Prof Udenta O. Udentais a founding National Secretary of the Alliance for Democracyand a Director with the Centre for Alternative Policy Perspectives and Strategy (CAPPS), Abuja. In this interview, he speaks on Nigeria’s 64th Independence Anniversary, President Bola Tinubu’s speech on October 1, threat to the nation’s democracy, among other issues. JOY ANIGBOGU brings the excerpt:
As the cotton closes on the 2024 Independence Anniversary, the stage is set for the 2025 edition amidst inconsistent policies and huge government spending, so what next for Nigeria after 64 years?
It is a very important moment in our history and democracy is conversation and contestation of ideas. If we don’t have dialogue with the way we’re doing now, we cannot enrich our democracy. The land is in great danger and therefore we must talk. It is only those who are in government believe that all is well. Despite all the celebration, this land is still hurting and nobody must short down democratic conversation. Nobody has done it in the past even under military dictatorship and, therefore, nobody can accomplish that today. That is why I think it is important for us to have this kind of robust engagement.
What is your assessment of President Bola Tinubu’s speech on October 1 which has been a major subject of conversation?
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It’s not enough to say he is going to look at his economic policies while resting in London, he should have delayed the leave and concentrated on the pressing danger facing the country. For example, in his speech, he talked about bandits and terrorism already being vanquished but that is not true. Eight years of President Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, Lai Mohammed and a lot of other Ministers talked about constructive defeat, strategic defeat and the technical defeat of Boko Haram but Boko Haram was vibrant and alive growing more in stature and spread in terms of geography from the Northeast to the Northwest infesting the bandits there that was within the context of cattle rustling and herders and farmers clashes. They contaminated it and turned it into a terrorist organisation up to the North-Central. So, if you go through those eight years, you will witness hundreds of Boko Haram’s commanders being executed yet the problem not only stayed where they are but grew on a large scale. The problem is one, in 1963 when the Organisation of African Union (OAU) was born the project of Nigeria’s foreign policy was the de-colonialisation of Africa. They accomplished that up to 1970 when the project was regional integration and General Yakubu Gowon and the rest of them created or constructed or crafted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). In the 80s and 90s was the contest of medium power that General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida drove. In the early part of this century, President Olusegun Obasanjo helped in transitioning OAU in planting pair review mechanism. From the eight years of Buhari’s presidency, Nigeria’s foreign policy became incoherent and almost completely dissolved to the degree that under Bola Tinubu’s presidency, ECOWAS unraveled for the first time in its history. The loss of Niger from ECOWAS was very crucial because, over a thousand-kilometer border with about five or six states in Nigeria, thousands are coming into Nigeria in the past year. That is why the Chief of Defence Staff had to visit Niger to plead with his counterpart. In essence, you can’t defeat Boko Haram when your borders are unmanned for over one year. Don’t forget that President Tinubu withdrew 109 ambassadors over a year ago and no ambassador has been deployed to the Nigerian Mission, you can fact-check me on this matter. That means there is a strategic retreat from the foreign scene and Nigeria is increasingly becoming isolated you cannot combat regional security challenges or combat terrorism and banditry unless you have your ambassadors on the ground in those countries bordering Nigeria. If you invoke the names of our founding fathers and the memories of struggle and say this is where we are from the gift they gave us, they will be embarrassed by that kind of speech. My take is that all those who participated in drafting the speech should either be reprimanded verbally or in writing or outright sack because that speech didn’t do justice to the president or the image of the country.
The presidency is the essence of our national pride and integrity. If you take a few other items on the speech, N30 trillion already completely paid off in the Ways and Means but that is not true because a lawyer has to take the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to court over the issue. What they did was to transform the Federal Government loans into Nigeria’s sovereign debt. A debt that nobody borrowed on behalf of the sub-nationals and everybody in Nigeria now has a 40-year tenure that everybody including our children and grandchildren will be compelled to pay. A loan that the National Assembly didn’t know when it was taken and never knew what it was used for and all those involved have not been criminally charged for it. So, the N30 trillion Ways and Means loans are still there, they just converted it in a nomenclature change and valuation. Another thing that came out of that speech was the convening a 30-day youth conference, the format of which has not been determined, maybe inviting thousands of youths across the country, mobilising billions of scarce resources in a speech that detailed so-called youth projects and programmes. If you have about seven programmes listed for the youths, what you need to do is mainstream them in such a way and manner that the youths will feel the impact of what has already been listed. If you have no programme for the youth, you can invite the youths to come and create some new framework or policy for them.
As an alternative, what would you have liked to see in the speech and what is your take on the state of our institutions?
As a Nigerian patriot, it’s my duty no matter the degree of the hurt in my heart and hurt in the hearts of millions of our people because nothing is working despite all the sermons. I don’t know how you get your fuel to come to work, how long you stay on the queue. Everybody goes to the market and sees what is going on despite the statistics they are releasing every day. So we can spend hours dealing with what is wrong with the system and what should have been done in that speech. The face of the speech must be compassionate and must be able to address critical challenges facing the people. That speech is practically a pedestal and it is not something someone would sit down and say I’m inspired despite the pain and hurt in the land. The speech didn’t inspire that depth of hope. When you invoke our history by bringing the lives and times of our founding fathers and mothers, you must equally bring it to bear on the contemporary stage and admit why the policies you have introduced in the past 16 months are not working but what he did was to reinstate those policies that are not working and re-emphasis them almost as if this government is stone deaf. The speech repeated what he had said before without bringing any creativity. When you talk about political mobilisation, if you don’t mobilise at the level of the political class, you cannot mobilise at the level of youth because the youth is a very strong constituency. So, the speech is lacking in that sense of mobilising the people of this country across political lines. Democracy is under great threat and I did say some time ago that democracy doesn’t fall these days before bullets are fired, it dies because those who take power using democratic means undermine the foundation of democratic governance. This currentgovernment is undermining daily multi-party democracyby planting people within the ranks of the opposition parties like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party and maybe to an extent the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP). The idea is to dissolve the coherence of the opposition parties and render the 2027 general election prostrate. The Rivers example is very clear and what happened on Friday morning in Rivers State is shocking in a democratic system and anybody involved in that operation must be held accountable. Even the civic space in the country is shrinking and look at those being detained and classified as terrorists, terrorist financers and treasonable felons for merely protesting, it is to create a state of apprehension among the people and ensure that they don’t raise their voices to protest. Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) as an organised sector, is still affected by the impact of sudden war declared on the President of NLC by the security apparatus of the state. That means that if we’re not careful and summon the will of the founding fathers and mothers of this country and the skills of those who battled military government to confront the elements of creeping authoritarian mindset among those in government today. That must be resisted by all democrats for this country’s democracy to thrive.
