A public affairs analyst and Convener of the Reset Lagos Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Adetokunbo Pearse, has said that the establishment of state police remains the solution to tackling the high rising insecurity in the country.
In an interview with VINCENT KALU, the member of the PDP National Presidential Campaign Council, 2023, noted that the government has not lived up to expectations in the areas of security, economy and governance.
What is your view on the state of the nation?
The assessment can be measured in various areas of governance. The first is security. It is clear to everybody that we are in a crisis. There is kidnapping everywhere; every zone is under siege and nobody is safe. Nowhere is safe; traditional rulers, government officials, security officials, pastors, doctors, children, university students in their hostels, abductions are everywhere, terrorism is everywhere. In the North East, we thought that things were cooling off, but Boko Haram and gunmen are abducting dozens of people, killing dozens. Security wise, we are at zero level.
The economy is in shambles, cost of living is rising every day. People are shouting and complaining everywhere because they cannot afford to buy food; basic food items are not affordable. The cost of petrol has tripled in price since this administration came. Before then, a litre of petrol was about N123, and now it is about N630, and everybody needs to buy petrol for their generators since public power supply is not reliable. Every time, the national grid collapses and for days or weeks, we don’t have light. All of these have affected the economy because productivity is at an all-time low and companies are folding up, foreign companies are leaving the country to nearby countries like Ghana. Unemployment is at the highest rate, inflation is the highest it has ever been. Minimum wage is N30, 000, which is not even the actual minimum wage because the government has not been able to enforce it. I know hundreds of people who are still earning N20, 000 a month. I know graduates that I taught about 10 years ago and they are earning about N100,000 monthlyW. I know a person who works at the Nigeria Ports Authority and lives at Ikorodu, he is only able to do one week on and one week off because the cost of transportation is N2000 to go to work and N2000 to return home. It about N120,000 a month. If he spends N120,000 a month on transportation, what is left from his salary is N25,000. It is impossible. So he has decided to be going once every other week. The economy suffers because of low productivity, as people cannot go to work to produce, so the country loses money.
The day President Bola Tinubu announced that he was going to fix the situation of the dollar, he failed because the key thing to do that was to delete the parallel market so that we have only one bank rate. But he has not done it. The market rate now is N1,475 to one dollar. In the bank, it is about N850 to one dollar. The other rate for traders which is open window market is about N855. We are having double rates. The economy is in deep trouble.
In the area of governance, we have waste, over bloated bureaucracy; we have the highest number of ministers we ever had. They are giving themselves money every day. They are going to fix the vice president’s house for N500 billion – all sorts of waste of money. The president is just appointing people every day and they all have to be paid. You have too much corruption; you have the Betta Edu case, which is a drop in the ocean. Corruption is from head to toe. You have waste of money and waste of resources and you are appointing people who have failed in their various governments in the past just to pay back these people. He is using his appointment to satisfy his own personal ambitions at the expense of the nation. In all three areas – security, economy and governance, it is zero.
What drastic measures should be taken because it seems the security challenge is defying solutions?
In the short run, the government establishes in every state a paramilitary operation whereby wherever there is a case of abduction, this group moves in right away. But the great deal of our problem is not just the law. Even when we have that paramilitary going, there has to be proper accountability so that when they find the criminals, they’ll bring them to book. It appears that there is cooperation between the security officers and the kidnappers because they find out that people are held ransom, the victims pay the ransom, and what do the police do? They escort them to go and deliver the ransom and yet they don’t arrest the people responsible for kidnapping. A lot has to do with enforcement, and government has to be transparent in this operation. That is what must be done in the short run.
Don’t forget, for security, Vice President Shettima must be held accountable. He said when they were campaigning for this job that he would be in charge of security to make sure that we are safe in this country, while Tinubu would be in charge of the economy. Of course, Tinubu has failed in the economy. From the day he removed fuel subsidy, the economy collapsed. I said it and a lot of professional economists also said so. As for security issue, Shettima should come and tell us what is going on. That is why I said that government has to probe all these things; it is not just a matter of sending in the military.
In the long run, we need to increase the personnel of our police force. And that is why we must have state police so that we can police at the state level, local level and the community neighbourhood level as they have in a true federal system. There must be devolution of powers in the security system to the states so that they can have state police.
One governor said that the state police cannot work because the governors cannot afford to maintain it. This is what I say to that: We should restructure the security system so that we can have more police. One of the things you have to do for the states is to give them powers over their mineral resources as we have in a federation. We cannot have a federation for nothing; you cannot borrow part of the system and not the essential part that will make it work. States should have access to their mineral resources. Right now, states are not generating money, only one or two states are viable in the country. Every state has mineral resources that they can use to develop their economy. If they are allowed to control their resources they can afford to pay their police and run their states.
Analysts argue that the pulling out of three countries, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso from ECOWAS is an indictment on Nigeria because it happened at a time that the Nigerian President is the chairman of the regional bloc. What is your take on this?
It is not about Nigeria. It is about Tinubu. When he became the chairman of ECOWAS, the first thing he did when there was a problem in Niger because the military toppled the civilian government was to sanction the country and threaten to go to war with Niger. He went to the National Assembly to ask for permission to go to war. Just like he did for the removal of subsidy and crashed the economy, he wanted to crash Nigeria. Not only did he sanction Niger, he removed the power supply that we were giving them. When you have those punitive measures against a fellow country and you are not the President of Niger or Mali or Burkina Faso, and so those countries are reacting.
They said the reason they are leaving was the way they were treated, that instead of the country talking to them, they wanted to fight them and force them. Whereas, the coup in that country that brought in the military was legitimate because the people supported the military against a corrupt regime. Is it not what happened in Nigeria that brought about ECOWAS itself? Was Gowon not a beneficiary of a military coup? After that he set up ECOWAS. Tinubu’s position that those three countries are illegitimate governmentS is not going down well with them. These countries are also telling him that you don’t have democracy in your country; that you came in by fiat and that you are not a legitimate government because INEC just gave you the position, and that there is so much corruption in your country; there is so much insecurity and you cannot defend us, you cannot protect us, you have no moral right to question us.
What is going on with ECOWAS is so significant to world development. There is a change going on in the world. You saw what happened when Niger got rid of France. They started getting value for their resources, uranium. For the first time, their uranium is bringing in a revenue that is one thousand times more than what it was getting from France as they are selling it in the open market. Countries are beginning to free themselves from colonial entanglement. Nigeria is so backward and Tinubu doesn’t understand that going to rely on France, America doesn’t work again as things are changing. Donald Trump said it when he was present that ‘don’t rely on us, go and take care of yourselves in your own countries’. That is what is going on now with Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. And many others would join very soon.
If you take a look of the map of ECOWAS now, the whole of the north is gone – 20,000 kilometres of land mass, about seven states of Northern Nigeria , and so the whole of the north is exposed. You are going to get limited access to trade and you are going to get increase in insecurity. These countries now don’t have to protect their borders against bandits and terrorists coming into Nigeria. That is why you now have increase in terrorism in the north, and it is overflowing into South West, and into the rest of Nigeria. All the rams that we eat come from Niger. When we have the next Islamic celebration, you would see that the price of ram has jumped up.
What should be done to reposition Nigeria on the path of growth and development?
We have to stop this approach of mediating problems here and there; we must go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem in Nigeria where you have this level of insecurity, weakness of the economy, poor governance, ineptitude, and nepotism is because the country is not a nation. We are a number of nationalities in one country.
Those of us that are talking about restructuring are not going as far as saying the nationalities must have their countries. No. We are saying let us go back to what worked in Nigeria, which is before independence in 1960 when you had the regions. Each region was developing at its own pace before everybody started to scramble to control the centre.
October 1, 1960 remains the most unfortunate date in the history of Nigeria. the he date we got independence was the beginning of our end. That was when Awolowo left Western Region where he was developing at a rate that was faster than anybody in the world. He came to the centre. That was when Nnamdi Azikiwe left Eastern Nigeria, when he was being called Zik of Africa because of his greatness, and came to the centre. Sardauna, the man who didn’t come to the centre sent his second in command, Tawafa Balewa. They all went to the centre and started fighting for the Nigerian cake and destroyed everything.
We must go back to when Nigeria worked. The eight point agenda of Sardauna, produced in 1953, emphasized that Nigeria cannot function as a nation, that everybody must hold on to their territory. That something we can do in common are control of Customs, army; other than that every region must control its own resources and must control its own affairs. Even the Customs, he said you collect your Customs and pay certain percentage. The regions had their embassies; they had their own trading partners; they were exporting directly. Everybody was exporting something. We must go back to that.
Sardauan was the one that foresaw what was going to happen to Nigeria. All the so-called Western educated people were talking about United States of Nigeria, but he said we cannot unite because we are not at the same level of development. The north was so far behind. The first university graduate from Northern Nigeria was in 1951, whereas the Western Nigeria has been graduating from Furabay and all over the world in the 1800s. Eastern Nigeria came in the 1920s.
Now that we have six geo-political zones, we can use them as the equivalent of regions before independence so that the federating units can have power, semi independence. They are not countries. They are like states in the USA, where each state has its legislation. They have federal laws and they have state laws and they are all very strong. They have state police, they have local police. Wherever they have rural areas, they have rangers. That is what we must have.
So, devolution of powers, decentralisation of governance will improve the situation in the economy. How can Enugu State sitting on the ninth deposit of natural gas in the world not be able to use it to develop the state? It is not only Enugu that would be developed but the whole of Eastern Nigeria. Abia is sitting on oil, but its Federal Government that is taking it. All these years they have been exploiting oil from the Niger Delta area and yet look at the situation of the economy.
If we decentralise, all of these would be removed from the Exclusive list. Ondo is sitting on the third largest bitumen in the world. Zamfara gold is more than gold they ever dug out of Ghana. They are selling it in Dubai market, but the federal government is not getting benefit of it. Only individuals benefit from it. All the illegal mining going on in Nigeria are a waste to the people; they are not seeing the benefit of it, but if we have regions mining their gold officially, mining their resources officially, the regions or state would develop. Restructuring will help salvage the country from destruction in the areas of insecurity, the economy and governance.