Mr. Alfred Ilenre is Secretary General of the Ethnic Minority and Indigenous Rights Organisation of Africa, a group under the support of the United Nations. In this interview with ABIOLA ODUTOLA, he faults Nigeria’s presidential system and revenue allocation formula, which he believes breeds and sustains corruption. Excerpts:
Nigeria loses about N640 million to crude oil theft daily. Some critics have argued that the Federal Government has not handled the issue seriously. How do you think it can be tamed?
The Nigerian structure is not designed to tame or fight corruption. The system will not allow it because nobody will run our system and be able to fight corruption, since the tentacles of our corruption have gone too deep that everybody is roped into it, including the religious ministers.
A country that is mortgaged into the hands of bureaucrats cannot fight corruption. So the present system cannot fight corruption and those who blame former President Goodluck Jonathan that he is not dynamic enough should have a rethink. The system has in-built mechanism to encourage and entrench corruption. I have travelled and seen different systems; there is no system (where) you make millions without sweating for it except Nigeria.
A country that is mortgaged into the hands of bureaucrats cannot fight corruption. So the present system cannot fight corruption…The system has in-built mechanism to encourage and entrench corruption
How can we tackle corruption in the country?
I suggest we adopt either the collegiate system or parliamentary system. The parliamentary system allows you to answer to your responsibilities. There is a response in the parliamentary system because you challenge the officers instantly. But in the presidential system, you do not even have contact with them. So they do not even have areas from which to get ideas on which to formulate policies and present policies. So this presidential system of government is not helping. If you go to America, the presidential system is the same but all the methods of implementation of their own policies are like the parliamentary system.
Aside from corruption, insecurity has been another challenge scaring business owners, especially foreign investors. What do you think is the way out?
Insecurity is not new in the country. We saw it coming a long time ago and we refused to do anything about it. Let me take you back a little.
Around 1988 in Benin, there was a robbery gang headed by Lawrence Anini tormenting the old Bendel State and the Commissioner of Police was not from Bendel. The police couldn’t track down this gang. But when they changed the CP and appointed an indigene, they (the criminals) were rounded up. That is, the police security is something that is residual. People can only confide in the people they know. So, once you sent a Yoruba man to head the police in Maiduguri, you are already compromising the performance of the cops. They will organise cult strikes and other crimes around him and he would not know. So, the way the Nigeria Police is structured, in the first instance, does not help in fighting crime and it scares away foreign investors.
It appears you are in support of state police. Will that save our business communities?
I am not talking of state police. I am talking of communal police, industrial police, and educational police. Every university should be able to have its own police. The railway corporation should be able to have their own police. So the law is such that the police will have to implement it without sentiments. Our police are not supposed to be corrupt if they are paid well. Some police officers in the United States earn an average of $71,000 while an American senator earns an average of $61,000. Their system has made the political offices unattractive and that helps to tame corruption and that is why the salary of the legislators and other political leaders are modest and unattractive, and they work longer hours than any worker. It should be for the sake of serving my own people.
There is also the issue of resource control, which was discussed at the National Conference organised by the Federal Government during the last dispensation. What do you think about this and what do you believe should be done?
The resource control issue is not supposed to be a controversy at all, because the elite group is benefitting from the confusion and that is why it created the terminology. There were five different revenue sharing formulas from 1946 to 1964; from 1946 when we decided to be a federation as we were no longer under the colonial rulers.
All of them agreed that the revenue sharing formula should be 50 per cent derivation, 35 per cent distributable common pool to be shared among the regions, and 15 per cent, to the central government. It was agreed that it was the universal way of distributing resources in a heterogeneous country. When the military came, that was when the problem started.
They started to distort the revenue sharing formula. (General Yakubu) Gowon removed five per cent from the derivation; General Murtala Muhammed and (General Olusegun) Obasanjo removed 20 per cent. When General Muhammadu Buhari came in 1983, he removed 3.5 per cent, remaining only 1.5 per cent. So the derivation formula was destroyed by the military.
The one that was receiving the least before started receiving the largest portion. So you cannot be surprised how corruption came about.
