From Priscilla Ediare, Ado-Ekiti
Dr Adebayo Orire is a medical doctor and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress(APC) in Ekiti State.
In this interview, the party chieftain shared his thoughts on Nigeria’s 25 years of practising democracy, President Bola Tinubu’s administration among other issues.
Kudos and knocks have trailed President Ahmed Tinubu’s one year in office. What is your assessment of his administration so far?
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s one year in office has gone through a flurry of activities, cerebral imputations, bold moves and genuine intentions, but because of either miscarriage of the process of actualisation, ignorance or ill-advice of the populace and the professional maturity of the actuators, majority of what he has done has not yielded the results that they were supposed to yield. Let’s talk about the fuel subsidy removal. The fuel subsidy removal is necessary and will always be necessary but there are so many things that you put in place before you subsidise. You will be able to say okay why this subsidy in the first instance? What are you going to do to remove the necessity for the removal of the subsidy? Who are the people that have been involved? Why are they involved? How are we going to make it smooth? And if something happens how are we going to curtail it? These are some of the things that he should have taken into consideration. When you subsidise, you must have a supply, if the supply is not there, you have not subsidised anything. If you remove subsidy and the people who are going to suffer from it are not well taken care of, they will make your work uneventful, unsuccessful. If the people you are removing the subsidy for do not really understand why you are removing it, they will curse you for removing the subsidy. So, you can see when you remove subsidy, what is the meaning of subsidy? You are helping the price. And when you want to say Nigerians we are no more going to help you to pay for petrol, you are going to pay for petrol at your price, then you must prepare them very well. You must have the supply and you must have a price control so that the ripple effects of all these things do not come back upon the people you wanted to help, the society you wanted to help. And those are the crises we saw as a result of subsidy removal. Subsidy removal is there, good, well intended but the problem is when the process of actuating all these came with a lot of side effects that did not end well on Nigerians.
Before we leave the fuel subsidy thing, why on earth does a country export crude for over 50 years and they cannot have refineries in every zone of the country if not in every state? Why do we subscribe to importation of refined products? I am sending you tubers of yam and I am importing pounded yam? Is that reasonable? Nigeria is mad. Nigeria governments in succession have been mad. You don’t subsidise what you can actually produce. That’s a very big gap. Luckily, we are talking of Port Harcourt refinery and Dangote refinery. But let not Dangote again go and import crude from U.S., according to some news items. Let individuals install refineries. After all, some Nigerians are having refineries outside this country. Let individuals put up refineries in almost every state. Let every state invest in refining of petrol before it goes up. And we will have petrol. The bottom line is that corruption is still not well curtailed.
Having said all these, in a nutshell, what’s your assessment of the current government in the country?
I cannot assess a year old government. It is too early to assess a year old government. Tinubu on his own should be able to do well but there are so many factors, the northern factors, the corruption factor, the endemic nature of our unseriousness in government. There are so many things that will affect the government; even political calculations.
Since the inception of President Tinubu’s administration, some tough economic policies and decisions have been made, how impactful do you think these policies and decisions have been on the people of the country?
You see, he came with the idea of having a very pragmatic and dramatic approach to the control of naira value. But he is short of few things. You put down your foot on the value you want to put on your money in any country all over the world. In Britain, if the value of the pound sterling goes below 2.5 percent, the minister must resign. In the U.S, anything that is going to make the value of dollar go down, they will actually prepare for war, to fight a physical war. So if you are in Nigeria and you are floating your money, you are floating the lives of the people in Nigeria. Everybody has put a value on what he has and nobody can value what you have more than you. And that’s why our naira will never stabilise until the government pulls out. Everybody is making money. If I were to be an Igbo boy selling market, I will want the value of the naira to be bad because I will buy low and sell high. If I were a boy in bureau de change, I will buy low and sell high. They are trading in money and that is exactly what other people are doing and that is what is killing our industries, our production lines, our agriculture, our education, everything. One, the political will must be there. If my money is five hundred naira to one dollar, the minister for finance, CBN governor work towards this and within three months get me that value of that five hundred naira to one dollar and that’s the way it must be done. All other calculations should be geared towards that one. But if you are trying to calculate from below to work to the top, you will never get it. The outside community will never allow you, and they will never allow their money to be treated that way -IMF, this and that. We don’t need IMF. We have overrated IMF. It’ is a private organisation, not even a government organisation. How does a private organisation determine the value of life in Nigeria? What right has the United States of America to determine how much we want to put on our naira? When we have our workforce, we have our climate, we have everything they will need. The only thing we lack is control. We steal our money and they are the people receiving this money. If you steal one billion naira today, eight hundred million out of it will go to the U.S or Britain. They have no moral right to control how much we put on our money. We don’t have production lines going on again because we have allowed them to fleece us and all these things will only come back when our money is stable. If the government cannot do agriculture, if the government cannot do infrastructure, if the government cannot do production line and they cannot put their foot down on the worth of the naira, we are just starting. We have not started at all. All these mathematical calculations will only work when you put those frameworks on ground. You are just justifying one thing or the other. You are justifying your line of thought. But it’s just a decision. Some people will say it doesn’t work like that. How does it work? If our naira is five hundred naira to one dollar, tentatively, I am just using that as an example. Anybody that cannot work with us like that should go away. The Russians will come, the Japanese will come. The Britons have been with us for the past fifty/hundred years; they have not done us any good. The Americans have been with us, they have not done us any good. We have choices, but we are not using these choices. And this is the problem we have. The naira value must be made stable. Let them call us any name. Even our money that we steal if we don’t take it out to their countries, they will feel us not to talk of our minerals, our oil, our human resources, they cannot do without us; it is just that we don’t know. So, the naira value is what Tinubu must actually work on with a very robust political will. Cardoso has tried a lot. But it’s not going to work. Naira value has started going down again. It was N900 but it is now N1,500 again. You see, you put down your feet, then you work towards it, and then you calculate all your parameters. We cannot raise all our industries in one year. We cannot raise our agriculture in one year, but once we stabilise it, everything will come up to meet it.
Let’s talk about your party at the national level, do you think the All Progressives Congress (APC) is still one entity in the country?
The party is still one entity. A political party is a potpourri of misdemeanors and demeanors, activities and inactivities, fraud and honesty, saints and devils together. You cannot have a slowly, smoothly moving political party. So, there will always be crises. Individual crisis, sectional crisis, and so many things. Nigeria is a complex country. You cannot have a very peaceful party. The reason they are political parties is that they will always have crises and settle them. So forget about Ganduje, forget about so many other things they will still settle them.
In that case, have the wrangling concerning the national leadership of the party been addressed, since you just mentioned the name of the national chairman of the party, Ganduje?
They are being addressed. It’s an on-going process. You have seen thousands of crises in political parties in Nigeria. So, why do we bother ourselves about it. They will be settled, one person is removed, another person will still replace that person. So what’s our problem with political parties? How are they impacting on Nigerians, that’s what is important.
Don’t you think this scenario has stagnated some affairs of the party as at now?
The truth in Nigeria is that the party is separated from government. Even if they are shooting guns in the political party, the governor is spending his money on whatever he is doing in the state. And if they are not hitting their heads with chairs and tables in the Senate, the Senate will be doing its own and the House of Reps will be doing its own. The issue is that the country is not all that coordinated for one aspect to affect the other so terribly because everyone of them is almost operating separately.
The truth is because of general indiscipline then, the country is suffering. In a good country when the leadership of political party is in disarray, the whole country will be in disarray. But this is not so in Nigeria because every sector in Nigeria is actually in disarray. The executive is not doing well. The judiciary is having its own problem, the legislature is having its own problem, even in your state, the local government has its own problem. The state is not being run well by the governor. And the ministry is stealing its money. So, we are just here in Nigeria fucking ahead despite all these disorganisations.
Do you think the party has met the needs and aspirations of Nigerians?
Yes and no. No, because under this situation you cannot even meet the aspirations of yourself. No, because nothing has happened. It’s my party. APC is my party, if two good things are happening, three or four bad ones will come and crush it. Look at what effort, how Tinubu started with corruption with Emefiele and co. Just barely three months or six months after, we discovered that Beta Edu stole billions of naira. And if you look further she will not be the only minister that has stolen money. When Buhari came to government, I sent a personal letter, he didn’t work with it. I said they should set up a special court for corruption cases. Financial misappropriation in high places, special courts, special laws, special penalties, special time lap.
If you are talking about a commissioner or a minister stealing money or a governor stealing money, the case should not last six months. What are you looking for? If you know that this person has stolen money, there will be files, there will be records. All you need to do is to check the records, confirm the person that took it, pack all the people that are connected with the money transfer, put them in jail until their case is concluded and that should not last six months. And once you give capital punishment to two people, Nigerians don’t want to die.
There is no governor in Nigeria today who will not make about a billion naira legitimately from salaries, from allowances, from security votes that he can spend unchecked; he will make about a billion naira and he will not eat from it, he will not buy petrol from it; everything is done free, on top of it you are still stealing money, stealing hundreds of billions of naira. And that accounts for bad hospitals, bad schools, bad roads causing accidents and so a lot of people are dying because of your misdemeanor. Then you now say plea bargain. What are you plea bargaining for? You stole one billion naira, you are told to go away with four hundred million naira out of the money you stole.You are still allowing them to steal. You are calling a case of fraud, corruption, it is going through about five, six years in prosecution process. I mean justice delayed is justice denied. We are tackling this thing with kids’ glove. We cannot estimate the money we lose to theft, to corruption. It is not only money they steal, they also steal money through project execution. When there is penalty for offences, there will be sanity in the system. When there is no penalty for offences, then you are actually encouraging theft. Nobody wants to obey any law if there is no penalty. Of all the countries I have visited in the world, Nigeria is the most beautiful, well endowed, well provided for in almost every aspect of life. We have brains and we have brawn but we have allowed indiscipline, impunity and lawlessness to destroy us. We have no other problem more than lawlessness. Immediately Nigerians enter the airplane from Muritala Mohammed Airport, they are already obeying laws, we are the same people who will go there and maintain law and order but when we come back home, we become lawless.
So, in summary, are you saying that our leaders should demonstrate more political will in the fight against corruption?
They are not going to demonstrate anything because most of them are corrupt. You and I have to force them. The citizens have to force them.
How would the citizen force them?
We, the outsiders, you the journalists. There was a time when one senator brought a car home and the villagers started throwing stones at him. Let that sort of thing continue. They say the governors have immunity, talk. They don’t have immunity to prevent you from talking. The social media is there. When we wage this war and the government knows that you want it, they will do it. Then one day, you and I will want to put an eye on who we put in offices. You elect people into offices, knowing their antecedents and you expect them to change when they get more power, it is a lie.
Your child is not obeying you when he is hungry, you give him food and you think that is when he will obey you, he will not obey you.
Nigeria’s democracy is 25 years old, would you say Nigeria has progressed or not under the present democratic rule?
Nigeria has retrogressed. I am almost 70 years old. I was alive as a young boy when Awolowo was being jailed. We were listening to radiovision in my village at constant times. There was water running well. The road that we had from Ibadan to Ado -Ekiti was good. We had free education. We had a scholarship scheme, a bursary award scheme, a loan scheme when I was in the university. And you can take two out of these three. And if you are fraudulent, you could take the three. You will start school today and you will know the date you are going to graduate. There was work, immediately you finished school you had work. I saw that, today, I am seeing it, even if I say it is better, you know it is not better. How many industries do we have today working? When I was a student, I was doing holiday job. It wouldn’t take us three to five days to get a holiday job. If you graduate today, how many years do you think it will take you to get a job? Ovie Whiskey, former FEDECO chairman was accused of being bribed of one or two million Naira, he said that if he saw that kind of money he would collapse. Now, who would try to bribe a judge with one or two million Naira? It is hundreds of millions or billions now, things are bad. Let us talk facts. It’s all that we all know. Okay, look at the road networks, how do you want me to go from here to Abuja on a low vehicle? Is it everybody that will be going to buy Jeeps? At least, the jeep will not fly. My first three, four, five cars were new cars, now we are buying 13, 14 years old car and we call it grade one cars The older we are in democracy, the worse we are getting. And we must change the mindset. We must reset our brain, the brain of the people in governance to toe the line of honesty of purpose, dedication to duty and patriotism. What we have now is parochialism, kleptomaniacs and disorder. We are just deceiving ourselves.
I am APC inside out and I am a great fan of President Tinubu.
Leave Tinubu alone. He can make it work, but they will not allow him to make it work. The northerners have been threatening. The governors are not cooperating. He had to cry out that the governors failed to use the money he gave them for the purpose he gave them. These are the issues. I don’t know how our brain got disorganised that it is only theft and personal gains alone. And it is affecting us. Graduates now cannot speak good English, cannot practise their profession very well. And I think we just have to sit down and have a rethink. There is no singular person who will do it well until we start from the basics. If the father is a thief and the mother is complicit, all the children will be thieves. So, let us go from the basics the way we teach our children. What are the values? I was in the board, Hospital Management Board (HMB) and everybody was expecting me to steal. Steal what? Steal the three hundred million naira budget that was not even spent. How do you expect me to steal the money? Some people started blaming me for not stealing. The people themselves expect you to steal. That is the bad thing about it. As a governor, if you cannot steal, they will not even allow you to win. We need to reset our brain. The way we have wired our brain these days is to steal. People go to the extent of encouraging their children to do Yahoo plus. This is maddening. The entire life of Nigeria is upside down and it is getting worse every day and it needs a surgical intervention, real radical change of approach. Get me ten pastors and ten imams, nine and half of them are thieves, whereas in those days when you mention the name Bishop, we will bow down our heads in my village. We must not deceive ourselves, if we continue this way we are killing this country for ourselves, for our children’s children. Our children are going on Japa, they are going to develop other places and this place will remain undeveloped. Tell me an area that is better. Technology yes, we are using the wrong side of information technology. We cannot even monitor this small Ado-Ekiti. If there is theft somewhere, you should be able to detect it from your table, from the governor’s office, from DSS office. Kidnappers are working unchecked. No value for human lives, they slaughter and shoot at people anyhow. Life doesn’t matter again. Is that what you will say is better? The country is getting worse everyday and we must do something, otherwise there will be anarchy, there will be war, there will be destruction of this country.
Some Nigerians have cited high profile corruption by politicians as clog in the wheel of Nigeria’s democracy. They are of the opinion that military rule is better than the current democratic rule. Does it mean that during the military era, there was no corruption?
The normal soldier man was wine, war and women. And they were not stealing enough money. They were just stealing and making money to enjoy themselves. I am not saying army rule is good on its own. You take over government unlawfully, you legitimise it just because you have khaki, that’s not in any way comparable with democracy, even though when you do democracy badly, you can now compare that with the government that was stolen. if the armed robber is kind to you when he comes to your house, and doesn’t allow your daughter to be raped and doesn’t slap you, and a pastor comes to your house, stealing your money and raping your daughter, which one is better? What I am saying is that they robbed our country of democracy, but what did they do that time? There was order, there was progress, they had a time they were leaving, even if they were pushing it forward, we were able to push them out. There was more peace. We were all alive then. If I am now saying what happened during their reign is better than what is happening now, that is just saying basic truth and fact. But I am not saying armed force insurrection into governance is better than democracy. We don’t need anybody to say that we are not doing well, we democrats. Stealing is skyrocketing, killing is skyrocketing, degeneration is skyrocketing, the value of life, the value of naira, everything is getting bad. We had a better life under the khaki boys and so we in democracy must rethink, Nigerians must rethink.
The new national anthem, “Nigeria We Hail Thee” has replaced “Arise O Compatriot.” there have been mixed reactions concerning this. How do you see the step of the Federal Government?
Well, except they are going to make the content of this anthem functional, it is just window dressing, whitewashing. They should have taught children in primary school that this is the code of conduct they want. Just parroting the thing without following the tenets is just like pouring water on the back of the plate. Adopt anything, but make use of the content. Are we united? How many compatriots do we have? How in Yoruba land are we really following Awolowo? How deeply are we appreciating the good side of Zik? So what is it that should actually cause war in Nigeria between the northerner and southerner? Between the Easterner and Westerner? If not superficialities and atrocious sentiments. How is the Nigerian government through the National Orientation Agency and some others, what are they doing? You see, the issue of changing what you sing as a national anthem is useless if what you are going to think and act as Nigeria will not follow it. And Nigerians have more problems, than just singing anthems. And if we must spend our money to change it, which they have done, then they must spend money on making sure that we follow the content of the national anthem. We should be tailored to act along that way. We say God bless the Queen! God bless America! Are we blessing Nigeria? Because we have not been trained to bless Nigeria. Let’s have a clinch on that anthem and let that clinch be on the lips of everybody. And is Nigeria one? Is the Fulani man seen as a friend in Yoruba? Can a Yoruba man do what he does in Lagos in Kano? Is an Igbo man well respected in Minna as a full blown Nigerian? These are the issues. Singing all these things without acting them is just like wasting time. Yes, we want to see what is inside this one and what is inside that one. We have used the two before now. How did they help us? Let them set the way we should act and let us start training our children from kindergarten and start enforcing anybody in government, the local government, state government and the Federal Government, if you don’t act the content of this national anthem in your modus operandi, you are out. That is how to do something.
But this one is just window dressing and whitewashing. It won’t go anywhere, it won’t do anything.
What’s your assessment of the performance of President Tinubu’ s cabinet members?
Well, you see, I have been in Nigeria for a long time. I have seen presidents. I have seen governors and I have seen ministers. You don’t know these ministers. You only see their exteriors. Somebody like Bayo Orire does not just say one minister is good and two years later you will discover that he has stolen billions of naira. I cannot assess them. That’s me. And there is nobody performing anything. What performance are you seeing now? There was a blast in Ibadan, nothing happened. I mean in Jericho, one of the first GRAs in Nigeria. Buildings collapsed and nothing happened and you want me to assess government. Is it the military that I will assess or the police? Or the presidency? There are kidnapping and killings everywhere. What do you want me to assess? You want me to call the police IG and start cursing him? We cannot even maintain the Naira value. Should I be cursing Cardoso? Or the Minister of Finance that I don’t even know, Wale Edun. What about all these cases in EFCC? Should I be talking of the Attorney-General? So you don’t just give a blanket performance result to what you don’t know. I don’t know what is happening. Let them do well. But Nigeria is not working well. They are not dunces, at least before you become a minister, you must have good performance, you must have good track record, at least you have done well for yourself. They are all good people but let them do the good, Nigeria is not seeing it.
Tell me one area where Nigeria has seen it that you say this man has been exceptional as a minister.
You are talking of passport, you are celebrating passport of 24 hours that has been happening in other countries in the last 30 years. That is on a good record but to me, you don’t celebrate such a thing, you are celebrating mediocrity. What I am saying is that let the whole thing translate to a good Nigeria. They can do it if they want to do it, they are good guys and none of them is poor. They don’t even need to steal, if you and I are still alive no minister is poor enough to steal money. If you and I are still running our affairs, no minister has brain degeneration not to do well, if you and I are still Nigerians, no minister has any right not to be patriotic. We have to let them know that they still have a lot to do. The few guys that I know who are ministers are fantastic guys, brilliant, bold, and forthright, but what is happening to the government has not translated into anything, that is by my own assessment and so I cannot give kudos or pass mark to any one of them for now.
