- Says “Nigeria is already finished, Buhari has messed up, destroyed the country“
In this concluding part of a two-hour interview (first part was published on Monday, July 5), 91-year-old Dr. Uma Eleazu, economist, political scientist, administrator par excellence, a former presidential aspirant on the platform of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP), who served in the 1978 Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) set up by General Olusegun Obasanjo to midwife the 1979 Constitution and was also a member of the Constituent Assembly, reflects on the state of the nation.
Elder Eleazu, who set up the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, says Buhari has messed up the country completely, insisting that Nigeria’s redemption lies in the “Aburi agreement together with the Decree 8 that General Yakubu Gowon made to implement the Aburi Accord.”
He spoke to IKECHUKWU AMAECHI in Lagos.
Alaigbo is in turmoil. What do you make of the level of insecurity in the Southeast?
We have a very tricky situation in the Southeast. Tricky in the sense that we have young people who are aggrieved about what is going on in Nigeria. And if I were young like them, I too will be aggrieved. .
Why would you be aggrieved?
I will be aggrieved because we fought a war and we were promised reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction but it is not happening. By the time our people came back after the war, they were given 20 Pounds to start life. And in the East, you look at the division of the states, initially, we were all grouped into one – East Central State. Anything that was happening was in that East Central State being further divided into the five states that we have now.
And then, the way they share money based on local governments and all those criteria which they did when we were not present to contribute favours them. To use local governments to allocate revenue when the old Kano State has almost the same number of local governments as the East Central State even after we have been divided into five states. The only thing that has happened to Kano is that they created Jigawa out of it. When revenue is shared on the basis of local governments, you know we are cheated.
And there are so many other subtle ways in which we have been cheated. Is it in development? A whole federal government will make plans like the gas master plan, and bypass Alaigbo. Same with railway. It is a tug of war for Enugu that has had airport for a long time to be recognized as an international airport. They use tax and all kinds of subterfuge to kill our people’s businesses. You remember Ibeto’s story with Dangote Cement. Or is it INNOSON Motors? If they had a chance, they would have destroyed the place.
So, the young people look at these things and those who are angry, in my opinion, are justified. They have a reason to be angry.
So, what do you do when you are angry, even if justifiably so?
That is where we part ways. The anger should make us come inside, being the kind of people we are, to see what we can do for ourselves.
In 2005, Bob Ogbuagu, who used to be the secretary of the Eastern Nigeria Development Corporation (ENDC) wrote a paper and came to me and said, Uma, join me, you are a younger person, in case anything happens, let us go and see the governors.
We went round and saw those who were governors in the Southeast then. And what was his proposal? That they should set up something like the old ENDC which Dr. Michael Okpara used to do all the magic he did in Eastern Nigeria. And this structure will be in charge of only infrastructure and he mentioned roads, railway from Port Harcourt to Enugu and possibly to Makurdi, electricity.
In other words, he was saying, let us take and hive off what will make investment in these five states attractive so that we can develop our region.
How was the scheme to be executed?
He suggested that each governor should pay about N100 million monthly to a central fund and he calculated it and it will be about N6 billion every year.
He said with that the executive of the organization that will be set up will now be able to look for the engineers and contractors, employ our people the same way that the ENDC was working. And be developing the whole region so that the states can concentrate on things like schools, hospitals, etc.
What did the governors say?
The idea didn’t wash with the governors. Then, sometime during the Obasanjo regime, the Movement for the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) came into being and when MASSOB split, Nnamdi Kanu, who was part of MASSOB jumped into IPOB and started his rabble rousing. And he has so much following.
At that point, he took over IPOB from Emeka Esiri, who was trying to follow quasi-judicial process of getting a referendum as the UN people advised him. At one stage, they even wrote to a few of us at Ohanaeze to come and be members of what they called the Traditional Council of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra. That was how Dr. Dozie Ikedife got in.
Ikedife called me and said, your name is on this thing, and I told him I don’t like the way Nnamdi Kanu talks. I told Ikedife that I don’t think we should give Nnamdi Kanu that aura. The original IPOB was what I was interested in, the one that will be legal and we can get ourselves to the point where the outside world will say okay, we will come and help and conduct a referendum. So, I decided not to join them.
Coming back to your question, we are in a delicate situation. 1n 2017 when they declared IPOB a terrorist group, that is what gave Nnamdi Kanu prominence. He was now seen by others as a persecuted person and the only person who can speak up about these problems in the Southeast. But he is not the only person who can speak, or in fact, who is speaking. Many others are speaking up.
What could Nnamdi Kanu have done differently?
A lot. I remember in the last Anambra State governorship election, he was advised to come and campaign for Osita Chidoka. He was told, look what you are saying is okay. Some of our governors are not doing well. But come, let us go through the political process, get one state and showcase how Alaigbo should be governed and if you get that one state, then subsequently move on to Imo, Abia, until we now have all the five states being run under the same kind of ideology at the same time, not fighting with the Federal Government. We will just receive whatever they say is due to us and properly use it to develop our people. He refused.
So, right now, he has played into the hands of Buhari, that is the way I see it, and as far as Buhari is concerned, Alaigbo is IPOB. He considers the whole of the Southeast as IPOB and he can now say, oh, we will talk to them in the language they understand.
If you go down to the village level, you will find out that there are so many people who are supporting Nnamdi. If you tell people in my village that he is not all that they are seeing in the social media and television, that he is leading us into a war, a war that we don’t need to fight, they don’t want to listen.
So, that is the problem that I see. But gradually, I think it is dawning on some of them that Nnamdi may not be the messiah Ndigbo want. Coupled with Buhari’s style of governance, the country is down to pieces.
In a recent interview, the President said the Southeast is a dot in a circle. That has generated a lot of controversy. What is your take?
When he said it, I presumed he was saying that Alaigbo is encircled. That they have encircled us, how then can they leave? That was the question he asked.
So, who has encircled us? That is the first way of looking at it. We have Akwa Ibom in the South, and a quarter of Akwa Ibomites are Biafrans. Their youths are members of IPOB and they are very active in Akwa Ibom.
You move towards Rivers State and it is the same thing. I will say that they are more IPOB, percentage wise, than Akwa Ibom. Leave the mainland Alaigbo and go towards Delta, it is the same thing. You have many people who will tell you that they are IPOB in the Igbo section of Delta State. Even in the non-Igbo section of Delta, so, for him to say that we are a dot in a circle, where can they go, is ridiculous.
Well, our people say it is only when there is a stampede in the market that you see that a woman with a big backside can run.
You can do a lot connecting dots. He only sees one dot but he doesn’t see the other dots. If he thinks that our trouble is a dot, what about those who started breaking the Nigerian state? The dot started from them. How did the dots originate?
For him to say that, I think that he is suffering from dementia. He is too old to be sitting where he is sitting. He tends to remember things that he knew when he was young but he doesn’t remember things that happened about five years ago. Buhari doesn’t remember things he said in 2001, 2002, 2003 and those are matters of record. He created so many of these dots that have created what we have now.
So, what do I think about the dot statement? It doesn’t mean a thing. It is not like a profound statement that people should worry about because he himself has not thought it through what a dot means.
While so many Southern leaders including the governors are unanimous in saying no to open grazing, the President is up in arms, insisting it is open grazing or nothing. In fact, in the interview with Arise Television, he said he had told the Attorney General to dig up a First Republic gazette on grazing route and reserves. Are you aware of such a gazette and is it a solution to the problem at hand?
That is why I said that he is a little senile now and tends to remember only things that happened long ago. There may be a gazette on grazing routes. I don’t know the number and the year. I know that there is something said about grazing in a document called Lord Lugard’s Political Memoranda. They created grazing routes and it was all within the North then. To bring cows to the south, they had to use train.
So, until Malami finds the particular gazette that Buhari is talking about, we will wait and see. I have read somebody who said Malami has found the gazette and that only Oyo State, Oyo North specifically, was in the gazette. The rest of the South was not part of it.
Why? Because Oyo shares borders with the North coming from around Ilorin. It is only from there up. It is not in the South, definitely not in the East, part of the West and not in Lagos. But during the years of planning, I am now talking from about 1970 to 1978, at least I participated in the making of the Third and Fourth National Development Plans.
This was a time that we had seen the possibility, in other words, there were background papers presented, we had a conference in NISER, I can’t remember who presented that paper but it was anticipated that there would be desert encroachment in the North and it would be better to have plan of action.
It will require looking at the Third and Fourth National Development Plans to see the projects that were planned under the Ministry of Agriculture. But that was when the River Basin Development Authorities were created. And what they were intended to do was to develop each river basin to ensure that we retain water enough to irrigate parts of the North where it would be very dry during the dry season.
So, the solution at the time was to provide water there in the North. These were issues discussed in seminars. So, what I am saying is that the problem that Buhari is trying to solve, he is doing that in a very wrong way.
Yes, there is problem in the Sahel region and people are now on the move, but should they go and displace people in their own ancestral homes? People can travel and resettle somewhere else because of desert encroachment and with goodwill and if they are prepared to abide by the rules of the new place that they have found themselves, they adapt to the situation. I don’t think people in the South would have chased any Fulani away if they were just coming because of the desert problem.
After all, they have been living among us and people didn’t chase them away. They have been bringing their cows and selling them until this modern AK47-carrying herders, instead of the stick that Buhari himself said they used to carry.
We have been living with the Fulani people with stick and cap for many years. There was no problem. They were given lands. Some local governments built abattoirs for them where they slaughter their cows and sell them and there was no problem. Some of them had children in the East who went to school there and speak Igbo like you and I. Just like our own children, who were born in the North, went to school over there speak Hausa.
There was even a time Zik proposed that every school in the Eastern Region should teach Hausa. That was his own idea of nationalizing everything so that everywhere you go, you either speak Igbo or Hausa. I think there was a law that every child in school in the Eastern Region must be able to speak Igbo and one other Nigerian language. It is either Efik, Hausa or Yoruba.
But the way Buhari now wants to completely displace people from their ancestral homes and bring people from other places to come and live there will not work. That is the source of all the trouble we have in Nigeria now.
Do you then agree with those who claim that Buhari has Fulani supremacist agenda?
I believe so. He started playing his Fulani card since 2001. You remember when he went to the then governor of Oyo State, Lam Adesina, to ask why Yoruba were killing his people. Buhari still regards Boko Haram as his people. He didn’t see Boko Haram as fighting the Nigerian State. He saw them as fighting infidels, Christians and other people. It is good if they bomb churches as far as he is concerned.
When people talked about the inhumane nature of Sharia, he said they only cut the hands of Muslims, not Christians. When he eventually won election, where did he go to present himself? Niger Republic. He went to Niger even before he was inaugurated. And look at what he is doing. He wants to move everything to Niger Republic.
So, I believe that he has more than sympathy for his ethnic group, and he is not prepared to allow others have the same level of sympathy for their own ethnic groups. I love Igbo just as he loves Fulani but that is not a reason if I am President of Nigeria, I will say Fulani people should all be killed.
That is the difference. So, people talk about inclusion, about managing our diversity, he just hasn’t even tried to manage diversity. Instead, he has worsened the diversity in Nigeria by his policies.
Will Nigeria survive Buhari?
It depends on what we consider as survival. In my own opinion, the country is already finished. What we are doing now is to see how to pick up the pieces. He has destroyed the country. And if we allow him to continue, I even doubt if we will have any election in 2023. So, I think he has messed up the country.
The effort we should be making now is to see whether we can halt drift. When I close my eyes, I see something like a truck going over a precipice. The front tyres have already crossed the edge and the truck is now hanging in the balance. That is where we are. The front tyres are already hanging on the precipice and people are now trying to see if they can pull it back. It only requires the earth beneath that truck shifting a little bit and the whole thing will collapse. That is the kind of Nigeria we are in now. That is the mental picture I have of what is happening.
That is scary. Was it a mistake electing Buhari president in 2015?
Yes it was. Sadly, those who pushed him to become the president knew exactly what kind of person he was. When you trace his antecedents, and what he was saying and the way he was behaving, it should have been clear to them that this man had an agenda.
They thought he could change. That was why when Obasanjo wrote that letter that Buhari was incompetent, I wrote a rejoinder and said, you were one of those that brought this man. You burnt your PDP card and joined to get him in, you ought to have known better. This man had been with you in the military, and you looked at what he said in 2001, 2003, 2007, running against you as president. You knew. So, it is no comfort for you to come and tell us, oh, that man is incompetent. You have been a head of state and you knew him even in the army, how competent was he as a General. That was my reaction.
What is the way out for Nigeria given where we have found ourselves?
The way out right now is for us to have a good conversation, which cuts across the length and breadth of this country and also vertical in terms of age structure. And left to me, that discussion will still ask just one basic question: Do we want to have a country called Nigeria? If the answer is yes, then each group will answer, under what condition are you prepared to accept one Nigeria? That is where we are all going to differ until we can come to an agreement. And many people have said it that when we chose democracy, we know what it implies – constitutional government, rule of law, equity, fairness and justice. When you run a government where those ingredients are not present, then what will take over will be anarchy.
That is where we are now. So, we have to leave the era of anarchy and start moving back to the era of rule of law. You cannot run a society without laws.
Structurally speaking, I think we should resolve to have all the geopolitical zones as federating units and then move into a confederation where each of the units will be fairly independent and autonomous to do what it wants to do.
How to arrive at that in a short period of time will be to go back to the Aburi agreement together with the Decree 8 that General Yakubu Gowon made to implement Aburi Accord.
If people of goodwill can just sit around those two documents, things will work out well. We can even put inside the document that under this accord, no unit will be allowed to secede in the first five years after which we will all come back for a review to see how well economically, socially and all that we are doing. Are we coming together or still moving apart?
If we have people of goodwill, our being in a confederation will be to see whether we can as we are growing independently see areas of co-operation because what the British left for us was a country tied together by railway, communication, laws, etc.
But Buhari is turning that upside down. Now, instead of railway from Port Harcourt and we all meet in Kaduna, he now wants to start from God knows where and go to Lokoja, Kano to Maradi in Niger Republic.
Who then is the enemy of the country? Who is dividing the country? Buhari wants to relate more with Republic of Niger than with “Biafra.” That is why he is avoiding Ndigbo.