On Monday, December 2, Senator Chris Anyanwu, veteran journalist, politician and media entrepreneur, presented her autobiography – Bold Leap – to a highly distinguished audience in Abuja. Two days later, she sat down with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI in her Abuja home for an exclusive, no-holds barred interview. We didn’t talk about the book. Instead, she spoke passionately about Nigeria – the huge potentials and daunting challenges, democracy and the flawed leadership evolution process, which she insists is at the heart of the country’s problems. And she blames politicians for managing Nigeria in a way that has not taken the country forward.
- Senator Chris Anyanwu
Many prominent Nigerians, especially those that have held public office, are not used to writing their memoirs. What could be the reason and why did you decide to be different?
I think it is fear of reproach that makes people not to unburden, not to tell their stories. They consider the mentality of Nigerians, especially the mentality of younger Nigerians who have taken hold of the social media and their tendency to savage everybody, especially elders. It is a major deterrence. When you think about how they are going to mess you up or how they are going to falsify what you have said, and start focusing on the negatives rather than the positives, people just decide to pull back and have their peace.
But that didn’t deter you?
Yes, because I don’t care. I am more interested in putting down something for history and posterity sake. I come from a family of historians. If you don’t put down something for history, you will be misunderstood all through your life. And you could be a priest or a saint and somebody out there with his foul mouth can come out to say, you are a devil. And you are no longer there to defend yourself. And that false image will stick. It is better to say what you have to say while you are still around, let people respond to it and you can also come back and respond to their own response to what you have written. It is better than just growing old, unable to do anything and then all the knowledge, all that you know passes away. But most importantly, these stories we are talking about shine a light on how we have lived, how Nigeria has been, what went wrong in the past, what went right, and it can help the future generations to redress certain mistakes.
When a nation or a people go in the wrong direction due to mistakes of individuals, or a circle of leaders, it is good to tell it: Okay, I was there and this happened. If I had known, we could have done this. We argued this but the stronger elements had their way and this is where it led us. Perhaps, when you read that, you now consider whether we can now go back and look at those ideas that were voiced earlier and try to see if you can now bring them up to date and utilize them to redress the mistakes of the past for the good of society.
Is that what you mean when you say that your latest book, Bold Leap, is very much about Chris Anyanwu as it is about Nigeria?
Oh yes! When I am telling my story about how I worked for the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) as oil correspondent, for instance, I tell the story of the major issues of the time, what I covered, the issues of missing oil money and all that. That is part of our history. You can’t say I covered the oil sector and you don’t talk about how the phenomenon of illegal oil bunkering started, the impact it had on our revenue at that time and how illegal bunkering has continued to grow to the point that now people are building pipelines under the high seas straight to where oil tankers are moored waiting to take in our oil. In other words, as you are drilling our oil, the crude is going straight to adversarial interests and a lot of the crude oil is stolen.
That is how badly the malady has grown. I saw the early beginnings of this as a correspondent as we went round with boats. I saw little boatmen drilling holes in the pipelines. That was the level it was then and by last year it had gotten to a point that the head of the NNPCL himself was crying out that much of our oil was being stolen. So, that is what I am talking about; telling my story as a correspondent and in the process also telling the story of Nigeria. We don’t live in a vacuum nor do we live in isolation. We live in a society. My personal story must dove-tail into what was going on in the larger society.
Is it not curious that whenever former President Muhammadu Buhari was in-charge of our oil industry, something went fundamentally wrong? It was during his time as oil minister in the late 1970s that $2.6 billion that accrued from our crude oil sales got missing. Again, when he became civilian president and appropriated the petroleum ministry as the de-facto minister was when oil theft climbed to dizzying heights?
You know, oil is very attractive and it is a sector that is prone to fraud because of the big time money involved. The players are strong and they are not just Nigerians, they have international alliances and connections. And so, I know that it is a lot to take on for someone like Buhari. He will be sitting in his office and the players will be doing what they are doing. But I think more should have been done in terms of monitoring what was going on. I cannot go into what was in his mind, what he was seeing , the big picture he was seeing and why he was not able to, with all his experience the first time as oil minister, why he wasn’t able to stem some of the malpractices that became big and cancerous under his watch as president.
The story of your life is the story of Nigeria writ large. Would you say this country is making progress?
Well, on certain levels we have made a lot of progress even though we don’t seem to realise it. Physically, I know the way Nigeria looked in terms of aesthetics. I know how Nigeria was. Recently, I got one of my best stories while I was at the NTA. It was a documentary on Lagos; the portrait of Lagos at that time. If you look at that documentary, you will never believe it. I don’t want to go into vulgarities but Lagos was a place that dead bodies were dropping on the streets all the time. It was normal to see that. Lagos was a place where there were no conveniences for the public. But Lagos today is a totally different thing. The same goes for Abuja. The character and aesthetics of most states have changed. If you go to Port Harcourt, you see the highways. These are real emerging cities that can compete with cities in the Western world. They are really coming. In my state, Imo, we have very wide streets, although Imo traditionally has always been a very clean place. But now you see standard roads with drainage, street lights and adornments and like many other states, the capital city is looking better and development is gradually moving to the semi-urban areas.
READ ALSO: Chris Anyanwu’s Bold Leap
You see flowers planted, you see nice environments. You can walk the streets safely. At the time that I was doing that documentary, you could not. Lagos was not only dirty, but also quite dangerous to navigate. But things are changing gradually. What you might argue is that with all the money we have, with all the gifts of nature – oil, gold, and all that – we should have made a quantum leap from where we are now. That we have not is regrettable and I think that is what pains a lot of Nigerians.
But there are other areas in which we have retrogressed. It depends on where your focus is. Also, the way we politicians have managed Nigeria does not seem to have taken us forward. We should have gotten the hang of our democracy. It should be smoother. This whole thing of having elections and people having a lot of litigation and violence, we should have gotten over that by now. Even during IBB’s Option A4, we got rid of people snatching ballot boxes and running away. And we now went over to digital election systems, and guess what? It got worse.
We should be somewhere faraway from where we are now. And I think we should try harder because Nigeria has the talents to make that happen. In virtually all states of the federation, if you go to every village in Nigeria, you will find a superstar, a first class brain. Why is it that they go to America and they are sought after? They are seen as a people that are specially gifted. Nigerians have been rated as the population group with the highest education in America. Even the Native Americans envy them for their advancement. They are out there, working as high professionals and earning high salaries. Why can’t we allow the abundant talents make things happen for us here?
We can do it if we all stop thinking in an insular manner. The insularity of our thinking, the insularity that pervades our activities in the public sector is killing us, is causing us to retreat and retrogress and I think we should open our minds and accept the fact that a nation that is gifted with all sorts of peoples, strengths and all that can maximize those strengths rather than thinking in small, insular ways and retreating to our villages. We cannot retreat to our villages and expect to be able to handle 21st century problems. No village has it all.
In your book, you graphically illustrated what some people refer to as the 101 of Nigeria’s politics. And it is ugly. Why is politics in Nigeria such a dirty game?
It is a matter of a lot of regret. I think we can do better. These things go in cycles. Maybe you have people of certain mindset, and when they dominate the system, everything reflects that thinking. But forget about even thinking. The process of leadership evolution is at the heart of our problem because the kind of people it tosses up may not be the best for the system. And it is a certain type of character that it tosses up.
You see, when you want to run for office, you cannot predict anything because from the congresses to the primaries to the elections, the more you look the less you see. Things don’t go by the rules. There is a lot of perversion of the system. The system is hugely affected by, I don’t want to use the common word corruption, but a certain type of crooked thinking. We say okay we are going to have primaries, these are the rules but the rules are never followed because someone, somewhere will twist it and make it work according to what he wants. Not as has been laid down in the rules. And there are no consequences.
So, while you are playing by the rules set out by your political party, somebody or some group are doing a different set of things. They are re-writing the rules according to their own whims, interests. And it must go the way they want it. So, you come to a state and sometimes you find one person virtually “nominating” or better, “appointing” everybody from top to bottom. One person decides who will be senator, who will be member of House of Representatives, who is going to be state assembly member, who is going to be in the local government, who is going to be everywhere. Is that the democracy we worked for? That is not democracy. That wasn’t even the practice of democracy when I got into politics. That time there was hope. Four years later, everything turned. So, it must be the entry of certain people of certain thinking, the domination of the system by certain type of people or people of a certain line of thinking; a line of thinking that is essentially anti-democratic.
Twenty five years after, the situation is getting worse. How hopeful are you for Nigeria’s democracy?
If there are no reforms, no tweaking of the way we practice our democracy, the leadership evolution system, the electoral system, all the steps that have to be taken to get to the final thing which is general election; if there are no reforms, then you cannot have good outcomes. We must reform the leadership evolution system and process. We must start dealing with the many anti-democratic practices that have crept into that process. You cannot start from a fraud-ridden congress and expect to have good election. It is the people you produce through this process that the electorate are asked to vote for. And most often, they look at the choices and say aah!
And that is why, they go to all the candidates, and ask them for money. Some take money from all and then go and vote for the person who tied them down with an oath. So, something has to give. It is possible to tame this wild horse called democratic electoral process by just saying we can’t have this, put a few things in the electoral law that further restrain people engaging in bad practices and also there has to be a clear and evident danger that if you do certain things in the system that you will be punished. And you will not get out of it through corrupting the court system.
When people know that if they falsify election result, that they can go to jail, I want to know how many people will do that for anybody. There is no price for bad conduct in the Nigerian political system, very little.
Every new election cycle, the National Assembly will always include additional provisions to the Electoral Act purportedly to curtail some of the ills you have outlined. Yet, rather than improving, our electoral process is getting worse. Who can hold the political class accountable so that the right things can be done?
The judiciary is supposed to hold politicians accountable. It is the last stop for citizens looking for justice. But political malpractice is a very pernicious thing, very difficult situation.
Do you think that Nigerian judges have the capacity to do the needful?
These are very hard questions. They have the capacity. The question is, do they have the will? If they have the will, then they will do what they ought to do. They will impact positively on the process. They have the capacity. They know the law. They have to build up the will to do justice, to stop things going bad. And for me that is the highest form of patriotism. You are at this gate and yours is to make sure that armed robbers don’t capture the system. And you are sitting there, do not allow them to pass that gate. When they pass that gate, the fallout will boomerang on everyone and all the sectors. So, they need to build the will to stop certain practices from getting through.
I know it is a deeper question – what happens and all that but at the end of the day, it comes down to the will because you see in other places, you see people who are celebrated. They don’t take and they don’t give. And there are people in the system, this same system that don’t take and they don’t give. So, we just have to find them and build a cross-sectorial culture of resisting and doing good.
The first few chapters of your book painted the picture of a very ugly and dark side of the country and anyone who reads it will feel your pain, which in a sense was the collective pain of Ndigbo after January 1966 leading up to the civil war. Your father could not survive the trauma he was subjected to at the hands of fellow citizens in a detention camp in Port Harcourt. His properties in the same city were classified as abandoned and seized. How were you able to forgive and do you think this country has done enough in promoting true and genuine reconciliation?
Those are wider questions that the country must face up to at some point. On the individual level, well, it has been a long time and there has been a catharsis. Even writing Bold Leap helps one offload some of these things. One of the things that also helped was the fact that I came across good Nigerians from all parts of the country, good people. There are good people everywhere in Nigeria. And as I grew up, I was helped in some difficult circumstances by people who were not even my relatives. So, I came to know that there are good people everywhere and goodness does not reside solely in my village or my family. Goodness runs everywhere. You just have to pray to encounter such people and do good yourself. If you do good, you will attract good. So, that helped.
And you know that psychologically, sitting down and dwelling on a painful past has a way of holding you down. You got to fix your eyes ahead and keep on walking, even running, keep being positive and doing the right things. You may not always score but that is why we pray, that is where God comes in. That when we stay on track, do our best, that He will help us hit target. I think what may have helped also was the fact that I schooled abroad, returned to work on the national level and in the course of this crossed paths with a broad spectrum of Nigerian society, I met some of the nicest people who were almost like brothers and sisters to me. When you read the book, you will see some of these encounters, and that helps paint a more rounded picture of the Nigeria I came into. I also encountered people who were very insular, very ossified in their negativism and irredentism. I met them and they did attempt to be dream killers but they didn’t stop me because I didn’t let them. I resisted them and one should be realistic in expecting that people out there are not only going to be good people but you will once in a while meet very difficult people. And at that point, you have to resist them. And don’t give in to their negativism and backward thinking.
You once aspired to be governor of Imo State. Recently, your name came up as one of the possible successors of Governor Hope Uzodimma in 2028. Will you run for the governorship of Imo again?
I come from a political family. I don’t think I will leave politics because when politics passes through you, you keep getting interested in politics but I am not running for anything and people should not disturb themselves. I wrote the book myself and it was ready long before last year’s election. I didn’t release it then because I thought that maybe one will be seen as favouring some people who were in the game at that point and I thought I wanted all the election processes to end and the coast cleared for me to do this and I have done it. Let nobody say that I did it as a precursor to running for election. I know my state, I know what the issues are and if I want to run for election, I won’t wait for people to tell me. I will be the one telling them. And I haven’t told them.
What peculiar challenges do women face in Nigeria’s political arena and what advice would you give to young ladies out there who may be interested in partisan politics?
In terms of what women go through, my answer is: read my book. It paints the picture so much so that if you are going into politics, you could almost use it as a handbook. You will get to know some of the things you will encounter and be better prepared to go around them. I will say actually in general that my entry into politics was easier than most. I didn’t encounter a lot of sexism but the problem was the top political people, the common people were very fine. I didn’t expect the kind of reception I got in Imo. Very good. It was just a certain hardcore leadership group that was sexist and I think I understand it better now. As you move to the top, the space narrows, the competition becomes fiercer and people tend to use whatever weapons they can grasp to do their fighting and sexism becomes the tool that some people use. Which is where the oji (kolanut) thing comes in. It is one way of talking down women. Okay, you are now a politician but you cannot break the kola. We are the ones that can break the kola and that shows our supremacy. But that is something you meet at the top there. The common people are generally better. You have very right thinking people with large hearts, very liberal in their thinking and I did say so in the book. So, it is the leadership core that needs to stop using those ancient weapons to fight contemporary battles and discourage women.
You don’t discourage your women when other people are encouraging and lifting theirs. Women are an important group that can aid group advancement. And you don’t insist on supporting only your wives, daughters or girlfriends. There are women that are independent but they have it. They have what it takes and they can help give you a push and help bring good to the society. Don’t knock them down. Have a level playing ground, encourage them as you encourage the men. Going back to your core question, I can’t go into what is done to women, what they suffer. They should read my book because it is really a big subject there. And that in itself is even a subject for another book.
If we focus on your primary constituency – the media – would you say that some progress has been made from when you started to where we are today?
Amazing progress in the private sector. Nigeria was coming at some point some years ago when our sons and daughters came back from everywhere in the world. They started business ideas that were topnotch. During President Goodluck Jonathan’s time, the ideas that came from those young people was going to give Nigeria a quantum leap forward. Then suddenly, things started happening and many of them went back, escaped from Nigeria to go and toil in the streets of foreign countries. And we lost that momentum. So, the private sector has made tremendous progress and I think that is one of the pillars that is still holding up Nigeria. The private sector is making a lot of advances. The media is one – private radio and television fantastic. They have gone a long way. Look, if we had the advances that we have now in broadcasting, I would have still been in NTA or one of the private stations.
But at the time that I was there, there was very little money. A lot of toiling but very little pay. But now, even NTA made strides in certain ways. When I went to NTA recently, I could not believe that this is the NTA complex. Walking along the corridor alone will make you pant for air. The place is so well set out, so much better than a lot of media houses abroad. They have what it takes to have a great output. If they don’t today, then there must be a problem. But I think there has been a lot of advances. If you go to Channels Television, you will also see a normal, modern media house as you will see in New York and elsewhere and their output is competitive. Arise Television is very competitive in terms of content. Everywhere, there is a lot of progress. But we can also do better.
What works against especially private media now is the state of the economy. How much money comes in, how many manufacturers can afford to advertise their products, how much will they agree to pay even if they decide to advertise, and will the money come on time? So, the state of the economy affects everything and has affected the private media hugely. NTA is more cushioned because it is both a federal government-funded outfit and at the same time, undertakes commercial activity. So, they enjoy both worlds. And having the Federal Government backing them also gives them competitive edge in terms of advertising. So, NTA should be swimming in money.
You seem to believe a lot in Nigeria from the get-go. So many people travel abroad and don’t ever come back to live permanently in Nigeria. But you did. Even after your brush with the Abacha dictatorship, you didn’t flee. So, what is it you see in Nigeria that others don’t see and how hopeful are you for Nigeria despite the daunting challenges?
I see the potentials. I have lived abroad for God knows how long and I travel abroad, spend a lot of time abroad. If you go to every Nigerian or most Nigerians be they in the U.S., UK, Italy or wherever they may be, you will find that their spirit is back home. As you are sleeping here, they are calling, they are asking, what is going on? They are interested, they are worrying about Nigeria because no matter how hard they work and how much money they make out there, they, in many ways, remain outsiders. Ideally, if things were good, most of them would prefer to be here. Nigeria is one nation in the world, one of those few places in the world that God has given to the black man as his domain. It is where the black man or black woman is king or queen. I am not sure that I could do the things that I am doing, that I could dream as I am dreaming here if I were living in America. You have to be part of their aristocracy, from their financial, political or business elite. You must come from that stock to have an easier ride into the big league. Of course some have fought their ways in but it is a hard fight.
Look at little me, I have dreamed up a few enterprises including three radios. It doesn’t matter the outcome, those things are there employing people. The radios are speaking to people’s problems. They are dealing with Nigeria’s problems day after day. That is what we worry about in the media. And you couldn’t say that someone who has done that wasted her life. I may not be making a billion everyday like people in certain businesses, but we are there standing. When things happen in the society, it is to the media that people run to for answers, for more information.
So, how hopeful am I for Nigeria given the undeniable, mostly avoidable challenges? I will say that there is no other place that we have as late Tony Momoh would say. There is no other country that we have. We are Africans, we are Nigerians, and this is our home. This land is our land and we have to get interested. And this is a place, if things go well, a lot of our people who are abroad will come back. They were beginning to build houses here and set up small businesses ahead of final return because you just don’t carry your suitcase and say I am going home. You have to prepare your way and I think that people running government should do everything to seize on this; to stem this negative tide, to get back our country, to improve things whatever it takes. If they have to import people to come and do certain things, to make the country better for all, not for a few, they should do it because this place is home to the whole black race.
The quantum of intellectuals that we are losing to other countries is just too bad. But they can’t stay. Much as they would want to stay out of patriotism, they cannot waste their lives in a place that they are not surviving and not likely to thrive in. And that is just it. We love Nigeria, we want things to go well. I think that if things are done right, if they get a handle on the problems, you will see that in four years, this place will bloom out of the gifts that lie underutilized in Nigerians themselves. It is not foreigners that will save us. And there is nowhere to run to again. There is nowhere in the world to run to. The world is getting to be very tough for the black man.
For people who are taking all of their money and going abroad, we have seen that before. There was a generation of Nigerian leaders that went abroad and made investments. They woke up one day and their foreign allies contrived ways of tricking them and taking all the money from them. It could be risky putting all ones eggs abroad and not putting some down in ones country to make it a better place. And what Nigerians are asking for is: please, let us have a life in our country, tell us how we can contribute to make Nigeria a better place. There is no better place for a black man, not even South Africa. The struggles are different and intense but Nigeria is easier. Therefore, if you come here and all that you are talking about is your village, your tribe, quite frankly, it is nauseating and infantile, almost.
Let us look at bigger things. How to do, how to improve, how to move forward, how to rise, how to run, how to dominate this Africa, our immediate environment. That is what we should be talking about, not running round and plotting how to decimate everyone else. Use the brains latent in this land to build up this place, to solve our problems, to make it a better place, to make it a place that even the black Americans in the U.S. who for generations have been under tremendous pressure can now, make Nigeria a second home, a place of resort as they have done to Ghana; a place where they can live and thrive, make money, invest money without it being taken away from them; where they can stay and have a good life without ending up in prison. We can do that. It is possible.
