NewsRestructured Nigeria Will Benefit All – Okurounmu

Restructured Nigeria Will Benefit All – Okurounmu

July 18, (THEWILL) – Senator Femi Okurounmu is a chieftain of Afenifere, a pan-Yoruba socio-political group. He also represented the Ogun Central Senatorial District in the National Assembly between 1999 and 2003. In this interview withAYO ESAN,the octogenarian speaks on the worsening insecurity in the country, the National Assembly’s efforts to amend the 1999 constitution and the issue of restructuring. Excerpts:

The issue of insecurity, which is one of the greatest challenges facing Nigeria at present, has assumed a frightening dimension. What do you think the Federal Government should do about it?

I would advise President Muhammadu Buhari and his Fulani henchmen to stop their plan to Fulanise Nigeria. That is the main cause of the insecurity. You know we have to go to the root cause of the insecurity before you can solve the problem, otherwise you will just be beating about the bush.

Glo

The main cause of insecurity in the country today is the agenda of the Fulani led by President Buhari, promoted by him and with the cooperation of the Fulani from Niger, Mali and other countries where there are Fulani in Africa. They all believe that Nigeria has been ordained by God to be the Fulani country, where the Fulanis can make their home. Buhari believes in this agenda. As president, he is using his position to further the agenda, to make Nigeria the home of all Fulani. This is the major cause of the insecurity in the country.

Many of the bandits fomenting trouble across the country are not really Nigerians. Buhari himself has said so. A lot of them are Fulani from outside Nigeria. They were encouraged to come in fully armed and they are trying to take possession of lands. Kidnapping is the means of funding their operations. When they kidnap people and collect ransom, a large chunk of the ransom money goes into funding their clandestine operations. It looks like the Nigerian authority knows about it and that is why none of them has been arrested. That is why they demand ransom and government ensures that the ransom is paid and they get the money. For example, look at the case of the kidnapped secondary school students. In Kaduna State where the students were captured, the bandits are asking for foodstuff to feed them. How do you deliver food and other necessities to people and you don’t know them and you can’t arrest them?

Sheikh Abubakar Gumi has been saying that the Federal Government should cooperate with bandits by giving them money. So this is the agenda that the government cannot claim to be ignorant of. Even when Boko Haram terrorists are captured, they are released immediately for rehabilitation and later recruited to join the Army. And when they join the Army, they become fifth columnists.

So our problem is that the government in power itself is in support of bandits, terrorists and all those promoting insecurity in Nigeria. By the time government dissociates itself from them and begins to see them as terrorists and those apprehended are prosecuted and jailed, the problem will become minimal.

Some of the political fallouts of the worsening insecurity are calls for secession. While some people are calling for Oduduwa Republic, others are agitating for a Republic of Biafra. Is self-determination the right approach to solving the problem?

Well, the time has come for Nigeria to face the truth, which is now steering us in the face. We can no longer hide from the truth. The question we need to ask is, have we really had one country? That is the question we must answer. What is the definition of one country? When you say the nation has one country. First, they must be united by a common set of values. Perhaps the most important ingredient for uniting a country is the set of values because people live and die for the value they hold dear. All the wars that the western countries have fought and died for are wars to prevent western values from going into extinction. The West, for instance, fought the Soviet Union because of a clash of values: Democracy versus communism. The West goes to other parts of the World to go and fight, fight to die in order to promote democracy and preserve western values. That is all. They don’t go to fight for two things but to preserve their values. And to ensure that the values they hold dear are not threatened.

Do we have common values in Nigeria that hold us together and for which a Yoruba man, Fulani man and an Igbo man would want to die to preserve such values? What values do we have in common? We don’t have religion in common. We don’t have love for education in common. Our lifestyle and beliefs are quite different. Some of us believe in democracy, some believe in the ranka dede system. Then with these differing values, how can we say that we are going to die for something? What do we want to go and fight for and die for? If you say Nigerians should go and die for Nigeria now, a person should ask himself, what he is going to die for. Is it to preserve a Yoruba way of life or is it to preserve the Fulani way of life? One has to ask himself. So I have just asked, do we really have one Nigeria? The answer is no.

But the thing has not been so bad until the last six years. Buhari has now thrown it in our face that all of us in this country are second class. We are just slaves to the Fulani. He does it with relish and without any remorse. All the appointments he has made are to the advantage of the Fulani. He appoints Fulani to juicy positions and marginalises other Nigerians. So the rest of us have to follow and obey. It is the Fulani who govern and control. When they make laws, the laws are only meant to keep us in check in the South. Laws are not equally enforced. They may make a law and the law sound like a good one, but it is only for us here. The law will not be enforced in the North. It will be strictly enforced in the South.

Even a blind person can see that we are now slaves to the Fulani. The condition for our living in Nigeria is to continue to be slaves to the Fulani. That brings me to the agitation for Biafra and Oduduwa Republic and so on. As I have said, if you value freedom, if you don’t want to be a slave to anybody, and you feel that under the present system in Nigeria, you are virtually a slave and the system is trying to make your enslavement total, the only option you have is either to fight for your independence or to surrender and say I will continue to be slaves as long as I am allowed to have my three square meals a day. You can’t even eat three square meals because of bad economic policies. Many people today cannot eat one square meal. So you may say I will continue to be a slave as long as they don’t kill me.

What about the issue of restructuring the country. Will that stop the agitations?

We said we should restructure because we have always argued that if we restructured, the situation will become better. Those of us who are old enough to know what Nigeria was like between independence and the first military coup d’etat (that was between 1960 and 1966) would know there was relative autonomy for the three regions, which later become four regions. Those regions were relatively autonomous. The Western Region was operating without its hands tied behind its back by the Federal Government. We were able to exploit our own resources. Our major resources were cocoa and, of course, palm kernels. These were the things we exported for money. And we developed cocoa and rubber. With these, we were able to acquire money to finance the needs of the Yoruba people. We were not told by the Federal Government whether we could do it or we could not do it.

Every region at that time had its own constitution. We also had a Federal Constitution that united all of us and took care of issues, such as defence and so on. In fact, between 1960 and 1966, it was the region that was contributing funds to the central government. So from whatever we gathered, each region was made to contribute certain percentages to run the centre. The others you used for the interest of your regions. That is why we were able to have free education, even though other parts of the country couldn’t afford it. Some people in the West said we could not afford it, but Awolowo said we could afford it. With prudent management of resources, we were able to afford it and it was a success.

So with this kind of autonomous relationship, the country was able to develop. There was healthy competition among the regions. This is what made the country to develop between 1960 and 1966. We were ahead of some Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Singapore. We were ahead of them during this period. Now, you can imagine where those people are now and where we are as a country. They left us several miles behind. They are rubbing shoulders with America, Japan and China, while we are getting poorer every day. And we are becoming more primitive everyday because we have centralised governance.

The various ethnic groups in Nigeria have lost the autonomy that enabled them to develop. All the cocoa farms have dried up now because there is no more incentive to develop cocoa. The palm trees are no longer being cultivated. I don’t think that anybody even cares about the groundnuts in the North. Everybody has abandoned agriculture because all of us are now depending on oil from the South-South. It is the revenue from oil exports that everybody goes to Abuja to share. We abandoned what used to sustain us even before oil came. And that is because of the centralised government we are operating.

If we restructure and we go back to relatively autonomous regions, things will get better. If we don’t go back to the autonomous regions of the past, we can have autonomous states. We can define what we call states. After all, under Yakubu Gowon we had 12 states. So we don’t need to have a multiplicity of states like the 36 we have now. Of course, the idea of 36 states is wasteful. If we go back to 12 or six states and they operate relatively autonomously without their hands tied, given the chance to exploit their resources, respond to the needs of their people and develop at their own pace, Nigeria will start moving forward again.

But the Fulani, who are benefitting from the current system, are saying no. They are saying they don’t want restructuring. It is clear why they don’t want restructuring. It is because this centralised constitution was created by their past military leaders, who were in power before they gave power to the civilians, starting from the 1979 Constitution, which was made by Murtala Mohammed. Obasanjo was just there, always afraid of being killed today or tomorrow. Obasanjo was just an observer in that government, although they called it Murtala/Obasanjo government. They started this centralised government and every other ruler upheld the status quo, from Ibrahim Babangida to Abdulsalami Abubakar. These are all northern leaders who believed that before power returned to civilians, they must give us a constitution that would ensure that the North would always be in power and the North would forever be in control. That is what the 1999 constitution is all about. The 1999 constitution was framed by military leaders from the North in such a way that when the civilians take over governance the North would always be in control.

If you look at the membership of the National Assembly, especially the Senate, the North is in majority. In the House of Representatives, the North is in overwhelming majority. And when we say we want a new constitution, they will tell us it is only the National Assembly that can change the constitution. Who is the National Assembly? The National Assembly is what has been put together by the North to guarantee northern domination. So, anything the North does not want cannot pass through the National Assembly.

The National Assembly is there to guarantee and safeguard the interest of the North. For those who don’t understand, the National Assembly is nothing more than that. Look at the PIB, it has been before the National Assembly since Obasanjo’s days. They refused to pass it because they didn’t like the provisions. It was there during Goodluck Jonathan’s tenure, but they refused to pass it because they didn’t like it. Now it is Buhari’s time and they modified the provisions to say they will give only three per cent or five per cent, depending on whether you go by the position of the Senate or the House of Representatives on profits to the areas where the oil is obtained.

About 30 percent of the profits will be used to look for oil in virgin areas. And those virgin areas are, of course, in the North. This is what the North wants. If it were a case where the National Assembly can protect the interest of the nation, as opposed to the interest of the North, such a bill would not have passed through it. Since the assembly is not effective enough to protect the national interest, we can’t depend on it to amend the constitution to give us a fair and equitable Nigeria. Never. We have to write a new constitution and the National Assembly is not in a position to do it.

We cannot blame those agitating for Biafra Republic or for Oduduwa Republic because they are executing the only option they have other than to live as slaves in their own country.

The governors of the 17 southern states met recently and insisted that, come 2023, the president must be from the South. How do you see their position?

The southern governors, under the present political dispensation, cannot do anything other than giving the appearance of doing something. There is nothing they can do. They can only give the appearance for the sake of their people thinking that they are doing something. But really there is nothing they can do. As long as you are in the All Progressives Congress or the Peoples Democratic Party, your loyalty must be to Abuja and the Fulani. If the Fulani don’t endorse you, you cannot become a governorship candidate of a state like Ogun or Lagos because the parties are under the control of the Fulani. You cannot even become the governor of the state under the PDP. Both the PDP and APC are under Fulani control. After all in 2019, even we in Afenifere decided to support Atiku because he was talking in favour of restructuring. But we knew then that Atiku himself is a Fulani man. So it was Fulani Atiku versus Fulani Buhari.

The country has been so structured that the Fulani has gathered all the power to themselves. Unless a southerner that has agreed to play their own game, he will not become president. They are already threatening the southern governors that if they stop open grazing, they will not have the presidency. So if they are in a position to say that, it means that they are in control of who gets the presidency, not to talk of which candidates. We have had this kind of experience before. During Sani Abacha’s time and the Yoruba’s struggle was so intense that they had to concede the presidency to Yorubaland. They didn’t allow us to choose our own man to be president. When we, Yoruba people, chose Olu Falae they decided to release Obasanjo from prison because that was the man they wanted. This was because Obasanjo played their game right from the time of Murtala Muhammed. So Obasanjo became president, but he was not there to represent the interests of the Yoruba. Instead, he was there to represent the interests of the Fulani. That is what they will do, if today they say the presidency goes to the South. They won’t just pick any southerner; they will choose somebody from the South who they can dictate to and they trust to protect the interests of the North.

That is why an average nationalistic Yoruba man does not care about 2023. What we care about is either we restructure, in which case, we can control our own affairs or we give room for other people to have their own country. Let us have our own country because being in Nigeria does not pay us. It doesn’t pay the Yoruba. If we agree to restructure today, I am all for one Nigeria.

About the Author

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AYO ESAN, has been actively reporting and analyzing political events for different newspapers for over 18 years. He has also successfully covered national and state elections in Nigeria since the inception of this democracy in 1999.

Ayo Esan, THEWILLhttps://thewillnews.com
AYO ESAN, has been actively reporting and analyzing political events for different newspapers for over 18 years. He has also successfully covered national and state elections in Nigeria since the inception of this democracy in 1999.

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