A former Foreign Affairs Minister, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, speaks on zoning, state of insecurity, troubled economy, power rotation, Electoral Act and other national issues, in this interview with BOLA  BADMUS.

A number of aspirants are positioning themselves for the 2023 general election.  Amid all this, there are agitations that it is turn of the South to produce the next president. What is your view on the issue?

The interesting thing is that we, Nigerians, do not pay sufficient attention to details. Somebody writes a headline and nobody takes a good look at that headline to see how accurate it is. I gave a lecture, I can’t remember the exact date, probably in 2002 or so, where I pointed out that people say that we now have the principle of zoning entrenched in our political practice, and I said I don’t see it. I was speaking at the Yoruba Tennis Club, I said I don’t see it. I said look at the way Olusegun Obasanjo emerged from the convention of the PDP. I said Alex Ekweme ran against him in that exercise and I mentioned a few other names of people who were not from the South who ran against him. And I said well, of course, you need not say that there was no northern candidate, it meant the zoning was for the South. Therefore, any candidate from any zone in the South, whether South-West, South-East or South-South can take part. I said even in the main election itself, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu ran against him (Obasanjo) under the flag of APGA. So I said well, as far as I was concerned, it was too early to run off the flag and say we all agreed to zoning. In the next election, 2003, I said Buhari ran against him from his own party. So can we say that we have zoning? The answer which I got was that zoning was now an agreement within political parties and not a constitutional issue. It was never in the constitution. So, if we then go on, after Obasanjo, it was Umaru Yar’Adua. Again, Buhari ran against him. Buhari was a constant electoral actor whether you had the Northern candidate or the Southern candidate. And we were always having somebody from the APGA. After Obasanjo, Peter Odili campaigned until, well, he was persuaded by Obasanjo using the EFCC to get him to step down. So with this itself, if there had not been that episode or pressure, Odilli would have been the candidate. He already had the support of a lot of party stakeholders. In fact, everybody knew, if not for the intervention of Obasanjo, Odilli was going to be the PDP candidate. So, where then is zoning? When Obasanjo went to pick Yar’Adua, he didn›t justify it that it was on the basis that it was the turn of the North. So, when the North now says there is no such thing as zoning, rather than dismissing it off-hand, it is something, I mean that attitude, you need to interrogate. I don’t think there would be any crisis because what is now coming out from the All Progressives Congress (APC) consultations is that they have zoned the chairmanship of the party to the North and by implication, I said by implication, they haven’t said so publicly, but by implication, it means they have zoned the presidency to the South. But, the point I am trying to make is this, from both parties, APC and PDP, you have aspirants because they are not candidates yet, you have aspirants coming out from all over Nigeria: from the North, from the South. That means that there is no consensus even if you resolve it now, without asserting that it is a principle that it must be rotational, you would continue to have crisis each time election period comes around. This is because candidates would step out from all over Nigeria, from the North and from the South. The question really now is: do you want that? In fact, ask yourself, we have been amending the constitution ever since you know the National Assembly was inaugurated. They have been stepping out to amend the Constitution; they’ve never offered that provision that governance must be on the basis of rotation, they have never. 

What is your position on the new Electoral Act?

It is a step forward. Do not forget that I served on the Electoral Reform Committee, but of course, we approached the issue on a global basis in terms of calling for a reform of government institutions that have an impact on elections. What people are happy about too is the fact that the INEC is now allowed to bring in technological provisions – the Smart Card Reader, how they transmit results and they figure that this would lessen the question of electoral fraud. Of course, in our own report, we proposed that where a tribunal finds a candidate to be culpable of fraud, that candidate should not only be disqualified, but also barred from taking part in election for a couple of years and that it would lessen the tendency of a candidate to get his supporters to disrupt the election or inflate the votes. That provision is not there, but they’ve adopted the technological approach and that’s a welcome provision. In addition, they have addressed what I regard as tribunal not using the number of accredited voters as a factor in determining who has won the election and who has not. I think we, probably, all know the Supreme Court judgment they had in mind when they said that. You simply cannot take registered voters to decide whether voting has been inflated or not. It is the accredited voters on an election day that is now the critical factor. And that would curb the tendency of tribunal and appellate court to go fishing for other issues. Then they have addressed the issue of internal democracy within the party. In addressing it; they’ve left the door wide open.

In what way?

They said a party is at liberty to do things; to adopt candidates by direct primary, indirect primary, or by consensus. Because when you are talking about consensus, you cannot be talking about votes, that is how many people voted for a particular candidate. Consensus has to do with the leaders go in, close the door, you don’t know what happened behind the door and then they come out and say the party had decided that this is our candidate by consensus. If you can recall, the position of the Supreme Court in the Rotimi Amaechi case was that people vote parties and not candidates, and that this man was illegally denied; he won at the primary and that the guy who the party then adopted was not the winner. Now, under the law now, I suspect that probably, practically all the parties are going to adopt their candidates by consensus for a lot of the polls. So, the consensus is an act of wisdom. How do you challenge an act of wisdom in the law court. That’s why I said it’s seeking to address the question of internal democracy within the parties and they left the door wide open. 

There is an ongoing effort to amend the 1999 constitution. Which areas would you want the National Assembly to attend to so as to have a people’s constitution? 

I agree on reserving some seats for women. I encourage them to do that although there is the question of how they are going to ensure that because we are not running a one- party system. If we are running a one- party system, then fine. If the decision is taken within the party, you then turn it into this process called proportional representation. If it is a one- party system and you are using proportional representation, even that becomes problematic. Do you then reserve some constituencies for women and then the men in that constituencies would say that you have short- changed them? But there are ways in which it is done, other countries do it. Apart from the national list, you now have a list just for women alone. But in a multi- party system, how do you do that? I don’t know but the principle of reserving more seats for women, more representation for women is welcome and it is something we should pursue.

I don’t agree with immunity for President of the Senate, Chief Justice of the Federation, Speaker of the House of Representatives. We would seem to be moving in the wrong direction. In the United States which we are copying, there is even no immunity for the president or the vice- president. And people have been agitating for the clarification of the immunity for president, vice-president, governor, deputy governor. Instead of addressing that, you are extending that to the Chief Justice of Nigeria and others. Pretty soon, even local government chairmen, who make up the third tier of government, would also be accorded immunity. I think again, we in this country have a tendency of trivialising important issues. Even in candidates coming out for president and governor, we are trivializing those posts. You look at some of the people who have stepped up as aspirants, you will say I have never heard of this fellow before; what has he done? You Google to look at what he has done; you ask yourself, where is this guy coming from?

So, what qualities should Nigerians look out for in electing their next president?

Have all the people who are qualified declared? No. You can’t start picking a preferred candidate when the race has not started. They say there is going to be a relay race, and you are already saying Igbobi College must win. You don’t even know whether Igbobi College is going to get through different stages. It is when all the people who are interested have stepped out that I would answer you. 

Bearing in mind the fact that you are an elder statesman, what qualities must the next President possess?

There must be a seriousness of purpose; we must have somebody who has ambition; somebody who, in the past 20 years, has been involved in the struggle to make Nigeria a better place. We need somebody who is committed, who has been prepared to suffer for this country in terms of his involvement in the process. Those are the things I would be looking for. I would look at his Curriculum Vitae. I would look at, forget about the party manifesto, his record in the past 10- 15 years. What has he been saying? What has been his position on critical issues? What position has he taken? Those are the things I would be looking for.

Looking at the state of affairs in the country, is Nigeria progressing or retrogressing?

I have answered that question in terms of the constitutional amendment. I was the deputy chairman of the 2014 National Conference. I know what the decision of that conference was. If I am to tell you the difference between where we are now and where that conference envisaged we should be if we implemented its reports, we would be here for six months. You don’t need to ask me. Is your newspaper happy with the state Nigeria is? Forget the fact that you work for Tribune, personally when you sit down at home, talking with your wife, are you happy with where we are? I must be deaf or dumb or blind not to see the problems in the country, and not to see whether these problems are being addressed or not.

A critical problem facing Nigeria is insecurity. What do you think is the possible solution? How do you advise President Muhammadu Buhari to deal with the issue?

We are undermanned in terms of security personnel when you look at the volume of land mass of Nigeria and at our population. We are terribly under-staffed. Even the United Nations has said that Nigeria needs close to 1.5 million policemen. We have about 400,000 policemen now. So, that is why the military has been brought on the streets of Nigeria, manning roadblocks, getting involved in dealing with kidnappers, bandits and so on because we don’t have enough policemen. The military itself now is stretched because the security issues that you have in Sokoto are same issues you have in Maiduguri, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and all over the country. There is no zone in the country that is immune from the security palava that we have now. So, let us think outside the box. The mistake is that we continue to use the General Order that we inherited from the British, meaning that once you’ve done 35 years in the service, you retire, and once you’ve got to a particular age. I look at some of the officers who have been retired, if you ask them to run five miles in the morning, believe me they will beat you. They will run the five miles and there will still be enough energy left in them. So for me, the ultimate is to boost the manpower in the security services, mop up more funds for them, do more recruitment, more training and you retire people if they are incapable. This is an emergency. You can retire them, but that a Colonel or a Major, who has done 35 years, but can still outrun anybody, you can keep him in the service until the emergency is over, that’s the ultimate. But for the meantime, recall what I said. We put the military on the streets where they don’t belong and it is because there are not enough police men.Let us start a National Guard. And to me, if I were to be in position to order it, I would ensure that the period for Youth Service Corps would be increased to two years. That mops up the issue of unemployment of graduates, two years. The second year is for a military training and as soon as they finish that, you draft them into the National Guard. Also, the police itself. They keep retiring people because they’ve done 35 years not because they are incapable to continue. So I would say all the people who are going to be retired by 35 years, don’t retire them, transfer them to the National Guard and the same thing would apply to the military. Don’t retire them, transfer them to the National Guard. In the meantime, the National Guard itself will be recruiting so it will now be having, you could call it the Third Force, I would call it Second Force. The police being the First Force, National Guard, Second Force, the military itself Third Force and the National Guard would be called to where the military cannot go rather than the military. You don’t find the military on the streets in America, or on the streets in Britain, unless there is an emergency that has overpowered the police. So, that is what I would do; that would be my own solution to the problem of insecurity.

The economy is troubled more than ever before. What do you see as a way out?

On the economy, I don’t like the idea of setting up a committee of people who are comfortable, who are well fed, and asking them to develop and design an economic programme for Nigeria, I am not sure they are sensitive enough to anger on the streets. I was listening to one gentleman the other day. He was asked how Nigeria can benefit from the crisis going on in Ukraine and the shortage of gas in Europe in terms of our own Liquiefied Natural Gas (LNG)? And the questioner said because even as of today, we are still flaring gas. The gentleman replied, saying it would take three years to design an LNG something and this and that. Ah, excuse me. I said well, I can understand where you are coming from; you are comfortable; you are well-fed, well-paid, probably you would get foreign holidays, 90 days, with you and your family, all paid for, that’s why you could say all this. And, there was no sense of urgency. This is probably why they say when they don’t teach history in our Universities and in our schools, I say ‘o ma se o.’ This is because actually, history is the fundamental basis of education. They would tell you how Hannibal crossed the Alps. They don’t say you should go and cross the Alps. You would read there how America confronted with shortages in the Second World War, what they did that they were producing armaments in 90 days, the kind of armaments they were producing in six months, war ships were being built. They would tell you how the Germans, I am not saying you should be like Hitler, but how did he prepare Germany on a war footing? That’s what History would teach you. If that man who was saying it would take three years was an unemployed graduate on the street, would he say that? No, he wouldn’t. I am suggesting partly that if a committee is to be set up on the economy, it should not be populated by comfortable people, we are all in this together. So if we are going to have a committee, let’s have one third of people who are comfortable, have one-third of people who have a reputation of being in a hurry, people who have the reputation of thinking outside the system, and then maybe 10 percent of people who actually are hungry. What you would get would be totally different? When Roosevelt, became president, America was about to collapse; unemployment was so high that Americans actually were saying that Hitler was not too bad, after all. He provided employment for everybody in Germany, maybe that’s what we need in America. So what did Roosevelt do? He was paying people to plant flowers, not that that was what Americans needed, but he was putting money in their pockets so that they could buy food and put food on the table.

source; tribuneonlineng.com