…says many PDP govs are in talks with APC leadership
…despite ruling Nig for 40years, North remains world’s capital of poverty
…many years of rulership translates to nothing
…GEJ remains the most detribalised Nigerian president
Hon Rimamande Kwewum Shawhulu, a veteran journalist and communications strategist is a second term legislator representing Takum/Donga Federal constituency of Taraba State.
In this chat with Emman Ovuakporie, TNG’s Regional Editor, North, Hon Shawhulu spoke extensively on various issues plaguing Nigeria, his party the PDP, the calls for plebiscite, restructuring and other national issues.
Excerpts:
Q: Today the talk about plebiscite or restructuring and the signals are all over that the state of insecurity in the country has remained unabated since 2015; do you subscribe that we should do a plebiscite or we should restructure the country and go full regionalism?
A: Your question appears to give the impression that the plebiscite or the restructuring is because of insecurity, I think it is much more than that because there have been the calls for restructuring from the time Nigeria was created.
We had the 1957 the Willink’s Commission that went round to investigate fears, at that time the minorities especially in the south and in the north were looking for independence. Some form of restructuring was accepted, independence for the minorities in the south and so the Midwest was created which became Bendel State now Edo and Delta.
And then the same request for the middle belt in the north was denied by the colonial authority and the denial helped to strengthen the fact that the north or what constituted northern Nigeria did not require in any democratic setting any vote from the south to constitute the majority government. Perhaps this is what many young Nigerians or people don’t understand.
“If you look at the statistics that have been strengthened by the creation of states, the delimitations of constituencies and so forth, you will notice very clearly that the North by itself does not need any vote, not even one vote from the south to constitute majority government. The North can always produce majority votes”.
This the military government tried to change when it created in the 1979 constitution, the rule that you needed to have only 25% in 2/3 of the states, in this case 25% of the votes from 24 states to become the president.
Practically what this means is that you can become a president without winning majority votes in any state in the south, all you require is 1/4 of the votes from the 19 states in the north. So all you require is to get 25% in five states from the south you become president.
And so the agitations of some people from the south has been that and this argument was canvassed at several academic fora and which is why terms like fiscal federalism, true federalism and co emerged.
In spite of the fact that power has been more or less in the north, since independence for 60 years now, the south has held the presidency only under Obasanjo’s two tenures and after the coup he took over from Gen. Murtala Mohammed 1976 and handed over 1979 then he was president for 8 years and then we had Aguiyi Ironsi he was president earlier on for few months and then President Goodluck Jonathan for 6 years or thereabout and then we had Chief Ernest Shonekan who was there from August 1993 – November 1993.
“So all together in the 60 years of our independence, the south has had less than 20 years, the remaining 40 years power has been more or less in the North”.
In spite of this fact, the North is the poorest place for anyone to live in the whole world today. When they say Nigeria is the capital of poverty in the world, most of that poverty is resident in the north.
So we have a situation where the power that the north has held has actually not translated to democracy, to good governance, to economic development, to empowerment in the north.
So you have people agitating in the north too like the people of the areas of the Middle Belt which was defined indeed, by the late Sarduana of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello himself as areas below the North that were inhabited by non Hausa and Fulani, non Kanuri, non Nupe and non Bolewa.
So the security situation is now only a trigger. Some people have argued that the security situation has been accentuated by the grinding poverty that exist in the north.
However, some counter argument is that if poverty was just the only basis for the kind of situation that we have, that if poverty alone could account for the violence we have in Borno and Zamafara and Co then that violence indeed will be taking place in Taraba and Sokoto which today are said to be the poorest states in northern Nigeria.
There are many factors that have brought us to this stage of agitation for restructuring. Restructuring is a metaphor for disatisfaction we are dissatisfied with the system.
Q: If a government that came to power on the platform of change and after getting the power has backtracked on his promise, do you think the people should still trust such a government?
A: The presumption in the question you have asked is that people take decisions freely; people are rational when they take decision. But we do know that when election comes people don’t take rational decisions; ethnic, religious sentiments and other factors come in when people are taking decisions.
If people are to take decisions rationally about who should rule over them, as far as I am concerned President Goodluck Jonathan was the best person for the Hausa Fulani Muslim North because President Jonathan had them in his mind and he really meant well for them much more than their own people meant for them and I can prove this statistically for you.
He established schools, Almajiri schools were established there and there were more ministers from the northwest in particular than other parts of the country.The key personal staff of the President were mainly Fulani. Principal Private Secretary, Chief of State Protocol, PDP Chairman, Minister of Defence, National Security Adviser, Political Adviser, the IGP etc. Before Jonathan left, Zamfara and Kano had two ministers beside the fact that each of the seven states had one minister. So they had about 9 ministers from the northwest. It has not happened before or ever seen.
But you see, people don’t take political decisions rationally, they take decisions on the basis of issues that are different from the issues of development, and what logically should favour them.
So we are now saddled with President Muhammadu Buhari and the economic vitals of the north, even those of the northwest have gone backward and today the number of children not in school will definitely have increased by two folds or so because of the insecurity that we have in the country. There are no economic activities that are taking place, industries have folded up.
“Today people are so divided that if anything happens the killings that will take place nobody can imagine when it is going to end. So I don’t think that we should be talking about people and elections because as it is now, people don’t take electoral decisions rationally”.
I think time will tell whether the people in Sokoto, Kano and co will decide that they have had enough and then turn to vote for people that will help them in the quest to live like normal human beings with economic activities, with schools to go to and not under deteriorating circumstances.
There was a time this argument was going on about the issue of grazing reserves, people gave the arguments that were to me very terrible that cattle roaming the street are a way of life of the Fulani and I said that is wrong. You are discriminating against these people.
Why do I say that; there is no culture in history that do not go through the period of keeping of cattle, people have moved into a modern economic life. I asked these people who were arguing cattle roaming the street was the culture of the Fulanis whether they will allow their biological children to go into that profession? We all know that there are better and safer ways to rear cattle. said they are arguing in the interest of the Fulani, do you really love this Fulani or you don’t want them to go to school, you want them to be roaming about keeping cattle. You don’t know that they can keep the cattle in a better way, in a way that they will be dignified, they will not threatened in the bush by animals, by snakes and by other people.
Q: With the picture you painted now, what role would the National Assembly play especially with the ongoing constitution amendment? Will it address all the issues you have raised? The 2014 confab report, is it not time it is brought to the National Assembly to be deliberated on?
A: I am a member of the constitution review committee, we had a meeting where someone argued that the document has to be brought officially otherwise it cannot be regarded as a legitimate document, well that is neither here nor there.
“If the National Assembly does not get it right, the country will not; because the National Assembly holds a lot of power”.
The National Assembly as in most democracies determines what the executive does, what happens in the judiciary, etc.
If the laws are not proper, make new laws including amending the constitution, which is the highest form of legislation we have.
I think that as it is now the public does not trust the national assembly that is a fact and unfortunately it does appear that even our staffs, legislative aides and workers don’t trust National Assembly members because they have gone on strike.
Unfortunately, people have argued that and I do disagree that you should have a legislature that says yes to everything that the presidency brings, I say no to that because the legislature arose principally to disagree with the executive. If you are not disagreeing with the executive, if everything they bring is okay, then there is no need for the National Assembly to exist, pure and simple.
“The system was created in way that the National Assembly has to exist to disagree, to argue and it is only in the midst of arguing and disagreeing that you can both think about something better to be done. The moment you cannot do those ones then things will not go on well”.
Most of the development in sciences and technology that have advanced the world were things that were in disagreement with what the establishment wanted, for instance, the law of gravity, and the shape of the world. It was said that the world was flat and those that disagreed were penalised.
So when you remove the room for people to argue, for people to disagree, for people to say no, then you are saying that the National Assembly does not need to exist and that is not right because you cannot have a democracy without having the legislature. Any form of government can exist and they have existed over the centuries.
But you cannot have democracy without the legislature. That will be an expensive and destructive monarchy . But what distinguishes other forms of government is the existence of a parliament. Indeed, a parliament that is able to disagree, a parliament that can say yes or no and that is the way to do but when you remove that, that we cannot say no, then you are saying, then you are saying the national assembly, the parliament should not exist and I think those people saying this are doing a great disservice to democracy and to the institution of the National Assembly.
Q: On the issue of referendum, not many Nigerians are aware that there is no position for a referendum in the constitution and you are in the process of amending that document. Won’t it be thought wise to be included as a proposal so that a referendum can become enabled in our constitution because discerning Nigerians are of the opinion that government deliberately refused to add that provision to the constitution.
A: How many members do we have from the northwest, 91. How many members do we have from the northeast, 48 and that is 139. All you need to say no to any constitutional amendment is to ask the northeast and northwest to come together and say no because constitution amendment is the game of the minority, they need only 121 votes out of 360 to kill any amendment.
So anything about restructuring, anything that the northwest and the northeast cannot happen under this constitution, it is that simple, we don’t need to waste our time.
Q: You just said that Nigerians no longer trust the National Assembly; as a member of the what are those things that you think should be done apart from the issue of it’s a rubber stamp?. What are those things you think should be done to restore the confidence of Nigerians on the legislature?
A: Well, it is an ongoing process and we can learn from what is happening in other climes but I also want to tell you that generally around the world the legislature has very poor image but if you make the mistake to say you don’t want the legislature to exist, you will have riots on the streets as it happened last year when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom wanted to put aside the parliament, there were riots, millions of people came out on the street because that is the symbol that people are participating in government.
One or two things that I think are important, it is very important that we open up the National Assembly, the way we go to look at the budget of other ministries and we publish them, we have to open up our budget and our expenditure to the public.
“We scrutinise the budgets of other MDAs line by line. Why is our own not published line by line?”
Number two is that we need to increase our interaction with our constituency and the general public, how that will be done remains to be seen. But I want to tell you that the pressure that the parliamentarians in Africa and in Nigeria face is not the same type of pressure that the parliamentarians in Europe face.
In 2016 I went for a programme at the UK parliament where a member of the House of Commons came to speak to us and she said last week she went to her constituency and I said wow, what happened there, how many people?
Nobody goes to a member of congress or House of Commons to pay his children’s school fees, for burial, to do any of those things; the highest favour they will go is they want a letter of introduction to a ministry or for something to happen or they want him the parliamentarian to appear at a public function somewhere.
In 2003 I was a parliamentary staff here, I worked with the then speaker and a member of the House from Bauchi was complaining on the corridor and I asked him what was the matter, he said that since he got to NASS in 1999 and we are about to leave, nobody had ever come from his constituency to ask me what he is doing about common problems in the constituency, everybody that had come to see him, complained about a sick child, school fees, marriages, naming ceremony or burial.
I have met well educated people, professors who tell me that members of the house of reps collect N24million per month, fortunately that day I was holding my pay slip and I showed my pay slip.
A former chairman of my Local Government was in the car with me one day when we the alert of my salary came and I showed him. He replied that if I had not shown him the slip he would never had believed that is what we were collecting.
But then how many people can you explain to, how can an educated person for instance say that members of the house of reps collect N24million per month. N24million times by 360 times 12 months will give you about N103billion in a year. What is the total budget of the National Assembly?
And that is why I advocate that we should open up the National Assembly, let the public know what we are getting here and if people know that maybe the pressure will reduce or if people think that what members are getting is not justified then they can work for a new system to pay.
Q: The gale of defections and like defections that may happen between now and the next election; is it that your party members have lost faith in the PDP or are they running away because of self preservation?
A: You know PDP lost the election in 2015 because of PDP and not because the opposition was strong. There were many PDP members that did anti party and worked for Buhari to win. In fact I was with a former PDP governor who confessed he was among the people who ensured that PDP lost the presidential elections in 2015. He is still a very active member of the PDP.
“Now when you have people in PDP that don’t believe in PDP, PDP cannot have success and that was why PDP lost the election again in 2019, PDP lost because of PDP”.
Secondly, if someone’s heart has not been in PDP, like some of the governors that are defecting or that are rumoured to be defecting, we do know that in the last 2019 election many of those governors worked for APC, so if they are defecting now does it make any difference?
It is just that the leadership of the party does not understand what it takes for a party to win elections, it does not understand what a party should do to organize itself. So the leadership of the party has sold the party to governors who are decamping to APC and that will make it difficult for PDP to perform well in the next elections.
There are many PDP governors who are talking to APC leadership, some are in the press, some are not in the press, which is why you hear APC people saying that they will rule for a long time, it is because they are interacting with PDP governors who are talking with them.
And unfortunately, the PDP leadership under Secondus has sold the party to the governors and it is unfortunate that you are selling the party to the governors who are going to defect, it doesn’t make sense.
And if you look at the period between 2015 and 2019 what the PDP caucus worked hard to strengthen the party. Those active members were denied tickets and PDP lost in their constituencies.
“So the reason you see APC boasting that they will win is because they know they are talking with PDP governors and the PDP governors are the ones that the national chairman or the National Working Committee has handed over the party to in the states; so they are busy destroying the party in the state to escape EFCC”.
We are hoping that maybe the reconciliatory work headed by Saraki and other well meaning people will work otherwise I don’t see a chance. For instance if you look at what happened in Ebonyi state, the National Chairman of the party handed over the party to the former governor, who made his brother deputy chairman of the party . He decamped with the state chairman so that his brother will become the chairman of PDP, so that he controls both PDP and APC.
