January 30, (THEWILL) – Dr Kunle Olajide is the Secretary General of the Yoruba Council of Elders, YCE. In this interview with AYO ESAN, he speaks on the 2023 general election and the need for a new constitution for the country, among other issues of national importance. Excerpts:
As we look forward to the 2023 general election, many presidential aspirants are already showing up. In your own opinion, what are the qualities the next President of Nigeria must possess?
Number one, the person must know Nigeria like the back of his hands. He has to know the country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Sahara Desert. Nothing must be strange to him. He must have capacity, competence and character. Then he must have a track record of good performance in whatever he has done before so that we can use that to assess him and anticipate what his performance will be in office. That is very important. He must be a true Nigerian, who believes and loves the country. He must not be a sectional person whose record is ethnocentric. No, Nigeria does not need that now because we are near the fringe. We need somebody who can pull us back and weld us together as a nation, otherwise we will not be able to survive the next decade. So we need the right character.
Before the 2019 general election, there was a think-tank in the South-West and I remember you are one of the members who looked at the various political parties and advised on which of the parties would serve the region better. Is there something like that again as we approach the 2023 presidential election?
I would say yes and No. You must appreciate the fact that the Yoruba are highly sophisticated. They are the most sophisticated people in this country. The more sophisticated you are, the more difficulty it is to bottle you. Unanimity that can take place in the South-South, South-East and the North, you can’t expect to have that in the South-West. This is because we are sophisticated and very liberal, we are emancipated and everybody knows his onions. So to be able to gather the people together and tell them to go this way and they listen to you, you need to convince them on what you have seen in that character and his performance. For me now, I am not aware of that, but I know some socio-cultural groups are thinking on what type of candidate Nigeria needs. I know there is no unanimity yet because some people are saying and our elder, Chief Ayo Adebanjo is saying that the President must come from the South-East. I don’t agree. I think my own belief is that the President must come from the South. This is because it is not something that is served a la carte, that it is now my turn or it is your turn. It is politics and you must be able to play your politics right.
In my own opinion, the people of the South-East have not played their politics right since the inception of the present democratic dispensation. They started by bottling themselves up in their party, APGA, which did not go beyond the region. For anybody to rule this country, you must at least score one-third of the votes in two third of the 36 states. And that cuts across all the geopolitical zones. So if a party has been labeled a zonal party how can it garner one third of votes in two thirds of the states? That is my own reading of the situation. They didn’t play their politics right and we cannot say because they have not had the President, they must have the president now. No, it is not served a la carte.
The understanding is that the presidential position must rotate between the North and the South. The North will be finishing its eight years next year. It now depends on how well each of the zones in the South play their politics. This is because to win the election, they must not be restricted to the South alone; they must garner votes across Nigeria. So it depends on which zone has the quality, the capacity and the understanding of the Nigerian nation to be able to have that spread. If it is the South-West that continues to have it repeatedly so be it. If the South-South can outplay us, fine. If the South-East can outplay South West, fine. You cannot say it has been South-West, South-West most of the time and so it cannot be South-West, no. It means we have been playing our politics right and we understand the workings of this country. Anybody that wants to govern the country must understand the workings of this country.
You are one of the people that have called for restructuring. And you have said before that if there is no restructuring, there is no need for the next election. Are the South-West elders now backing down on the issue of restructuring?
I have, in fact, backed out on the issue of restructuring. I am now a very strong apostle of a new constitution. Restructuring will then become a by- product of the new constitution. When you are talking of restructuring, you are relying on the National Assembly to devolve power to the states. But as far as I am concerned, the National Assembly itself is an aberration. This is because if you have a proper federal structure the power must reside in the federating units. The national legislature should just have a few items. I can cite an example. Nigeria in 1963 had only 16 items on the exclusive list for the Federal Government. The rest were residual in various regions.
Now we have about 66 items on the exclusive list of the Federal Government that is an anathema to a true federal structure. A true federal structure means one, the various groups making up the federation are different people just as we are in Nigeria. We have stated this for the umpteenth time, all of us are different people, the Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, the Itsekiri, Kanuri, Hausa, Fulani, Tiv and Idoma, etc. We are different people with different histories, cultures, even religions. This means we also have different beliefs and we shape our behaviour toward our origins. We have to sit down together and decide how we want to live together and what we want to cede to the centre. But there is nothing like that because of what the military did, most especially General Abdulsalam Abubakar.
I said in a recent interview that people should not applaud Abubakar. He is the one that brought this problem upon us. He was in office for just nine months and nobody saw the constitution until they were sworn in. Chief Obasanjo did not see any constitution until he was sworn-in. He did not even know the quality of the job he was to take and whether he had the qualities for it or not. We are standing reality on the head. That was wrong and I criticised him. I said this recently. So it is wrong for him to now start pontificating after laying a false foundation for democracy in the country. It will not amount to anything.
So we have to start from a new beginning. We must sit and agree on which of the powers the federating units will take and which ones do we want to cede to the centre. But nothing of such is happening because we are having about 66 items on the exclusive list. Even if you want to marry in your local government area, Abuja has to sanction it. The country is heterogeneous and you cannot bottle us up particularly in this technological age, a digital world where communication is universal and global.
You talked of a new constitution. How can we get it and how soon will that be?
We can get it within a short time. The whole process may not even last more than three months, if there is the political will on the part of the President and those in authority. But I don’t see that political will there. These are the factors we must have in mind when we elect the next President. The reports of many past national conferences are gathering dust in the Aso Villa. We had Abacha’s report, Obasanjo’s report, and Jonathan’s report. In any case, Nigerians have been talking about the type of country they want.
A lot of people talk about the 1963 constitution. If we want to return to it, nothing is bad. It means everybody will have to develop at their own pace. For me, it is something we can achieve in a maximum of three or four months. Several times, I have been asked how we can go about it. And I have said if the President has the political will, let him send two bills to the National Assembly. One bill should be for referendum and the other for a Constituent Assembly Commission. The one for referendum is to insert referendum into our constitution. In other words, power belongs to the people and sovereignty belongs to the people. We give the legislators and the president partial sovereignty. The one we hold is the one that has to come to us when there is a logjam in the National Assembly in a referendum. If there is a logjam in the National Assembly, they come back to us as happened in the United Kingdom a few years ago.
So there is no true democracy where you do not have a referendum in the constitution. That is why I felt very awkward for the former Head of State, Abdusalam Abubakar pontificating to us now. He kept that constitution in the cooler. He just collected 23 people led by my friend, Prof Yadudu from the North. They didn’t allow any of us that are Nigerian nationalists to make an input. I am a Nigerian nationalist, but they didn’t allow us to look at it and to criticise it. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who contested and became president, never saw it, yet he swore to uphold the constitution he never saw. You can see the country standing on its head. So to me, we must go back to the basics. Nigerians must be allowed to agree on how they want to live together. That is what can endure. All these patch-patch things cannot endure.
The National Assembly recently had sittings round the country to seek inputs into the amendment of the constitution. What is your take on that?
I have said it loud enough that it was an avenue for the members of the committee to make money. You cannot gather the people’s opinion by visiting the zones at short notice. We have said that you should give Nigerians up to three months to say what they want. Then the Yoruba leaders would sit in the Yoruba nation and agree where and when they want to have one or two meetings before they now agree on what they are bringing to the table. The South-South leaders too are made up of about six ethnic groups. You have the Ijaw, Itsekiri, Urhobo and so on. We have not been truthful. We are trying to patch up this country on falsehood and that cannot work. That is why we are where we are today.
What can we do to stem the tide of insecurity that has also spread to the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway in recent times?
We should make plans to eradicate poverty. Where there is hunger, you can’t have peace and I quote my leader of blessed memory, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He said, “In a country where there is no justice, that country will be terribly uncomfortable for the rich and the poor. The rich will not be able to sleep at night because the poor are hungry. So the poor will invade the privacy of the rich. So it is better you let everybody feed.”
About the Author
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.
