Tag: Ekwueme

Hon Ghali Na’Abba, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, a lecturer, unarguably one of the most vibrant speakers Nigeria ever produced in this chat with TheNewsGuru.com, TNG, Regional Editor, North, Emman Ovuakporie when he hosted National Political Equity Movement, NPEM, spoke in various issues ranging from Igbo 2023 presidency, religion, internal democracy and other matters, excerpts.

Hear Him:

Whenever the word unity is mentioned of course it doesn’t mean that we must all speak the same language, practice the same religion and so on and so forth. What it simply means is uniting our minds towards a direction that is positive.
All of us belongs to one religion or the other either Christian or Muslim, unfortunately most of us we don’t even understand our religions not to talk of another religion this is very sad. We must all go back and know our religions and be aware of course that there is deliberate efforts on the part of certain religious leaders to mislead their followers so that they don’t understand other religions.

Knowledge is universal, you must learn everything on the face of the earth so that you understand what it is and understand the context within which we live. Nobody must restrict the spread of knowledge and it is very important that we don’t just know only our religions let us know other religions so that we can be able to live with others.

Our common humanity should be our governing guide. All our needs are the same, we breath the same air, we drink the same water, we eat the same food, we require the same shelter, we require the same security and for me as a Muslim what I am taught from my sacred book that God has created us, different nations and tribes so that we may understand one another, we may know one another.
For example I am Hausa Fulani from Kano, ambassador is from Abia state and he is Igbo; if today me from Kano and he from Abia are both Hausa speaking and we wear the same dress, we eat the same food and we have the same culture, will there be any need for me to know him or him to know me knowing fully well that we cannot exchange anything because everything he has are the very things I also have.

So it follows that if the world is uniformly consisting of the same people who share the same culture, the same religion, the same everything then the incentive to travel to anywhere to exchange goods will not be there. So this is the wisdom that God Almighty applied in creating us different tribes and different nations and God doesn’t have any preference for any particular tribe in this world.
Every time God will address us as all mankind or humankind and this has been my guiding philosophy since I was a child growing up, to value other people and their way of life. Unfortunately many times people will tell is that we are enemies and we must continue to be enemies.
So let me appeal to you as youths that anybody who tells you that any particular person, religion or tribe is your enemy please don’t listen to him or her. What you must do is to live amongst yourself and understand yourselves and always apply a simple philosophy of do not do on to others or do not inflict on to others what you will not inflict on yourself. This simple philosophy is enough to see Nigeria unitied. It is a philosophy exposé by Christianity, Islam, Judaism and I don’t think it is a difficult philosophy to imbibe and work with.
The major problem with mankind is greed and you will agree with me some of you who knows political philosophy, will agree with me that most political philosophers have their sources in faith, always derive their sources from Christianity and Christianity, Judaism and Islam are one religion but most people don’t know and it is from these sources that the philosophers came up with the idea of democracy and within democracy there is the contextualization of the various rights; rights to liberty, rights to life, right to pursue your living and so on and so forth.
Therefore as young men and women, what I will advise that you to do all the time is first of all understand the people you are together with because the most important thing in life is that whatever you do carry people along, try to persuade people to see why you are doing a particular thing, make them understand and once they understand then you carry them along because they will follow you. Once you tell people and convince them that this is your direction, this is the reason you are taking this direction, people will follow you.
The reason we are having problems in this country is that leaders don’t want to carry people along and Nigeria I consider as very easy to govern once there is transparency and sincerity.

No human organization will ever be problem free, it will never happen because the whole purpose of existence according to our creator is to test us to know who are the best and who are the worst.

Thereof we should not expect a utopia, we must expect challenges and it is through the challenges that you will know who is good and who is bad. We have been having problems in this country and these problems will not stop but I am an optimist and I know that a time will come when most of these things will be history.

We have been debating about our democracy particularly the aspect of our internal security and this internal security the reason we keep talking about it is that it is so pervasive and its effect is very pervasive because lack of it is destroying our country, it has permeated every where. Once you don’t have internal democracy it means you are governing without most of the country because it is through the contextualization of internal democracy that the ordinary people can participate in politics and once it is not there it means that those in authority have taken away politics from the people and put it in their pockets and that is why when elections are to take place you see governors inviting virtually everybody to government house for him to be able to dictate who contest election in their party or not and it is the youth that are being destroyed by the day.
It is a source of worry to those of us who are older because we too felt victimised but at our age we cannot turn the clock back but we can work to see that it doesn’t happen to your generation and that is why some of us speak out whenever the opportunity permits to speak against most of the things bedeviling our democracy.

Now full cycle, our democracy has been hijacked and those in control run around it and my dream about our democracy, you know as well as I do that it has not been historically determined here in Nigeria, it is an alien system to us, brought to us and therefore not everybody may know the way it works.
80% of those participating in the system don’t know the way it works and that is the reason I have been emphasizing there must be some form of tutorial in order to teach those participants what it is, what it is meant to be, what is its history and where it is supposed to take us, most of this people don’t know this and unfortunately from the ward, to the local government to the state they are the participants.
So how can you utilise a system where most of the participants don’t know its working. When you are democratised you achieved the industrial revolution but here we have never being industrialised, in fact it is called industrial democracy, we are not industrialized therefore all of these things must be put into context and whichever government is in power must adopt a situation where these tutorials are institutionalized so that all the parties not only the ruling party benefits from it.
Then that is how people will understand the implication of what we do. If they work in the direction of destroying it then these are the implications they will learn from these tutorials and if they work towards building it then these are the implications and they will definitely work towards building it.
Now they believe that anything they do is right and they commit most of these atrocities with relish and all they care for is power and it is because we have not been practicing it the way it is but even our calculations of power never work out.
We have very many talented people in this country who can run this country better than those who have been presidents or governors or whatever but because the system does not allow competence and merits to be the governing principles of our system, we have people who are capable and who have capacity not just participating and we cannot develop that way.
Talking about south east president which is one of the focal points of your organization, I believe the south east have able and qualified people who can govern this country and I am close to a lot of Igbos and a lot of them are my friends such as Ken Nnamani, Pius Anyim, Charles Soludo, many Igbos who are capable of becoming the president of this country.
What is important is that the Igbos from the south east must support these people and bring them forth to Nigerians because what is important is for not only the south east to bring somebody but let them bring somebody who has the trust of other parts of the country and I am sure if that is done a lot of things might happen in a positive direction.
In the past you have other parts of the country supported the Igbos or south east candidate someone like Late Alex Ekwueme, he was our candidate in 1998 at Jos but because the military wielded a lot of influence since they have a particular candidate who eventually emerged, we had to let go.
But most of us from the north and south east, south west wanted to have Dr Alex Ekwueme elected as the president of this country and that happen because he had been sufficiently exposed to other Nigerians.

He was found to be a good man, a man of integrity, intelligence who has embraced other Nigerians.
For I don’t think other parts of the country are avast to a south east president. I believe that what the south east must do is to put its act together and bring forth someone who is sufficiently exposed to other parts of Nigeria because when you bring someone who is not known to other parts of the country, it is human, it is sociological, even at a lower level, leadership is such that when you want to contest to become something; I know you now for some years, and I know your pedigree and if somebody comes here now from Kano that he wants to be something, I don’t know him, I will definitely root for you because I know you. I know you are a good man, I know your capability, I know your capacity and I know that you will not deceive and that is leadership.
There are many people from the south east, some are our friends, some are our Allies, we know the good people and also know the bad people, it may be complex but that is how to do it.
Other people who emerged as president of this country like Umaru Yaradua, Shehu Shagari or Buhari it is not as if the region organized to have them contest for the president, it is their political parties and among the political parties those who knew them very well decided to support them, contest within the political parties and emerged as candidate of their party and sometimes that coincides with the overall preference of the region, sometimes it doesn’t coincide.
So I believe that the south east should do a research on some of those who have served nationally and field them, support them and also go round the country and convince the rest of the country that this is the candidate please we want you to support him and these and these are what we want to do for the country, I think that is the way it should be.
I don’t have absolutely no problem with anybody from the south east, in fact some of my best personal friends are from the south east and this is not the place I can mention the life saving activities that some of my friends from south east got engaged in so that I survive. I will support the South east.
What I will urge you to do is to continue to unite yourselves and whatever you do carry your people along, try not to engage in any misunderstandings and always remember you will come up to manage and this is what Nigeria requires and that philosophy I spoke to you of, do not inflict on to others what you would not inflict on yourself, let that be your guiding philosophy and that way everybody will get its dues.
What is however important is that people must be responsible, people must uphold the efforts of leadership, leadership is sacrifice, leadership is a trust. If you are given the responsibility of a leader particularly in the context of Nigeria, you are not just the leader of your tribe but the leader of other tribes, all the tribes in Nigeria and therefore every person wherever he comes from has a right on you because in becoming president for example all parts of the country voted for you and since that is so and for us our late sage Usman Danfodio and I keep repeating this, they wrote extensively on political administration and one of the popular things they wrote was that the easiest way to bring about strife at any level is to show preference for one tribe or the other and these were Islamic scholars.
So what they are saying in principle is that no matter what as a leader you should not show preference for your tribe at the detriment of other tribes. You will easily lose the trust of the other tribes and strife is capable of being formented or has the potential of being formented. So we must avoid anything that will be troublesome for our people.
And wherever they are complex issues be deviling the country, call all the tribes, their representatives sit down, even of your tribe has peculiar needs and in attending to those needs you may get yourself embarrassed; call the other trines and tell them that look where I come from we have this problem and as a president I believe that if I go and solve this problem you may likely suffer some consequences, how can you assist us?
All the tribes in this country are human and I am sure they will come forward and say Mr President go and do it for your people and once that is done, isn’t this a better way of doing things. All of us have compassion.
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