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By Daniel Kanu
Comrade Akin Osuntokun, political scientist and strategist, served as political adviser to former President Olusegun Obasanjo and was also a director of the presidential campaign of the People’s Democratic Party in 2011.
The bold and courageous intellectual in this engaging encounter with Sunday Sun, speaks on Nigeria’s pitiable condition, the leadership failure, the danger ahead, and the way out, among other critical issues. Excerpt:
What do you make of the political climate, against the backdrop of consistent postponements by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and even the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), especially their presidential primaries?
Nigeria is increasingly becoming liable to the analogy of the prison where the inmates have taken control of the administration. What should be our expectations of a party in which the newly imposed chairman is an embodiment of all that is wrong with Nigeria? And this choice was singularly made by a leader who fancies himself as a man of integrity. What is going on at the party should surprise no one and I will be deceiving myself if I tell you. I’m disappointed. I’m not because I don’t expect any better behaviour from them. It is a party of dogs eat dogs.
What is your take on the humongous fee (N100 million, N40million) for the collection of the presidential form. Is there any implication?
It is not just humongous, it is an advertisement of impunity at the highest level. Can you see how this bill is being trivialised? The levity with which it is dispensed makes you wonder if the sum we are talking about is N1,000. And many of them are public officials whose sworn affidavit of asset declaration are with the Code of Conduct Bureau-from which we can establish their income status inclusive of their present emoluments. Why has the ICPC or EFCC not gone after them to establish how they got the money? Yet we are surprised that people are being kidnapped for ransom. When the army of the dispossessed and underclass see this wanton display of corruption and theft in high places can you blame them for taking recourse to banditry to extort their own share of the national pie?
The Southeast is complaining that the large number of presidential aspirants is a ploy to frustrate their zone from getting the presidential seat in 2023. Do you share in such view?
I really don’t see the correlation here. If we accept the principle of zoning the presidency to a particular zone, how does the number of aspirants from the zone become a problem? The principle is not predicated on any condition other than the eligibility to contest for the office by aspirants from the zone and the preclusion of other zones from contesting.
The Southeast said both the APC and the PDP should have zoned the presidential slot of their different parties to the Southeast zone if they had wanted the region to emerge as the president of the country in 2023?
As the cliché goes you can take the horse to the river, but you cannot force it to drink. One way or the other, both parties, APC and PDP committed themselves to the North /South rotation convention. I then felt embarrassed and disgusted when it was being contested that the rotation was open to the three geopolitical zones in the South. At the end of the day it was up to the president, were he disposed towards accepting the utility of the prescription for national unity and integration to drive the actualisation of the rotation to the Southeast zone. Unfortunately, we have a president who is apparently not only indisposed to the notion, but is allegedly working towards the enthronement of a northern moslem successor. In the circumstance, the South and the Middle Belt especially the Southeast should be thinking of withdrawing participation in the elections altogether. You see there should be a point at which you say thus far but no further. This is the kind of language political bullies understand
Are you confident the 2023 elections will hold given the rising spate of insecurity in the country?
According to the Abacha doctrine any security breakdown that lasts beyond 48 hours has the element of government complicity. As I earlier remarked, Nigeria is on a free fall where any outrage can occur including the non-materialisation of the 2023 elections. If the elections hold as scheduled, it will not be for lack of efforts to thwart it. And, of course, the potential manipulations and outcome of the elections may actually be the casus belli for monumental crisis.
But are you optimistic that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will deliver the 2023 elections?
Yes, it can deliver a rigged manipulated election, but it cannot deliver a free and fair one.
What kind of a president do we need at this crucial time and are you satisfied with the quality of aspirants parading themselves so far to lead Nigeria?
Peter Obi is an exemplar, but the tragedy of Nigeria is not a lack of leadership materials, it is that the status quo would valiantly exert itself to frustrate the emergence of anything that is good for the progress of Nigeria.
But why are Nigerians still allowing the status quo to continue to manipulate the system for them?
I don’t quite understand what you mean. It is difficult for any divided and consequently weak society to resist the tyranny of the status quo. But pushed to the extreme you are going to provoke the kind of separatist self-determination groups that has become the vogue in contemporary Nigeria. We are also seeing the intimations of anarchic implosion all over the place. With the prospect of economic collapse indicated by markers such as paying over 90 per cent of national income to service, Nigeria is headed for a perfect storm scenario. Nigeria has become a basket case and I can only pity the Buhari successor who is going to inherit this grand failure.
The ruling APC government under President Muhammadu Buhari has been unable to fix neither the economy nor security. What may be the cause?
The cause is the omission and commission of the man in whose table the buck stops namely President Mohammadu Buhari.
What are really your fears today for Nigeria?
That it may be too late to salvage Nigeria.
You said it may be too late to salvage Nigeria, but it is not impossible. So what exactly needs to be done concretely to salvage Nigeria while some critics say Nigeria needs restructuring, some have also argued that with good leadership even without restructuring Nigeria can be fixed. What view do you align with?
Again as the saying goes you cannot build something on nothing. No modern political system is built on the presumption of getting good leadership. Science is predicated on the worst, not the best-case scenario. Hence the prior necessity of drawing up a groundnorm called the constitution that stipulate the prescriptions for assuring the survival and good health of society regardless of the worst case scenario of bad leadership. Political science proceeds from the premise and assumption that you are going to get bad leadership hence the anticipatory mechanism of mitigating the potential damage such leadership can inflict. Constitution is the primary organising principle and condition for the maintenance and sustenance of the polity. Leadership is the secondary factor. So until Nigeria rediscovers the country specific federalism that was prescribed for Nigeria in the independence constitution Nigeria has no prospect of durability. This is the advocacy of the proponents of restructuring. The irony here is that it was those who took Nigeria from four regions to the 36 nominal states we presently operate are the people who restructured Nigeria into the subsisting deformity. The restoration back to federalism will require a consequential constitutional rectification.
