BEVERLY HILLS, March 07, (THEWILL) –Professor Bola Akinterinwa is a former Director-General of the Nigeria Institute for International Affairs. An accomplished scholar of international repute, author and columnist on issues of national and international affairs, he asserts that Nigeria is heading towards a failed state and proffers solutions to address the ugly trend in this interview with Amos Esele.
You are a former Director-General of the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, N.I.I.A, a professor of International Affairs with a bias for diplomatic law and history, a former Special Adviser to two Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Oluyemi Adeniyi and Dr Ojo Madueke. You had taught and worked in the media. How would you characterize Nigeria of today?
Nigeria of yesterday, Nigeria of today and possibly of tomorrow has a lot. When Nigeria had a foreign policy focus, foreign policy principle, the country was well respected the world over. I give you some instances. Nigeria was well respected in two or three ways in international relations. If you look at Article 2, paragraph 7of the United Nations chatter, it provides that member states must not intervene in the domestic affairs of other foreign states. The word used is an intervention, which must not be confused with interference. Interference means you are butting into the affairs of another country without using force. When you use force, we talk of intervention. How was Nigeria respected in this perspective in international relations?
In 1963 President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo was assassinated. Togo was a close ally of Nigeria. But the then Foreign Minister, Dr Jaja Nwachukwu said in a pronouncement that Nigeria will not consider the assassination of a good neighbourly friend as it has fallen into the internal affairs of a foreign country. The second example was when Nigeria came up with a compromise position on Apartheid in South Africa. Nigeria said any country in the world must fight apartheid inside and outside South Africa. In a particular case, the Nigeria passport of the 60s had in its inside back cover a clearly stated statement that the holder of the passport must fight Apartheid with any means available to him or her and wherever he or she found himself of herself. Nigeria said Apartheid would be an exception to that article of the UN. The Nigeria of today has no foreign policy with any force or principle.
Why have we lost focus?
Simply because before we had a decolonization struggle policy of non-alignment put in place as a result of the cold war between the Soviet Union led WARSAW pact and the United States-led NATO. There is nothing like non-alignment even though the movement is still there but there is no cold war again. In 1994 South Africa became independent, so there is nothing like saying we are fighting Apartheid. Under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency, the government came up with the idea that Africa is the centrepiece and we need to go with global centrism, meaning that whatever we are able to achieve at the external level the fruit will be brought back home. So you can see we had no focus because the basis is no longer there.
Maybe that is why it was easy for President Muhammadu Buhari to announce in Egypt some time ago that any Africa can come to Nigeria?
There is policy as a decision, policy as a technic of implementation, policy as a tactic, policy as a focal objective, depending on what you want to expatiate on. We have a policy, which will tell you exactly what you are pursuing as an objective. The same policy will tell you how to go about it. What we have today in Nigeria is supposed to serve for tomorrow. The foundation that is being laid today does not allow for any objective to be achieved in the future. In Nigeria of yesterday, the infrastructure was there. Today the conception of Nigeria as a united nation has been completely bastardized. The notion of national unity is meaningless.
How would you explain that?
With the situation of insecurity, many persons, rightly or wrongly, now see one ethnic group, the Fulani as the major source of threat against national unity today. Many persons believe that the Fulani herdsmen are unnecessary creating problem outside their jurisdiction even though the Constitution and their interpreters say they have the right to locate and reside wherever they find themselves in the country. Others also say they have the right of establishment but you cannot occupy contrary to the rules and law of your host state. So when you look at all the issues involved there is no pointer to a good future, not to talk of a better future. The country is so sharply divided.
Well, there appears to be a national agreement that restructure will solve our problem but why we all talk about it, we are not talking to each other about it. Why?
There is a difference between an agreement to agree and a disagreement to agree.
Please Explain?
Nigeria is trying to cope with disagreement to agree at the level of how to handle the problems confronting the country. Some are asking whether we should continue with a presidential, democratic system, while others are saying we should go to a regional democratic system. People hold a different opinion on all these. But the beauty is that while some people are asking for restructuring, the government is not showing any preparedness to listen to the clamour. That trend has brought a situation of order and counter-order, which always amount to disorder. The order of people versus the counter order of government cannot but amount to disorder. We are now at the level of encounter and when you do not manage the encounter well, it will lead to disorder.
The situational reality we are in encounter is manifesting in many ways such as banditry, kidnapping unlimited, Boko Haram insurgency.
Do you think these encounters will end?.
In fact when you look at the pattern of kidnapping, it started with female schools-Chibok and Dapchi. When you look at it, the words Chi is common to both schools. I am trying to say that when you look at the words that differentiate the two towns, that is Dap and Bok, any town with such words may likely be part of kidnapping. This is the pattern when you also look at similarity of the names, Kankara and Kagara, whose students were also kidnapped. Those that are attacking do a lot of reflection too. So we need to know what they are thinking about in terms of their next attack.
Don’t you think ransom payment may be a major influence in the decision making of the kidnappers?
That is bringing me back to what I said earlier about Nigeria of tomorrow. That it is not bright. The question is justifying why the future may not be bright. Ransom payment has two functional aspects, which I can call positive and negative. When you look at the target interest at stake, you can determine whether to pay or not to pay ransom. When you decide to pay, it is because you want to avoid a situation where there is no death. That is to say the life of every Nigerian is important. And you cannot quantify the life of any Nigerian. There was a time when, for example, President Buhari was in secondary school and we are now discussing issues of his certificate, could he have thought he would be President of Nigeria.? So if you kill a secondary school student and you pay compensation to the parents, does that replace life? So when the government say they do not pay ransom, they are lying. Ransom is not the problem. The issue is that ransom payment does not solve the problem. Former President Goodluck Jonathan said there were Boko Haram supporters in his government. Now, government is saying bandits are foreigners. So why do you want to grant amnesty to a foreigner who is a bandit?. Ransom payment is giving more powers to criminals, no doubt. But when you look at the problem from a different angle when a governor reportedly said herdsmen carry AK47 in self-defense, you ask yourself what about the farmers whose crops are destroyed by the herders?. Should they be allowed to carry guns also?. I am giving these scenarios to further explain the order and counter order that leads to encounter and disorder when the problem is not resolved.
What would you suggest as the solution to these problems?
In a country of self-deceit there is no way you can move forward. We must move to a foundation of political governance based on honesty of purpose. Anything short of that will not move the country forward. We are mentally fraudulent. Where is the honesty of purpose? Because whatever complaints there are will be openly addressed objectively. President Buhari said he had never had the time to look at the 2014 Constitutional Conference Reports. That does not show honesty of purpose.
There is this increasing view now that Nigeria is a failed state. Do you share that view?
When you look at it grammatically, I would say Nigeria is on the path of a failed state. All the dynamics are there. The only thing is that we have been moving at the speed of a snail to the destination of failure. Look at the manifestation of insecurity as at today. As a way out, I would say, firstly, that President Buhari reverses his stand on security. The security of the nation comes first. Secondly, he must address that nation on whether there is a ‘fulanisation’ agenda or not. Thirdly, he must address the question asked by former Libyan leader Muomar Ghadafi when he said Nigeria cannot know peace until it is divided into Muslim North and Christian South. The President has to speak up if he genuinely wants solutions. When ex-President Obansanjo said that a ‘fulanisation’ agenda was afoot, why did everybody keep quiet? Why are people not looking at the herders/farmer conflict on the basis of the alleged ‘fulanisation’ agenda? Who are those sponsoring them? We need to ask questions.
What is your take on the increasing resort to self-help by Nigerians on this matter of insecurity? I have somebody in mind, like Sunday Igboho operating in some states in the South- west.
There is nothing absolutely wrong with that. People are saying the government can no longer protect them. There is also the call for state police because you have governors who chief security officers of their state but cannot give orders on security matters to Commissioners of Police in their states. Why should a police officer be sent from, say Maiduguri, to Badagry in Lagos?. The point is that if we want to build a nation state we have to be honest about it. We need to translate honesty of purpose into action and stop deceiving ourselves
About the Author
Amos Esele is the Deputy Editor of THEWILL Newspaper. He has over two decades of experience on the job.
