VICTOR NDOMA-EGBA, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and Senate Majority Leader, has remained a leading light in the Red Chamber since he emerged to represent Cross River Central in 2003. He talks with Editor, Politics/Features, EMEKA ALEX DURU, on the current security challenges in the land, problems with Nigeria’s budget arrangement, his constituency projects, among others
Nyanya bombings and abduction of Borno school girls.
Victor Ndoma-EgbaFirst of all, I feel very sad and pained that we still have this insurgency and terrorism. For me, the meaning of all of these is that every Nigerian is henceforth a stakeholder in the security of this nation. We can no longer go with the attitude of consigning issues of security to the security agents alone. Every Nigerian is now involved in the fight against terrorism and every Nigerian must be a stakeholder in this fight because it has assumed a dimension that a limited number of people cannot do it all alone, no matter their training, no matter their equipment.
Terrorists more equipped than the military?
The military and all the other security agencies put together have less than one million men and we are looking at a country with a population of about 170 million in almost one million square kilometres of space. There is absolutely no way the military can be found dominating every space in our nation today. It is practically impossible. Even in more developed climes where they have larger military and far higher levels of technology, every citizen is involved in providing security.
These insurgents are not spirits; they live with people. So, until people begin to provide intelligence on them, there is very little that the military will be able to do.
For me, the time has come for us to be more alive to our environment, more alive to the people we meet, more alive to events around us; so that if anything happens, we will be able to immediately describe and make our own contributions to further securing our nation.
Insurgency orchestration and motivation
I think we have had terrorism with us for quite a while. I remember many years ago we had the Maitatsine sect in Kano. They were not branded terrorists. They were branded fanatics. But their activities were not different from what we see today. So, it is just that the nomenclature has changed and the intensity has changed. Why has the intensity changed? One, terrorism has become a global phenomenon with international affiliations. These international affiliations come with international funding. International funding gives it international dimension. I had it on good authority that some of the terrorists that had been picked up were not even Nigerians, which means that we even have mercenaries coming from beyond our shores to engage in this act of terrorism. So, it is a very complicated situation. And I do not think it is as simple as blaming Mr. A or Mr. B.
Terrorism also has a particular environment to thrive in; an environment of poverty, an environment of unemployment. And you know, statistically, the North East of this country has the highest rate of poverty. What we should rather be concentrating on is how to address the issues of poverty and education in the most vulnerable parts of this country, rather than trade blames.
I am not part of this blame game.
Jonathan’s approach to tackling insecurity
What suggestions have those who have accused the president of weakness made as to how we could handle this situation? It is the military that is handling the situation along with the State Security Services (SSS) and other security agencies. These are professionals. And they are the ones engaged in the fight. What is lacking, in my view, is the synergy of the open society with the military and other security organisations. They are saying that the president is weak. They should educate some of us who don’t understand the argument. What else should he (president) have done?
Efforts of Mr. President
I know, from my position, that everything possible is being done to curtail the situation. But like I said, my own reading of the constraints is that those of us in civil society are not doing what we should do. We are not yet stakeholders in this project. When these insurgents enter a town, don’t they live in houses? They certainly cannot be spirit. If we don’t begin to play the role each and every one of us is expected to play in this situation, blaming anybody will take us nowhere. We can say that we are under totally new circumstances. Our attitude and approach should rise to the challenges and the demand of the new circumstances. We should be alert to our environment. That is what it means.
Call for Jonathan’s resignation
We are in a war situation and people are diverting attention. Which president resigns in a war situation? I think we shouldn’t politicise this very serious issue of the security challenges we have at the moment. Politicising it will compound it.
Expectations from 2014 budget
Let me say that not much is going to change because, I mean, the ratios are very clear. We have 76 per cent of the budget for recurrent and that is the component of the budget that is for running of government and public institutions – their overheads, salaries and all of that. Twenty-four per cent of the budget is for capital. It is the capital component that drives development. It is through the capital component of the budget that you construct roads and do other projects that have direct bearing on the people. It is the capital component that will bring improvement to our educational infrastructure. But as long as you have the capital component far less than the recurrent component, don’t expect much. Whether the budget is passed on January 1, March 1 or April 1, not much is likely to change.
The real issue, as far as I am concerned, is that we have structural issues that we must address. And in addressing the structural issues, let us go back to our Independence when we had three regions. What was the ratio of the capital budget to the recurrent budget? What was the ratio when we had four regions? What was the ratio when we had 12 states? What was the ratio when we had 19 states? What was the ratio when we had 21 states? And what is the ratio now? We must interrogate those structural changes in our polity. People have told me that at some point in our economic history, we were at par with countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Brazil, India and Indonesia.
There were certain historical similarities that we have shared with these countries. Apart from, may be, India, it is military incursion into the political life of those countries. If we shared the experience of military incursion, then military incursion cannot be the reason we are where we are and they are where they are, because it was an experience that was shared by virtually all of these countries that we were at par with at some point. The one experience they have that we don’t have is that their federating units have remained the same all through this period and ours has gone from three to 12 to 19 to 21 to 36. And that has had great implications on the ratios between recurrent and capital expenditure profile. So, we must do something fundamentally different to be able to get the kind of ratio that will result in a dramatic change in the lives of the Nigerian people.
Strategies for change
We must clearly look at the structure of governance. We must also look at the public institutions we have. We must, as a matter of policy and choice, reduce the size of governance. People have talked of corruption. Yes, there is widespread corruption. But corruption is a function of systemic inefficiency. Where the systems are not working efficiently, people take advantage of that inefficiency for personal benefits.
Corruption is not an end; it is a consequence. I think the issue of the size of governance and the inefficiencies that have come with the structure of governance and the size of governance must be addressed. It is not something that is as simple as saying that the National Assembly has passed a budget and the president has appended his signature. It is not that simple, in my view. It is something far more fundamental.
Strategies for budget implementation
I have just painted a picture of systemic inefficiency. Oversight does not restructure the polity. What we have now is a structure that will deliver more on inefficiency than on efficiency. And what is the purpose of oversight? Oversight is to ensure that money appropriated is used for whatever it is meant for, and to also draw attention to the inefficiencies in the system. And we are doing that. That is what the constitution says. We cannot arrogate to us powers that the constitution has not given us. To the best of our constitutional powers, we are doing the oversight. But will that oversight address the systemic deficiencies in our system?
Addressing the fundamentals
We have to be honest and forthright about this restructuring of the polity. There are those who are still clamouring for creation of more states. There are those who believed that creation of states has brought development. I don’t think so. I think we must do a more fundamental analysis. What was the growth rate in our economy when we had three regions, when we had four regions, when we had 12 states, when we had 19 states? We must be upright enough to look at ourselves in the eyes and do this analysis. How did we fare when we had better decentralisation? And how are we faring today? How did we fare when we had agriculture as the bedrock of our economy? Are we better off in this system that we now run?
National Assembly, the problem?
I have heard people say the National Assembly is the major problem in our country. And I said the budget in the last six years is N150 billion. It has remained N150 billion. What is the percentage of that to the general budget? Just about three per cent or less! Even if you were to sack the National Assembly today, what will be the savings? It is less than three per cent of the national budget. So, the National Assembly, in my view, is not the issue. We must go fast and address the fundamentals of our polity.
Impressions on constituency projects
The inspection became imperative because I had been seeing the projects on paper. And I needed to put a perspective to those projects. I think it also opened the eyes of quite a number of people and they began to appreciate that these are physical things. People were amazed at what was on ground. I now have clear picture of what some of those projects require, what more needs to be done on them to give them the kind of quality they need to have.
Those that we have had problems with, either for non-performance, I am drawing the attention of the relevant MDAs to the issues that we discovered.
Projects inspected
We inspected a number of school buildings we are taking up for renovation; health facilities, including the on-going specialist hospital in Ikom; erosion control projects, especially in all the six local governments of our senatorial district, and major erosion intervention in Ikom. We inspected a number of water projects. I have a major water project in a place called Edor in Ikom and in my own community called Akparabong.
Cost of projects
There are projects I have attracted to the constituency that we can’t put a cost to. One of them is part of the Trans-African Highway in my constituency. There is the Calabar-Oban-Nsan-Okoroba Road, a major project running into tens of billions of naira. It is about N80 billion or N90 billion. The projects we inspected, excluding these two, amounted to N7 billion and we arrived at the total value from the contract cost.
Previous projects
These ones are the ones from 2007. I must make this clear. These are projects that I have attracted through government. I also have my personal social responsibility projects. I have my scholarship scheme.
We have over 550 beneficiaries today at all levels – undergraduate and postgraduate. We equally run computer literacy programme, and a good number of people have so benefited. We have the small and medium business initiative. Currently, over 100 people are undergoing training in Calabar. I have my medical intervention. Recently, I brought doctors from abroad who gave my constituents free medical attention. Then, I regularly offer assistance to individuals, groups and institutions as the need arises. But I believe those ones are things you don’t have to talk about. They are not things that one should begin to say out and make noise about like some people do.