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There’s no political will to overcome insecurity in Nigeria – Odoh

Prof. Bernard Odoh is a former Secretary to Ebonyi State Government (SSG) and 2019 All Progressives Congress (APC) governorship aspirant in the state. In this interview, he shares his views on insecurity in South-East and Nigeria, the restructuring debate and the clamour for president of Igbo extraction, among other issues. UCHENNA INYA reports

Why is it that in South-East, there is no galvanized system through which academics can tell the politicians that politics is not a profession, and secondly, areas we have comparative advantage over others and the need to invest on them?

In the South-East, many including young, middle age and elderly persons respect position and money. We haven’t really paid emphasis on intellectual property and our politics is not flowing from the grassroots. Our politics is cascaded from top to bottom. If you build from base, people earn respect because of what they have done. So, it is a case of if you can muscle your way, then you muscle your way. The academic community in the South-East from the time of Prof. Attahiru Jega, when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) moved academics to be in charge of elections and declare winners, things have gotten worse. What happens now is that you see someone who is earning between N100, 000 and N200,000 and he is going for election assignment and he is given N1 million or N2 million to return somebody who didn’t win. So there is confusion and the confusion is the temptation to resist the money you have been offered and play by integrity. There is no serious research going on in the South-East. I don’t know how many of our colleagues in our universities who are working with research grants. A situation where every academic is wait ing for salary is part of the problem. The salary and every other thing is coming from Abuja and so there is too much control from the centre. And because much of the control is coming from the centre, even the election of vice-chancellors is not autonomous as people think. So, the academics are not independent of politics and politics is not independent of academics. So, there is confusion and that has made it difficult for academics to challenge the government. That is why every academic you see now is either a supporter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) or Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). It is only few that have been able to distinguish themselves based on the researches they have done beyond this shore that can command that kind of power. The system is in disarray and so many academics are affected by the system. But things are not totally hopeless. A lot can be done to get it right and that is why leadership at policy-making level is very important, and that is why we must not take it for granted. A decision by one mad man can destroy what has been built for decades.

What is your assessment of governance in South-East geopolitical zone?

It is very disturbing because you can’t separate governance and legitimacy. If you are a governor that emerged from a democratic process in your community, you know everybody and everybody knows you. In that case, the system or governance owes the people the duty to perform. But if you have a governance system that does not owe people legitimacy, they see the people as the problem to their own growth and that is what disconnects the led and the leaders. That is what is happening in the South-East. So, you have the traders, doctors, lawyers, journalists and all these professionals who don’t even understand what is happening because nobody is asking for their opinions.

have sat in council and I know how projects and ideas are generated. Most of the ideas and projects are not really coming from the people. The challenge we have in the South-East here is that our people go to Abuja, collect money and spend; month by month, year by year and now it is decades. As we speak now, there is no plan anywhere that says in the next five years, we will build railway to connect all the South-East states. There is no plan to establish one or two universities in the South-East that can compete with others anywhere in the world or plans to create a tech hub in the zone in the next 10 years. There is no economic master plan for the South-East. Each state governor is pursuing his own personal agenda and there no cohesion and team spirit. The whole problem still boils down to leadership and that is why I continue to say that people who don’t have leadership qualities should not go close to government just because they have money or connec-tions.

The intellectuals who are supposed to embark on political mobilization and political enlightenment are not doing that. What are you doing in that aspect?

The society is made up of all of us and no single person will claim that he knows it all. Why you are not seeing that it is because of porous politics which is more of a means to get something and go away. And because it is a means to get something and go away, once you get your own, it doesn’t concern you whatever that is going on. Or when you try to get your own and it didn’t work, you do U-turn and go back. In the South-East, once you are into politics, you will look for money to buy drinks and other things for people who are visiting you and because of that, it makes people to become weird when they get to the position. Nigerian politics is in such a way that it makes impoverishing people to thrive. So, all of us have a duty to add our little support. We need to convince people inwardly to see who will perform well and also make them understand how to do their personal assessment of the person coming out to lead them. So, the more we can get people to understand that we are in a mess and need collective efforts to put things right, the better for all of us. The Igbo man is not a beggar and we have a duty to sustain that legacy.

Considering the fact that the system have conditioned people to be more mindful about what they can get now because of hardship, how easy is it to assimilate young Nigerians into the desired good governance?

Many people born between 1970 and now have never held any position of responsibility even small offices like supervisors of cleaners in an organization. There is little or no mentoring going on to prepare the generation of 50 years down to be responsible leaders. That spirit is long dead. There is nobody in their midst that provides leadership mentoring for them and so they cling to those who provide cash for them. If we raise a crop of people who can become vocal points in their midst, that will make a big difference and change their reasoning and understanding of the reality.

What do you recommend as the way out of the current security problem in Nigeria?

I will say in all sincerity that I have not seen the political will to overcome insecurity in Nigeria. Even though I’m a member of the APC, I will speak my mind. There are many agitations going on and these people who are agitating are our citizens and part of the Nigerian project. If in a family you have some of your children who constantly cause trouble, sometimes the best thing is to sit them down and ask them what the problem is and most time you find out that by mere listening to them, you will be able to solve the problem. My thinking is that there are lots of resentments; people feel shortchanged.

People feel that the way appointments to key positions have been done is not right. People feel that all the security chiefs and suchlike positions are clustered in one place and so they don’t have confidence in certain people policing them or being the army around them. These issues are all sensitive issues. You have people who carry arms and they have not been declared terrorists and you have people who are protesting and you declare them terrorists. I think there should be some level of sincerity. The security challenge has gotten to the point that as a nation, we don’t have to delay it any longer because as I speak now, I can’t tell you that I’m sure of what will happen this year because you wake every day and hear about shooting by unknown gunmen. We now have unknown gun men and ‘ungun’ known men because we know them.

I don’t have confidence on the Ebube Agu security outfit by the South-East governors because the governors are being reactive to the activities of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its security. They are supposed to sit down and make proper plans for the security outfit and how best to go about it. If genuinely this country will go on as one, we shouldn’t continue this way. There is an urgent need to address the front burner of these agitations. We may not address all of them once but there have to be some sort of sincerity.

There have to be signs that people will see and believe that this man is ready to deliver. With that, much of these things will reduce. I also think that all of us are stakeholders and we can engage our communities. Many of our young people who are not gainfully employed have become agents of this violence because a young man or young woman who is at the age of marriage and age of employment but is neither employed nor married is frustrated and can easily be converted into this mischief. So, we have collective role as citizens of Nigeria to ensure that the country does not go into a point of total collapse.

What do you think would be the fate of the South-East in then2023 presidential election?

In my opinion, anybody who is talking about 2023 now given the way things are is not being sincere to himself. The South-East cannot produce a president alone because if you look at the pattern of the last two elections, we have been made to know that we are minority by the voting pattern. So, a bridge must be built. We must have people we can beat our chest and say they have bought into our ideas and into our quest. As I am now, it is not clear in my head who our partners are in this country. That is, on the normal of, go to the field, build alliance and win on your own. We can produce a president by somebody saying ok, let us pick this man and make him the president because we can control him. At least let us satisfy their agitation. But the president that will come from mass mobilization across the country because the candidate is from our area and has the capacity; I don’t know how that will be possible. Every state in the South-East has at least three persons running for president, and there is no cohesion within the region. At minimum, there will be about 10 persons from our region running for president. So, how will they win?

What is your view on restructuring?

Restructuring means a lot of things; it depends on which one you are talking about because we are good at playing up nomenclature without understanding their meanings. So, when people are talking about restructuring, which one do they want to restructure? It has to be very clear. If you are talking about devolution of power, you want the regions to have their own autonomy where the regions can have their own prime ministers and the regions become their own seat of power, while the centre does mainly national security, foreign affairs and other things, you keep it one side.

If it is about you get money from Niger Delta, you give them 40 per cent, take 60 per cent and share to others, it has to be really defined. Is it the constitution because if you pick that document and look at it, there is a lot of fraud in it? Even the first sentence there says ‘we the people of Nigeria.’ Who are the ‘we’? Where did the discussion hold?

So, are we restructuring the document because the whole discussion starts with that thing that keeps us together? If you are restructuring the constitution, what of the institutional structures that are already in place? How do you reengineer them?

For instance, there is one Supreme Court. If you commit offence in one village in Anambra State, the matter will end up at the Supreme Court. Can we have Supreme Courts at regional level? We have the Inspector General of Police; can we have IGs of Police at the regional level? What is the possibility of dealing with these issues? The word restructuring has to be properly defined, so that people will know what they are advocating for because personally, I don’t understand the angle that restructuring is being advocated for. If it is at the regional level, it makes sense. Whatever you produce, you sort yourself out. Provide your security, infrastructure and leave those at the centre to run foreign affairs. It simply means that people are being told to go and work hard and make do with whatever you produce. Any form of restructuring is not restructuring.

The central government can control the army because even in advanced nations, the army is not controlled by states. It is the president that authorizes deployment of army; it is not governors. But if you are talking of police, that one is homeland security, which means internal matters.

If you have the commissioner of police in Awka, who is probably from Onitsha, he is our brother and we know him. If he misbehaves, we will go to his kinsmen and tell them that he is not doing well. But if you move somebody from Borno to here, he doesn’t understand our language or the local dynamics or even how to deal with criminals, so it becomes more difficult.

But then, if you look the behaviour of our governors, it becomes a concern because if you are a vocal person in your state, who speaks your mind and the governor is the owner of the police, he will call the DPO and order him to lock you up. So, they are not a one way arrangement. So, the way to solve the whole problem is to go to the root cause, which is the economy. Once we can get our young people to be productive, too many of these things you are seeing will fizzle out.

You said you are still interested in politics. In 2023, will you contest for a position or just support others?

For me, my concern now is really the insecurity. The killings and other issues are so high and it is a thing of worry to anybody who is really thinking well for the country. For the 2023 elections, nobody knows what will happen. We don’t know whether we will be here by next year or whether the place will scatter. So, my prayer is, let there be a country first. If we have country till then, then of course some of us would want to run. With our experience, why not, we would want to run but for now, I am just praying and encouraging all those who can help, let us do the best we can do to ensure that we have a country first.

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