Tanko Yunusa is the National Chairman of the National Conscience Party and was the Presidential Candidate of the party in the 2019 general elections. A two time Chairman of the Inter Party Advisory Council and a member of the Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar-led National Peace Committee, Yunusa currently combines his leadership of the NCP with being the spokesperson for the National Consultative Front, led by Prof Pat Utomi and Ghali Umar Na’aba. In this interview with MAYOWA SAMUEL, Yunusa speaks on many national issues, including agitation for self-determination, insecurity, the economy and constitution amendment. Excerpts:
How would you describe the current security situation in the country?
The truth is that we have a very, very bad situation at hand whereby no part of the country is safe and everybody is scared even to move out of his own house. Unfortunately, the rate at which the situation is deteriorating is so alarming. People are killed on a daily basis.
We just lost a high profile politician, Ahmed Gulak, in Owerri; and at the same time a Provost of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) was killed. Almost that same time, a businessman was abducted in Oyo State and was also killed. And just last Sunday, about 200 students of an Islamic school were reportedly abducted in Niger State while about 14 Greenfield University students were released after their parents claimed they paid a whopping ransom of about N150 million, including eight motorcycles. So, the situation is such that almost everybody doesn’t know how to move around in the country. To put it mildly, the security situation is so, so bad. There is no other way to describe it.
Your position is at variance with that of Presidential Spokesman, Mallam Garba Shehu, who claimed on national television, that the security situation in the country is by far better today than what we had or what we were experiencing in 2015. You mean you don’t agree with him?
I don’t agree with him at all. I think Garba Shehu is being economical with the truth. See, I understand the fact that we must speak in favour of our paymasters, but you don’t pit the interest of your paymasters against the interest of the total population of the country. It is glaring that things are getting worse. At a point in time, yes, we had barricades from here to there on major highways. But this has transformed into tiny bombs in everybody’s home. You can no longer sleep with your eyes closed because when you’re sleeping, you don’t know if some gunmen would come in and harass you. And they have various names for them. You have Unknown Gunmen, you have herdsmen, you have kidnappers, you have bandits, and you have Boko Haram, and they are so many and all of them are found here, dwelling in this country. It is quite unfortunate.
There is yet another critical aspect of our country’s life I want you to look at and that has to do with the economic situation. Are you comfortable with the country’s economic performance?
“To put it mildly, the security situation is so, so bad. There is no other way to describe it …You can no longer sleep with your eyes closed because when you’re sleeping you don’t know if some gunmen would come in and harass you. And they have various names for them”
I doubt if there is anybody who can claim to be comfortable with the economic situation or the economic indices that are presently being thrown at us. Remember the government of the day promised to improve the economy as one of its three-point agenda when it was coming in six years ago. Unfortunately, there seems to be no road map for improving the economy of the country. There is hunger in the land and it is ravaging the country so hard because production of food is not possible as a result of dire security situation. How can an economy grow when people don’t produce anything? It was established at a time that vessels come into the country and go back without taking anything out. How can the economy grow? If people have forgotten, we should remind them that at a point in this country, we were buying a bag of rice for N8,500. Today, it is about N23,000 to N25,000. And you ask yourself, what about the much publicised local rice? Where is it and why has it not brought down the price of rice in the market? Look at the exchange rate. It has skyrocketed from N185 a dollar to as high as N450 a dollar. Then look at the pump price of petrol, which people use to transport goods from point A to point B. At a time it was N79, but now it is N162 and, in some cases, N165 a litre. How do you expect the economy to grow and boom under these circumstances? The government of the day has not been able to put in place a workable plan to grow the economy. How do you close the borders without putting in place a programme that would provide succour to the people while the border closure lasts?
Take again the issue of foreign debt. The country is so much indebted to such countries like China and many more. And you expect the economy to grow? No. You know how much is used to service these foreign and domestic debts monthly, I don’t have to tell you here. It is extremely huge. All you need to do is check it out in the DMO (Debt Management Office). How can the economy grow? All the industrial areas that were involved in production from Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Jos and so on are all down and out. No efforts or plans to restore these production lines. I mean this was a country enjoying the manufacturing of Peugeot and Volkswagen cars. Those factories were built with less than N15 million each then. Today, we are using over 60 million naira to buy a single car. Yet, nothing is done to revamp the factories that can produce hundred and thousands of cars and that will generate employment. How can the economy improve and grow? The economy is in such a shambles and painfully, there is no practical economic blueprint to take us out of the woods. I think the government has failed seriously in this respect and the worst of all, they are not thinking outside the box.
See, it is not rocket science. Just ensure that every local government in this country has its own way of survival and is producing something or known to be producing something. Truth is there is no local government in this country that cannot be associated with the production of one item or another. But the problem is that we don’t have local industries that can transform these natural resources to consumable and even export to earn money. Much of the little we produce go to waste. But you rather shut down the borders with nothing coming in and nothing going out and there is so much insecurity in the land. How can an economy grow in such a situation? It cannot.
There has been increasing agitation in recent months for self-determination in the country. What could be responsible for this?
The recent upsurge in agitation is as a result of the people not feeling the impact of governance. Let us get it clear, 90 per cent of the population live in rural areas where there is no direct government presence that they can feel. All they hear is how their leaders in government are taking N30 million or N15 million monthly as salaries while they are struggling to make ends meet with less than N30 ,000, monthly, as salaries. And so they become hungry and angry. And when a man is hungry and angry, he can easily become a tool to be used for any project. And that is exactly what is happening. What you are seeing now in Nigeria is because lots of our localities have for long been neglected by government. In the South-East for instance, they are asking, why should other zones have six states and they have only five? People from the South-South and South-West are saying, look we want true federalism so that we can control our resources make our communities work. In the North-East, there is total decay of infrastructure and lack of proper use of the vast land in the region; same thing with the North-West. And in the North-Central, people are saying they need to be carried along and not be subjugated based on religion or tribe. All these agitations are coming because of the enormous disdain, deceit and decadence in our governance system. All these must be taken care of. Nigerians don’t want any government that is deceitful, we don’t want a government that is decayed in thinking and we don’t want a government that holds its people in disdain.
“Nigerians don’t want any government that is deceitful, we don’t want a government that is decayed in thinking and we don’t want a government that holds its people in disdain”
Nigeria is going through a very precarious moment. If you were to advise Nigerians, what would you tell them?
Good question. I have said it before and I wish to repeat it here, Nigerians should not be fooled. Nigerians should look deeply and they will see that those against them, who are holding them down, are not more that 10 percent of the population. We, the rest people are about 90 percent. What we need to do is look and focus on the things that unite us together. The problems we have are common problems of how to put food on our tables, how to secure the lives and properties of our siblings and family members and how to create jobs for our people. These and many others are our common problems. And we must continue to focus on how to find solutions to these problems because a poor man in the east is the same as the poor man in the west or north or south.
