In this interview with MUDIAGA AFFE, a professor of political science and an ex-Minister of External Affairs between 1985 and 1987, Bolaji Akinyemi, who is also a former Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, speaks on sundry issues, including the sorry state of Nigerian foreign missions, to the increasing spate of banditry as well as the need to implement the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference, in which he was a co-chairman

Nigeria is said to have about 120 foreign missions globally. Do you think they can be sustained considering the increasing recurrent expenditure and dwindling revenue?

There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian economy; it is the misapplication of funds. Recall that for more than 15 years, there had been the allegation that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation is not remitting all the money it is supposed to remit to the Federal Government. If such money is duly remitted and if the leakage in the economy is plugged, we would not have problem funding the foreign missions. The late President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, had once said that ‘Nigeria is the hope of Africa and the black race’. You cannot be the hope of Africa and the black race by running a foreign service on pittance or by closing down embassies. You must have your presence in the international community. If there is anything in which there is a consensus, it is that we should fight for one of the permanent seats that will be allocated to Africa in the Security Council of the United Nations. The only way you can get this is to get other nations to vote for you and this cannot be possible if you decrease your presence in other countries. So, if the economy was genuinely bad, we would not be spending so much money on our senators and members of the House of Representatives as we do at the moment. If the economy was genuinely bad, NNPC would not be holding back funds meant for the Federal Government. So, I have no problem with sustaining vibrant foreign missions; it, however, depends on the leadership at the top. I am not talking about the foreign minister, but the President. It is the President that must develop a vision for Nigeria’s role in the world, our presence in the world and our image in the world. Having articulated that, he gives it to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to implement.

What is Nigeria’s strategic interest in countries like Sri Lanka, Hungary, Poland, Vietnam and the like?

It is because they all have votes in the UN. When you intend to fight for a seat in the Security Council of the UN, those are the countries you are going to lobby. They cannot veto somebody’s application for membership. It is one state one vote and your competitors probably have presence there. Even our competitors in the continent, like South Africa, have their presence in these countries you want to push into the background.

Does Nigeria have any foreign mission that rakes in revenues just like the American Embassy in Nigeria?

Well, it depends on the volume of visa applications. How many people would want to come and visit Nigeria? Is the country positioned in such a way that you will have massive applications for visa applicants? If you have people who want to come to Nigeria as tourists, investors and scholars, you could charge them anything you want to charge as visa fees the way embassies in Nigeria do. It is Nigerians who want to travel abroad in great volume. So, these countries that allow their embassies to charge outrageous visa fees do not force Nigerians to apply.

Considering the sorry state of some of our foreign missions, what is the need having an embassy that cannot sustain itself, at least for maintenance purpose?

If you do not have the funds to sustain an embassy in the style and gravitas to which that embassy is entitled, then it becomes counterproductive because you are sending out negative messages to the countries where the embassies are based. If your vehicles are in bad state, the building housing the mission is in sorry state and allowances of diplomats are not paid or delayed, you cannot maintain an effective presence in the country. But the main issue is not lack of availability of funds but that of misapplication of funds. Our newspapers are daily reporting cases of misapplication of funds.

The problem of migration, globally, recently assumed a frightening dimension. How can this be addressed, especially in Nigeria?

For the countries that are involved, obviously we are one because our name has been mentioned several times, there are two issues to be addressed. The first is the economy. The government must design programs and economic policies that would encourage employment, and, in a way, address the issue of this wide disparity between the very rich and the very poor. We must close that gap. Opportunities must be created for the employment of the youth – those who are coming out of secondary schools and tertiary institutions and even those who are not educated. There are programs, whether in terms of agriculture, that will require the skills of those who are not educated. The second step is that the government must embark on massive education or sensitization of its citizens. When you listen to these people involved in this migration, they will tell you that their family borrowed as much as $5,000 to pay the traffickers to take them to their destinations. Even if they get through all the humiliation and the dangers of the Sahara, kidnapping, banditry, and degradation or being sold, you still end up in Europe with zero dollar in your pocket. Now, $5,000 at an exchange rate of N350 per dollar amounts to about N1.75m. Are you saying that cannot set up a small scale business enterprise in Nigeria? There was a woman who narrated her experience on a British Broadcasting Corporation program after a failed attempt to migrate illegally out of the country, she resigned to fate and set up a restaurant in Nigeria. She said the business had been booming and being able to pay fees of her children and house rents. The monies given to traffickers are wasted monies. Monies are not found in the streets of Europe. They should use the monies given to these traffickers to set up small businesses here. The government should also find ways to subsidize such activities. The government must design policies to address this problem of lack of employment for graduates and non-graduates and this will address this problem of migration because it is devastating to our image as a country.

One of the cardinal policies of the present administration is the fight against corruption. Are we stable as a country to fight corruption?

Yes, we have corruption at the lower level, but it is not that kind of corruption that is posing danger. The corruption that is posing danger is at the higher level and that is the one that should be addressed. When you look at the history of other countries, I doubt if we have any country that is corruption free, but that is if you are caught. But in Nigeria, what we need to do is to ensure that people, who are caught, no loopholes exist for them to escape. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission should ensure that they get crack lawyers who would prosecute their cases after thorough investigations had been conducted. The judiciary also has a big role to play. There had been allegations of corruption among judges in terms of judgments which they hand down. So, you could see the different layers. If all these are taken care of, there will be spillover to the bottom. But when people are aware that those at the top are escaping with their loots, they will not be discouraged from whatever passes through their table.

President Muhammadu Buhari has just got a second term mandate. What should he be doing differently?

First, I think the question of the economy should be addressed holistically, meaning employment, empowering the youth. There is a correlation between instability and unemployment especially among the youth. Millions of Nigerian youths are not employed and to me, that is a time bomb. Government must design policies to address this issue. Secondly, government must design policies that will address the roaming young people who have no dreams and no opportunities because they feel that the country is not just there for them. And so, they become bandits, kidnappers and armed robbers and they form the pool that organisations like Boko Haram recruit from. There are several other Boko Haram organisations in the country and how do you block all if you cannot provide alternative for these young people? A country that cannot feed itself and has to import food is looking for trouble. There must be a workable agricultural policy that will make us food sufficient. One of the things that we have is large expanse of land and we should not be importing food. There must be subsidies to the farmers so as to change the agricultural activities. The world over, there are regimes of subsidies in every country of the world towards agriculture or industrial activities and we must have that. We must ensure that the subsidy gets to the farmers without it being pilfered somewhere along the way. Do not spend much of the subsidy administering the subsidy. They must go directly. Again, we must have an economic policy to industrialise Nigeria. When we were growing up, we had the textile industry, canning industry, rubber companies and many others. They have all disappeared. We were once on our way to real industrialisation. It is not as if it cannot be done; it has been done before but we have allowed smuggling and lack of sustained economic policy to destroy all these. To me, if President Buhari addresses two or three of these suggestions, in the next four years, he would be leaving a legacy behind.

You are one of the strong advocates of the restructuring of the country. Are you still maintaining your position?

I am tired of talking about restructuring because it has been over-trashed. Pick up a typical Nigerian newspaper, it is a daily discourse. Whatever they need to know about it is there. Go further to pick up the report of the 2014 National Conference; it is there. It is simple – transfer more issues to local government areas and states, transfer resources to them to implement those items rather than have a gigantic apparatus at the federal level that is too far remote from the issues we are talking about. Let a level of government that is more designed to address local issues address it. Unfortunately, this was something left to us by the military and it has become difficult to revert. We had addressed this at the National Conference. If you transfer issues to the other tiers of government, you must give them the wherewithal to implement that.  There are so many roads within the city that are called federal roads. Why? What is the state government doing? There are roads in the rural communities that should be within the purview of the local governments; instead, they are called state roads. Why? So, to me, that is what restructuring is all about. Let local issues be addressed by local institutions.

You were a member of the 2014 National Conference, why do you think it is taking the Federal Government this long to implement some of your resolutions?

Well, because it has become politicised. The North thinks that it is being targeted when you talk about restructuring; whereas, it is not so. I have just given you the simple definition of restructuring. Every single part of this country would benefit if local issues are dealt with by local institutions. You see the time it takes for petitions to go from the local government area to Abuja and then find its way back? You would have lost time. By the time it gets back, you now will have to send a team from a federal ministry to investigate what the issue is all about in the local government. With all these moves, you would have spent so much resources meant to address the issue on the administration of the issue because you will be spending money on the civil servants’ travel expenses and the rest of them. These are the issues that the villagers know more about and they have the solution to them than the strangers you are sending to investigate it. This is what I mean by restructuring but it has been politicised. We would all be beneficiaries if it is done. The second reason is what I would call ‘power play’ because people do not give up on what they regard as their benefits. In the long run globally, you gain some and you lose some. That is what happened at the National Conference because after so much debate on these issues, we were all enlightened that through consensus, we were able to arrive at these recommendations, but I am afraid that the prejudice is still there that restructuring is targeting a particular section. Look at the issue of security, you recruit a policeman from Cross River State, for instance, and post him to Sokoto State. What does he know about the problem of security there? Does he speak the language or the layout of the boundary? Does he know what factors encourage kidnapping in the state?

What do you think is responsible for the rising spate of kidnapping, banditry and herdsmen’s menace in the country?

Hmm… we have a problem in Nigeria and the problem needs to be addressed. Things have never been like this before. No road is safe now. When you declare that the Kaduna-Abuja road is no longer safe, should that not be a challenge to the central authorities? What encourages this banditry and kidnapping on a road that leads to the federal capital? Where do the people who are involved in these activities get their courage from? When a traditional ruler in the President’s village is kidnapped; that is a slap in the face of the central authorities. Yes, I know that we do not have enough security men. As a member of the Electoral Reform Committee headed by Justice Mohammed Uwais, some of the issues we addressed were questions on security. How many policemen do we need to secure Nigeria? We used the UN template that for a country with the size of Nigeria with the population and geographical size, we need about 1.5 million policemen.  We have only about 350,000. It means that we are under-policed. So, who is chasing who? The newspapers are replete with stories that the police do not have enough modern weapons and that some of these bandits are better equipped. I think I really do not have an answer to this question except to say that it is frightening. We have never had it this bad before.

So, is the call for state police right?

I am not too sure about that. Not that Nigeria is not ripe for state police but I think our politicians, our governors, are not ripe enough to handle the concept of state police. Look at what happened in Rivers State during the just concluded general elections. If our governors have state police under their commands, they would kill their opponents. Even in several states, there was commotion among militia controlled by one set of politicians against militias controlled by another set. I am leaning now towards supporting state police but I do not think I am there yet because I am afraid of what a sitting governor would do against his opponent in states where you have state police.

As a member of the Justice Mohammed Uwais-led Electoral Reform Committee set up by late President Umaru Yar’Adua, what can we do to improve on the conduct of elections in the country?

As a member of that committee, I can say that we looked at a lot of issues and did a thorough study. Unfortunately, it was the illness of Yar’Adua that prevented him from implementing that report. The moment he became ill, the forces around him, who thought they were going to be in power for the next 50 years, had no interest in implementing that report and they never thought they were going to lose an election. Now they have become opposition and things that they should have taken care of, in terms of giving us an electoral system that will be acceptable and will command credibility worldwide, we lost that opportunity; but the report is still there. Let me address one or two. We tend to blame the Independent National Electoral Commission. Is it INEC that gives a judgement three weeks before an election that a party should be registered or that a candidate should be swapped? Do you know what that means? The INEC will have to destroy all the ballot papers that they have printed because of the judgement. I think that the National Assembly should have to come up with an electoral law that simply says that there should be no more court judgements three months before an election to allow INEC plan properly. Again, do you know the number of parties on the presidential election ballot paper? These are people who had no interest. They were candidates without grassroots support, no base. Yet, we had a long list of presidential candidates. This can only happen in Nigeria.