•At 86, country’s situation gives me great pain

Professor Ango Abdullahi, former spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum, has lamented the current suffering in Nigeria, attributing it to leadership failure. In an exclusive interview with Saturday Sun, the Octogenarian recommended that the only way to salvage Nigeria from its current doldrums is to go back to the drawing board. He spoke with PAUL ORUDE in Bauchi.

You’re 86 still going strong. How does that make you feel?

I thank God for his great mercies, for sparing my life to attain this age of 86 years in a country where the life expectancy has been fluctuating between 48 and 55 years. I think this is a great gift from almighty God and the only thing you can do to almighty God is to thank him. So I thank God for his mercies, his grace for keeping us alive, and to a large extent also keeping us healthy and still active in one way or the other at this age

Talking about relevance, not only are you still active, you are still being sought after by individuals and organisations. What is the secret?

I suppose there could be several factors to explain this. First, I have already explained how grateful to almighty God we are for keeping us this long. We also have to thank almighty God for giving us the opportunity to engage in various activities that have to do with the Nigerian state in various ways – in education, to administration, politics and so on and indeed  that’s a great opportunity for you to interact in a country as big as Nigeria and as diverse as Nigeria. A great opportunity to interact and this opportunity to interact is probably one of the key areas that explain the relevance you are talking about. At one point or the other, one’s name is mentioned as being able to do one thing or the other, or participate in one meeting or the other. For example I was fortunate to have participated in three constitutional conferences -1987, 1996 and 2005. So you see the explanation is simply that one has been given an opportunity to engage in public service and in the course of engaging to socially interact with a large range of Nigeria’s diversity and that explains why you see us perhaps where you don’t expect to see us by virtue of age or relevance.

Nigeria has so many abundant resources, human and natural. Yet we are still struggling in all aspects of life. Where did we miss it?

This is where I feel the most pain, I must admit. Having left University of Ibadan in 1964, and this is talking about 60 years ago and given what one has had from teachers, pioneer fathers, and leaders of this country ranging from the Balewas. Azikiwes, Awolowos and so on, as students we come out to the campus and they say please study hard because you have lots of responsibility to move this country forward after you graduate and so on and so forth. So we were looking at this number of years and the number of people who have gone through tertiary institutions till date and for us to look at the material achievements that Nigeria has been able or unable to achieve, certainly it should give me pain at my age. Especially when I look at Nigeria in the context of other countries who probably started as we did, perhaps started earlier than they did, and for them to have achieved so much and for us to have achieved so little, it is very painful. This is part of my pain for what remains of my life. You can give so many examples. Of course you are very right. This country is one of the most endowed countries in the entire world, in terms of anything you can think of; in terms of materials resources, and human beings. We are now over 200 million and talents everywhere within and outside this country and yet you look around and say today Nigeria is only able to produce 3600 megawatts of electricity. Not enough for a big house in Europe or somewhere else. Not enough for a big monastery or a big church. Not enough for 200 plus people. In a country with this vast territory and people to look after – 3600 megawatts of electricity. Just imagine small countries like South Africa 50,000 megawatts. I just returned from Cairo and there is a mosque in Cairo that requires 15, 000 megawatts of electricity powered daily. So for Nigeria with all these things you mentioned, just mention anything, is it water, land, what is it that we lack? And yet this is where we are in terms of human development indices which you can count as negative. And when you hear some agencies say Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world and it angers you but it is a fact. Very true. So those of us who saw Nigeria 60 years ago and continue to see Nigeria in even worse situations than 60 years ago, it’s a painful experience. So I feel so sad that I thought that with people, and the kind of background that I have, we are so many, thousands of us. In fact there are more engineers in Nigeria in terms of paper qualification than there are in Britain and here we are. I am just coming from the hospital now to see a patient. There is no electricity in the hospital, there is no dialysis machine in the place and so on. It is so sad. The next question perhaps you will like to ask is, why are we in this position? Is it we human beings who have failed? Here the answer is yes and no. The reason why the answer is yes and no is that Nigeria is 200 million plus and of course no matter our numbers we need leaders. So to my mind the first place of failure that has brought Nigeria to its knees today is lack of leadership. I always try to make this comparison. It pains some people but it pleases me to do so. Our founding fathers, those who worked for Nigeria’s independence and a few years after independence have done far better in terms of quality, honest leadership than the kind of leadership we have enjoyed since them. What we have here today, given my experience and what I have seen today and at my age, is just a crisis of leadership. Banditry of leadership, if you like. This is my coinage or terminology. Leadership banditry is what we have in Nigeria because if we have no leadership banditry, we cannot be where we are today. We read about corruption and all sorts of criminal things that are happening in our country and nobody seems to be held accountable for it. So this is the crisis. But the public is also guilty in a way in that the public, in terms of the political frame, gives the followership an opportunity every four years using the current constitution to examine the leadership of the country to see whether they are doing enough for them to be elected or re-elected as the case may be. But you find the same set of people, or set of political parties that have failed this country coming, recycled all the time. So we don’t expect anything new in terms of moving forward. Very unlikely because we are recycling things that have failed over and over again and we cannot expect to move forward using recycled materials that have failed us before.

Can you also pinpoint external factors behind Nigeria’s stunted development because some have argued that because of our history with colonialism, imperialism…

This is absolute nonsense because Indians have suffered from imperialism for so many years. Many countries have suffered from imperialism for many years. Malaysia, even South Africa with apartheid and so forth but they are doing well and Nigeria is doing badly. So I don’t accept the excuse that our failure has to do with our colonial and post-colonial experience . This is nonsense and we have to ask the question for an honest answer: why did you fail? We failed because we have failed ourselves and at what point are we going to accept that we have failed this country? And at what point are we prepared to redeem ourselves? The country is so poor and people are suffering in every aspect of their lives from lack of food to lack of shelter to insecurity and so on. Everything that you try to mention is wrong in Nigeria and yet we say we have leaders. Where are they?

President Tinubu’s administration removed fuel subsidy, and the ripple effect has seen the majority of Nigerians groaning under hardship. Was it the right policy?

Yes and no here. The question is, if you are going to introduce a policy, you have to screen that policy. Really analyse. The pros and cons of the policy and the modalities of its implementation are all part of the discussion that precede the implementation. I think this is where so many things have failed us in Nigeria. The last Development Plan in Nigeria was 1972. I happened to be a Commissioner for Economic planning for North at that time for North Central States. Professor Adedeji used to be our Chairman because he was a Federal Commissioner for Economic Development. No planning. We have resources but no plans and unfortunately we are not doing enough to ensure that the correct leadership is selected. The process of selecting the leadership is faulty, the political frames are not suitable and if they are suitable are not being used and are being abused. At the end of the day Nigeria ends up with leaders that are not serving the Nigeria interest and this is the real problem. Subsidy, yes. Subsidy was used and abused before but that abuse should have been the basis on which the subsidy is removed and when you look at the various area of abuse and clog, then you remove the subsidy and the accruals that will come out of the removal should then be directed to positive areas that will affect positively the lives of Nigeria. I remember more positively, I am not a fan of Buhari, he was not the one that really did the Petroleum Trust Fund. Abacha did and Abacha did a thorough job of adding cost of fuel, and then using this additional revenue in a special account that would address some of the critical areas in the Nigeria state –Education, health and so on. But now the subsidy has been removed. Where are the accruals? Perhaps there should be billions because billions have been stolen from subsidies and these billions are being recovered, but where are the billions going? At the end of the day, all these policies mean nothing unless you have people in place to really implement the good side of these policies. If you say the country is suffering from poverty, cost of transport, insecurity and so on and we are supposed to have  leaders, we have a president, we have governors, we have members of the national and state assembly and so on, and a country which admits that it is broke, what do you expect? The sacrifice should first be from the leadership, not the followership. The sacrifice should be from the leadership by example. Instead the leadership, as we can see, from what we read in the papers, the legislators are looking for cars and each one costs about N160 million while some people cannot cook one meal in their house and so on and all sorts of expenditures. If you analyse the 2024 budget and look at the allocations that went to the various sectors and sub sectors you know that the leadership is not really there to address the challenges that are facing ordinary Nigerians. It is sad