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Elder statesman and former Minister of Education Alhaji Dauda Birma, has said there are attempts to destabilise Nigeria. In this interview with VINCENT KALU, the Sarkin Gabas Adamawa called on security forces to come down hard on foreigners, who are agents of destabilisation.
What is your view on the state of the nation?
We are in a transition; we had a very hectic time during election, and the elections are over, the winners are constituting their cabinets. What we need to do is to wait and see what will come out from various governors and the federal government. We have this problem of insecurity, which I understand is being tackled now. Banditry has taken over a substantial part of the north, but I believe that the police are on top of the matter.
Kidnapping is all over; we used to hear about it in the South, which started in the Niger Delta, but it has come to the North. We are told that kidnapping was deliberately brought to the North to destabilise the region. It is a very worrisome situation because if you talk about poverty in the North and when you add kidnapping, which is preventing farmers from attending to farms, then the issue of poverty is going to be compounded.
I hope the security agencies should be up and doing, but more than that, I believe that community leaders should also get up and tackle this issue before it is too late. This is putting a very big question mark on the future of this country because if insecurity is what we can boast of; if robbery, kidnapping, rustling are what we can boast of, then a big question mark is put on the future of Nigeria.
Talking about kidnapping, it is becoming alarming in the Southwest, and the victims allege that herdsmen are responsible
You cannot doubt anything. People will not talk about what they have not seen or heard. I have heard about it, but I have been told authoritatively that when you hear them speak, the Fulani language they speak is alien to Nigeria; it is Fulani language of some parts of West Africa.
So, the authorities should now look beyond our borders, as people who are not happy or interested in the peaceful future of Nigeria have recruited people from outside who are perpetrating this heinous crime. For ages, the Fulani herdsmen who normally live in the bush may have been associated with robbery, but kidnapping is a new phenomenon now. I’m told that they are going to take kidnapping to frightening level because they want to destabilise Nigeria, particularly, Northern Nigeria. The phenomenon now is what they are doing in western Nigeria, but there is nowhere you can deny the fact; the victims are not talking out of their imagination, they are talking about what they have seen, heard; their experiences.
You talked about these kidnappers being foreigners, does this not cast doubt on the security agencies?
We have porous borders; people choose when to come into Nigeria, people who are not Nigerians are coming into the country to destabilise it. Our security forces should go against them. When you see foreigners coming in at will, carrying guns and doing what they do, you feel sorry for this country. Our security agencies should wake up, so that those who are not foreigners but are involved in perpetrating these heinous crimes should be contained, arrested and punished according to the law of the country.
We have taken too many things for granted so far, and if we want to build this country, we must be serious to deal with these foreigners who come into this country at will and please themselves with what they do.
Buhari said recently that true federalism is the only way to go, what is your take on this?
When people talk about true federalism, they are talking about federalism from their perspectives. I keep saying this, we should organise a roundtable where we talk to each other politely, nicely in a cordial atmosphere, but when we insult and shout at each other and say, this is what we want, it will not get us anywhere.
We have the National Assembly, and they are the ones to amend our constitution, so we must be very careful who we elect into the NASS, we must talk to them; our leaders, our opinion leaders and elites must talk with these people on what we want. The sovereignty lies in the individuals, but they have surrendered their sovereignty by electing some people into the National Assembly.
The NASS we have now is going to be responsive, so what we should do now is to organise our thinking; get our thinking under one roof and talk so that when we agree on what we want, we then take it to the National Assembly because everybody can see the gap that exits, which have made our federation difficult. People now choose what they think is in their advantage and propagate it.
Now, it is coming from the president, how do you advise him on how to go about implementing true federalism?
Let him talk to various states; let him talk to various geo-political zones, and they should be balanced people, and not people who are on the lunatic fringe; people who will be reasonable and see reasons in each other so that we can agree among ourselves, but if we delay it and it gets worse by the day, and from talking we get to shouting and from shouting we get to harming each other, then there will be no Nigeria to call our own.
People are already talking of where political power should reside in 2023; some argue that the North should retain it, while others argue that it should be Southwest, some say it is the turn of Southeast, what is your position on this?
Nigeria, as a growing concern is dependent on give and take, we have the North and the South divide, and if you remember the amalgamation of 1914 was on the Northern Protectorate and the Southern Protectorate, then we have to be sensible.
Power should rotate between the North and the South, but we shouldn’t micro zone the seat of power. For me, a Northerner, if anybody from the North is president for two terms, I would expect power to go to the south, but I now ask which part of the south it should go to because if you say you are micro zoning to this area, it makes them lazy, it makes them exclusive that they don’t embrace the others.
For instance, if you look at the north, if power goes to any part of the north, the three northern zones keep quiet and say since it is in the north, we are comfortable, but if it goes to the south, they would not sit and see each other eye to eye and resolve that if it is in the south, it is in the south. I’m the last person to say since it is in the South, let it go to the Southeast, let it go to the Southwest or let it go to the South-south, but anybody who agrees with the opinion of the region should come up.
When Abiola won the June 12 1993 election, I remember how Abiola worked hard to win the sympathy of the North, but for anybody to sit in his corner and say that he is entitled to the presidency, I think it is hallucination and I don’t agree with him. The South is the south and the North is the north and the South has no right to tell us that it should be the Northeast, Northwest or North central, they should allow the North to take their decision, and the North should allow the South to make up with their decision, without coming to say that it must be this enclave or that corner.
Talking about political power, there is this argument that the north has held power up to 42 years of 59 years of independence, but in same region, is where you have the highest illiteracy level, poverty, out of school children, and other negative indices, are you not concerned about this?
There is a general misunderstanding of Nigeria from the beginning to now. One, in the north, the only economic activity is farming, which has been at subsistence level for a long time. There hasn’t been much of economic activity.
However, the south borders the sea, the whitman came and for the last 300 years, have been relating with the South and the South embraced western education and profited from western education, but the North was deliberately denied western education by British conspiracy.
The first person to become a doctor in Northern Nigeria was in 1954, and the first Northerner to become a lawyer is still alive; the first Northerner to become a commercial airline pilot is still alive.
You see that modernity came to the North very late. If you get to the Southwest, by 1810, they had doctors, had lawyers, engineers, nurses, etc because they had access to western education; they have access to economic empowerment because of their proximity to the sea, their proximity to other parts of West Africa where they traded.
So, you should not look at North being backward because they held power. Don’t think that because somebody is in power that he is empowering his people; don’t think so. Look at the landmass of the north; 70 per cent of the landmass of Nigeria is in the north, but I do not buy the idea that because power has resided more in the north that they should be more prosperous.
For instance, look at what they call Boko Haram, which says that people should not expose themselves to modernity and western education, so, these people are living in denial, why should they not be poor? It is our collective responsibility as Northern elites to try and find ways of empowering people, especially economic empowerment. This is what I think we should look at.
Talking about educational development, it took Tanzania about 25 years to migrate an illiteracy nation to a literate nation, having literacy level of 77 per cent, why has it not been so in the North?
Go and look at the map of Tanzania in the context of Africa; it was exposed to India, it was also exposed to Middle East. There was a time when people from other countries through the Cape of Good Hope on their way to travel through Indian Ocean had to go through Tanzania, and then Tanzania had a leadership, which was not quarrelling with each other.
In Nigeria, what we have discovered now is that we should be jealous of each other; we should undermine each other, which is not helping us. We should now work together and stop all these negative tendencies, which we see in social media, where people punch each other and call each other the most derogative names, which have the capacity to break up Nigeria.
People argue that Buhari’s style of governance; the way he makes his appointments fuels agitations across the country, for example, the recent appointment of seven heads of NNPC subsidiaries, where one was for each region of the south and two from Northeast and two from Northwest. The people of South-south say this oil is from their place and the president isn’t sensitive in the appointments
It is laughable. The cabinet has just been dissolved. Who was the minister in charge of oil? Kachikwu was the minster of state for Petroleum, and he ran the place through out the last four years. The new cabinet has not been constituted, and when it is done, we are going to see the new minister in that place.
They are saying that four persons were appointed from the North and three from the South, but when Diezani Madueke was the minister of Petroleum and Okonjo-Iweala was minister of Finance, everything was in the South, did the North commit suicide?
The moment the North does something, it is as if the end of the world is coming, and I don’t subscribe to that. When the political situation is being discussed on representation, people from south look at the north as one geo-political zone. The north is made up of three geo-political zones; 19 state governments, while the south is made up of three geo-political zones.
Therefore, when they are making their analysis, they say, one person from the Southwest, one person from the Southeast and one person from the South-south, and four persons from the North, but the north is made up of three distinct geo-political zones, where we agree with each other because generally speaking, we have the same culture, that we look at politics from one point of view does not mean that the north is one zone.
We should always think of the North as three zones and the South as three zones. This fact is being neglected in the analysis of what comes to the north and what comes to the south.
The South is an entity with 17 state governments, and the North is an entity with 19 state governments, therefore, when things are being shared, don’t look at the north as one entity and then the south as three different entities; the north is three entities and the south is three entities.
This fact is being lost. They say, four northerners; one south easterner, one south westerner and one south-southerner. People should look at it from one point of view and this why the north is being demonised, as if it is only one political zone, it is not.
The thing is that under Northern Nigeria government, our leaders made attempts at forging unity among the various states of the North, and when states were being created even during Gowon’s time, the north had six states and the south had also six states, therefore the north is not one entity; it is three entities that have come together.
