Two-term former governor of Kano State, now a Senator representing the Kano State Central Senatorial District in the National Assembly, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, in this interview with RAPHAEL EKPANG, speaks about burning issues militating against the growth of Nigeria 60 years after independence.
Excerpts:
As a leader what do you have to say about the challenges facing the country 60 years after Independence?
Thank you very much, I am always very optimistic in my assessment of the issue of life either as an individual or as a nation. In education, between 1960 and now, we have had of course turbulence, but the growth in terms of the number of people who went to school is very encouraging. In the 1960s and up till 1980s, you can count the number of secondary schools in the country. For example when I had the privilege of leading the Association of All Secondary School Principals in Nigeria in 1988-1992 and 1997, there were just about seven thousand secondary schools in Nigeria. Kano was having a little more than 200. In my own time as the governor of Kano State for eight years, I created over four hundred new junior secondary schools and most of which are now senior secondary schools, so you can see the growth in spite of the cries of seven million out of school children in Nigeria which of course is as a result of population explosion. Although we are not really satisfied, it’s not totally bad if you take a look in retrospect. Even the exposure to what you call the western system of education, compared to what we have today, I think we are making some good progress even though among applicants to Nigerian universities, you hardly take more than 30-40percent, which is still very low and means we still need many schools; primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. The quality may not be as sound as it used to be, that is also part of the challenges. Politically too I want to say it’s not totally bad especially the transition we’ve seen from 1999 till date, we’ve never had that long political stability in the past. We’ve never had our democracy stay stable this long since independence. I always say that if you take for instance the United States, the number of years in democracy they are enjoying now, they were worse off than us when they were in the number of years we are now in our democracy. When America was 40 years old, they were killing themselves, fighting everywhere. They were not as peaceful as we are in their democracy when they were 20-39 years old in democracy. There is also a serious challenge in what we call good governance. You see, if you ask most people what is good governance, you are going to have many interpretations from as many people as you ask. Now, what exactly is good governance? There are six characteristics of good governance, anywhere you go around the world and there is good governance, these are the parameters they follow.
First is Voice and Accountability, which means a situation where there is communication between the leadership and the electorate. The leadership must accept criticisms and the government has to be able to communicate and explain its policies to the understanding of the people.
Second is political stability, if you don’t have political stability in your country there is no way you can talk about growth. Just like I told you the experience we’ve had, the interruption by the military junta, we are contemporary with Malaysia in terms of independence, but today Malaysia since independence are talking of between 5-6 leaders because they have not experienced these interruptions by the military since their independence. That is why they are where they are today, so political stability is one of the factors that give you good governance.
Third is effectiveness of governance which is all about the policies, the programmes of the government and how effective they are viz a viz the aspirations and expectations of the people. A situation whereby the government just wakes up and does what people call elephant projects whether they are relevant to the people or not, where people don’t have good water to drink and you start building overhead bridges, as far as I am concerned, that is not effectiveness in governance. We are so carried away with physical infrastructure forgetting issues of social justice and human development. These are indices that show how effective a government is; no matter how beautiful your roads are, no matter how bright your cities are with electricity and good environments, if people are hungry, there is no democracy.
In fact, Mallam Aminu Kano, once said, “If you don’t see democracy on your plate of food you are not independent. And he also argued, any government policy, any government programme, any government decision, if it doesn’t translate to easy access to food is rubbish” which is true, of what benefit is a government policy, decision or programme if at the end the common man who constitutes about 80-90 percent of
the population cannot have easy access to food? Another parameter of good governance is the rule of law which means having the laws that govern the lives of the people and the ability of the government to have them comply willingly, not by coercion, not by taking any hard measures.
How effective are your law enforcement agencies, how relevant are they in the lives of the people? Today what we have is that the government abuses the rule of law than citizens. The court will give a verdict but the federal and state governments are the ones flouting the court judgments. I’m sure you have all had these experiences, which mean we don’t have total rule of law and there is no way you can have a government without the rule of law.
Regulatory Control: What laws are you promulgating; are these laws relevant to the aspirations of the people, are they relevant to the well being of the people or you are just creating laws to give the government weapons to be too rigid rather than getting people to obey them willingly. Discipline is about the willingness of the people to comply with the rules, so if you create laws that make life more difficult for the people simply because you just want them to obey and people don’t even understand the rules and why you are creating them, then you are not going to have good governance.
Control of Corruption: When you talk of control of corruption you are talking of measures, you cannot succeed in controlling corruption until you institutionalize social justice. It is not about arresting a big fish who has stolen billions, it is about the common man in the village who is being cheated by the village head, who is being cheated by the sergeant at the counter of the police station over there, who is being cheated by his neighbour or who is being cheated by the rich because probably he is poor, that is what we call social justice. That is why when I was the governor of Kano State for eight years, some of the agencies I prioritized were the Public Complaints Commission and Anti-corruption Commission. Fighting corruption means you allow or give them a system of bringing their complaints and listening to them, it’s not just about pursuing those who have stolen big money, that is just a tip of the iceberg. What social justice do you have in place? The ordinary tricycle rider on the street, do you care about his welfare, do you care about how he operates, are you bringing rules just to collect taxes, do you care about the plight of tenants against their landlords or you are leaving them at the mercy of the landlords simply because they have no house and the government doesn’t care? All these issues are very important so that the common man will see that the government cares.
What of welfare of the security agencies, you see I always explain one thing that if you bring a detective, an inspector to go and interrogate a person who has been accused of one billion naira corruption and this detective doesn’t know what he will eat in the next minute, when they lock the room to discuss, he will end up negotiating to have something to eat the following morning. So, a government that doesn’t care even of the welfare of the security agents is not preparing to succeed. That is why today, police officers at checkpoints don’t care. Even if the Inspector General is in mufti, they will ask him for tips. You see that is one of the issues I tackled when I was in the government, its a common knowledge; within my first two years 2003-2005, I cleared 20 years of pension arrears, we spent about five billion naira to pay pensioners who were owed for years, the records are there. One thing the government is forgetting is that when you pay pension the money circulates back. If today the government decides to spend twenty-four billion naira to pay pensioners, the money definitely will go back into circulation. If the pensioner who has just received his pension goes to the market with one hundred thousand naira, as he is buying from the sellers, the sellers are also buying other things from other people and at the end, the money will keep circulating round and many persons will benefit from that. Almost 100 persons will touch the money and within 24 hours the N100, 000 has helped one hundred families to survive apart from boosting their morale.
Today as we are talking now, retirees have not been paid their pension since 12-13 months ago, those in service are discouraged because there is a saying that ‘ you have to decide the depth of the water from the one that goes in’ and that will guide their attitudes.
When those in service discover that those who have served up to the level of the commissioner of police are coming back to beg after service, because if you retire 2,3,4 months you are not paid, you are already a beggar, that is not good enough for a democratic nation. All these are indices that add up to your fight against corruption.
How would you rate Nigeria’s past leaders in the light of widespread corruption among the leadership class in Nigeriatoday?
What made those in the past not to be corrupt was the quality of service then, when I joined the civil service in the late 1970s as a fresh graduate, I had a house in the government quarter; three bedrooms with a bed in each of them, I had almost everything that should be in a three bedroom flat, so with all those, I did not need to go into corrupt practice. So, when I hear people talking of people in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s were more disciplined, what made them disciplined? It’s not because they were different species from the Nigerians of today, but what made them more disciplined was because their welfare was a major priority of the government. They didn’t need extra money to survive because the little they had was enough to keep them on because the government provided social justice for them. As far as I am concerned, I think the government at all levels should begin to address the issues of workers’ welfare, they should make it a top priority because there is the only way that the government can work effectively. When I was contesting second term in office in 2007, it was the pensioners who were happy because we created a livelihood for them that insisted and contributed N10, N20 and gathered five million naira and came to the government house to give me a draft of five million naira for the campaign because we had improved their livelihood and civil servants’ through a contributory pension scheme. We saved about N9billion. Those who took over from us within a space of time they blew the N 9billion in the name of building houses. You can’t use the money that doesn’t belong to you to build houses. All those buildings you see when you are entering Kano from Zaria were built with pensioners’ money that we saved during our government, and they did that pretending as if they were doing good to the people. Those houses now nobody is living in them and pensioners have not been paid, so you can see priority of government. With due respect to politicians, most of them go into government with the idea of physical development, to give the impression that they are working, so those of you in the media shouldn’t be carried away when you see the government putting caterpillars and heavy duty equipment on the roads. Ask them with which money and at what cost they are executing the projects? Those overhead bridges, I’m not saying those things the people do not deserve them, but are they really the priorities for you and me, we still have challenges but on the whole I don’t think it’s totally bad.
INEC said they have records of 82 million wp-signup.phped voters; when you add all the votes in the last presidential election, I don’tthink they were up to 30 million votes, where were the remaining 60 million wp-signup.phped voters. You said they were wp-signup.phped, now what stopped them from voting, therefore, all our elected leaders were not properly elected because none of them got more than 30% votes from the total wp-signup.phped voters. With this INEC still have a very long way to go in terms of enlightening politicians about the need to mobilize people to participate in the process of electing leaders. So far, so good, gentlemen continue to pray for our nation.
What is your reaction to the current level of insecurity in Nigeria?
Insecurity is a serious challenge; there are five factors that determine effectiveness of security agencies. Remember, today we have fewer than a million policemen to cover about two hundred millions Nigerians, in Egypt they are eighty million but they have four million policemen to provide security for them unlike Nigeria that has two hundred million population with fewer than a million policemen. So the issue of number must be addressed. There must be a serious decision to increase their number if we must make any headway as a nation. Their training; there has to be continuous training of the officers but today you can find a policeman who has not gone for a week refresher course for over ten years in service, so our security is garbage in garbage out. If they don’t undergo training regularly, we cannot expect more from them.
The issue of welfare, sometime ago, one of the electronic media went round and exposed the barracks. The hostels of the police training institutions and the barracks, you won’t want to go there and eat, human beings living in such places; they showed leakages everywhere, dilapidation, some of those buildings that were built in the seventies have never been renovated for once, not to talk of the take home, not to talk of lack of incentives, some of them buy their uniforms themselves which are supposed to be free.
The issue of equipment: No matter how trained you are without equipment you cannot do beyond your capacity; take for instance, as a professional cameraman if you don’t have a good camera, of course you can’t have job satisfaction. Before you take your shot, it will take you up to one hour to set up your camera and all those stuff, so you end up being demoralized before the work starts. With that, you won’t even have the motivation for the job again, that is the typical situation of a policeman without good equipment. The issue of pension: If you know your end will be bad, there is no way you can give your best in service, because as you are getting to your retirement point , you will be thinking of going back to poverty. Until the government addresses these five factors there is no way we can improve in terms of security.
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