Senator Victor Umeh, who represents Anambra Central Senatorial District at the National Assembly, is the Chairman, Senate Committee on National Identity Cards and National Population. In this interview with CHUKWU DAVID, he speaks on the proposed 2025 national census and some recent developments in the polity

Former military president, General brahim Babangida, in his autobiography, gave insight into the 1966 coup, clarifying that it was not an Igbo coup as widely claimed. What is your take on his position

I believe that what is very important for Nigeria at this stage is a national reconciliation and healing. Babangida’s book is a very great book.

Apart from bringing out the facts even against himself in the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, which he accepted responsibility, but also said that he was wrong in what he did.

He was also able to make fundamental statements as a young military officer then, about what happened in the civil war, what led to the civil war, particularly the first coup of January 15, 1966.

He was able to bring out what myself had known previously because I worked with General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu when he was National Leader of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and I was national chairman of the party.

I worked very closely with him for five years, and most of these things I already had them in my knowledge. That coup was not an Igbo coup. The way Babangida posited in his own book and the account he gave of the coup is something that is open even for unbiased minds to have come to terms with it a long time ago.

But because of maybe, the casualties of that coup, people have not averted their minds to the concrete undeniable facts that the same coup was crushed by Igbo people. Ojukwu was in Kano then and he didn’t agree with the coup. And when he spoke with Major Nzeogwu, he was a Lieutenant Colonel then, so he was a senior officer to Nzeogwu.

He disagreed with them, the same Ojukwu that later led Biafra. And in the book, “Why We Struck” by Colonel Ben Gbulie, he said it clearly. He put down the names of other people, who were involved in the coup and who were not Igbos, but from Western Nigeria.

General Babangida in his book, listed their names and the commands they led in the coup execution. The intention of the coupists as told by the people themselves, including Col. Ben Gbulie, was to bring Chief Obafemi Awolowo out of the Calabar prison because the revolutionaries were not happy with the government of the day.

They felt that Awolowo was a more progressive person than the people in authority. They were planning a better society for Nigeria to make Awolowo an ideal president and head of state, but their coup failed.

I’ve seen a lot of people writing in reaction to what Babangida said. Someone who has been head of state of Nigeria for eight years, and he was Chief of Army Staff at some point. So, he went through the army and he had knowledge both classified information about everything that happened during the war.

So, he gave that statement as a patriotic Nigerian to speak the truth even though the Igbo people have been punished because of that coup. We have lost so much because of the 1966 coup and it was because of misdirection and misrepresentation. There was never a time the Igbo people met and decided to organise a coup.

How do you mean that the Igbos lost so much because of the January 1966 coup?

More than anything, the coup set Eastern Region backwards because at the time the coup took place, Eastern Region was one of the leading economies in the world. Dr. Michael Okpara was doing great work.

We have lost so much because of the 1966 coup and it was because of misdirection and misrepresentation. There was never a time Igbo people met and decided to organise a coup

In Western Nigeria, the government was doing marvellously well. Things were going well even in the North. Agricultural produce was helping the economy of Northern Nigeria. Groundnut pyramids, cotton, all these things have all gone because of that coup that led to the second coup that brought General Yakubu Gowon divided Nigeria into 12 states and destroyed the four regions we had.

His own coup came because even with the January 15, 1966 coup, Nigeria was still four regions. There were military administrators appointed when General Johnson Ironsi became the head of state. So, he had military people as heads of governments of the four regions until Gowon dissolved the four regions and created 12 states in 1967.

So, from that Gowon’s division of Nigeria into 12 states, creation of more states and local governments by the military continued, and today, we have 36 states and 774 local governments. So, people should be able to know how things happened and Babangida did a great job by bringing out some of the silent truths.

He served in the army and he spoke about his own experience, a close shave with death. So, I commend him for putting the records straight. Those who are controverting him should know that Igbo people were killed, Igbo officers killed Igbo officers.

That showed that the coup was a national revolution not targeted at any tribe otherwise Chris Anuforo that I later met, couldn’t have killed Lt. Colonel Unebe.

Those involved were young officers who wanted to execute their conviction and it turned out the way it did. I pray that God will rests the souls of those who lost their lives and give Nigeria a healing spirit, so that we can put our past behind.

You know that they don’t teach history in the secondary schools but Babangida brought out his book that has become almost an encyclopedia of history that nobody can throw away. It was written by a man who was involved and who was the head of state of Nigeria, and who has played so great roles in shaping the future of Nigeria the way it is whether good or bad.

So, my soul is uplifted reading from Babangida that the 1966 coup was not a coup by the Igbo people for selfish interests of the Igbo nation. These were people who were in the army, who had their own ideas of how things would be.

They weren’t carrying out the coup to go and make an Igbo man the head of state. If the coup had gone through and Awolowo was brought out and put as head of state of Nigeria, maybe, the Igbos would have been spared the onslaught and the ethnic cleansing.

What is your advice, going forward?

What I am asking for now is that with this account and the truth revealed; If they know all those things they denied the Igbo people because of that coup, they should begin to make adjustments and know that the Igbos did not organise any coup to make the Igbo people in Nigeria dominate others. What the Igbos have had as part of them is their hard work; their adventurous spirit of commerce and business.

Despite all the discriminations put on our way since the war ended, the marginalisation and the privileges they are denied as citizens of Nigeria as well as the structural imbalance in Nigeria, occasioned by the military’s creation of states and local governments, the Igbos have continued to move on.

So, there is need for reunion and reintegration of the Igbos into Nigeria, particularly in the area of science and technology. Biafran engineers and scientists developed weapons of mass destruction but because these were done by the Igbo people, that ingenuity and invention were allowed to waste when the war ended.

Those scientists who built these weapons were rather put under watch. They have all died and I know that Nigeria lost because necessity is the mother of all inventions. When the war ended and Gowon made a historic speech of no victor no vanquished, he should have gone for those Biafran scientists.

He should have sent them abroad, if he was thinking properly though most of them trained abroad in good universities. If he had sent them on advanced courses, Nigeria would have had nuclear weapons by now.

The present government is proposing to conduct a census. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Population, how is your committee working with the relevant agencies to make the proposed census a huge success?

I took over as chairman of that Committee on February 4, when the Senate President made some changes. The process is on to get brief and all that.

The chairman of the National Population Commission has come here on a courtesy visit to familiarise himself with the new leadership and step by step, we’ll be able to discuss, to know what their programmes are. I intend to call him again to meet the committee.

Even though he has met with the Committee under the former chairman, Senator Abdul Ningi, we are yet to meet as a committee. So, when he gets ready with his programmes, he’ll come back. Remember, they just did their budget defence before these changes were made.

So, we’re working with that budget, which has been approved. In that budget, there is no provision for census in 2025, but I know that f the President wants the census to be conducted, he has the opportunity to bring a supplementary budget to accommodate the census.

He also has a service-wide vote from where he can dip his hands and fund the census if need be. So, everything will depend on the President accepting that the census will take place and he makes a declaration.

The constitution requires that you should make a declaration that there shall be census. His programmes will determine what happens next. But the preparations will continue to go on until a formal declaration is made by the President.

Nigeria has not conducted a census for decades. What is Nigeria going to gain by conducting it now, and what has the country lost for not conducting it all these years?

Census is very important for planning. A nation that does not know the number of human beings living inside that nation cannot make adequate provisions for the needs of the people.

So, census will give you the demographic data, age brackets of each part of the population, people between one day and maybe 10 years and so on and so forth. You graduate it over and you have a data with which you can now make specific provision to look after those people.

You now know the number of old men and women living in Nigeria who require special care; people who have become vulnerable as a result of old age. Then the children who are of school age, how to provide for their educational needs.

So, it’s not sufficient for you to continue to say Nigeria is above 200 million people and they continue to budget for above 200 million people. You may be under providing because the critical segments in the population may not be adequately provided for because you don’t know how many there are.

So, population census is a very important thing to do in any country and you know you keep updating it. The law we have is that you do census every 10 years, every 10 years you update your population; you do another census to know how many people who have died, how many people have moved from this age bracket to another.

Some people have tended to say that census is also needed for election purposes. Well, that you know the number of people in Nigeria is one thing, but not everybody who is a Nigerian or who is captured in the population on the census exercise would want to vote or register to be a voter.

So, the electoral register maintained by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is different from the number of people living in Nigeria. So, there may be about, say, 100 million people, and only about 80 million people register to get their voter’s card to be able to participate in the election.

The recent drama that happened on February 20, on the floor of the Senate between Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan and the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, has brought serious embarrassment to the Senate and Nigeria at large. How do you feel over that?

The Nigerian media both social media and the conventional media have refused to focus on positive things happening in Nigeria. The only thing they focus on is something they think they can use to do sensational headlines. It doesn’t help. The Senate has a Standing Rule, and it was read out.

I wasn’t in the plenary on that day. I was away on duty in Lagos. I went to attend a major stakeholders meeting, organised by the Federal Ministry of Works. People in the building material and manufacturing sectors were in attendance.

So, myself and my chairman, we all went there with our colleague in the House of Representatives, to be part of the dialogue and conversation, to see what we can do to help to bring down the prices of building materials in Nigeria, to be able to enhance production of affordable housing for Nigerians because the costs have all gone out of reach. Both cement, sand and even labour.

I’ve seen the clips and I will tell you that that outburst was unnecessary. The Senate Standing Rule is another book that is there. It gives the power for allocation of seats to members to the President of the Senate. It also empowers him to also change the seats at different times.

And this one was the case of two members of the left side of the aisle, that is the opposition side, defecting to that side. The Senate abhors open seats in any side. So, once somebody moves, there must be closing of gaps. It has happened before.

A nation that does not know the number of human beings living inside that nation cannot make adequate provisions for the needs of the people

So, I think for some reason I could not understand, our sister decided to make an issue out of it. But our rule is also that you don’t speak when you are not on the seat assigned to you. If you’re not on your seat, the President of the Senate will not recognise you to speak.

And when she refused to go to the seat allocated to her and wanted to speak, the Senate president rightly ignored her and said ‘you cannot speak because you are not on your seat. Go to your seat and then address me.’

He was quoting Order 10, which deals with outside a members’ seat. So, if she had gone to the seat given to her and then shouted Order 10, privileges, the Senate President would have listened to her. So, it was a case of not observing the rules and decided to make a case out of actually something I didn’t consider necessary.

And that was the attack and the whole media picked it and gave it all kinds of colouration. The Senate president did not ask them to move Natasha to a particular seat, it was the agreement done by the Sergeantat-Arms with the Senate Services Committee.

It has happened to me. I was in the U.S last year, attending the Oil and Technological Conference and the Senate president called to inform me that he would like to swap my seat with that of Senator Fadaunsi. I was sitting at the edge of the aisle. Fadaunsi was sitting inside.

And he told me, for medical reasons, that they would like me to go inside and Fadaunsi would go to the aisle to enable him to move out anytime he wanted to move out urgently. I told him, with all pleasure, do that. What is in it with where you sit? I now sit inside, away from where I was located. I didn’t make any fuse out of it because he told me in advance.

Later on, some people started arranging it again, and I was amazed. I don’t struggle for such things because if you are in that chamber, there’s no place you cannot be sighted by the presiding officer. If you have anything to do and the Senate President is not catching you when you want to make a major contribution, you can now rely on Order 10 privileges, which require that every senator shall be heard on matters of debate.

So, I will like you to help to diffuse the tension. The Senate president was absolutely right in the way he conducted the proceedings of the Senate on that day. And our sister, we also tried to counsel her. People talked to her. I also sent her a message to calm her down.

And in the parliament, you have to follow the rules of the parliament. If there are things that you do not like, there are alternative ways of addressing them. You can go and seek private audience with the Senate president after the day’s session and tell him things that you didn’t like what happened.

I know Senator Akpabio; he is a very jovial person. He can make joke out of anything, even when you think that he will come out strong hitting you, he will laugh and make joke against you and move on.

He’s not somebody who carries such things to extreme level. Now, the Senate has suspended her based on the investigation, findings and recommendations of the Senate Committee on Ethics, Code of Conduct and Public Petitions.

It came to that point because of her later actions and unwillingness to show remorse. However, I believe she will learn a big lesson from the development and come out stronger as a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

It’s also a lesson for all of us senators and indeed Nigerians. As I said earlier, we have a rule book, which provides guidelines for our conduct. We cannot be making laws for Nigerians and refuse to adhere to our own internal rules. That’s all I can say about that.