A former member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Musibau Kolawole Taiwo (popularly known as HKT), has faulted Nigerians who accuse President Bola Tinubu of bias in the selection of ambassadorial nominees. The All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftain also urged citizens to view national security as a shared responsibility that requires collective effort. In this interview with OLADIPUPO AWOJOBI, Kolawole discussed the need for the establishment of state police and emphasised that government policies, particularly the removal of fuel subsidy, should be seen as necessary steps toward moving the country forward, despite the current economic hardship. Excerpts:
Can you talk about the ambassadorial nominees, especially on the number of the non-career officers that are there; people are saying this is not good enough?
I don’t want to talk about the job of the president, let him do his job. It is left for him to pick whoever he wants as ambassadors.
What of the immediate past Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, will it not appear as if he worked for the incumbent party in the last general elections?
We are just begging the issue; ambassadorial position is different from others. I saw another former chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega at ECOWAS parliament on many occasions when I was in the House of Representatives; he used to come there to deliver lectures. He told me that he didn’t know what Nigerians want again.
He said that he organised free and fair elections and yet people were complaining. If they wanted to rig election, they cannot use the INEC Chairman because he has nothing to do with the election directly. The only thing he does is to announce the results. It is the adhoc staff that the politicians put there that you should abuse; elections are usually rigged at the polling booths. The people that are talking about rigging like Mr Peter Obi, can he claim to be a saint, when it comes to the issue of elections? The number of people living in the Eastern part of the country is smaller than in any other part of the country and they do a lot of manipulations there.
I read somewhere where former vice president Atiku Abubakar told former president Muhammadu Buhari to resign as president in 2018, saying that in 2011, Buhari told former president Goodluck Jonathan to resign based on insecurity, the same insecurity that had been there when they were there. Politicians always tell people to do what they cannot do. Some people would say President Bola Tinubu started insecurity in Nigeria, what concerns someone who was in Lagos with the insecurity that started in the North? If you are an electoral officer, before you can contest any election after leaving office, you must have spent 10 years outside.
Appointment has to do with image of the government and the president has to look for someone that has a very good image that can defend the country. The reason they said he must have spent 10 years after leaving office before contesting for any office is for him not to influence the INEC to do anything that would favour him. Is Mahmood not a Nigerian? Every Nigerian has the right to serve the country when he or she is called upon.
It is the function of the President and I will not query him for doing his job. Do they compensate people because of rigging alone? It might be because he conducted a free and fair election that he is being compensated. A right thinking Nigerian should know that 2023 general elections were not rigged at all. The APC won because of the mistake of the opposition. When we wanted to take over power from them, all the oppositions collapsed into one, but in 2023, the opposition did not do that.
The opportunity of being appointed is every- body’s right, but it’s the function of the President to appoint people. When they want to fault any ministry is it not the president’s name that they would mention, any minister they mentioned must have performed extra ordinarily.
When President Tinubu appointed Dr. Betta Edu as the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, and she did not perform, he removed her. He even removed Abubakar Badaru as the Minister of Defence. The only thing Section 14:4 of our constitution said is that appointments must be spread across. If he did not spread them then you can complain.
It is being said that we should have state police urgently to combat our current insecurity…
President Tinubu fought for the establishment of state police, when he was the governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007. He clamoured for it, and stood for it. All his life, he has been clamouring for state police. When he became the president, he gave the governors directives to set up state police in their respective states, and they have not done it.
But people are saying that state police could be used against political opponents by governors…
That is giving the same excuses of yesteryear; it is like zero one zero in statistics. How many months of the years do we use for politics? Is it up to six months? Then you will leave over three and a half years because of the fear of only six months.
The primary function of government is to protect the lives of the people. Secondly, if you are the governor and you use it against the people, immediately you leave office, the person that would take over from you would use it against you, even within your party, which we have seen. We have seen that even when you replace yourself with your son there can be problem. That happened in Kwara State. Lagos State has been very innovative; they introduced the Lagos Security Trust Fund.
There was a time that we had a lot of security problems in Lagos State. Then they came up with a law that empowers the state to establish it and it is sponsored by the private sector. The state only appoints the Executive Secretary of the fund, while the Chairman comes from the private sector, and all their members are from the private sector.
They buy things and give to the Executive Secretary to give to the security agencies. We’re even supposed to have street police in Nigeria now and not just state police. There are a lot of people without jobs, they would just be around the people and gather information. Security is about information, if you don’t have information there is nothing the security man can do.
What could be the problem with our armed forces, is it that they are overwhelmed or they need external support?
The job of internal security is not even for the army, it is for the police; the army ought to handle external aggressions, but because there are some elements of external aggression there as they are being sponsored from outside, that is why the army had to come in.
The problem started with our people; there was a day I was speaking with Senator Ali Ndume from Borno State as we were colleagues at the ECOWAS Parliament, he said that the boys that started Boko Haram were like area boys then.
He said that they used to stay in his area and that he was jailed for six months for what he didn’t know anything about. They have even accused the Vice President, Kashim Shettima of the same thing that they saw the head of the guys in his house, that he ate with him. I told them that many politicians face the same problem.
It has happened to me before; they said that I asked them to kill people. When you are from the same area with some guys, they would be free with you and when they become notorious, they would accuse you of sponsoring them. There was a time they said that former president Muhammadu Buhari sponsored the bandits and terrorists, when he lost the 2011 elections.
Are you saying that after he became the president in 2015, he still needed to continue that? That shows it’s beyond what we are saying because they ought to assist him, when he became the president. I would not say they are rubber stamp; they are different from the state houses of assembly. The President must have been doing what they want before they support him. If I were in the National Assembly, I would do the same.
I remember how we used to approve loans for the government because we had no option. I could remember how we approved the removal of subsidy in the 9th Assembly. You have a budget of N17 trillion and you are to spend about N6 trillion on subsidy, then the entire country is left with N11 trillion, that means we don’t need government again. The President came and said ‘subsidy is gone’ and people are blaming him. The late President Buhari said if President Tinubu didn’t remove subsidy when he did, he would not be able to remove it as he tried it three times and failed.
Do we need the support of the United States of America to fight insecurity?
I don’t think so; the U.S is losing the grip of the world. The country is supposed to be the police of the world that should do the right thing. But lately, President Donald Trump has been doing all sorts of things. After supporting Israel to kill the Palestinians, you are now saying that there must be ceasefire.
Why did you allow them to kill so many people, when you know that the people that perpetrated the killings then were just a group, you are now killing innocent people, you are not even getting those people. When they said they wanted to swap prisoners, it is the same people that are carrying guns that they are swapping with, but they are killing ordinary Palestinians.
We are not supposed to be sentimental about it. Everybody pitied Israel the way Hitler killed them during the Second World War, but the amount of blood Israel is shedding in Gaza is getting beyond imagination. Yes, those people were wrong to have killed and kidnapped their people, it is condemnable, that was why when they started the attack, people supported them.
But it’s getting too much. One of the tenets of Islam is that God is the only revenger; if you can do exactly as they have done to you, then you can do it. That means you must be just, if someone cuts your finger and you want to cut his own too, it should be the same way. God says He is the only one that is just.
