All governors are President Jonathan’s men –Fayemi

[Mirror]

• Says many NASS proposals for constitution amendment may not see light of day

Dr. Kayode Fayemi has been in the saddle in Ekiti State for almost three years. In this interview, the governor speaks on the crisis rocking the Nigerian Governors' Forum, NGF, his endorsement for second term, why the ongoing constitution amendment might fail and the state of security in the country. AYODELE OJO reports.

Your party leadership has endorsed you for a second term; what does this mean to you?

I have become very wary about this word, endorsement. It has become a bastardised word courtesy of the Nigerian Governors' Forum, NGF's election. Seriously speaking, I think it is a burden when people say that you have done well. It means you have to consistently do better in order to sustain the acclamation from the people. That is what has come out of the endorsement that our leaders gave to me last December and the affirmation by Chief Bisi Akande and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu during their recent visit.

I also think seriously that what we have learnt from Lagos and Edo experiments is that if good governance is to be entrenched, it will be useful and helpful for political parties not to change candidates arbitrarily unless there are compelling reasons to do so and those reasons listed in the Nigerian constitution like temporary or permanent insanity, ill-health etc. So, if we are to consolidate on things that we have achieved, it makes sense to keep the team unless the candidate chooses not to contest.

Two, our constitution allows second term. Obviously, you cannot legislate against people having the ambition to contest against an incumbent. These two reasons apart, you also have to ask the objective question; what will the opposition bring to the marketplace to sell? Lies? Pretense? Propaganda? At the risk of sounding immodest, there are clear, tangible and palpable changes everywhere you turn in this state.

This is "eye-marking" not "ear –marking." But, the important point here is that endorsement is not an election. We have a lot of work to do. It's great that our leaders recognised the work that we have done so far but the election is not going to be a child's play. We are preparing for a very tough election because we know fully well that the other side is targeting Ekiti in 2014 as part of the dress rehearsal for 2015.

Hon. Opeyemi Bamidele appears not to have accepted your endorsement by the party for second term. What's your response to his disagreement?

You want to make me do what I don't really do. The truth of the matter is that I don't think I want to join in elevating Opeyemi to the level that I honestly don't think he belongs. When somebody makes himself obviously at loggerheads with the party, the party has ways of dealing with that. I am not the party; I am an interested party in this. I don't think it is fair to comment. The party will take care of that appropriately.

What is your take on the ongoing constitution review, especially the submission of the House Ad Hoc Committee for the removal of immunity for President, Vice  President, Governors and their Deputies?

I have both conceptual and practical problems with constitutional reform as being carried out by the National Assembly. With the greatest respect to members of the House of Representatives, when they claimed that they held 360 meetings in their constituencies to gather feedback from the people, I think it is a fundamentally flawed and disingenuous way of conducting constitutional reform process.

Either in terms of global best practice or even in terms of elementary feedback mechanism, I don't think it qualifies. Some of us have argued for more than a decade that the process is as important if not more important than the product of constitutional reform process.

What has happened has not met the basic requirement of legitimacy. Some of us believe that this process will end up in referendum that all Nigerians will have a say in. Constitution is a serious matter to exclude the citizenry from it.

No matter how intelligent people's representatives are, we thought we're likely to get to this position. My opinion is that the current constitution we operate says it is only the National Assembly that can amend it and that could be done with the ratification of two-thirds of the State House of Assembly of the 36 states to become a legal and accurate constitution amendment. But then, it comes back to the question: is everything legal legitimate?

On immunity, although my own position tallies with what the House of Representatives recommends, in the sense that I have consistently said immunity should be limited to only civil matter and that anyone who commits a crime and expect to be protected by the law is first, not democratic and second, not interested in good governance. Since we all agree that the bane of our country today is corruption, criminality in high office, whether it is electoral criminality or grand theft of the public treasury criminality is criminality.

I have always believed that the only justification for immunity is when pedestrian and irresponsible cases are filed in court to distract public office holders. That has nothing to do with criminality and I think I still hold strongly that view. Immunity for civil matters should be adhered to. However, lawyers can be dangerous and difficult.

They can turn civil cases to criminal issue depending on what they are fighting for and that is the only reason why I think this should be very well defined in the constitution. In that wise, I don't think immunity is a matter for just the National Assembly to decide.

Majority of the proposal that I have seen from the lower chamber have truly undermine the spirit and the law of federalism throughout the world. For example, on SIEC, in some parts of the world, the unit that is responsible for election is the local government or county. Many countries don't have what is called federal electoral body; Britain, USA, all of them.

We only do our own thing in Nigeria in reverse order and yet, we expect to get correct outcome. It doesn't work that way. There is logic to the principle of federalism and that logic is subsidiarity.

Expunging SIEC makes little sense. But in our country, we want to be unitary state, yet masquerade as a federal state. But I do know that many of the National Assembly proposals for constitution amendment may not see the light of the day unless they are not coming to the state House of Assemblies.

Nigeria is presently faced with security challenge; what is the way out of the situation?

We have almost moved to a point where we need an economic cum security strategy. I don't know how that is going to happen but the Council of State and opinion leaders might need to step back and look at the possibility of organising Security Summit.

One, there is a body led by the Minister (Turaki) talking to the various players in this unfortunate development. But I do think what we are confronted with now is poverty- insecurity complex. That is the challenge that we must address.

The most prominent aspect of the Boko Haram issue is the religious angle but it is not as devastating as the economic strand. It is when people feel they have nothing to lose that some of these things happened.

That is why we need the equivalence of a marshall plan for the areas ravaged by terror and insecurity. We ought to also pay more attention in involving the military in civilian affairs.

I know the implication is that we appear not to be in charge and that the military should come and rescue us. That rescue can be defined in elastic terms involving military in civilian matters. You are sending a sub-minimal message to the military that you cannot take charge of the situation and that must be worrisome in the light of what we have seen in Egypt.

It should worry us that we are playing with fire.

What is our youth development programme in Nigeria? We have 60 per cent population under 25, and majority of these young people are totally fed up with the Nigerian state. For one to be young and idle, other forces will find use for you. That's the part of the country's major problem and we are not dealing with it the way it should be done. Those who are in the power corridor seem to be totally detached from their people.

We certainly need a coherent strategy and that strategy must be a Marshal Plan. State of emergency should have been a component of the comprehensive marshal plan that we need in this country.

And the plan must be based on special economic security because we must be able to cut off the oxygen that is fuelling what is going on. If you don't cut that oxygen off, it will continue to spread to other parts of the country.

I happen to know the governors of Borno and Yobe very well. They are some of the smartest governors we have in this country and it's been so sad that Boko Haram has diminished the impact of the work they are doing in those states. I think there is a fifth columnist in this government that is desirous of this crime being perpetrated so that it has impacted on politics in 2015; or it helps to put the president in the bad light.

It could be either way; those who are out to get the president and destroy him and or those who seek to protect him and protect his agenda of return. Maybe their thinking is that if we keep the North perpetually busy, with these crises, election may not take place there in 2015. I'm throwing this out as my own reflection rather than certainty. But we are not the only country afflicted by this kind of challenge but it refuses to go because of the little attention we pay to intelligence gathering and analysis.

Up till now, the police intelligence unit is virtually operating at zero, military intelligence is not as impressive as one expects. We are just left with the State Security Service, SSS. That seems to have a bit of teeth in it. And that leaves us with enormous challenges. May be there is something the Americans saw which we didn't see when they predicted that Nigeria may disintegrate by 2015. But, we don't need to resign ourselves to fate.

We need to make a clarion call to Mr. President and all of us in leadership positions to begin to respond to issues. This is one of the issues discussed at NGF and we proposed that we should make resources available to the afflicted states. In our view, you cannot have about 10 million idle children out there and not see the correlation between helplessness and hopelessness of these young people.

There is correlation somewhere, poverty and violence are related and we must do specific things to separate them. We can take specific steps. Right now, the bulk of what is happening under the state of emergency is being paid for by those states.

So, you can see what is happening that if Borno State gets a monthly allocation of say N5 billion every month and it devotes N2.5 billion to keep the Joint Task Force, JTF, in place. There is an opportunity cost there. The economic and development opportunity that should benefit from that money is lost to security and yet there can't be development without security.

With the security challenge in the country, do you see state police playing a role in this?

Well, my position is that I am an advocate of multi-level policing. If you bring me from Ekiti to go to Zamfara and you dumped me at Talata-Mafara and you give me a gun to protect people; who am I protecting at the place when I don't have clue about the language?

I see multi-level policing having a key role to play in the country. In the light of what we have also seen in Rivers State, I can tell you that some of our colleagues who are opposed to multi-level policing are changing their views now because they could see the blatant abuse of federal police within a local entity simply because somebody is not on their side of the debate. Many of us are setting up alternative security forces in order to protect our people and our environment. That is what Zamfara State wanted to do that led to the debate at the National Assembly.

The governor decided to take the bull by the horn because 48 of his citizens were killed in one day and our police cannot do anything about it. Governors have come to conclusion that if the police cannot help their state after they have bought uniform, patrol vehicles, bullets, some electronic equipment and Armoured Personnel Carriers, APCs, for the police, they will look for alternative way to protect their citizenry. We are actually running the police.

Many of our colleagues train police personnel even abroad. If we are doing all these, how can someone turn back and talk about federal police. Many of these things are a clear distortion of federalism.

But we are made to understand that all the governors agreed to the one per cent deduction to fund the police?

Not all the governors agreed to the idea. Some governors came out to address the media on it. I have raised it with the Chairman of NGF. I wasn't there when the idea was tabled to governors and I know that some governors who were there did indicate they will go to court. I'm elected by Ekiti people. I cannot subscribe to that deduction without going to my people first. It's their money.

Do you just sit at one economic council meeting and decide on your own to accept the deduction because they put a paper before you to agree to one per cent deduction from federation revenue? What is the modality for that? Will one per cent deduction from our allocation address Ekiti State security challenges?

Who dictate what happens with the one per cent? Is it Abuja or Ekiti? Do I have total control over what Commissioner of Police does in my state? Even with what we bought for police; we don't have total control over them. In this country, we just keep dodging fundamental issues which are structural. It is the nature of the Nigerian state that we must address, not the symptoms of the malaise as it is manifested in the police. Once we do that, even if everything will not fall into place, we'll begin to get a direction.

As an insider, what actually happened with the NGF election and the fallout?

Our colleagues who have found themselves defending this albatross round their necks also know that this will come to haunt them. A lot of them have lost their credibility. First, they said there was no election. When we came out with tape, Nigerians knew that there was an election. When the ballot was counted, they said the chairman did not vacate his seat.

We had two hours of debate before the election. This is what most people are not aware of. Before we got to 35 votes being cast and counted, we have had three hours of debate on one, consensus.

We said at the last meeting we concluded that with the decision that Okauru (NGF DG) was going to organise election and whoever wins becomes our chairman. Later they said we should vote via open ballot, show of our hands; we said we are adults, we were not doing show of hands, we would vote by secret ballot which is recognised in the country's Electoral Act.

They agreed again. We moved to the issue of agents for the candidates both candidates agreed on one agent, he was there with the DG. We all sat, voted and the agent supervised this. They knew the truth, that is why it saddens me because those who are against the result of the election are highly respected people.

They came back and said there was no voting when every single one of them voted. Of course, you have seen Niger State governor's comment, you have heard Kano, Jigawa, Adamawa and Sokoto governors' comments on the issue. They have come out to say who voted for whom. Ours was clear because we voted in bloc.

It was those who joined us that were not clear to Nigerians. And those who did it have come out to say they did it. Really, it is worrisome. What is worrisome there is the reaction from the other side. We felt Mr. President is the president of all. Our president is not a candidate in the NGF election.

He has no interest because he made that very clear to us that he has no interest in the NGF election and I don't want him to be dragged into this NGF issue because it diminishes the Presidency. The occupant of that office should not be diminished. We must not do anything to diminish the office and the occupant.

That is why some of us are vociferous in our own meeting. NGF meets only once in a month on the eve of the National Economic Council, NEC, meeting. How should we shift our meeting because we want to make an impression?

We won't do that. The NEC meeting has been scheduled and the eve turned out to be the day the Presidency wanted to have dinner. We went for our meeting but while there, we said, the invitation to the dinner was a trap. We went for our meeting and we have met technically.

We didn't meet to take any decision. We went to the dinner because it was our President that invited us and we must not do anything to diminish him. But, we have been diminished before Nigerians because they don't really make difference between 19 and 16.

They just say these governors can't even hold simple election and they want Nigerians to come and vote in 2015. I think the president must find a way to exercise his moral authority on this matter.

We must also find a way to meet the president in supporting him to exercise that moral authority because it doesn't augur well for us, for some people to be hiding or creating the impression that they are the president's men. We all are president's men. We are the president's governors. So, we are all his men.

The president was once a governor, a member of the forum. So, he knows that he must not do anything to denigrate the forum. He must not allow people to hide under his apron string to undermine the forum.

The truth of the matter is that, there is only one NGF that is running. Although someone claimed that he is the Sole Administrator of another NGF. Even the terminology is a problematic one. Are we still in the military era when we used to have Sole Administrators? When we talk of programmes, NGF is still NGF. We still run programmes and all the 36 states still run programmes for NGF. The other NGF has no office. It has a place called office but there is no soul in that office.

It has no programme. We have programmes that are jointly run with the World Bank, DFID, other institutions of state and the workers there are about 50. I think we need to do something. It is not about Amaechi. This is another problem I find disturbing.

The issue is not Mr. President versus Governor Rotimi Amaechi. It has nothing to do with President Jonathan and Amaechi as many of us in the Governors' Forum don't see it that way. For many of us, it has to do with integrity and independence of NGF. There is a danger in presenting two forums.

What's your perception about other governorship candidates in the state?

They are about 20 running in PDP at the last count, but we would not underestimate anyone of them. Whoever is running is important to us because it is an election. Everyone is important and I take them very seriously.

I take election as a scientific process in which you cannot ignore anyone, no matter how inconsequential the person might appear. We have all sorts of people whether it is in Accord Party, PDP or Labour, all of them will meet us on the field.

National Mirror