At 94 years, Dr Uma Eleazu, an economist, political scientist and administrator par excellence, has seen it all, having been everything, literally, since joining the civil service of Nigeria in 1956 as a clerk. An academic, he was a lecturer in both Nigeria and the United States. He oversaw the setting up of the Public Complaints Commission in 1973 and also the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) between 1975 and 78. He was a member of the committees that wrote both the 1979 and 1999 constitutions. He once headed the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), as well as facilitated the creation of the manufacturers associations in Kenya and Uganda. Elder Eleazu consulted for both the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO). He once headed the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) and in 1993, he was a presidential aspirant on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Despite all these glittering feats, he is distraught: “I didn’t believe that I will be alive to see Nigeria drop to the level where we are now.” In this exclusive interview with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI two months after his 94th birthday, the son of a Methodist priest who desired, as a young man, to be a pastor, says he has only one wish: “By June next year, I will be 95 years. I am praying that I will see a United Tribes of Nigeria as one country where there is peace, order and good governance. And then I will thank God for taking me any time after that.”
- Dr. Uma Eleazu
June 16, 2024 was your 94th birthday. How do you feel at 94?
I feel strong and I thank God for that. The fact that at 94, I can still get up in the morning to see the sun and drink tea, walk around the house is something I thank God for.
There is no doubt that at 94, you feel personally good. But what about Nigeria? Do you feel good about where the country is right now?
No, I don’t. I was born when Nigeria was 30 years old. And when Nigeria became independent in 1960, I was 30 years old. And Nigeria has been independent for close to 64 years now. We are even retrogressing from where the British left us in terms of our politics, educational system, infrastructure and the values that people hold dear, so much so that we have even forgotten our own native values, on top of which we built the Christian values that we got in the south. I don’t know about the Moslem values in the north.
We have almost rubbished everything and we now live in what Hobbes would call a state of nature in Nigeria – war of all against all where one can leave his house in the morning without being sure that he will return. He can be abducted in the middle of the road and that’s it and people will start negotiating. It is a new kind of slave trade. I don’t even think that the white people who came to buy slaves way back in the 17th and 18th centuries did that much. They negotiated with some chiefs but what is happening now is just terrible. I didn’t believe that I will be alive to see Nigeria drop to the level where we are now.
All the things that people talk about in politics and democracy – freedom, liberty, civil rights – are gone. Can you exercise your rights properly today as a journalist without somebody coming to look over your shoulders? People are afraid even to speak. No, this country is not what I expected it to be after more that 60 years of independence.
What exactly do you think went wrong?
Many things have gone wrong. Let us begin with the institutions that were established. In most cases, we abandoned the native institutions except probably in the villages where those institutions unfortunately have also been bastardised by the influence of money and what is happening in politics. So, in societies that are stable, their values will be inherent in the institutions that they have. And as long as the institutions maintain those values, the society itself will be stable. What has happened in Nigeria is that the traditional institutions have been destabilised by colonialism. We now borrowed the institutions of democracy or modern government. If you want democracy, it goes with representative government, it goes with responsible government. Unfortunately, the people who lead in these institutions here are not responsible, are not effective, have no integrity to maintain the integrity of the institutions, and that is what has gone wrong.
I think if we take just election time, because that is when you see the best and the worst of politicians. Check all the institutions that are in the constitution to maintain democracy, how do they work? Is it the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)? And if you look at how INEC is working and compare it to the manifest functions written in the law that established it, you will find out that the problem is not that the law has not stated what should be done, it is the integrity of the individuals to be faithful to the values that they are supposed to uphold by conducting free and fair election.
And that is why some of us think that the problem is not writing a new constitution or making a law. The problem is in having the values that will maintain such institutions ingrained in those who are going to participate. Let me give an example. In the civil service during colonial times, if you join the civil service at the time I did at what they called senior service, there are two codes that they will give you to read. One is called the General Orders, the other one is Financial Instructions…
Which year was that?
I joined the civil service of Nigeria in 1956 as a clerk and that was before I went to university. When I returned, I was promoted to what was called senior service. It was only for people who had degrees or you have stayed so long in the service that you know all the rules at your fingertips. Now, when you are promoted into that senior service, they give you these two books – the General Orders and the Financial Instructions. Those were the rules that governed Nigeria by the bureaucrats.
Now, ask whether those rules still apply in the civil service. That was where the rot started. In other words, they changed the General Orders to what they called Civil Service Rules. The Stephen Oronsaye report that they have been debating is just a question of let us go back to how the civil service was run. You have to maintain integrity of individuals, you have to promote people on merit, and so on. So, my response to your question is that there are institutions and there are values. Once they no longer align, the society begins to wobble.
You were a member of the committees that wrote both the 1979 and 1999 constitutions. Recently, The Patriots embarked on a project of giving Nigerians a new constitution. Some stakeholders argue that a new constitution is not immediately necessary, suggesting that the focus should instead be on improving the conduct of politicians operating under the current framework. But chairman of the group, elder statesman and former Commonwealth Secretary General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, argues that even the best leaders will still struggle to address Nigeria’s significant challenges under the existing constitution. Do you agree?
Writing a constitution is easy. You can get a body of lawyers, political scientists, economists, scholars and they will write a constitution for a country. But those who are going to write a constitution must know first of all what the people believe in, what values they hold dear and if they agreed to be under a constitution. Most constitutions begin with the phrase, “We the people.” So, the first thing is to know who the “we” are.
Yes, I heard His Excellency Chief Emeka Anyaoku say what you just reported. My view is that you can have good people, that is people with integrity, people with the right kind of education, people with the right kind of attitude, and they will use this same 1999 constitution and run Nigeria well. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo was the first person to use the 1999 constitution and he selected young men and women to join him and because they were people, relatively as far as I can see, of integrity, they were technocrats, who knew their subjects, so they could sit together and decide what they will do. They were not money grabbers, I mean the people who worked with Obasanjo at least in the first four or even six years and they set this country on the trajectory that it was going.
The problems that Obasanjo had were from people who didn’t want to use the values that were inherent in the constitution. And they did things on their own. If I remember well, the first problem on this 1999 constitution that Obasanjo met was the people who decided that they were not going to abide by the section that declared Nigeria a secular state and 12 out of the 36 states decided that they have to be Sharia states. It was a big challenge because they wanted to do things in their own way outside what was in the constitution.
Secondly, the political parties and their members didn’t even understand their own manifestoes. They didn’t believe in any ideology. What is the ideology of PDP? What was the ideology of ANPP or AD? We don’t know. So, it is the ideology proposed by the people who are at the top of the political parties that will help them manoeuvre and work the constitution. What they adopted was contrary to the statement in the constitution that Nigeria will be a liberal democracy.
Again, a section of the constitution detailed what was called the directive principles of state policy in which it was stated that anybody acting on behalf of government, whether in the civil service or any part of the government must abide by those principles. One of them is what we call Federal Character. Under it you have Unity Schools, NYSC, etc. Those are the things that were to help people to begin to think of the country as one Nigeria. It was supposed to be affirmative action on the part of the government but the people who are operating it didn’t see it that way.
- Dr Uma Eleazu
- Elder Uma Eleazu
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So, my own take on the issue is that it is not what you write in the constitution, it is what the people who are upholding the constitution, and how they interpret the words of the constitution and operate it that matters. That is what gives any country the stability.
So, what do you propose?
In what sense?
Writing a new constitution as proposed by The Patriots or ethical reorientation of the politicians who operationalize the constitution?
Well, it is good to go back and look at how Nigeria was constituted, how Nigeria was governed because it is the constitution of the various parts of Nigeria that becomes, “We the people.” We have never sorted out ourselves. Who are the “we?” We don’t even know how many people there are in Nigeria. Everything is guesswork. Some say there are about 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Others will say there are about 373 ethnic groups. Has anybody taken time to find out how many ethnic groups are really in Nigeria? Do they all agree on anything? Have they all agreed to come together to form Nigeria? We were Christened Nigeria on January 1, 1900 by the British people. And we have been carrying that name. So, to start a new constitution, we have to understand for whom the constitution is being written. Which means going down to count all the ethnic groups in Nigeria. We can then decide to have, my preference is a kind of confederation where each people group will have a certain level of sovereignty over what happens within themselves and that is what we will be negotiating. And they will be able to say that this is the much of our activities as a group that we can allow to be given to a bigger group. Somebody can become a citizen of Nigeria as a whole but belongs to his own ethnic nationality.
Won’t that be a recipe for crisis and eventual break-up of Nigeria? How can the many ethnic nationalities be welded together if each is to have some kind of sovereignty?
No, it will not be a recipe for chaos and anarchy if we all sit down and decide what is important for us in our coming together. Why do we want to come together? One American author says that federations are a result of bargain. Everybody wants safety in his home, his surroundings, safety from attacks by a bigger unit or bigger people group. So, during the bargaining, we will be looking at what is the danger we face by being who we are in Ohafia, for instance, if we don’t join this bigger group. That is for us to decide. You will find that the danger is some other bigger groups than Ohafia can come together and threaten us or even kill us off. So, it is better for us to join a bigger group as Ohafia people than to maintain independence provided that bigger group promises to protect us. So, we will not have our own soldiers in Ohafia. The bigger entity will have the soldiers who will be drawn from all of us who are under the bigger group.
If you know how the military is organised, we will have an army made up of various battalions. Then there will be the Ohafia battalion and maybe we will have two or three battalions depending on how big we are becoming Ohafia Company in military terms. And that company will join the other companies to form a Brigade. So, when you come to a certain Brigade, you have the Ohafia Company, you have the Owerri Company, you have the Obowo Company, etc. If there is a war, the overall Brigade can now call up several contingents. If you read the Bible, that was how David was fighting his war and there were other people like that. Even the British army in those days, the Scottish, the Welsh regiments, they call them up.
Except that in the modern world, because of the technology of warfare, it pays now to have a much bigger defence force but the defence starts from right at the bottom. So, we will have independence to run our schools, health services, our farms, but for purposes of protecting all of us, we are prepared to join all the others near us to form a bigger unit to be able to have a strong military cantonment.
So, federalism comes out of serious bargaining. And that is the reason why I said earlier that if we are going to embark on this journey, it should be thorough from the bottom up until we are able to get what we now call states to gather together because the states we have now, the military people just sat down in their offices and drew a line and said, okay, put a state there and you take part of the land that belongs to Ohafia and give it to Akwa Ibom State and you now create enmity between Ohafia people and the other people because when we object, they will say, no, government now says that we own this land. Which government? So, everything has to start from below and as we go up, even the act of participating in the whole thing will now enlighten people as to what the governance means to their lives. And after they have participated and were part of setting it up, you will find that they will do whatever that overarching government asks them to do.
This seems rather complicated. How long do you think it will take and do think it is practicable?
Even if it takes us two years to do it. We have a government in place. Let them continue bumbling around. We can say okay, like The Patriots have set up their advocacy committee led by Prof Anthony Kila, they start work and draw up, maybe, questionnaires which will be answered at the lowest level. For the purpose of this discussion, let us call that lowest level the local government. The British people did it and I don’t see why we cannot do it. There are 774 local governments in Nigeria. Their committee will send a questionnaire dealing with the issues that governments deal with. Which of these issues do you want the constitution to leave solely in your hands? And let them answer the question. That was how the Ibadan constitutional conference of 1950 was organized.
So, people at that level will be part of making the decision and by the time you gather responses from 774 local governments answering only the same question or set of questions, you will begin to see a pattern and that is a big job. It can be done. If you do it once, that is all you need. The one that was done between 1949 and 1950 carried us for so long until it was messed up after the military intervened. They started right from the Native Authorities up till the Ibadan Conference. It doesn’t matter how long it is going to take. Let us get it right because if people don’t participate in the discussion about how they are going to be governed, there will always be trouble.
Do you think that The Patriots have the capacity to push this through without the buy-in of the government considering what it will take financially and logistically to accomplish the task?
Well, I am not a member of The Patriots but I am interested in what they doing. I don’t think they have the money but money is not everything. If the sitting government, that is Tinubu’s government, realises the necessity to do what they have asked him to do, then he will find the money. I don’t think we will spend more than what it costs to buy one aircraft to do this job. If they spend millions of dollars just to buy one aircraft, they can cough out that money and give it to people and say, look, here is money, let it not be your problem, go and do this thing right from the villages up to the centre. Let us sort ourselves regarding how we are going to live together in this country.
It is not beyond the federal government. That is one way of doing it. The state governments can also be given the task to produce the money for their own states and even contribute staff for this committee. They go to Abia State, for instance, and say, look, we have been set up to do this thing and this is what we want to do in your state. We need some of your civil servants to help up with documentation, computer work, etc. We have the people, it is the will to do it that is lacking. If we have the will to do it, every senator can even pay for the process in his or her own senatorial district. Why are they paid so much money? Although if you go that route, it will mess up the whole discussion. I don’t trust our politicians. They are so mercenary and Machiavellian that they will want to dominate and cause the questions that will be asked to be distorted.
Why should the president be interested in a process that may whittle down the powers of his office?
It is an assumption. I don’t think if we do it properly that the powers in the hands of the federal government as of now will be diminished too much. Now, the overpowering thing that they have is the security architecture – military, police, DSS, etc. You can decentralize some of those and you will still have the prestige of being president of Nigeria.
In fact, most of these people aspiring to be president cannot wield all the powers that a president has according to 1999 constitution and we need to whittle down the powers. Some will go to the Senate and that is if we make them to read the constitution; some will go to the House of Representatives and some of the powers will go to the governors, more powers will be given to the Houses of Assembly and it will still be in the hands of “we the people.” And that is why it is important, first and foremost to find out who we, the people, are. We count ourselves, how many people are really Yoruba living in Yoruba land, how many Igbo live in Yoruba land, how many Igbo live in Igbo land? How many Itsekiri live in Nupe land, in Jigawa, in Borno? Over 60 years, the population of this country has so moved around that some of the categories that I am mentioning are really irrelevant when you come to think of it.
If you read the annual report of some colonial officers, I read one on Kano sometime many years ago. In the annual report of 1923 or 1924 in the colonial office, they said they were expected to take census and they said in the city of Kano, you have Igbo, so many and they put, Yoruba so many, Nupe people so many. I was surprised the way they detailed the people who lived in Kano. Then they counted those who lived in Sabon Gari. I think it was the 1921 census that they did. You can check that out on Lord Lugard’s political memoranda. Every provincial resident administrator was expected to produce an annual report of what happened in his province. And in the report, they will even say whether there were riots, how many people are in prison. Detailed report. So, how is it that those of us who now own the place cannot sit down and say, we know we have so many of these people in our locality.
Go to my little village Ohafia, we have Fulani and Hausa who live amongst us. Their children went to school up to University of Nigeria, Nsukka. When they speak Ohafia dialect, you won’t even know that ethnically, they are Fulani. Same with Hausa. They have been living there. When I was a boy, in Umuahia, there is a place called Ama Hausa, just behind the house of the father of this IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, at Afara. That is where you go to get meat and you go there and Hausa was the lingua franca in Umuahia. Nobody touched anybody. There were routes that they followed designed by Lord Lugard. From the north, they followed that route until they got to Umuahia.
The problem is that we seem not to take cognizance of the political socialization that has come with urbanization in Nigeria. If any citizen of Nigeria is living in your domain, he is entitled to every right that is in the constitution whether he is born there or not. But we have to know the lowest unit that we have. Instead of 774 local governments, we may turn out to have just about 250 ethnic nationalities that can form the United Tribes of Nigeria. There is no shame in calling ourselves that, in telling the entire world that after sorting ourselves out, we the people of Nigeria have agreed that we set up a central government for the United Tribes of Nigeria and these are the rights of a citizen of the United Tribes of Nigeria no matter where you live within the boundaries of Nigeria. Nigeria has a sovereignty but each tribe has suzerainty. So, the Igbo nation has suzerainty over all the other villages in the Igbo tribe. Yoruba will have their own, ditto for Urhobo, Ijaw, Idoma, Tiv, Kanuri, Hausa, Fulani, Itsekiri and so on. Did you know that Idoma people are Igbo and they may decide to join the Igbo nation?
Are you confident that we will ever get there?
I am 94 years. By June next year, I will be 95 years. I am praying that I will see a United Tribes of Nigeria as one country where there is peace, order, and good governance. And then I will thank God for taking me any time after that. If the committee set up by The Patriots work hard, it can be achieved in two to three years and we will have a constitution that everybody will respect. Everything comes from respect and trust. The problem with the present constitution is that even the people elected are not trusted. We don’t trust them. We don’t respect them because of the chicanery of the electoral process and the court system, the judiciary, and the politicians themselves.
One of my nieces living in London was going to stand for Parliament and she paid something like 300 pounds. That was all that was needed for her to buy forms and do everything in her party. In our last election in Nigeria, people were picking forms of some political parties for N100 million. Which means ordinary people cannot run for election in such a situation. You have to first of all cough out N100 million. This is just to say, I will like to run. What kind of country is that?
What is your assessment of Tinubu’s performance 15 months after assuming office as president?
In my view, he has not performed well. There are actions that he would have taken at certain times that could have shown us that a new regime has come into place. We were already tired of Muhammadu Buhari and his government and Tinubu said he was coming to continue with what Buhari was doing. That was wrong. The way he removed the subsidy is something to be debated. Was there any subsidy really? I am one of those who believe that there was no subsidy in the first place. They were just using the bogey of subsidy to siphon money from the NNPC. If you want to give subsidy to people, you have to device a system so that the subsidy will go directly to them and the people will see that government has done something.
If I may give an example, in the US when they wanted to give subsidy to poor people, they printed food stamps, you can’t use those stamps to buy a car. You can only use it to buy food. To make sure they subsidise food, they put the stamps where you can go and buy them. You take $200 and you go to the office and they will sell stamps to you worth say $1,000. You now go to a grocery store and you pick the things that you want to buy, you have been empowered with $1,000 from your $200. So, you buy anything you want worth say $600 and you present your stamp book and the grocery store will tear off $600 because everything in your basket is $600. There is an office where they will now take those stamps and recover their money. So, in the meantime, you can live on equivalent of $1,000 with your original $200. So, you now see how the government has subsidized your food. That is subsidy. In the case of Nigeria, this petroleum subsidy, they didn’t do anything like that.
First of all, they allowed the three refineries we have to go derelict. Then, they started refining abroad and when they finished refining, then they import the PMS and Aviation fuel. But the other products, they don’t bring back. Out there, they pay for the refining with the dregs of the quantity that they refined. They bring back the other one and pay the people who brought back the ones that will be sold in Nigeria and then say that is subsidy. For some of us, they are not subsidizing. They are subsidizing those who have vessels to bring back the products they are selling. And they decide the price which they will sell. And then they tell us we have subsidized it whereas what PENGASAN was saying at the time that I used to follow this thing is that when you refine the thing here in Nigeria, you will get this slate of products and this one will cost this and that one will cost that and so on. And because it was coming from our refinery, they were not talking about subsidy.
I was chairman of what they call Price Products Marketing Company (PPMC), which was a subsidiary of NNPC. And I know for certain that if our refineries are working, there will be no subsidy. You just put the transportation on it to take from the refinery or the depots. In addition, there were pipelines from the refinery on the eastern flank to Aba, where we had the biggest depot; from Aba to Makurdi, where we had another big depot, then from there it goes up north. Even from the Atlas Cove, the pipelines were there.
But they didn’t use the pipelines when they were refining here. Instead, there was one big man, I don’t know if I should mention the name, who had a fleet of trucks and the NNPC was paying him bridging cost for trucking the products that should have gone through the pipelines. So, instead of allowing the petrol to go through the pipelines, he will come to Aba or to Atlas Cove with many of his trucks and truck to the north. Then we discovered that he doesn’t sell the thing to the petrol stations in the north. Much of it ends in Niger Republic. You can quote me in this one.
We agreed in PPMC to send spies and follow some of his trucks and they even took us to where they used to change the plate numbers of the trucks from Nigerian plate numbers to Nigerien plate numbers and pass effortlessly through the borders. By 4am, all the products they took from Aba and Atlas Cove will be in Maradi, Niger Republic. When we blew whistle, the whole thing fell on me.
The government of the day led by General Ibrahim Babangida appointed a commission of enquiry headed by Justice Bello and the lawyer for NNPC was late Rotimi Williams. So, we did our own research and submitted our report and at the end of the day, the managing directors of Port Harcourt and Warri refineries were fired because they presented wrong reports whereas I got friends in PENGASSAN who gave us the facts.
So, there was no subsidy in the first place to remove. What has happened is that some people wanted to buy NNPC or out bought NNPC and want to maintain that there was a subsidy that they were paying. So, all this subsidy is gone, I have removed subsidy sloganeering, there was no subsidy anywhere. It was just manipulation of the transportation and distribution of oil that caused the problem that we have even today. So, that was wrong if I am assessing what they are doing. He has done nothing as far as price of petroleum products is concerned.
The idea of buying new aircraft and all that is wrong given the kind of economic situation in which Nigeria finds itself under his watch. If I were sitting on his seat, at the time this #EndBadGovernance protests erupted, I will just say, “I hear you, I have ordered for an aircraft, but I have cancelled it; I placed order for a yacht but I have cancelled it; we have to use the money for those things to now do this or that.” Even what they call palliatives, how is it done? Who receives it? People in government still salt away this money. The people they have in their security and intelligence network are seeing all these things but they don’t want to speak. So, they are all part of it. For me, Tinubu has not done well in his first year.
Do you think he has the capacity and the will to do better in the remaining years?
Well, so long as he has the capacity to hire and fire, he should look at all the people he has gathered around him and fire some of them and bring in new blood – younger people who have not been in politics, people who are fresh in their minds looking after what will be to the benefit of the people, people who are not money hungry. When you have a National Assembly that the first thing they do if they want to amend the constitution is legislate their own emoluments, and find ways of putting the money in the budget in the name of constituency projects such that in the end all the money put in the budget will come back to them, then there is trouble. Who handles the constituency projects? So many things are going on and we have not started changing them in his time. This is why I said, it is not just to produce a new constitution, we need to produce new men, new Nigerians if things are to change.
When we were about to have independence, the British people created what they called Man o’ War Bay. Have you ever heard of that? And they selected young men and sent them there for training. Most of them came from the civil service and what they were doing was like debriefing those people and saying you are the people who are going to take over from us, you have a task if you want to maintain this country. When they finished they collated their experiences and produced a book called The New Nigerians. That is the kind of thing we need to do for people who have been elected into the Senate, House of Representatives, State Houses of Assembly. They need training and retraining.
So, when I look at what is happening in Nigeria, I say, no wonder Plato wanted to produce a class of the elite people, the guardians of the state. So, The Patriots must write a constitution that should produce guardians of the state.
In the last speech that she made to the Nigerian Bar Association, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala came near to saying that when she asked members of the NBA, who are we expecting to champion rule of law in Nigeria? Of course, that should be the Nigerian Bar Association. You see, we can write a constitution but we must find a way to train the people who will run the constitution itself.
