First anniversary: We have been taken for a ride – Yadudu

[MrVan]

By GBENGA OKE

PROFESSOR Auwwalu Yadudu, presently a teaching staff at the Bayero University, Kano was Legal Adviser to former Head of State, General Sani Abacha. Erudite and forceful in his arguments, Yadudu in this interview bares his mind on the state of the nation and reviews the actions and inactions of the Goodluck Jonathan administration after one year. Excerpts:

President Goodluck Jonathan has just celebrated one year as elected President. What is your assessment of the administration and its impact on the average Nigerian?

Well, I am not an average Nigerian but we all feel the pulse of the nation whatever state we are. I hope I am not being uncharitable, but quite frankly and very regrettably, I have not seen anything positive that I can pin-point to score this administration in one year. Unfortunately, the administration does not seem to understand or comprehend the challenge of governance and it seems to me that they don't seem to have the grip of first understanding all the negative things that have been happening across the polity or taking steps to deal with them in a meaningful manner.

We have one year of democracy, yes Mr President has been in office for a year but I do not see any promise that he has made that he has attempted and certainly delivered. You get many vows and if you count these vows, you lose count of them. The approach is 'I will do' but really there is nothing to show for it. That is my regretful assessment of the one year in office of this government.

How then do you react to  increasing clamour over the 2015 election?

Well, unfortunately 2015 is thrust in the public eye by the presidency itself and personally, I am not a partisan politician. I find it very regretful that down the line you have three years to run an administration and to give account of the mandate that the people have given, yet you are thinking of submitting yourself for re-election in 2015 now. In other places, when elections are over, it is over and it is time to deliver on promises made and on the basis that you do well, the public can give another mandate when they look at what you have done.

It is the President that threw 2015 in the open and therefore if others join in taking up the issue, it is unfortunate. I can understand if the opposition are busy thinking about 2015 because they have an election to contest but it should not be the person who has been elected that should be thinking about any elective office now. The President should think of how to start running the business of presidency. For me, I consider the talk about 2015 regretful and unhealthy.

Could that have been what prompted the dog and baboon statement credited to General Muhammadu Buhari?

I cannot talk for General Buhari because I do not have his authority to speak on his behalf. Whatever statement he has made was made in the context of the circumstances surrounding a visit.

He made the statement and it unnecessarily generated controversies. When the presidency picks the baton and begins to count 2015 and somebody takes the issue up with them, I think it is only fair. As I said, I am not talking about the content of what was said and what was not said, but I think General Buhari and other political aspirants are entitled to pick up issues with this issue of 2015 that was started not by them, the opposition, but the presidency.

As a major player in the group of Northern Professionals and Politicians led by Dr Junaid Mohammed what is your take on the increasing polarisation of issues between the North and South?

This nation has come a long way as one indivisible united nation and I personally would do anything to defend that regardless of who is at the helm of affairs at the centre. The agitation for regional interest or the protection or promotion of regional interest is something that does not necessarily affect our federation. Mallam Aminu Kano had a saying that 'everybody may be a Nigerian but we all know where we come from, our own home.'

In any event, all politics is local and national politics is local because I can offer myself to be a Senator or the President of this country but the starting point is my constituency. So on the agitation for the promotion of regional interests, I do not see any harm in it.  As a Northerner, I see a lot of wrongs in the elevation of ethnic agitation. Of course, I will not hoist or construct their agitation on the basis of ethnicity but for us in the North, we are a region from historical experience that have transcended regional ethnicity in our association and political expression.

I think it is good for the polity and for the nation. You can speak about territory, you can speak about shared culture but ethnic affiliation is something that does not appeal to me. To your question about the regional agitation or promotion, I personally will not work to ensure or to seek to hoist a Northerner, however ill-suited, however ill-prepared, and however un-qualified to be the leader of this country simply because he is a Northerner. I will want to see this nation have a leader that we deserve who in any event will offer himself for service, who will not render himself as regional champion.

I will want to see a great leader regardless of where he comes from being qualified, able of character to run the affairs of this nation. He may be from the North, from the South. The situation we are in about zoning and rotation is an affair that the PDP as a party rightly or wrongly put in their constitution, it is their own problem but of course PDP will not always run the show in this country.

Some eminent Northerners have recently claimed that the North would do better without the South. Do you share this opinion?

This nation is so inter-connected, it is so inter-dependent that it will be fool-hardy to think the South can survive without the North or think the North can survive without the South. The issue really is that, God forbid, you come to a decision where you want to part ways for whatever reason, I can assure you that give and take, the North stands a better chance of surviving it than the unit of the South.

I don't mean to say that the North does not have its own problems but it far more problematic in the South than it is in the North. For example, if you are talking about economy and market, in this world today, the larger the economy the better and therefore in my view, we all are better for it united than divided because we stand a better chance being together than divided.

What is your take on the different slants by major Northern groups on the 2015 presidential contest?

It is not unusual for any given regional organization to have expressions that take different forms and it is expressed at different platforms. First of all, I do not belong to the Governors Forum, so I do not know what brought about their position and agenda. The group that I belong to is not just the group that Dr Junaid convened, I am not partisan but I belong to committees and groups that will make a difference in the life of this nation and also make a difference in my immediate community.

2015 is for politicians and partisan people but of course it will be wrong to think there won't be discordant tunes concerning the candidature or political party, you cannot wish that away and it is not only happening in the North. You cannot say the South-East is speaking with one voice politically, certainly you cannot say that South-West will be going to 2015 with one voice.

Prof Yadudu You cannot shut people up and I don't see anything wrong in what they said because there has been one agitation too many and the governors might be talking about the North within the PDP as a party or the North irrespective of party affiliation, it is too early to say what they are all up to, whether it is something they can deliver or not.

Do you subscribe to calls for a Sovereign National Conference?

I think there cannot be two sovereign powers at the same time. Sovereignty and our constitution belong to the people and under our system, the people have delegated their sovereign rights to their representatives in the different arms of government, whether in the Legislature, Judiciary or Executive and according to the legal order we operate today, these are the sovereign authorities we have and that is the only legitimate platform or basis for discussing any problems that we have. Personally, I think there is no problem of a constitutional or structural nature that we cannot solve except we refuse to have political will to attempt through the existing legitimate order.

Sovereign national conference

If you talk about Sovereign National Conference, it is something constructed on other consideration, it is problematic and will be chaotic and it will lead to disorder. Well, it is few people that are meeting in Lagos and they make the noise but in terms of reality, it is not more than the noise that they met because you cannot move an inch further without reshaping the polity.

All the structures of the federation, all the issue you want to change outside the context of the legitimate authority are built on the 1999 constitution. If you don't want to be a political anarchist, I don't see them getting much mileage trying to construct things in terms of the polity, structure of the economy or of the federal unit outside the system.

Do you think northern leaders have responded well to the insecurity problems in the North?

(Cuts in) Is it insecurity in the North or the entire country?

But the North feels the insecurity more and innocent lives are being lost on daily basis. Will you then say the government has shown enough will in tackling the menace?

First, it is wrong to talk of insecurity in the North because there is insecurity generally over the country. We have different manifestation of it everywhere. It is true that we have an entirely different security challenge in the North as we do in the South-South, as we do in Lagos and everywhere. First, my problem with this challenge is that the Federal Government doesn't seem to understand what the problem is.

It is incompetence maybe arising from its lack of knowledge of what the threat is. It is incompetent to handle it and in some cases, some officials appear to be complicit in really not getting to the root of the problem. If we are going to get to the root of this insecurity, everybody has a role to play. The governors and those in authority at different levels have a role to play in dealing with the challenge. Make no mistake about that. W hen you have the entire law enforcement apparatus controlled by the Federal Government and the governor has no say as to how you deploy the police or how you control them.

When you have the armed forces also at the control of the Federal Government and the governor, the LGA chairman cannot give them any order or direct the police how to operate. When you also have the State Security Service under the control of Federal Government when we have this kind of insecurity challenge facing the country, you cannot make headway on it, you will only keep making promises but taking no action of meaningful nature to deal with it.

Of course we aware that you are maltreating people, setting road blocks, throwing the security operatives around the people but this will not help solve the problem, it will only escalate it. The government is even spending a lot of money to massively install gadgets that if you are to check now, do not work. Here in Abuja, you have all this surveillance cameras installed with billions of naira but they have not helped matters.

My take is that there has to be a genuine attempt on the part of the Federal Government especially to understand the true nature of the security challenges and to be very non- partisan and dispassionate in seeking to find out what really the problem is.

In my view those who are charged with the responsibility of dealing with these problems are already compromised, they are already biased and they have their mind closed to pursuing other options because when other events like bank robbery happens, they will say it is Boko Haram, when political assassination happens, it is Boko Haram, some of these things that Boko Haram used to make claims on, the truth of the matter is that the pressmen are not investigating things.

People post things on the website and you just swallow it, we all swallow it. There are some on youtube, somebody dressed in camouflage with grenades all around and he claims this is what he is, unfortunately the security agencies do not understand the threat exposed in this manner, believe me, if you don't understand the phenomenon and if you don't adopt a non-partisan and dispassionate attitude to it, you will never get to understand it, all you will do is to wreck the economy, you will wreck social life and you will breed disgruntled elements who will take up all sought of things and you will make life horrible for everybody and it is not what we need to find solution to our problems.

Do you subscribe to General Azazi's claim that the PDP zoning arrangement was the major cause of this problem?

To me, that statement is nonsense, absolutely nonsense. The PDP zoning arrangement did not begin in 2007, the zoning problem of PDP has been with us. The problem of Boko Haram's manifestation did not start in 2007, and it started much earlier. It is very naive for the National Security Adviser to find it necessary, even find it expedient to use that as an argument. It makes me feel sorry for this country because what he has done is simply to say that somebody in the North wants to put sand-sand in the their son's garri and make his government troublesome.

For street and pedestrian argument, that can pass by but for the person who ultimately advises on security matters to the President to even swallow that argument is wrong. He did not only say it in private but even said it openly. That it is the reason why things are happening the way they are happening in the country, we are sorry as a nation and I don't see us really trying to understand the problems. Quite frankly, I have respect for his office but I think it is the most unhelpful statement that can come out of an office such as his.

Some say high poverty in  many parts of the North as a major reason for this insecurity......

(Cuts in) Not only in the North and I think if you work to deliver on employment to the youth, it is wrong to talk of poverty in the North because youth unemployment is national, youth agitation is national, youth tendency to violence is national, it only takes different manifestations and different outlook.

Different outlook

So, I don't think it will be right to say that solving poverty alone will solve the problem but it is a mix of actions that will help to solve the problem. With the number of years the North was in power in Nigeria, it is believed that there should have been major development in the entire zone but it seems the reverse is the case!

It is simply the most unkind thing to say about the leadership in the country. A Northern leader does not consider himself as a leader of the North to the exclusion of the rest of the country that he leads, so it will be wrong to say that I am responsible for the problems of the youth in the North and not in the south. It will be wrong.

The point really is that, it is true that our leaders North and South, West and East have not truly given good leadership to run our affairs in a manner that our problems will be solved and this is across the divide and if you want to make that argument, I will be ready for it but it will be wrong to begin to have a scale of preference.

You don't tell me that over the years the Governors in Rivers state have done more to the youths than the governors in Kano has done to the youths, I don't know the figure but my hunch is that they have all taken us for a ride and they have not really done anything. Again, you don't need to tell me that the 8 years Obasanjo did in government, he has done more to attend to the problems of youths in the South-West, if he had done that, it will be wrong and unjust of him. Sometimes we just move around the problem.

Vanguard Nigeria