Senator Adegbenga Sefiu Kaka is a former Deputy Governor of Ogun State. Between 2011 and 2015, he represented Ogun East in the Senate. Currently a gubernatorial aspirant on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, Kaka, in this interview with AYO ESAN in his Ijebu-Igbo countryhome, speaks on several issues of national importance. Excerpts:
About 50 people were killed in Taraba and Adamawa only a few days ago, coming on the heels of another massacre in Plateau State. How do we stop these killings?
It is a pity that the issue of insecurity keeps on recurring like a very stubborn decimal. Some of us, out of conviction, have said it times without number that the primary solution to this problem, either by armed robbers, militants or cult members or Fulani herdsmen, is: let us decentralise the police force and let us equip the police force. And when we say equipping our police force both in terms of personnel and human resources, we know that the police as presently constituted, is below 300,000 to man nearly 200 million people. That ratio is embarrassingly low. If we can remove the paradox of gross unemployment in the society and we have areas that are being understaffed in terms of quality, then what stops us from recruiting all our fresh graduates, the best brain from the youth corps, employ them and bring them into the police force. When you recruit young graduates, it will be difficult for any Inspector General of Police or Commissioner of Police to ask a graduate policeman to guard all these miscreants that we have who are parading
In fact, policemen are now scarce as nearly 40 per cent of them are being deployed to serve as security guards. Those young graduates will carry the integrity, the confidence of graduates into the service, so that the issue of collecting N10, N20, N50, N100 token at checking points will not be their lot.
So we need to actually go to the grassroots to do the changes. Then in addition to decentralising the police force, there should be state police and local government police. So as things stand, community policing has no alternative. Somehow, some selfish individuals who are benefiting from the over-centralisation of the police force continue to say we are not mature. When are we going to be mature? If it is put in place and there is the fear that a governor can manipulate the whole system, we can fashion out an amendment in the Constitution to accommodate an overriding role by the federal police over the state police. Then the police can have provision for an overriding role, more or less like over-sight function over what is happening at local and community levels.
These are the areas that are key. Then beyond that, posting an Emeka to Yauri, or posting a Bello to Ibadan or posting Ayokunle to Zamfara, won’t work well. They are strangers in the eyes and there is no way they can see the ground like an indigene would do. Let the people from the different locations man their locations; they will be able to blend with the community, not the artificial police-community relation that we have been trying to foster over the years that have not yielded any fruit.
So, if that one is done, I am sure there will be proper blending. Since these miscreants, whether you called them armed robbers or herdsmen, are part and parcel of the system, they would understand their nuances, they would be able to monitor them closely and if any new person comes into the area, with the collaboration of the people, they will fish them out and deal with them. And if any state commissioner of police or local divisional police officer is going out of his ways, then there are superior authorities who will call them to order. The time has come for overall decentralisation of the police. The time has come for us to make state police and local government police visible and then, the re-organisation of the federal police also is very key.
Some people are saying that to forestall the recurring Fulani herdsmen-farmers clashes, we should have a cattle ranch in each state. They believe that will solve the problem?
If you want to talk about the herdsmen, what they are doing is purely criminal. It has nothing to do with agriculture. It has got nothing to do with ethnicity. It has nothing to do with culture. If there is any cultural inference, it is because they are migrants and if they insist on being migrants, there should be effective surveillance to monitor their activities, and whoever violates the law should face the music, no matter where he comes from; whether you are a Fulani, Igbo or Yoruba, you commit a crime and you face the music. That is what the law says and once you respect the Constitution, those people we are going to entrust our security with at various levels, once they are well trained and are patriotic, will do well. So if anybody wants to go to his village and be taking gratification from his brethren-‘papa and mama’-let him go and do that; they will lynch him. If an Emeka wants to go to Onitsha and be collecting bribes from his people, if they want to give him, let them give him; it won’t be under the cover of anything or that we are posting somebody here or there, destabilising his family.
By the time you ask the police personnel to go to Gombe and after three or four years, you tell him to go to Onitsha, he can’t be carrying his children about. So leaving them in a place where he can’t supervise them is also breeding bad children for police personnel who are serving the nation. And they won’t even have the mind to serve effectively. Let’s localise the police and stop this deceit and charade.
If you want to talk of grazing, cattle rearing is a business concern and since it is a business concern, the input, the processes and the output are not different from what is going on in other business concerns. Whoever wants to do cattle breeding must know a little bit about genetics, you need to know a little bit about the health of the animal, you have to know a little bit about feeding of the animals and you must know about the housing of the animals. You need to even know a bit about the marketing. So in knowing all these, you devise a system whereby the needs of the enterprise is taking care of.
So whoever wanted the business to grow must invest on feeding, not inconveniencing other people. It’s not right just because you want your own trade to thrive, you continue to disturb other people, asking government to use the money that belongs to me and you, the money that should be used for common good, to be used to promote your own trade. It cannot stand. That is why I said it is totally different from the issue of security.
Though they have overlapped but the overlap can be taken care of if the security operatives are well groomed, well-grounded and furnished with required materials and apparatus to work with.
President Muhammadu Buhari, while signing the 2018 budget recently, accused the National Assembly of having padded the budget. You were once in the Senate, how did the National Assembly and the presidency develop and sustain a robust relationship during your time?
Number One, I would not want to affirm that there was no such problem. What we had was understanding between the leadership of the Executive and the leadership of the Legislature. There were many things that were going on then that were not even known to the ordinary member of the Legislature. There were many things that were going on and were not known to ordinary members of the Executive. We had what we called the executive within the legislature as well. But the ability of the leadership first to affirm patriotism so that they put the nation about self, ability to say, ‘yes, let us balance what is going on into various constituencies’, was there. This is because some of the things that are creating problems centre on the thought that all the projects should be in my constituency, which is a selfish agenda. We are in a federal system; so don’t say because you are the Senate President or President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, then you want to implement an agenda that is lopsided. The people will react. Then beyond that, is corruption. Because people want to take more than they are entitled to, they tried to find ways of beating the established norms. That is why some people will go to the extent of padding a financial plan, which is an illegal act and criminal. So if for whatever reasons, you are convinced that the budget proposal is not in sync with the expectations, yes, you dissect it, make necessary amendment and then make it public. It won’t be under cover. It was because it was undercover that it is being called ‘budget padding’; but if it is done openly, there is justification for that. But by and large, the legislature and the executive must work on the same page. If they work on the same page, a lot of these things will be ironed out before it gets to the public domain.
Regarding your ambition to govern Ogun State, how far have you gone in reaching out to party leaders, members of your party and the electorate generally?
As far as I am concerned I have been traversing the length and breadth of Ogun State. One thing is certain; there are hurdles. We have the political party activists, who are party members, when you put them together; they are not more than five per cent of the society. The real people are the voters. As far as Ogun State is concerned, I can tell you that I enjoyed the goodwill of the majority of the electorate in Ogun State. But because of the way we run the political parties, the party members may be inadvertently making the mistake of presenting an unacceptable candidate to the electorate and the consequences are better imagined. As far as I am concerned, I am working on the generality of the electorate. Then I am trying to break in, into the party’s structure, so that the primary could be made to be free and fair. I don’t deceive myself; right now, the party’s structure is in the hands of a group which sees some of us as outsiders to the party, which is quite unfortunate. But I am not going to be deterred. I am determined to forge ahead, believing that he who is with God is in the majority. It is left for the electorate to fight out, asking for the best within the society and without doubt, I am not boosting my ego. I believe I happen to be the best in the current dispensation in Ogun State. So, it is now left for the state to accept my offer to serve them or reject it. In the case of any rejection, heavens will not fall.
