Founder of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), Dr. Frederick Fasehun, in this interview with Assistant Editor (South West), MUYIWA OLALEYE, speaks on the recent leadership crisis in the National Assembly, President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war and how former President Olusegun Obasanjo used and dumped the organisation.
How would you assess the current political situation in the country?
Nigeria is on auto-pilot, and the only visible segment of the Nigerian government is the presidency, as represented by President Muhammadu Buhari. He has been going to various places in the world and fighting against known corruption. The legislators were voted in, and immediately they resumed, they turned the National Assembly into a boxing ring. In the process, they had to go on holiday. As far as I am concerned, the legislature has not been visible. Nigeria is now in political doldrums. All Progressives Congress (APC) was shouting “change”, which Nigerians strongly believed in. But the change we have noticed has been in the negative. There has not been any positive change. That is my own way of looking at the political situation in the country now.
Again, the legislators are not doing anything, and if any at all, they are asking for jumbo pay; the governors are asking for bail out without telling the country what they have done with the previous allocations. We were told that there was no money in the treasury, but there was money to bail out governors that have stolen from our common wealth. I don’t see that as fighting corruption.
The president came in and we were jubilant when he said that he would probe past governments without bias and people were happy that the law had caught up with them. But that expectation was depleted when he decided that he would probe only former President Jonathan’s government. This in the eyes of decent Nigerians would not amount to anti-corruption but witch-hunt. That is my personal view. People are being retired all over the place, especially those who have been in the opposition to the government now. Those members are being hunted down, being arrested, being searched, probed and so on and so forth.
To me, that does not amount to democracy. Democracy is a level-playing ground where everybody, no matter how high, who has been perceived to have stolen from our commonwealth, should be probed. Mind you, 75 per cent of the rich men in this country have robbed Nigeria’s treasury.
What is the way forward?
The laws and the Nigerian Constitution are there to guide us. To me, we don’t need to make new laws. The laws are resting on the shelves and the files are gathering dust. Maybe, we should set up a body to review our past laws. Those laws that have outlived their usefulness should be discarded, while many of them would still be useful. Don’t we have laws against theft, insurgency, lawlessness, impunity, corruption, rape and other criminal offences? These laws have been there and what the government should do is to commit itself to reviewing our laws and making corrections where necessary. That is why we have the legislature.
Is your observation a reflection of the kind of people in the ruling party and around Mr. President?
I have said at different occasions that most of these characters don’t love the country. All they care about is to be voted in and they collect gigantic salaries and allowances, contracts and expect the next election. Nigerian politicians don’t have the love of this country at heart. Once they get elected, they are looking forward to the next elections. When the singsong of change was on, and people elected Buhari as the president of the country, people jubilated because we know his commitment to fight against corruption.
But here we are; the net has become very porous. Many of those we thought would face the law are now in foreign countries and we wonder what the responsibilities of our security operatives – Customs, SSS, Immigration, police and other security bodies – are. What I am saying is that attention must first be on the servants of government. They should be called to order to hold their functions as primary responsibility to the nation. There are many Nigerians outside the country now because they are trying to escape the law. We just have to appeal to foreign countries to look into their banks and help us retrieve what they have stolen from the country.
Your party, Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), was involved in internal crisis recently. What was the cause?
I must confess to you that they have not succeeded in destabilising the UPN. National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party met recently in Owerri. No one has succeeded in derailing us. We have a focus. We had our National Executive Council meeting in Lagos in March, and we followed it up three months later in Owerri. Before that, we had met in Abuja and Kaduna. We are now all over the place and we thank God. Those who feel disgruntled constitute what I call “all noise but no action”. Where are they? I understand that somebody called himself the National Chairman, one professor I have never met. I have not even seen him as a member of the party.
Well, I am not surprised because Nigerians are fond of calling themselves names and awarding themselves titles. Musicians call themselves “King”; some call themselves “Professor” and whatever they feel. So in that sense, there is nothing in a name. It is only a mark of identity, and identity may be factual or empty. As far as the UPN is concerned, I remain the only national chairman of the party, because the certificate of the registration of the party is still with me.
Let me make this clarification; the party did not contest any election as UPN. I made it clear before the election that the UPN was not going to participate as UPN in any election. We studied the manifestoes of various political groups and said that any one that was in consonant with ours, we would collaborate with it. Based on that, we collaborated with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the presidential election. After that, we returned to our camp. We are now strategising, and by the grace of God, in the coming elections, you will see a well-reformed UPN.
Again, we could not have participated in the last elections because we were registered only 18 months to the elections. Those we were going to contest with had been in the turf for 16 years, and there was no way we could have been able to flex muscles with those who had been on the turf for that length of time. We realised that much and because we are Nigerians who had to participate in the politics of our country, we chose those who did not say “change”, for nothing. Now Nigerians seem to be biting their lips to comply with the singsong of a political party.
How would you assess the present legislators in the National Assembly?
It is too early to say or to assess them. But to me, they have not lived up to our expectations so far, and it is that bad. We hope they would listen to the voices of reason and mend their ways and get ready to serve a gifted country like Nigeria. We expected that they would start to run as soon as they came into office, but they have not done that. Rather than do what is right, they started asking for their wardrobe allowances and other benefits. Frankly speaking, that is not the best way to serve your country.
Politics should be a selfless service; you allow the country to give you commendation. We are now giving commendation to Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik), Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello (Sardauna of Sokoto) because we cannot find their shipping lines, banks and international hotels. All we have seen is free education, agriculture and decent infrastructure. When I was leaving Nigeria for the United Kingdom, the total federal budget of Nigeria was 38 million pounds. Awolowo was there to give the people free education. He built the roads, developed rural/urban integration and people started building estates in virtually every local government area, and his people were happy. When there is a good ruler, the people are happy.
Do you see Nigeria returning to the era of Awolowo, Zik and Sardauna by way of getting patriotic people?
Honestly, there are still decent Nigerians; unfortunately, majority are money bags and the Nigerian politics is studded with demand for money. It has got bad to the extent that we have devised means, and very ridiculous one for that matter, of bribing the electorate by stuffing money in the bread at the polling booths when they line up to vote. When you offer them bread on the day of elections, they know that it is not just bread, but there is ‘butter’ inside.
That kind of system must be changed. Some of us are happy we may be in opposing camp; but we are happy that President Buhari, who had an antecedent of fighting corruption, is now there. The character of a group is a manifestation of the leadership’s character. But we hope and pray that his own character and integrity would go down into those who are assisting him in government.
How would you react to appointments so far made by the president?
So far, I will say that not only the South West is being marginalised, a few places are being marginalised, and I think he should be advised to realise that he is the President of Nigeria. Our constitution stipulates that every part of the country should be represented in government, so that the federal character would manifest, and there would be no voice shouting marginalisation. We hope he would listen to advisers whose main commitments are to Nigeria as a federation.
Each state is expected to have representations in the government, so that we would jubilate on the federal character stipulated in our constitution. But so far, it is as if people have thrown aside the federal character clause and are just doing what their personal conscience dictates for them.
What is your take on the states owing their workers?
This was what brought about the bail-out which the federal government gave to the states. I think the federal government should not have doled out money to the states, because we are all aware that some of the governors are reckless. You see, they did not tell us what they did with the previous allocations. That was why some of us are complaining. Why should they all go to Abuja for the presidency to bail them out? If Abuja must bail them out, they should as well be made to account for what they collected in the past, and that is what we are saying.
In the process of bailing them out, some innocent characters are being smeared. They said (former President) Jonathan left the treasury empty, and two weeks after, we were bailing out debtors. One now needs to ask if they are telling lies against Jonathan. Didn’t Jonathan leave something tangible in the treasury? I am not saying that Jonathan was a saintly president. I personally don’t think that the bail-out was necessary. It was uncalled for. What bothers me was the fact that these governors were buying bullet-proof cars and (private) jets. Where do they get the money from, because many of them came into office wearing slippers?
What do you have to say on the security situation in the country?
There is no country that does not have security problem. But it is just that our own is 100 per cent a failure. The security of a nation depends on the happiness of the people and the type of government they have. If the people have been saying that they would make the country secure, this is the time to manifest that promise. Unfortunately, Nigeria is so insecure that no Nigerian feels secured. People lock themselves in their houses because of the pervasive insecurity reigning in the streets. I think we should set up a body to study why Nigeria is insecure to give recommendations on how to correct the system, while those in government should be very careful too.
The pipelines were so insecure that there was no day that we did not report vandalism and oil theft along the pipelines. As a result, some of us sat down and thought of what we could do to assist the country to curb these aspects of our national lives. I personally got in touch with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) in 2010 and wrote that I had some methods to be deployed along the oil pipelines that would reduce oil theft and vandalism. For almost five years, NNPC was going about considering our proposal. When they realised that our proposal was a good one, they said we did not register with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and there was no way the government could do business with an unregistered group. So they said that we should go and register Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC).
I said, I will not register OPC. I told them that OPC then was 21 years old and that if I felt that it was necessary to do so, I should have done that all along. I said if I applied to the CAC within 24 hours, they would register us; but we would be subjected to their banning. If you can recollect, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was one of the (factors) that made the OPC come into existence. We fought for him, fought for his regime and he ruled this nation for eight years of the constitutional prescription. It was surprising that the same Obasanjo that we protected was the one that said if you see any OPC member, shoot them on sight. So if we had been registered, he needn’t go that far.
It was the NNPC that drafted the contract agreement. They recommended a daily pay and I said there were many graduates in OPC and that okada riders made more than what they recommended. Despite that the pay was low, we accepted it because it would reduce unemployment. At the end of the day, we started and got fully committed to the job without any mobilisation from the NNPC. We did the job for three months and at the end of three months, nobody paid us one kobo.
Let me then ask; is that an attitude for confronting unemployment? Is that the way to tackle security? We took away over 4,000 people from their homes and they were in the jungle battling with snakes, wild animals, and various health hazards. At the end, they were not considered for the pay that they themselves recommended to pay them.
Mind you, when we were securing the pipelines, NNPC wrote to commend us that there were changes and that vandalism and thefts had reduced and that we were doing very well. It was sad that a day to the end of the three months, they sent mad dogs on us to destroy our secretariat. They came after us and shot at our members and injured them. To me, that was a sort of insecurity from the government because if those boys had decided to turn on the security operatives, you can imagine what could have happened.
Right now, we are thinking of going to court; so that the court would help us interpret the contract agreement the NNPC itself drafted and which we all signed. Those in power are not doing justice to the people. Injustice is a major cause of insecurity.