The state of the nation is a concern to many Nigerians. Things have continued to go wrong in government and lamentation appears to be a recurring decimal in the polity. Olisa Agbakoba, a former leader of the Civil Society Organisation, appears to have gone back into the trenches with like-minds, to pick up those arsenals that brought the military to its knees. With the recent formation of the National Intervention Movement (NIM) by the G-90, Agbakoba in this interview with ZEBULON AGOMUO, Editor, said the stage is now set for an intense pressure on government until the right thing is done. He also spoke on other issues. Excerpt:
How would you describe the state of the nation at the moment? What informed the National Intervention Movement registered by you alongside others?
As you are aware, I and some concerned Nigerians on the 29th of November 2017 initiated the national intervention movement (NIM).
NIM is a movement to uplift Nigerians. It is not a political party/organisation. It is a network of people committed to make a difference in our country.
Our objective is to mobilise Nigerians to hold government accountable at all levels. We want to grow by inspiring and supporting people to start small groups across the country.
We want a functioning democracy where political office holders are accountable to the people, public institutions are strong and there is the rule of law.
You can see, it is obvious that the APC and PDP, the two major political parties in the country, have no ideologies, that’s why we have found ourselves in this sorry state we are. You can see a country producing crude oil but cannot refine it for local use; therefore, you see queues returning again at the filling stations. Yet, Mr. Baru came back from London where he went to claim an award. I wonder what entitles him to an award; his country has no petrol. He rushed back to announce that he would by fix it. But this is the same Baru announcing N1.6billion for the turnaround maintenance of the four dead refineries that ought to have been sold a long time ago. So, we said to ourselves, when will this nonsense stop? Everybody is in his house grumbling, and lamenting, no job, no money, no health care, no nothing. We said to ourselves, what is needed is a coherent political movement.
Look at the harsh tag on SARS- #EndSARS. What did it show? It shows you the power. We are going to use the social media to mobilise Nigerians; but it is going to be membership-based and we are going to have friends of the movement. We are not going to depend on anybody to fund us, we are going to ask Nigerians to fund us- send your N100; send your N200, because it will require a lot of resources; so, in that way, we want Nigerians to claim ownership of the movement. We have been saying it, we live in a failed country, and unless we articulate the elements of the failure, we will continue to fail. As you can see, all attention is now focused on 2019; nobody is interested in governance anymore.
Governor Ambode of Lagos State says that he runs either the 3rd or 5th largest economy in Africa; you all live in Lagos, this is completely a broken city and in the index of the harshest cities to live in the world, it is 3rd from the last. Yet, he is there. He was voted in to govern Lagos. The governor is fixing federal roads when Lagos State roads are deplorable. It is not all the time we need to point to the Federal Government.
We need to look at what the states are doing. Look at the joker in Imo; I think the man has lost touch with reality. He is erecting statues of all kinds of people when Imo State owes pensioners. This is the problem and we are there saying nothing; and these men are screwing us. Where is Maina? We talk about fighting corruption. How come you have about 10 former governors facing corruption trial at the EFCC sitting in the Senate as senators, making laws for the country and the EFFCC says they are doing a fantastic job? They transferred it to the judiciary, which I think also has a part of the problem.
This is a government that says it is on top of corruption, yet, the NNPC is cesspit of corruption. The fight between Baru and Kachikwu made it clear. And because Nigerians don’t read, they don’t know that the President cannot be minister of Petroleum Resources by the constitution and that’s the case I filed. That was why when I was speaking with Charly Boy, I said to him, ‘I don’t know what gave you the inspiration to coin that phrase – Our Mumu Don Do. We are all ‘Mumus’ because we sit and talk about how bad Nigeria is. All we need to do is to come together. So, we are determined to see to it that this movement puts pressure on the government of the day to do the right thing.
That’s the thrust of the Movement. I can give you examples how smaller movements have succeeded. The Charly Boy group, I have not seen him with more than five or six people; the harsh tag SARS (#EndSARS) got the IG to dismantle that killer squad. Just harsh-tagging; it doesn’t cost you anything to harsh tag. The only thing is that it is not organised. Had it been organised so that we could have about 50 million people actively involved in social media in Nigeria. That is what our Movement is trying to achieve. But already from responses, we are up to about 5,000 (five thousand) without doing anything. So, we intend to shake up the place by asking some questions, simple questions. If the APC promised us A,B,C,D,E; how many of those things have they done? How many ministers are competent to deliver on their ministries? For example, my good friend, Dr. Fayemi, what competence does he have to be minister of Solid Minerals Development? Not because he is a bad man, but because that is not his background. It is like putting me in the ministry of Power. I don’t know anything about Power. What is the competence of another good friend of mine, Udo-Udoma to be in the ministry of Budget and Planning when he is a lawyer? But he is a good man, a nice chap and a successful man. So, the President should be called upon to dismantle his cabinet and pick the best people because the best guys are not there.
In football as you know, if you are at the bottom of the league, you need to sack your manager. The President can say ‘well I am tired’ and he vacates the office or get rid of people who are not competent. Another good friend of mine who is not competent – Geoffrey Onyeama, he is an intellectual property lawyer. He was in Geneva, he has no competence to be a foreign minister, but he is there. He is a nice and fine guy, tall, elegant and brilliant. The federal cabinet lacks competence and that’s what is causing our problems. The strategy of government business is completely misunderstood and that is a big shame.
What do you think government ought to be doing that it is not (doing)?
Government does three basic things; one, policy – for instance, if it now says, we want an energy policy. So government thinks through what that policy will be. Then, two, government executes it and three, government regulates it. That’s where government role stops. The government now hands over the responsibilities of running the business side of that energy to the private sector. I don’t know any time that the private sector has been invited to participate in running business in Nigeria.
The only person who has done it successfully on his own initiative is Dangote. Government did not tell Dangote to go build his refinery. When the refinery comes on stream next year, we will have many jobs from there. So, you can imagine if they were 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 Jim Ovias, Dangotes, we would have no problem. But it is the government responsibility to set that tone; to invite people. I have a lot of billionaire clients that have their money sitting in the bank because government does not create the policy that enables them to invest in viable business. First of all, they are afraid that even when government invites them, the same government may reverse it two years down the line. So, government work is misunderstood by even the President. He does not understand the nature of how to run a government and therefore, you have a catalogue of problems. They sold power to Discos and I challenge you to tell me any of those that bought the Discos who among them that has technical qualification.
They were all sold to political jobbers. They all went there and have no clue what to do and that’s why we are in this same situation. Government has four refineries, but government should not own refineries. Then we talk about the size of government. It is because government wants to hold things to itself because of the staggering amount of money you’ll make if you are in government business.
Otherwise, what I thought the President should be doing is to be holding strong conversations with the unions. I hope you know that government has about 3.5million employers; the current budget is over N8 trillion – broken into two- 70 percent is for salaries. Only 3.5 million is the population working with the Federal Government and that few chop all that money to the exclusion of the larger percentage of the population. So, what is the fairness? 3.5 million people spending 70 percent of the budget; and the remaining 30 percent for over 180 million people. Does it make sense? So, I expect the President to take tough decisions here; that is what it means to be a president of Nigeria. Labour will be angry, people will be angry; but without this new paradigm, which they do not understand, it is going to be difficult to move forward because every year budget will be passed and consumed. We are a consumer nation. We produce crude, we export it, but we import petrol and we don’t even have enough.
This is what we want government to begin to understand and that is largely what we are going to be saying using the Movement. We want to ask a question: Do you understand what it means to run a government? Without a pressure group like ours, I hope many will also come; we are going to continue the lamentation. I think enough is enough.
The other time we met; you said you were in talk with former President Olusegun Obasanjo on how he may help some of you to be on the driver’s seat of governance in the country in order to achieve that paradigm shift. Has he eventually given you his nods?
No. Obasanjo has not given me any backing. He just gave me an advice that if we want to change Nigeria and lamenting about old men governing us, we are going to go nowhere. He challenged me to come out. So, what my exchange with him led me to think was this. Because political party in the Nigerian context is an impossibility, you need to have resources. So, I said to myself that is not likely to work! The next best thing to do, so that we don’t lament, is to create a Movement, because a movement does not cause you any money- a movement that is mostly driven by the social media, it doesn’t really cost much. A political party in Nigeria is tainted. If I ask about the membership base of the APC, you will be surprised to know that it is less than one thousand, because they don’t depend on members to do things. They depend on capturing power. So the movement, to a large extent, is trying to address the issue the party could have done. It is a structure that is organised and that can achieve things.
Assuming you are offered the opportunity in one of the political parties to contest on its platform, would you accept it?
No. The Nigerian political space is so dirty that if you go into it, you get swallowed up. The only way is to go through it, which is what we are doing now. We must follow the Macron’s (Emmanuel Macron president of France) strategy. He had no party, but he won the presidential election. He didn’t join any political party because if he had joined, he would have been constrained by too many rules- you don’t do this; you don’t do that’. Now, which one will I join, PDP or APC? Or to start a party? That is impossible.
How can the system be sanitised? Compare when you were in the trenches and fought the military during your active years in the Civil Society struggle and the situation now; which one is dirtier?
On how to sanitise the system, it is by this type of process. We are determined to see to it that this Movement will continue to put pressure on government until they do the right thing. On the second leg of the question, it is dirtier now to do the fighting. Things are worse now. People do not have a common enemy as we saw it at that time. The military was our common enemy then. Today, you can’t trust anybody. People are in different camp now; you don’t even know who is on your side now. I may be talking to you as a member of PDP now, the next minute you are APC. That makes the fight difficult and dirtier. Again, the politicians of today can even sell their mother for anything.
