Alkasum Abba is a professor of Economics and a political historian. In this interview monitored on Trust Television, he speaks on Nigeria’s economy under President Bola Tinubu’s administration, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
At this point, is Nigeria a country or a nation, and where do you stand on what the answer is?
I think we are trying to become a nation but we have been blocking ourselves. We are just a country with divided people and I have all along argued that the biggest challenge Nigeria has faced was the regionalisation of Nigeria, including Nigerian politics and this has come to become a very big impediment to our growth and even our intellectuals, our politicians, our journalists, have this regional outlook and it’s not useful to us.
Where you are from or what you call it doesn’t define whether you will be able to discharge your responsibilities faithfully and honestly and I think that we have failed to overcome this difficulty.
I have explained time without numbers that when the British colonial government realised that the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), which was then led by Herbert Macaulay and later by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe was becoming a national party, mobilizing people across, especially after the 1946 campaign against the Richard’s Constitution of 1946, in which they thwarted Nigerian territory, the British were worried that if they were able to succeed, they will throw them out.
That what the Congress Party did in India. I have tried to explain that when the British realised that the Congress Party was kicking them out, what did they do? When they were granting the Congress Party independence, what they did was to divide the leadership of the Indian National Congress Party along religious lines and that’s why Ali Jinnah, who used to be a prominent leader of the party, was among those who broke up to have a Muslim League and then a country called Pakistan was created within the Indian subcontinent and people were forced to move because it was supposed to be a Muslim area.
Hindus were forced to move out of Pakistan territory into India and Muslims were encouraged to leave India and go to Pakistan. And I think this is the problem of the Indian subcontinent up to now than Pakistan.
India encouraged the creation of Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan, and they revolted. That’s why Bangladesh is close to India and Pakistan is hostile to India. This was what the British did to us. Then they regionalised the politics. They regionalised our outlook. But not only that, they encouraged politicians with regional outlook to take control of government at the level of regions and at the national level.
That’s why when people say we should go back to the 1963 Constitution, I laugh because it is Richard’s Constitution as amended in 1963, which encouraged not the consolidation of Nigeria but the segmentation of Nigeria, where the regions were being seen as autonomous. This is what people want us to go back to.
How much of that history is still shaping today’s Nigeria?
It is even in our politics, some parties say they zone it to the North and South. What does it mean? In politics, it is the quality of your programmes and the quality of your candidates that matters. If you bring a Fulani man like me as president and I’m hungry, what am I going to do with him? I want somebody who can put food on my table.
This is what people need in this country but we’re the ones who are being blocked from achieving this goal with this regionalism. Then ethnic comes in and so on and so forth, and even religion. When you are empty as a political party and as a politician, you have nothing to offer.
That’s why they resort to ethnic and religious and regional outlook, saying: This is the time for the North or South. We started with countries like Malaysia and South Korea, but look at where they are now and where we are It’s like when you start with your colleagues’ in a car race, they are moving at 120km per hour and you drop to 40km per hour.
They have gone and left us behind. Why is it so? It’s because we have not been able to sort out the quality of our politics. The quality of our politicians and political parties is very poor. That is why you see corruption killing the country. The biggest problem we face and why we’re not able to achieve anything is corruption. If you are not able to sanction people, then you cannot stop stealing. In China, if you steal $5,000, they will shoot you.
But here the story is different and that is why we can never have successful governments. That is why every government that comes covers up for the corruption of its predecessor. Who has brought anyone he has taken over from to book? None, because they know they too will get involved in corruption.
How do you think we can reverse the thought process that we are first Christians or Muslims, Fulanis, Igbos, Yorubas before we are Nigerians because Nigerian seems to be a secondary identity?
It is this philosophy that has drawn us to this level. I’ve said that people are suffering. During Muhammadu Buhari’s era, many people thought that he was a Fulani man. So, anytime he came up with something, they said: This Fulani! But Buhari was not Fulani. His wife is Fulani but Buhari did not even speak one word of Fulfulde.
He is not. But because of this, we have gotten into this kind of trivialization of governance. When his government came with a program called Ruga, it was bashed. Then Tinubu came and said Ruga but nobody said anything because you can’t accuse him of being an Hausa man.
President Tinubu said he inherited a terrible economy, but he has made the economy worse than the terrible economy that he faced
So, the regionalisation has been done in such a way that people in the South believe that everybody in the North is either Hausa or Fulani, refusing to accept that there is also diversity. Instead of harnessing our diversity and use it for our progress, we are using it to dismantle ourselves.
How do you think that corruption has shaped the narrative of our country in the past 65 years?
I think the first coup was not, sincerely speaking, a corruption problem. It was about regionalism and that was why the coup leaders were all from Eastern Region. So, they killed the premier of the Northern Region and the premier of the Western Region. They didn’t stop at that; they killed military officers of Northern Region and Western Region extractions, who were not part of the government.
So, you see it is that dose of regionalism which intoxicated them. And the media is part of the problem because it promotes this kind of thing.
They did not kill the premier of the Eastern Region. Emmanuel Ifeajuna, who did a lot of the killings was seen with Michael Okpara drinking, and when we asked, they said, Archbishop Makarios visited and he did not leave. They did not kill any senior military officer from the Eastern Region. So, it was not corruption in the First Republic that pushed people to go and kill.
Corruption has been either the undertone or the pretext for several military interregnums and it is still an issue that we’re still dealing with today. So, that’s the key point… I’ll tell you, it is growing. It has reached a point of unbearable now.
There’s this story, they said General Sani Abacha, when he was head of state, sent for ex-President Shehu Shagari. Two days he didn’t see Shagari and he was mad.
How can I call this man? We have not seen him for two days. Somebody had to go and explain to him, Shagari lives in Shagari village. There is no telephone line in that village and Shagari did not have a house in Sokoto. He was shocked. He said I am the one who read the statement accusing them of corruption. But here’s this man who lives in the village.
He was president; he didn’t have a house in Sokoto. So you see, it is easy when soldiers are taking over government, they will make this accusation. But I’ll tell you, it has become very serious since 1999. There has been no control of corruption in Nigeria and this is our biggest problem. I said that no new government probed its predecessor since 1999.
But the Buhari administration probed the Goodluck Jonathan administration like the Dasuki case …
They did not. What did they do? No, it’s just because Dasuki was not in good terms with Buhari. They were the ones who did coup against him in 1985. It’s not because Dasuki did anything extraordinary.
So you believe there’s personalisation of even the anti-corruption fight and there are sacred cows?
I don’t know what you call them, but people are not being investigated. Look at this government. It’s only Godwin Emefiele, who is being probed. Nobody else has been accused. But when you talk, you hear people talking quietly that some people have gone to refund monies. You don’t fight corruption like that. But I tell you, because each one that comes is going to do corruption, so they don’t want about investigating corruption.
Tinubu said the foundation his administration started on was a bit faulty but then he has been able to moderate and then caution some things, take some tough decisions as the president of this country. Do you think our economic growth has matched our true potential?
I don’t think so. President Tinubu said he inherited a terrible economy, but he has made the economy worse than the terrible economy that he faced. It is not what government says they have achieved.
Go to the markets; prices have gone so high. Cost of living has escalated. Transport fare has escalated. Now, anybody who is a pensioner, if you have a car, your pension money may not buy you a full tank or more than two full tanks in a car.
How do you justify this kind of socalled economic reform? You tell us about figures. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has gone up. What’s the use of GDP when I’m hungry? This is the point that whatever it is that they are doing, which they think is good, I think they have not related to the population. People are hungry.
We have never been in this situation. I don’t even want to call it hunger. I want to say starvation. We have never been in this situation since we achieved independence and you tell me you are reforming the economy. What do I do with the reformed economy? What is my business with how much foreign reserve we have when I’m hungry?
