Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba, is often praised as an influential Speaker of the House. This is on account of his courage, dynamism, constructive outspokenness, resolute pursuit for legislative independence and revolutionary approach towards the running of the House during his era as Speaker. In this interview with MAYOWA SAMUEL on Nigeria’s 61st anniversary, he regretted that the dreams of the country’s founding fathers have not been realized. Excerpts:
In your opinion, do you think the dreams of Nigeria’s founding fathers have been achieved or not? And can they still be achieved just in case they are yet to be?
We ought to have built a nation in 60 years but up till today, nation building has become a mirage and this is very unfortunate. Those dreams have not been achieved. When you read what these leaders said in their time, when you look at the commitment they put in for this country and the sacrifices they made, no right thinking Nigerian will accept that the dreams of those leaders have been realized. You could see how passionate they were about the development of this country. Today, all the leaders we are having in this country are mediocre, with the exception of very few people. I don’t regard most of them as politicians because they have transformed politics into business. Today, it’s very difficult for anybody to develop politically except he has money. Politics has gotten to the extent that when people want to come to seek assistance to join politics, they ask for capital, instead of asking you to advise them on who they should contact, how they should do their campaigns, what to say and what not to say. But they will ask you to lend them capital. So, it’s very disheartening what is going on.
What would you say is the cause of all the challenges bedeviling the country since independence?
The challenges have been well-managed during the first republic. But our problems started with the introduction of the military in politics. I believe that we have to move our politics away from that of military mentality and operate democracy the way it’s supposed to. Right now, those in power from 1999 to date have successfully been ruining democracy to the extent that they have obliterated elections in our political parties. In other words, internal democracy has been stiffened by them and it is because internal democracy has been stiffened that we are suffering from all sorts of problems. The casualty is internal democracy and it is a principal contradiction of our policy and since its obliteration, you will notice that everything done by our political parties have been done arbitrarily and arbitrariness cannot be the methodology we should use to operate our democracy because it is destroying the country. When you do some analyses, you will find out that this country has no future because we don’t have an orderly methodology for recruitment of leadership. Therefore, since the recruitment of leadership has become an all comers affair, you cannot predict anything but chaos. You can see that some political parties have been having caretaker committees for time immemorial and have been postponing their conventions because there is so much discontent within the parties.
“There has been no president or governor who comes to govern without prejudice in his mind. A leader must be entirely a different and extra-ordinary person in his capacity, ability and his patience. Most of our leaders today don’t have these qualities; they are greedy, selfish and self-centered
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What is the way forward and where do we go from here?
We don’t have a democracy the way it should. We should help look at it in order to be able to make a critic of it so that we practice it in a manner that conforms with our values. I believe that when we do it, our democracy can be able to give us good leadership because what has happened in the past till this day has been a failure of leadership. There has been no president or governor who comes to govern without prejudice in his mind. A leader must be entirely a different and extra-ordinary person in his capacity, ability and his patience. Most of our leaders today don’t have these qualities; they are greedy, selfish and self-centered.
Today, the nomenclature that describes who and who will represent their party in election is who is given the ticket; it’s no longer who has been elected. So, we must have good and extra-ordinary leadership which is a function of how the recruitment process is and we must have a look at the political structure of the country. We must assess that at 61 years, has this structure been working or not? If it’s not working, what must we do? If it is working, how can we improve on it? These in a nutshell are what we must do.
Regardless of these drawbacks, what few positives can you point at that Nigeria has achieved these past 61 years?
What has improved is the relationship among the various ethnic groups in Nigeria. In the 60s, we knew very little of one another but today, we know much about one another and this is due to the various steps taken by successive governments to ensure that Nigerians interact at various levels, be it in schools, boardrooms, in the legislature and within our political parties. One thing about democracy is that it provides people the opportunity to know more about themselves. I can tell you that I am 63 years old but at 42 years from the time I was born, I didn’t know the number of people that I knew in my last 23 years. I knew more people in my last 23 years than I knew in 40 years before I joined politics. Democracy provides people the opportunity to contact one another, that contact is very useful, whether at ward level, local government level, state level, or even at the national level. So, we interact and know more people. For indices that I’m supposed to talk about that will tell you whether people are developing or not, people cannot be happy in a regime of poverty and corruption. So whatever has been done in the quest to develop the country, except people are getting happier, you cannot count these things clearly as developments. Yes, we have roads linking many towns; we have more universities, secondary schools, banks. All these are called quantitative growth, but are without the necessary transformation onto development. Nigerians should have had qualitative lives in the last 60 years but we don’t have it and this is in spite of the enormous finances that have come into the coffers of this country, particularly from 1999 till date. When we came to the House of Representatives in 1999, the price of crude oil was $9 per barrel. By 2005-2006, it reached up to $140. What then can you see to suggest that something positive has been done with the money? Almost nothing that is developmental. This railway that people are talking about particularly in this administration, was to be embarked upon around 2003-2007 by the president at that time. In fact, I’m aware that about $8 billion was earmarked for the railway transformation. When the phantom project came, it became a mirage. The Mambila power project for example, which was supposed to start at that time, today, it’s also a mirage. So many other things have become a mirage. Thanks to President Goodluck Jonathan who had achieved something which was commendable in the railway but was very limited because the span of the railway from Abuja to Kaduna is too short. Even though he was president for only six years, he could have stayed longer but this administration has changed something good in that and has started to build something on that. That is a good initiative but what is worrying is the rate of poverty in this country. It is very serious.
It seems insecurity worsens each time a new administration comes in. What could be the reason behind this and what should be done?
The most important thing is for us to be able to get a leadership that can assure Nigerians of their safety, whether it’s the civil society, civil service or the military. Everybody in this country is apprehensive of his or her future. What is important is that everybody must feel that he has a secure future, otherwise, all of these failings in the military which are also manifested in the police, judiciary, civil service, civil society; all of these manifestations will continue to be present with us unless people are assured of their future. The cause of our underdevelopment is simply the loss of confidence of the people that transforms into the loss of confidence in the state itself. There is a lot of corruption in this country; it is not enough to have anti-corruption agencies that are only in the business of arrests. The government at whatever period must provide stability to this country on a continuous basis, recruiting more stakeholders in the country.
Government must make every Nigerian a stakeholder in the country, unfortunately, some leaders, because of greed and prejudice, operate in a manner that is exclusive, what we call politics of exclusion, not only politically but also economically. A president or governor just decides to exclude other people politically and economically, that is the surest way to destroy a country. Government must be inclusive and take care of everybody. Our leaders must ensure that they go out into the field, see where problems are, those who are not being looked after must be looked after. That is how you assure people and that is how people begin to get confidence in their leaders who should be more patriotic and less corrupt. But when we have a country where people ought to have their own electricity, almost no house in this country that doesn’t have a generating set except the owner of the house cannot afford it; there is almost no house in this country that has no borehole except the owner of that house cannot afford it; there is almost no household in this country where the children don’t attend private schools except the head of that household cannot afford it, even teachers in public schools take their wards to private schools unfortunately. So, in a regime like this, you don’t expect that corruption can be eliminated. Corruption is not only a criminal endeavour, it is a social endeavour and the underlying causes must be looked at with a view to ameliorating them. Leaders have to be committed, serious, inclusive and consultative on a continuous basis which I understand most of our governors, including the president don’t do, especially this current president. There are organs within our political parties where the president and party members interact. This is beneficial to the president because he will hear, arising from such interactions, many views which he can’t get from elsewhere. In PDP, we used to have caucus meetings on Mondays up till 2001 before a man called Audu Ogbeh came to be the party chairman and we used to discuss everything that is to be discussed, from budget, flashpoints, whatever, and the constitution of that caucus made it possible to hear first-hand information about what goes on anywhere in this country. We used to proffer suggestions. These meetings were useful even though they could not solve everything, but it solved a lot of things substantially. Currently, there is no organ in the current administration or in the party that is governing this administration for the president to be able to get this kind of information or to be able to get advice. That is wrong because democracy is about consultation, there are many stakeholders in the country who are equally patriotic and equally concerned for this country that are being left out for nothing but prejudice, the president is not only the stakeholder in this polity.
