Abaribe Carpets Leadership for Nigeria’s Woes
· Asks NASS Members to Place Country Above Party
· Says Legislators Wrongly Blamed for High Wages
· Wants ‘Bandits’ Properly Classified as Terrorists
· Says Operators, Not Constitution, are the Problem
If there is one thing that can be said with any certainty about our politicians, it is that Nigerians do not have much confidence in most of them. Paradoxically, politicians, particularly lawmakers, are supposed to be custodians of the trust of the people whom they represent.
Yet, they are still some politicians who, by their conduct, life-style and overall carriage, command the trust and respect of many Nigerians. Enyinnaya Abaribe, senator representing Abia North senatorial constituency in the National Assembly, is one such politician. Hie entry at every gathering arouses instant applause. His every speech or word is literally taken as gospel truth. The end of his every speech bestows hope.
How did this former deputy governor of Abia State, one time corporate player and brilliant economist acquire the stature of the conscience of the people, a redoubtable voice of the voiceless, and one whose every word infuses hope into the despairing?
The answer lies in his principled ability to speak truth to power, his unwavering identification with the downtrodden, his unyielding pursuit of justice and his uncompromising defence of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.
In this interview, Abaribe showcases why he remains the toast of many a Nigerian, why, despite his outspoken promotion and protection of the interests of the South-East zone of the country, only the extremely myopic would doubt his statesmanship or patriotism. He articulates his point poignantly, delivers it unequivocally and paints a pathway out of the mess that Nigeria has been thrown into, by what he describes as the failure of leadership.
The interview, conducted by the True Vision editorial team, is an interesting read.
You must have had some dreams that made you aspire to be a senator. How would you describe your time in the National Assembly so far? Will you say that the dreams have been realised?
Let me say that in retrospect, what I came to do in the national assembly has been quite fulfilling. Let me also state that the start of my political career when I came and joined the UNCP in 1998 was actually to run for the House of Representatives and not to be in the Executive. That exercise ended in failure and off course, that period, when Abacha died, another exercise started for which I joined as a member of PDP. I still went to run again and have the fortuitous encounter with Orji Uzor Kalu who was running for Governor and invited me to come and run as his Running Mate. And so that brought me to the executive and I can also encompass everything that inasmuch as being in the National Assembly all this while, to contribute my quota, I have also gotten to know that if you want to make a direct impact in the lives of people, you also need to have an executive position. Basically because, in the National Assembly, you make laws, you make motions, you make propositions to government, you pass resolutions and except for the act of making laws which guides the way government operates, we find that some of the time, the executive tends to ignore or does not take a much cognizance of some of the resolutions passed and sometimes to the extent thateven decisions taken by the National Assembly and conveyed to the executive, as in the best interest of the country, are ignored. So, the Executive wields an overwhelming control over the lives of our people and what we do is to try to moderate, try to shape them, try to move them to the right path. But if you are given to frustration, you will actually be frustrated with the way things go within our polity. But if you are an optimist, and if you are one who thinks that Nigeria can always be better and you can push and push at the door and the door will open, you will have the belief that whatever you are doing and in whatever little way, will have an impact of some sorts.
You have been in the executive before. Does your recollection of that era convey the impression that you are nursing the ambition to return there?
Now you want to put words in my mouth. I am just trying to put it in words, just as it is. When I was part of the Executive at the State level, I can confirm that I was not part of any decision making at the executive level. I would only attend State Exco meetings and was not part of any other thing even to the extent of being part of, lets say, the State Security meetings in which external people like the Police Commissioner, the DSS Director and others were part of. But as Deputy Governor, I was not part of it. Even the Secretary to the State Government was part of it and I think the Attorney General of the State was also part of it. But we had this anomalous situation in Abia at that time in which we were not engaged fully. Let’s just put it mildly, I don’t know what is obtained in other states. But haven come to the Senate and met other Deputy Governors, they also related their own experiences to me and most of them tended to almost being the same. I cannot say more than that because people can always talk about their own experiences and the way they saw things in their places.
What are the most important responsibilities of the National Assembly?
I think that I don’t know how you can rate the different parts of the legislature. And I think that if we try to do that, we would miss the point when we say, what is the most important function of the legislature. The basic function is to make good laws but in making laws, there are two sets of ways; bills come in and we treat them and they become Acts. The first one is what comes from the executive. When the Executive sees;what they think is wrong with law or how to improve it, they send it by communication from the President and they say, if you can help us deal with this. Secondly, is also private members bills. What we found out actually, is that there is a preponderance of the executive assenting to laws most of what they have sent as executive bills. But we have also seen that in this country that some critical bills are also passed as private members bills. For example, the NDDC Act is a private members bill. It was passed as law against the President’s veto. I think that was the first time that there was a Veto. The basic thing that a legislator does is to make laws. Second, is the representation of his people and in doing representation, the most critical bill that the person does as a legislator is the budget of the nation because that is the point at which you now start to see how you can effect things in your constituency by ensuring that resources as they are being distributed across the country, you ensure that your constituency also benefits from the resources of the nation. That is the basic thing in terms of representation. One other thing that I think that we overlook, but which turns to be very critical and which has now been shown by the way and manner the government of APC presently has handled matters is in approvals of recommendations of persons for appointments in certain areas. The ministerial people, when they are recommended by the president, we have now seen a pattern of blanket approvals. That started in the Eight Assembly and has continued in the Ninth Assembly and I think that is where the National Assembly has thoroughly failed the nation. And I say this with all sense of responsibility because we have now found that subsequently, performance of people who have been approved in executive positions, for whatever things they have done, have always ended up below par. Maybe one of the ways we would need to resolve this issue of below par performance is to insist, and which we have done severally but which has always been ignored by the executive, is that portfolios are attached to nominations. Because, when portfolios are attached to nominations, we will now be able to assess someone basically on his knowledge of the area he is going to work. The blanket approvals that we give to people and the fact that someone is brought in and you don’t know where he is going to go, so youdon’t ask him questions on critical areas and we now find out that we ask general questions and just do cursory things; that does not help matters. And I think that we have now come to the critical stage in our nation today where we ought to look forward and not continue with the things of the past.
The Disparity in the emoluments of the National Assembly members and other members of the society
I think there is a lot of misinformation going on. What goes out to the public is not actually correct. The earning of a legislator is regulated by the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) who set the earnings of everybody in the country, from the President down to the least person and that is well known. Where you now have a problem is that where you are sitting today for this interview is in the office of the Senator representing Abia South. Now this office also comes with funding for the office. And what that funding does is that that fund is used for the running of the office, just like the office of the permanent secretary, just like the office of the minister. You also have funding to run it, also just like the office of the President of the country, you also have a funding for it in the budget and that any spending that is done within that office is also audited and you have the Auditor general of the Federation coming to look at all the books. Now what we see is that only (and I emphasize the word only) for the legislator in the national assembly to be attributing the running cost of an office to the person of the legislator himself. For instance, if there is a budget for the travel expense for the Senator say in a year and the budget says you are expected to be in your constituency at least once in a month and the cost of your ticket for you and an aide is this, and that is aggregated and the medical expense for you and the pay for all the staff in the office is X or Y and everything is aggregated. And rather than being stated that that this is meant for AB or C, everybody says that they are taking this huge amount of money. I will not like to take anything that is beyond my legitimate earning but I would not want you to say that what comes for the running cost of this office is my take home and goes into my pocket, because it is used for the running of the office. I buy a ticket and bring the receipt and all those things are audited. And there is this mischievous comparison and I know the basic reasons these came out, the mischievous comparison is like this; somebody would say a United States senator’s basic pay is about $170,000 and then the Nigerian Senator by adding the running cost of his office, now say that he is collecting far more than the US counterpart but he forgets that the US senator has a budget for the running of his office that ranges from $3.5 million to $4.6 million for the largest constituencies. But nobody will mention that when they are doing comparisons and in doing that comparison add that $4.6 million US Senator’s running cost to his salary. But for the Nigerian Senator, you now add your running cost to your salary and say that is what he goes home with. That is not correct and that is what I am saying; that the information out there is not properly applied as to who gets what. Now I do agree for example, I have to travel and do other things but I have never seen any Nigerian executive that lives only on that his salary. If he wants to travel, he has to take it from the running cost of his office. I do not expect that a governor pays his flight ticket out of his pocket and I also do not expect that a minister pays his flight ticket out of his pocket just as I do not expect that even the head of any of the parastatals and all those that get approval to go and work there pays for their tickets and other official jobs from their pockets. I do not expect that that is what happens. But when it comes to those in the National Assembly, we are now asked why are you paying out of your office? So, you can now see that the comparison is not just right.
So, the comparison is misplaced?
Let me further explain how we have come to this stage. We had many years of a run-in of military interregnum in which there was no legislature and all that we had were the executive and the judiciary. With the inception of the civilian regime in 1999, we also had a former military head of state, now as a civilian president and so had a very difficult relationship with the people who were in the National Assembly then. I am talking of the Chuba Okadigbo-led national assembly. He could not understand that the national assembly was not a dependent arm to the executive but was supposed to be an independent arm. And so, when the national assembly at that time were seeking for budgetary positions to be able to fund their offices in this manner, there were bound to be conflicts and each side was trying to be superior to the other. The information coming out of the executive was that the national assembly were seeking for funds that they did not need. That is all that happened and it has stuck. Since that time, I had been the spokesman under the David Mark Presidency of the Senate and I had made efforts to correct this but I found out that certain things are just ingrained that nobody wants to listen to your explanation. And that has been one of the burdens every member of the National assembly will have to bear.
Do you think that the NASS, by its activities, has succeeded in making the executive to be more accountable to the people?
I do not think so. I think it depends on the inclination. I will say of the executive, the Umaru Musa Yar’Ardua regime was the best in terms of its relationship with the national assembly because, essentially, President Yar’Ardua simply left the national assembly to their own devices, gave them their budgets and simply accepted whatever came from the national assembly without trying to be overbearing. It was the same thing with President Jonathan even though there was a point that became very testy between the national assembly and President Jonathan. But it was caused principally because President Jonathan tried to shield some of his ministers from the attacks and pressures from the national assembly who felt that those ministers were not doing things in the national interest. The two regimes of presidents Obasanjo and this present one of President Buhari have been the Presidents that so pushed back so much and tried to dominate the national assembly in terms of what they felt was their own objectives in governance. And the most acerbic times we saw have been the senate Presidency of Chuba Okadigbo all the way down to Anyim Pius Anyim; we always saw that the relationship was testy and not cordial. During President Buhari’s first tenure, the relationship with Senator Bukola Saraki’s senate Presidency was very testy and was not seen to be very cordial. What has always happened was that every executive will always want to say that ‘it is what I say that would happen’. The present executive and vis-à-vis the senate presidency of Lawan took a different tag and say, let us cooperate with everything the executive wants. The result we have also seen that it has not yielded what Nigerians want. Nigerians have felt and called us all sorts of names so I think going forward, what ought to happen is for the national assembly to always put the interest of Nigerians first and not to see what the executive brings as in the best interest of Nigerians. It is not always necessarily so and that we have seen by hindsight.
Will it be correct to say that if the national assembly has been effective in ensuring compliance with the federal character principle, much of the cries of marginalization would have been unnecessary?
My own feeling is that it is not the job of the national assembly to always have to fight the executive for the executive to keep to what they have sworn an oath to do. So, the first responsibility is, for whoever is there as the executive, to keep to the laws they have agreed to uphold, to govern the country. So actually, what the national assembly would have to be doing is should be in those rare cases when they do not follow the law ashas been set out in Section 14 (3) of the constitution, Sections 15, 16 and 17 and also the laws set out in the Federal Character Commission, you do not need to because it is assumed that that under Section 5 of the constitution, you swore to an oath that you should obey all laws. Then you turn around and do not obey it. To come to what you are saying that because the national assembly is not doing what it ought to do, I can tell you that the national assembly is doing all it can. But I think that today, the national assembly finds itself under a difficult situation and that difficulty is for the leadership of the national assembly to be able to detach itself from the loyalty to party which you belong, seeing what is in the national interest versus what my party stands and my government says is its interest. This is not just because of this particular regime. This has always been the case even under the PDP regime. The only difference I would say is that during the PDP administration, we have far more people in PDP who had the courage to challenge their party and government in the interest of Nigeria than we have today.
What is your reaction to the recent statement by a senior political appointee that the constitution does not require the President to strike a balance between religious groups in appointments?
With all due respect, I think that the aide was grievously wrong. The constitution requires you actually and I just quoted it, several sections of the constitution from 14, 15 to 16 up to 17, the sections have those requirements. They are right there. Sections 2.72 and I think Section 2.79, I think there is a requirement even in the military. There is a requirement for you to have a balance in their responsibilities and even Section 5, as I have already pointed out also requires the President to obey all laws legitimately passed. And we say obey all laws. One of the anomalous situations we have today is the fact that because the President and the people around him have gone to the extent of ignoring the laws, there is this push back coming from all the agitators saying that we must throw away this constitution because they assume that the problem is that there are not enough checks in the constitution to stop the President from what he is doing. So, you can see where that is coming from. If you really look at the laws as they are, I think that there are sufficient balances put in there that somebody willing to follow the law as it is. So, when somebody wakes up and says there is no such power, I think that is totally wrong.
So you are saying that the Constitution is not the problem but those who are operating it.
There is a paper I did for the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) in Abuja in which I looked at this matter and I also came to that conclusion that the problem is that those who use the constitution have wilfully ignored the constitution and that has brought us to where we are today. They have wilfully ignored the constitution that should have guided us and that has led us to be brewing amendments upon amendments and that is why you see that at every assembly session, you see an effort to amend the constitution. And we are tweaking every little part of the constitution and those things we could have taken for granted that nobody ought to have wilfully broken them, somebody will break and so we say in order to repair that, let us also change the constitution that. And if we continue this way, there will never be an end to constitutional amendments. Even if we write a new constitution and there is no change in attitude, we will also find it very difficult to get to the Eldorado that we want.
Ten years ago, would you have thought that Nigeria could degenerate to this level of insecurity and instability? How did the country get to this point?
Never, never. I never would have believed that 10 years ago, that we would be at the point in which we are today, that almost half of the country would be facing insecurity that we have today and that we would have massive unemployment and the food crisis that we are experiencing to the extent that there is even the fear by most well-meaning Nigerians that we may no longer have a sustainable nation anymore. Ten years ago, which is 2011, we just came out paying off our debts and getting the country to looking forward to building a stable country. And I will make this assertion with all sense of responsibility, that leadership matters and that everything rises and falls based on leadership; leadership is everything. And anytime we make our decision on leadership in this country based on primordial sentiments, based on let it be my own person that would be there, based on let another person take the blame and not for me to take responsibility for my faults and limitations, we will get this kind of situation. And this is where we are today. At a point which we needed to blame our own person for missing the way, we will find a reason not to do the right thing and that is where we have found ourselves today, the cost of leadership failure. We can slice it or dice it any way but at the end of the day, because we have a nation that is organized in a way that the man on top decides how our nation should go, once he does not understand what he is doing, we fall to where we are today. And the leadership I mean is not just leadership at the presidency level but all the way down to the basic units of our national life.
Contrary to the tendency for the political elite in a country to put aside their differences when their country is faced with dire survival challenges, the opposite is the case in Nigeria. What is the way out of this quagmire?
What you are saying is that we are in a situation where the people who are running the country are unaware of the impending problem that may lead to the breakup of the country. And I think I had said that earlier. And I still come back to the same thing; that is, you have said that leaders would need to come together if they see danger. But that is, you are assuming that those people are really leaders. I have said it here that our problem is the failure of leadership and that this leadership is at all levels. What we now see is that because our leadership recruitment model is flawed, so we recruit leaders who are not leaders in that sense. The result is that they cannot see that we are going towards very difficult moments or situations. And so, somebody who is totally unaware of what he is doing will just continue to make mistakes because he will not see what a discerning person would see. Our problem, as Nigerians, is compounded by the fact that we have people at various levels of leadership who do not see that their collective action is leading to the wreckage of the country. That is just where we are and we should actually pity the nation at the moment. Because at all levels, when you want to point out that, this will lead us to a situation where you have to act, everybody will like, ignore you. Unfortunately, we have a situation where the people with the levers of power, that are supposed to move those levers in order to achieve particular results that would be beneficial to all, assume that by ignoring the problem, it would go away. Andso, rather than act, we avoid taking the necessary action and that has led us to where we are today. Take the North-West for instance, at a time that decisive action should have been taken against the terrorists there, what happened was that they were renamed bandits and were being pampered and paid because there was an assumption that if they were paid enough, that they would walk away. But what we have seen now is that that did not happen. Rather than the action of benignneglect and assuaging them, using government funds, all that has happened is to metastasize the problem to the situation we find ourselves today that a so-called bandit was able to acquire weaponry shot down a military attack jet. And that ought to have sent redflags everywhere. But what we see is an effort to make it seem as if it is nothing and it can only lead to further escalation in those people that I continue to say are terrorists. Rather than call them by their proper name and attack them in the same manner, rather every effort were being made to tag them in a different way and make them to seem soft. I have said it in many interviews that a man who comes and devastates your village and razed down houses, what would you call him? A bandit to make him seem sexy but he, by devastating everybody in the village and by taking hostages and by making sure that nobody goes to the farms, is murdering a generation of people and is ensuring that there is no production and ensuring that the place is laid waste. What else do you call that? And this has happened, starting from the North-East all the way down to the North-Central and North-West and creeping down to the South-West, South-East and South-South. The only reason why it continued this way was because no firm effort was made to halt it. You cannot run away from this leadership failure. Well, if there is any other person that has any other idea, he should let me know, if you cannot provide leadership in country of the nature facing this type of challenges, I do not know any other way we can do it. And I have said that take it any other way you want to look at it, somebody has dropped the ball and that person can only be the Chief Executive of the Nigerian state and the bulk stops on that table.
There are those who hold the view that much of the agitation in the South–East zone is because of disconnect between the legislators and the political elite from the zone on one hand and their constituents on the other hand. Exponents of this position point to the absence of many legislators from the zone at the recent Senate vote rejecting the electronic transmission of election results as a case in point. How can this situation be remedied?
Everybody from the South-East who was at the Senate that day voted for the electronic transmission of results. I do not think that there is anyone who voted against it. Most of the voting was on party basis and I have said it earlier that the basic problem between when PDP was in power and now that the APC in in power in this second term is the fear of party among those who are national assembly legislators. During the period the PDP was in power, they could take decisions that are against what the party wanted, in the interest of the Nigerian people. But we sadly do not see it now. What we see is basically that people prefer party or think that the sanctions will affect them.
While some people of South East extraction argue that the zone should produce the next President, in 2023, others posit that restructuring of Nigeria for equity and justice are more important than who occupies Aso Rock. May we have you view please.
I read an article a couple of days ago which succinctly said something about what I think we ought to all look at. The article actually says that in the matter of rulership in Nigeria, that the North, when I say North now both the military and civilian have occupied cumulatively about 43 years, yet in the poverty index of Nigeria, the North ranks highest about 87 per cent. In terms of education, it ranks lowest, in terms of children out of school, it ranks lowest. Out of the 13 million out of school children, the North has about 11 million. Now begging the question, what has being president of Nigeria brought to the North? And it is on that basis that I ask; where is the problem; is it on being president or making sure that the objective conditions are such that every member of this country will be given a sense of belonging as a citizen of Nigeria? I cannot also answer that question. The people from the South East, as part of the Southern Nigeria,whether we can get an emotional fulfilment form saying that each of us is a member of the Nigerian society. I have also made this point that part of what fuels the agitation for separation is that the youths perceive the treatment they get shows that they are not members of the society. Niger State has produced two heads of state and yet you don’t see the tangible benefit of that. But then on the other hand, you could also make the argument that as a head of state who has the interest of the whole nation, you could decide that you will not personalize the presidency and do things for yourself and that is the converse of it. And people will feel that you never did anything. Nothing stopped President Jonathan from putting all resources in ensuring the completion of the East-West road. But he had to consider so many other parts of the country and that leads me to the final comment. Part of why people resent and feel that the present APC government is not doing well is that. And that is a fact; that there seems to be a personalization of the presidency towards a particular region and towards a particular religion and particular ethnic area so the question is really hanging out there
Respond to the argument that if governments of the south east had utilised revenue coming into the zone judiciously, cries of marginalisation would have been uncalled for?
I can only respond to it by saying that I do not think that leadership failure eluded the South-East. I think the South-East also suffered the same type of problem by other parts of the country. And you now had a mismanagement of resources. And the consequences is the deindustrialization of the south-East as we see it today; deindustrialization because what we find today is industries moving out rather than coming in the South-East.
If the judiciary had been dispensing justice expeditiously, would there have been need to replicate existing laws such as the highly resented media bill when the laws of libel and other infractions already exist?
I don’t it has anything to do with the judiciary or the speed of judgment. That is not the reason for the push for the anti-media bill. The APC government came into power on the back of an extensive media campaign and did even worse of what they are accusing people oftoday. But the previous government was tolerant of views prior to 2015. In office, it is ironical that it is the APC government that is intolerant of dissenting views and has looked for several ways to truncate what is the fundamental right of Nigerians. I think section 39 speaks of the right to hold and express opinions. It you say that the time frame is too long, what you have to do is to approach the judiciary just like they did in the electoral matters rather than truncating people’s rights to fair hearing.
Is it proper to continue to operate the present Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria that was bequeathed by an unrepresentative military government or to insist that amending it by the National Assembly is adequate?
Well, you call it military constitution. Again, it boils down to the operators. Let us look at it this way: the constitution says that you should have a joint account of states and local governments and that every state should pay in 10 per cent of its internally generated revenue to the joint account for sharing to the local governments in the state. The constitution never said that governors will take it over and the make anybody they designate as chairman and decide how to spend the money without putting the 10 percent as required by the Constitution. They, therefore, hijack the fundsbecause sanctions can only come from the state houses of assembly. So they emasculate the state houses of assembly and make sure that they don’t even oversee what is going on and end up having this situation that has now made the President to issue an Executive Order and now brought all these things that have even led to the governors having now to come back and say,we agree. It is in the constitution and nobody just wanted to follow it. So, at the end of the day, assuming we get a very good constitution, and bring all the things, if we still have the person that decides that he will ignore it, either our members in the national assembly have the liver to resist such a person or things will continue the same way. And I go back to my final words: what happened in the US. If you remember during the time of the counting of votes that President Trump had to invite a particular delegation (I think from Arizona) to ask them to change the results.They came out of the meeting with the president, from the same party, in the same state and said no, that it was against their laws. So, what we need are those people who are strong to say, let us stay by the side of the law and by not whoever is in the executive position. And I think President Roosevelt said something of that nature, to the effect that loyalty to the country does not mean loyalty to whoever is sitting in the office as President but rather, loyalty to the constitution of the country.
