Bisi Adegbuyi is an accomplished lawyer and businessman with vast experience in real estate, hospitality and a firm advocate of confederation. In 2014, he represented Ogun State at the National Conference and he is the founder of Grassroots Addressing and Identity Network. In this interview with ROTIMI DUROJAIYE, the public administrator and a former Postmaster General of Nigeria speaks on the numerous challenges facing Nigeria, the 1999 Constitution, politics and the economy, among others. Excerpts:
Can you do a critical analysis of Nigeria of today and where you want Nigeria to be in the nearest future?
If I want to behave like a typical politician I will be interested in the next election and who will win or who I hope or prefer to win.
Nationalism is a part of life that nobody can wish away so if I decide to support the candidacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as I have publicly declared and endorsed him that should not be strange because as I have said nationalism is a way of life. Let me quote the late Prime Minister of Britain, Baroness Margaret Thatcher. She said, “the blessing of this century is that countries that have been artificially put together shall fall apart.”
Identities, politics and nationalism can never be eradicated, you can’t push it away. And that has been the bane of Nigeria, trying to re-invent the wheel and mismanaging diversity. So, the earlier we recognize the fact that we are different people and try to forge a union out of this disparate country called Nigeria the better for us.
I often wonder where the statesmen in Nigeria are. Do we still have statesmen in Nigeria? If the United States of America were to be confronted with the challenges that Nigeria is facing today (existential challenges), their approach would have been a bipartisan approach. Recall when the USA was attacked by terrorists, when the World Trade Center was attacked, it was America first. How do we get America out of this situation? So the Republicans and Democrats closed ranks (bipartisan approach) to solving the problems in America.
That is what is presently lacking in Nigeria, therefore I believe that to get Nigeria out of this precarious situation, we must find a way to work around a bipartisan intervention.
What that simply means is that we must find a creative way out of this presidential system of government that we currently operate, that I submit with due respect backed with cogent, credible convincing evidence is ill-suited for a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and diverse country like Nigeria. How do we ensure that if we go for the next election, some candidates that are representing critical tendencies are not shut out? Because the moment the president emerges from this presidential system of election, all other candidates are completely shut out. Don’t forget I have said this is the time to approach Nigeria’s problems using bipartisan binoculars, so to say. Statesmen think about the future of their country, politicians think about the next election and that is why we have the political gladiators talking about 2023 without thinking about what will happen thereafter. Why are statesmen in short supply in Nigeria?
So in my view, and please let me enter a caveat, I have publicly endorsed and I hereby endorse the candidacy of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for presidency of 2023. But I hasten to point out, without any apology to anybody, that neither Tinubu, Atiku, Peter Obi nor Kwankwanso alone can solve the problems of Nigeria going forward. Consequently, we must find a creative way of getting the leading presidential candidates to work together. Don’t forget Nigeria has been presented with a golden opportunity of having three of the four leading presidential candidates representing very strong geo-political zones. I don’t want to offend the sensibilities of the minorities but we all know the major tribes in Nigeria. We have Bola Ahmed Tinubu representing the South West, Atiku Abubakar representing Hausa/Fulani region, and Peter Obi from the South East, and having a critical section of the voting public rooting for him demographically I mean, make no mistake about it they may be trending on social media, the youths of Nigeria are evidently tired of the way the country has been governed, they want a new deal. Let me quickly point out that Peter Obi is not a new deal because he has been part of the old order.
That he has successfully navigated the political weather from APGA to PDP, from PDP to Labour Party doesn’t make him somebody who is new or has not been part of the problem, so we quickly need to put that point on the table.
But again, if we conduct an election in 2023, demographically speaking and having regard to what we call Psephology of elections which is the (science of election) using data and statistics with a view to predetermine who would win, the odds are in favour of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Go and check the history of Nigeria, I said it in the run up to the 2015 election and I think it bears repetition that when you have a presidential candidate who is very popular in the North West and is also popular in the South West, he has invariably done half of the job in emerging as the president.
In other words, there are some states in Nigeria where if you don’t win them, you don’t have any pathway to the presidency and those states seem locked for two of the presidential candidates. So in my view this election is for Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to win.
However, talking like a statesman, not being selfish, thinking about the future of Nigeria, I believe that the next government should be a cocktail of the leading presidential candidates representing the major tribes in Nigeria. I know this may not go well with some people, but then, we have to say it as it is.
“If we don’t change the system we may continue to elect presidents who will have good intentions or will want to deliver on all the fundamentals of democracy (education, health, shelter), but if the right system is not put in place, it will always be very difficult and at the end of the day, it will just amount to scoring an own goal or committing on false errors”
You have reviewed the various challenges facing Nigeria very well.
…Another issue that I believe we all should look at is having regard to how we have mismanaged our diversity, and that is why I am very sympathetic with President Muhammadu Buhari, who evidently has good intentions. I mean somebody who ran for presidential elections four times before winning, somebody who is determined and has good intentions, and wants to do well in office, he has done his best. But what we are seeing evidently is those good intentions alone do not guarantee success in office, you have to put the right systems in place and I dare say President Muhammadu Buhari was or is a victim of the system that we currently operate. Therefore, if we don’t change the system we may continue to elect presidents who will have good intentions or will want to deliver on all the fundamentals of democracy (education, health, shelter), but if the right system is not put in place, it will always be very difficult and at the end of the day, it will just amount to scoring an own goal or committing on false errors.
How do we correct the wrong system?
I had a conversation (and I think I can make it public) with Chief Bisi Akande that I share my first name with, and we kind of belong to the same ideological ways. I said to him in one of our various engagements that if Chief Obafemi Awolowo wakes up today to come and become the president of Nigeria, if he doesn’t change the 1999 Constitution, he will fail.
Baba Akande simply retorted that Bisi you are a joker, that if they make Prophet Muhammed (Peace be on Him), the presidential candidate and you make Jesus Christ his running mate and you want to run Nigeria on the basis of the 1999 Constitution, both of them will fail. It is just to drive home the point, that it is the system, Nigeria’s problems are systemic and no amount of people with good intentions or how determined you are, you might end up performing below the bar which is not your fault really.
I have always advocated and I am seizing this opportunity to advocate a return to the golden years of administration in Nigeria. Ask an average Yoruba man today, he will be nostalgic about the Awolowo years, ask an average northerner, the Ahmadu Bello years were golden years for them, ask an average Igbo man, he will be nostalgic about the years of Nnamdi Azikiwe. Now, that simply tells us that the system of government that our founding fathers negotiated with our colonial overlords, which the military establishment erroneously enacted by virtue of Decree 34 of May 1966, is the beginning of Nigeria’s problems.
But from the way things are now I don’t see any possibility of Nigeria changing the 1999 Constitution because those who are in government find it suitable for their own selfish purpose. So what can be done?
Well, elections are fast approaching and it’s practically impossible to do a complete overhaul of the 1999 Constitution. We can only make do with the Constitution amendment being pursued by the leadership of the National Assembly. If we don’t get what we like, we will have to like what we will get in the circumstance, and then make political reforms one of the issues that should occupy the front burner. In the agenda of whoever emerges as the President in this, I believe Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will emerge as president. If Asiwaju doesn’t want to fail in office, he must prioritise political reforms; I believe the time is ripe to put some issues in context or proper perspective. I have always advocated within the Afenifere Renewal Group of which I am a proud member that it is about time that we should begin to change our communication strategy regarding our advocacy for restructuring. Let’s not make a mistake about it, there are 350 ethnic groups in Nigeria, fighting for the soul of Nigeria, it behooves on people who are advocating for restructuring to take on a second look at how far they have gone, and change the narratives to political reforms. After all you can’t judge a book by merely reading the cover, let us communicate what we are advocating for in such a way that other contending forces will listen to us. Those who are vehemently opposed to restructuring believe that it’s a recipe for disintegration. Whether they are right or wrong is a different thing altogether. If that is the mindset of people who are opposed to restructuring, should you continue to make your advocacy more difficult by not changing your communication strategy?
Hence, I believe that the way to go is through political reforms. In the May 14 to September 17, 1787 United States Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia where the people that laid the solid foundation for America met, 58 of them, half of them lawyers, what they simply did was to embark on political reforms in order to resolve the conflict between North and Southern America. They did not discuss anything about the economy, it was after putting the right political context in place that a Secretary of State for the Economy was appointed to look at the economic implications of the articles of confederation that had just been re-configured or replaced by a new constitution. Reforms are ongoing all over the world. There is no institution that is not undergoing reforms. So Nigeria in my view is due for political reforms and I want to put this on record that Nigeria of today because of the mutual suspicion, distrust, ethnic cleavages, and the fact that we have done a very poor job of leveraging on our diversity, it is now time for Nigeria to consider confederacy as a system of government. Nigeria is by far too divided now for any federalism to resolve. Nigeria is tailor-made for a confederal system of government, and I will strongly recommend the model that they operate in the United Arab Emirates. Who doesn’t want the progress recorded by the Arabs in UAE where you prioritise development, set agendas that are dear to you, making progress without standing in the way of the progress of some other people? And I think that the next president is lucky, in the sense that he has built a network of friends and political associates who can easily relate with him. We can constructively engage people like Governors El Rufai of Kaduna State, Inuwa Yaya of Gombe State, and Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano State and let them see the reason why we should consolidate on what they struggled for, because these were the people that stood their ground and said the presidency must revert to the South in 2023. To consolidate on that is to go further and ensure that we embark on political reforms that will engender a confederal system of government which is a win-win situation for all the geo-political zones of Nigeria.
And we are lucky that we have built consensus around the six geo-political zones, those zones should become our federating units under what I will simply refer to as the United Regions of Nigeria, in the mold of the United Arab Emirates. And I bet anybody, if we do that and we couple it with a parliamentary system of government or a hybrid between the parliamentary system of government and presidential system of government, Nigeria will begin to call for progress in a matter of four years and I think about the future of Nigeria is a different thing. But we are at a stage in Nigeria today where they believe that they’ve seen it all and they must be having a change of mind about their attitude towards Nigeria.
The people you are referring to have their own different political gimmicks and ideologies
That is why we are saying that they should behave the way Americans would behave in this circumstance. If America were to be confronted with the problems of Nigeria today, the Republicans and the Democrats will drop their partisans and come together in the interest of the United States of America. That is what should happen in Nigeria too. Ensure a return to the political structure of our founding fathers who knew Nigeria more than anyone of us, who worked closely with our colonial overlords and negotiated for an agreement with a system of government that evidently worked for Nigeria. We simply committed political suicide by the act of the gladiators of the 1966 coup who we must point out didn’t understand the intricacies of multi-religious and religious and a country with so many ethnic groups. They had good intentions; they thought that by imposing a unitary system of government unity can be engendered. But it was erroneous, these were armed forces personnel who really were knowledgeable with due respect to them about how to forge a union out of a country consisting of disparate tendencies. In essence, I’m saying we need to get the opinions of the owners of Nigeria so that after the 2023 elections we can then do what I’ll propose.
All the works have been done, just the report of the 2007 Political Reform Conference of Obasanjo, or we may go back to the 1995 Abacha Conference, add it to that of 2007, add PRONACO Conference Report to it, add Jonathan’s 2014 National Conference and then add APC’s Committee on Restructuring led by El-Rufai which I believe is a cut and paste of the 2014 National Conference report of which I was a proud delegate.
Even after President Muhammadu Buhari got elected, he did not revisit or take a look at the Conference Report of Jonathan’s 2014 National Conference. May I inform you that I’m not one of the people who will criticize President Buhari for not looking at the way of that report. That is a man that has the courage of his ambition. You may not agree with him but he said that he never believed in it. How do we rationalise that a person who believed in a Conference, funded it, got 462 delegates to attend and came up with far-reaching resolutions mostly written by consensus, who had powers to implement some of the resolutions that did not require National Assembly interventions, failed and or neglected to do so? Why would anyone be blaming President Buhari for failing to do so?
Recently, I had a conversation with one of the Nigerian leaders I respect so much, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, and I asked him of all the zones in Nigeria which zone requires political reforms or restructuring.
Obviously, he answered in the affirmative that it was Yoruba. Why would you have an Obasanjo, a Yoruba, who never embarked on any restructuring? Why would you have a Jonathan from his zone where restructuring has been their song until he became the President and restructuring was no longer necessary for them when it was their turn to eat like they say in Kenya? Again I ask the question where are the statesmen in Nigeria?
Some people believe that whosoever wins the 2023 election must have the support of the owners of Nigeria. Who are the owners of Nigeria?
(…Laughs) Don’t we all know them? Anybody who has ruled Nigeria twice whether as a military head of state or as a civilian, as a dictator or otherwise, the various Chiefs of Army Staff are the owners of Nigeria. They are not more than 500. See, very few people effect fundamental changes anywhere in the world. Whether such people will behave like statesmen, live above board, forget about their personal interests are different things. People who benefit from a union don’t want to leave that union; they become centrifugal when they see that the union is not in any way taking care of their needs. An example is insecurity.
Okay, mention any country that is more united than the UAE. They have forged unity without compromising the affairs of their people, which to me is a test of how to figure out Nigeria’s problems. I was the PostMaster General for three and a half years and I made friends across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
Nigeria is evidently not working now, not because President Muhammadu Buhari does not want it to work, but it is beyond him. He has done his best in this circumstance, and he’s about to complete his tenure in the race to forge a united country out of Nigeria. But the system that we run in Nigeria is a journey to nowhere until we take a critical look at the system.
We are talking about structure and some people are talking about amendment of the Constitution…..
It is very clear that if you expect that fundamental changes in the political space of Nigeria can be achieved by the present National Assembly, no, what they can do is what they’ve embarked upon, to increase fundamental amendment of the Constitution to take Nigeria to its destination. But we are in a hurry to get there and a piecemeal amendment of the 1999 Constitution cannot take us to that destination. Constitution amendment is time taking, time-consuming and requires deep thinkers to be involved. Without patronizing the present Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, all the issues are clear to him, but he can’t do it alone. Nigeria urgently requires a reset, and whoever tries to do that will have his name recorded in gold and I believe Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the right man to do that, because all the issues are clear to him. In that journey of trying to achieve unity in Nigeria, he should continue to engage his political associates in the North who are the heroes of democracy and insist that power must be returned to the South.
I’m unhappy with the former Vice President of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar. He should have reasoned above partisan politics and become a statesman, thinking about the future of Nigeria and not contesting the 2023 elections. If he had done that, a roadmap to the unity of Nigeria or a path would have been created and history would have been very kind to him.
“I’m unhappy with the former Vice President of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar. He should have reasoned above partisan politics and become a statesman, thinking about the future of Nigeria and not contesting the 2023 elections. If he had done that, a road map to the unity of Nigeria or a path would have been created and history would have been very kind to him”
What is the way out of Nigeria’s economic situation?
Economists would tell you that Foreign Direct Investment follows political reforms all over the world. Nigeria is where we are because we’ve prioritized our so-called economic reforms without prioritizing political reforms. How do you justify a country where you spend 70% of your resources on recurrent expenditure? And the only way you can achieve economic progress in Nigeria is to first and foremost sort out your political problems and then you’ll bountifully gain the benefits of the economy that will follow reforms invariably. The cost of governance is Nigeria’s Achilles’ Heel. So I agree that we must talk about the economy. But my submission is that take the political reforms out of the way and economic benefits will come.
What would you say were your greatest achievements as a former Postmaster General?
I don’t like to blow my trumpet, but I succeeded in getting the people in NIPOST to embrace technology which is the sole of any postal administration. Any business that does not embrace technology will naturally die. Because I’m an entrepreneur, I simply decided to approach the business of postal administration from the private sector point of view and I’m happy to say that the Deputy Director General of Universal Postal Union, Mr. Chivas said and I quote him “Bisi Adegbuyi is one of the people that we would like to see running the African post because of the private sector initiative that he brought in.” That was what he told Minister Alli Pantami. That to me was confidence to what I did in NIPOST
How can we resolve the crisis within the education sector with our university students at home now for over six months?
We have short, medium and long-term approaches. Let the government look for money from anywhere and pay the lecturers, reduce the cost of governance to save money. Is it not better to take money away from politicians and use the money to pay lecturers? Politicians have too much access to free money in Nigeria, money that we are supposed to be spending on education and they are contributing so little to the socio-economic development of Nigeria. Without education, the country perishes in ignorance and no sustainable economic development can be recorded. Your country is what it is based on what researchers do. Universities are supposed to be learning centres where new styles of governance, new ideas and innovations are learned. You need to invest in them in order to benefit from them.
