…Says ethnic profiling very dangerous politics
By Daniel Kanu
Elder (Dr) Uma Eleazu, octogenarian and elder statesman, scholar, economist and political strategist, has ran for the office of the president of Nigeria just he has seen it all as far as the country’s politics is concerned.
He is chairman, Board of Trustees, Anya Ndi Igbo and member of Imeobi, Ohaneze Ndigbo worldwide.
The outstanding icon who will be 93 years this June is irked at what he described as latest worrisome developments in the country, and warned on future consequences.
He spoke to Sunday Sun in an exclusive chat on sensitive national issues, including the 2023 elections, Lai Mohammed’s allegation against the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, need for restructuring, and ethnic profiling of the Igbo, among others. Excerpts:
How will you react to the statement credited to the Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, in far away New York that the Labour Party presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, has committed insurrection, a treasonable offence?
I don’t understand what he means when he says Peter Obi has committed insurrection, therefore, he has committed treason. I think there is something going on here. As far as All Progressives Congress, APC, people are concerned, INEC has spoken. Everybody must be silenced. They manufacture stories and hang it on somebody so that while you are struggling to deny it, you will lose sight of the main issue, i.e. challenging the decision of INEC.It is all diversionary. How does he define insurrection, and how does insurrection become treason? It is part of the style of administration we should expect if Bola Ahmed Tinubu, BAT, finally becomes president. Fascism. People like Lai Mohammed should be very careful so as not to put Nigeria in flames.
Peter Obi is not inciting the public; I have been following all his speeches. He is no longer campaigning. They said “go to court” and he has gone to court, INEC refused to allow Labour to inspect the disputed IREV nor the forms E84. Then, Mr. Lai Mohammed turns round and say, PO is causing insurrection. Between INEC and Labour Party, who is inciting or inflaming the public? If the youths now rise up and complain the recalcitrant behaviour of INEC, they say ahaa, it is Peter Obi inciting them. We know their tricks. I have been following his speeches because I like what he was saying during the campaign and since after the campaign, Peter Obi has not made any statement which can be interpreted as inciting anybody to do anything. On the contrary, he has been telling his people to wait, we are in court and we are going to see this thing to the end. As far as I have been following Peter Obi that is what he has been saying and he has not changed. So, I think the Minister of Information is just being himself as usual, the lying minister, misinforming the public in other to create a situation in which they can impound or arrest the Obi-dients. He has to watch those tactics, Nigerians now know better.
As an elder statesman who was part of those that fought for the nation’s independence, how do you feel about hate speeches and the threat to Ndigbo in Lagos…?
(Cuts in) It is sad. I just said to myself, not again. It is a dangerous development. I have been saying, as I have said at different fora, there is no quarrel between Ndigbo as Ndigbo and the Yoruba as Yoruba. Yoruba people extend from Lagos to Kwara and Ndigbo occupy the Southeast geo-political zone. Some of them travel out to the other parts of the country and Lagos being a cosmopolitan city attracts people from all over Nigeria. They come here to work, to make money and go back to their places. And this country being a federation the constitution allows every citizen of Nigeria to vote where ever he or she is, not necessarily where he or she was born. In the last election Nigerian citizens living in Lagos (Igbo, Yoruba, Itshekiri, Hausa, Efik, Ibibio, Ijaw, Fulani etc,) who live in Lagos and registered to vote in Lagos trooped out to exercise their right to vote in Lagos. Those who went out to try to prevent people to come out and vote are the real enemies of Nigerian democracy. And all right thinking people should condemn such acts of intimidation and thuggery. A friend in the church said they stopped him from voting and then he told them he was not Igbo; still they won’t let him pass. They said ‘you look like an Igbo man’. They asked him to speak Yoruba and he couldn’t because he is neither Igbo nor Yoruba, they still stopped him from going to vote and that is what led to a lot of vote suppression especially in the governorship election. So, they had their way though, and elected who they wanted to elect, but that was bad for democracy. That kind of attitude will not help us to build a united country.
Ethnic profiling, which is singling out a people and attacking them or calling them names or painting them such that other people will hate them too, has caused too many wars in the world. Examples are Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Igbo in Northern Nigeria (1966/67). Ethnic profiling is dangerous! Even those who used to go to the shop of an Igbo man to buy whatever they wanted, now hate the shop where they used to go and buy their goods, spare parts for their cars, spare parts for their refrigerators, so they burnt it down. Why? Because the man is Igbo. Let me say it again. There is no battle between the Igbo and the Yoruba over Lagos. There was no Igbo man on the ballot in the March 18 election. We are simply witnessing the activities of little foxes that are trying to destroy the garden of our relationship with the Yoruba people. We won’t allow that, we won’t succumb to such insinuations. As I said the other day, ethnic profiling is very dangerous politics, that is what led to the death of 800,000 in one weekend in Rwanda. That is what led to 300 military officers of Eastern region origin, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik etc, being killed in one night in 1966. It was ethnic profiling. It was ethnic profiling that made over 50,000 Igbo in the North to be killed between 29th of July, and August 1966, all over Northern Nigeria. It is the dark side of our history. Do you then wonder why Hon Minister of Education, Adamu banned history from our schools? We can go on and on to document such events, that was what made us say okay: You don’t want us in this country, let us go and stay in our own country, we called it Biafra. And then somebody said no, no, no, we have to go and bring them back. That led to three years of war in which over a million people died on the battle field, and another two and half million people died because of hunger in the East. After all that, after over 40 years since we came back to Nigeria, to begin again to hear the kind of things that happened in Lagos during the governorship election this March is what made me come out to speak against it. I am not a politician. I am a political scientist. That was why I went to see some older men like me, Chief Ayo Adebanjo etc, who are Yoruba and who know how this country came about, to ask, is this the shape of things to come under a Tinubu administration? We don’t want war, nobody wants it, unless some people want it, at least those of us from the East, we have seen war and we don’t want another one. We don’t wish it for ourselves and we don’t wish it for the people of the West where we now live because if there is any war what you are seeing today may be reduced to rubbles in a matter of weeks. People are looking at Lagos and think it’s a big city, with big houses, big in everything, but believe it or not if we have a war in Lagos in less than six months Lagos will look like Ukraine, and I don’t think that is what we should even dream of or try in Nigeria today. I was in Sierra Leone in 2000 and I could not recognize Freetown, where I lived for two years in the ‘50s.
How will you evaluate the 2023 elections although you have briefly touched on it when responding to the question of hate speech?
How many days do you have to listen to my evaluation? The preparation, the logistics, the conduct on the election day, collation and announcing of results etc. This is not something I can cover in a brief interview. Suffice it to say that Mahmood Yakubu promised more than he could deliver. He mishandled the interface between the BVAS, iREV and the final collation. The election itself was marred by the politicians who were hell-bent on winning at all costs, maybe after this settles down, we should look again at the whole electoral process, whether we should continue this zero-sum game type of politics. In the aftermath of the election, no one has been prosecuted for crimes committed during the election. I read one report that says over 40 was killed in the attempt to go and vote. Has anybody been charged with murder? Will such people be tried and jailed? You see, when people commit crimes and there is no punishment for the crime, criminal behaviour continues unabated. I am still analyzing and processing what happened on February 25 and March 18. The election was a sham. It leads one to speculate that there was a hidden agenda to hand the baton to a particular person. In my opinion it falls short of what can be called “democratic election”.
Looking at Nigeria today, what can be done to salvage the country from drifting further, what do you think is the way forward?
Well, in the past, I have written a very long article, published in some newspapers. My view is that we should go back to the drawing board and restructure this country. There is so much concentration of power at the centre that the centre cannot manage the country.
We should go back to self governing regions. Maybe we keep the geopolitical zones as the new region. Secondly, we do not yet know what democracy is all about. We need to retrain all who want to go into politics about elementary principles of honesty, integrity, probity, and so on. Presidential system of government is complex; maybe we should return to parliamentary system right from the local government level. If we break down the governance of this country into manageable units the coordination will be better and the governance and outcome of government policies will reach the citizens faster. So, I think, what we need to do now is for us to restructure this country. Let me tell you my view on restructuring. There is aerial restructuring i.e. geopolitics. The North has more states and more local governments than the South. Secondly, the Federal Government during the military regime took all the sources of income and put them in what they called Federation Account, from there they now give what they like to the states and to the local governments. No one goes to check what they do with the money. When we were young, when the British ruled this country, there were only 27 provinces in Nigeria, the South had more provinces than the North even though the North had a larger area. The census, the British conducted in 1951 (because we were not yet independent) shows that there were more people in the South than in the North. When we got another census in 1961 it showed the same thing, that there were more people in the South than in the North, but the North rejected it and it was a disputed census, so every region just claimed how many people they think they have and that is why till today, we don’t have a credible census and we keep on estimating that we are 200 and something million people. Probably, if we really get down to a proper census, we may not be up to 180 million and you can also see what is surfacing with the election. I don’t think that the electoral figures published by the INEC are correct. INEC told the world that registered voters in Nigeria was 93. 4 million and then they said those that picked their PVCs were about 87 million, now it means that about six million people did not care or did not know that they were registered voters. Mark what I said, either they did not care to go for PVC or they did not know that they were registered voters and we have been talking about registering children, ghost names, foreigners etc. So, if we are 200 million or so and 93.4 million according to INEC registered to vote, that is those above 18 years, it means the remaining, let’s say 107 million, making up the 200 million, are children under 18 years.
Think about it. So there is so much self deceit in governance in Nigeria and we all need to sit down and restructure the whole thing, restructure our geopolitics, restructure our economic management systems and restructure our security system, restructure the financial system, etc. In fact, there are so many things that need to be restructured and the simple way of doing politics. Let’s go back to where we started in 1954.