MARTIN ONOVO, an engineer and public opinion analyst, was the presidential candidate of the Action Alliance (AA) in the 2011 general election. In this interview with Assistant Politics Editor, DANIEL KANU, he speaks on critical national issues concerning security challenge, national conference, President Goodluck Jonathan’s leadership among other issues.
Confab as presidential advisory committee
Martin Onovo
We do not need any critic or holy Moses to tell us that nothing good will come out of the confab, unless you want to proscribe our memory of the past. I know absolutely that nothing can come out of the confab. At best, it could be a talk shop, but I do not see anything radical coming out of it. What will they say that is new to the National Assembly and critical minds in the country? Secondly, the purpose of the so-called national conference is so perverse that even the name national conference itself is treacherous. What is a national conference in politics? It is the conference for the component units in the country. If you look at the pre-Independence constitutional conference from 1954 to 1959, that’s a national conference where the different regions that made up Nigeria sent their delegations to London. It was on that basis that Nigeria was negotiated as an independent nation and we all agreed. So Nigeria did not come down from the sky. Nigeria, after amalgamation, is a product of the agreement of the component units. Later we decided to modify Nigeria and we went to the Constituent Assembly in 1978 where we had an agreement that gave birth to the 1999 Constitution. When you talk about the national conference, it is not the conference of professional associations, labour unions or political retirees and gerontocrats. What they have just organised is what I see as a large presidential advisory committee. This is not a national conference, and nothing can come out of it. It will end up as a worthless, unproductive and wasteful jamboree, simple!
Consensus to the rescue
Consensus of who? What they are doing in the national conference is not constitutional; it is also not democratic. Which of the people participating at the national conference did we vote for? Or do you think that is not important? No Nigerian voted for any of them to go and participate on our behalf. How can something that is not constitutional, not democratic, serve a democratic purpose? Such action cannot be beneficial in a democracy and does not help in deepening democracy. The national conference is a waste of national resources. Don’t forget that the then Olusegun Obasanjo-led government had done a similar confab in 2006 which resulted in nothing. This one will also result in nothing.
Concern on abduction of the Chibok girls
I am very worried. If you have a situation and you try to address it and you exhaust your options and capabilities, it’s natural that you may be demoralised by the mere fact that you have exhausted your options and capabilities. That is what I think is happening, which is very natural. If after 70 days of trying so much to achieve this safe return of the Chibok students we have not succeeded, it is natural to start asking ourselves what we have not done right or whether there is a better way to get it done. This is a country where we have lost the sense of outrage and there are so many outrageous scandals that one seems to drown the other. So, what we need do is to continue to pressure the government to do what it has to do because those children are our future leaders. We can’t abandon them. Those children must be rescued alive.
Insurgents overwhelming Nigerian security agencies
No, I think the leadership issues we have in Nigeria are with respect to illegitimacy. I am not talking about illegality because most people seem to confuse the two. There is also this massive corruption that has demotivated the Nigerian military, and this is very obvious. There is no way those senseless terrorists can overwhelm the Nigerian military. So, it’s a leadership problem that needs to be properly addressed. Our military has the capacity to deal with those senseless animals in human form.
Apprehension on economic crisis
What we have on ground already is a very serious economic crisis because if you look at the present report where poverty is said to be about 70 per cent, and if you look at the unemployment data where even the government admits that unemployment has been increasing consistently over the last seven years, you will know we are really in a terrible economic crisis. If you also take into consideration that in 1999, a bag of cement was selling for N380 and today it’s over N2,000, you can imagine what inflation has done in the construction sector. In addition, we have a looming national debt crisis. The 2014 budget provides for N712 billion for debt servicing. This represents an increase of 20 per cent from 2013. If our debt servicing cost continues to grow at this rate, by 2016 we are going to need a trillion naira for debt servicing. Given that the cabal in power has been unable to control recurrent expenditure which has also been growing at the expense of capital expenditure, which we need for development, it becomes obvious that looking further down on that basis, the horizon looks even worse than the terrible economic crisis we have today. While government is claiming that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is growing at seven per cent, no jobs are being generated. It means government is lying, deceitful as there is no real economic growth. First, that data is not reliable. Second, that is not the standard measure for economic development because any economic development that impoverishes the people is perverse. So the right indices to use will be unemployment, inflation and poverty, which have all been growing in the last seven years. Government’s claim on economic growth is deceitful, statistical manipulation and an arithmetic fraud.
Jonathan’s achievement so far
Which achievement? What are the achievements when the level of insecurity we have in Nigeria today is unequalled and frightening? Don’t forget, security is the primary role of any government. You have to be secured to use the roads, to fly the aeroplane, in fact to enjoy any infrastructure. Armed robbery in the South West, kidnapping in the South East and the total loss of territory in the North East is alarming. A situation where Boko Haram now hangs its flags unchallenged, and destroying Nigerian flags, is shameful. Can we sincerely say that the welfare of Nigerians is being taken care off? Security is worse. The level of corruption now is alarming and unheard of, and government is not genuinely willing to investigate anything to conclusion. Oby Ezekwesili asked a simple question: what happened to the $67 billion that was handed over in excess crude and foreign reserves. Till today, there is no convincing clarification. Ezekwesili, you know, is not frivolous; she has the data.
Crude oil theft today amounts to about $13 billion per annum. The president said it is committed by highly placed people. Are they better placed than the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces which President Jonathan is? You remember the pension scam. What came out of it? It’s an international scandal. And then the most popular, the $20 billion missing revenue which President Jonathan said he established a forensic audit on. That forensic activity will take forever, and nothing will be heard about it again. How can this huge amount be missing and the president is claiming ignorance, requiring the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria to raise the alarm. Does it mean that the Minister of Finance does not know the financial flow; that she is not tracking the revenue? This is enough to remove any president from office in decent nations.
Look at the level of constitutional violations. Let us look at just two: extra-budgetary expenditure where the cabal spends money outside of the budget contrary to the constitution. That is the highest level of lawlessness because the constitution is the supreme law of any country. So if you can violate the constitution with impunity, you are capable of doing any other thing you desire.
Again, the constitution has mandated certain category of public officers to declare their assets publicly; but our president proclaimed that he will not declare his asset publicly. That singular action shows the president is not transparent and has something to hide. What he did is a constitutional violation. When we are talking about impunity and lawlessness, how can there be development?
With this level of crime in the country, rising poverty and unemployment, where then is the development? It is not my opinion, but the United Nations survey shows rising poverty and unemployment. The Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), shows that poverty in Nigeria is growing in leaps and bounds each passing year. It is not the opposition party that is saying this; but from the office of the statistician of the federation. Look at the many aircraft in the presidential fleet. What will the president be using 10 aircraft for, because all have to be maintained? Is that in itself not waste? Can we say the standard of our education is good enough? How much is the government investing in education, when schools go on strike sometimes eight months in a year?
Has government kept simple agreements it signed with labour unions, Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) or the polytechnic institutions? The nearly N10 billion or more that has gone into the confab can build world class hospital. Maybe it is part of their achievement that the nation’s universities were shut for over six months. Our polytechnics students have not gone to school for nearly one year. Maybe, that’s an achievement. We cannot measure the damage that this cabal has done to Nigeria. Can we truly say that power has improved, given the billions of naira already sunk down the drain? In 1999, power generation was about 3,000 megawatts. According to financial intelligence, we have spent about $51 billion in power since 1999, still the power generation is about that figure – 3,000 megawatts. What has happened to $51 billion? What we have is a sad commentary and metaphor for failure.
