Nigerians participated in 1944, Tafawa Balewa said nobody asked them to be part of Nigeria, that British just joined them to people who have different culture and religion that have nothing to do with them and that these people had started talking about independence. This was in a speech he made at the legislative council in Lagos. He made a similar statement when Enahoro moved for independence and when they came out, Lagos crowd booed the northerners for not allowing independence to come before that of Ghana. They got annoyed and went home and said they were not coming back to Lagos for any conference.
A lot has happened in this country that the young generation don’t know. The root of this is captured in one of my books, “Federalism and Nation Building in Nigeria, 1946 to 1964.” British people were in a hurry to decolonise because the United Nations was saying that it was immoral to have colony; so they started putting together all the territories to give them independence. They created the West Indies Federation, it failed; they created the East Africa Federation, it failed; they created Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; it failed.
The only federation they created then that has not failed is Nigeria, which is bound to fail if we don’t sit down and talk and that is why when Biafra declared independence, British fought tooth and nail to make sure Nigeria didn’t fail because they hold it as the only success they have in the British Empire.
They also created the Federation of Malaysia and Singapore; it failed. The time that Biafra was pulling out was also when Singapore was pulling out of the Federation of Malay, Singapore and North Borneo. Those were federations British put together. They were writing theories about federation government. Did it work? By 1964 that was when Singapore pulled out and then it remained North Borneo and Malaysia, later on they themselves pulled out.
East Africa dissolved into Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Federation of Rhodesia, Nyasaland dissolved into Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. All the white people they were protecting concentrated in Zimbabwe. Left to me, Nigeria federation should fail and then you see development. It doesn’t mean we won’t have problems, but not the kind of problem we have now. Example, there is no way we live under Sharia. People that have not studied militant Islam don’t know Boko Haram and all these cosmetics that we are doing. Read books on militant Islam. Their aim is to have a government that is headed by a Muslim. They cannot live under a government that is not headed by a Muslim. Go and read carefully what the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) said. They are all sympathetic to the Islamic sect; if they succeed they would applaud them.
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