Your impression of the national conference
I feel as if the president had to rush through the programme because for a long while it appeared that he was not enthusiastic about the idea of whether sovereign national conference or national conference at all. That he probably got persuaded that it was in the national interest for us to come together, dialogue and diffuse tension that has become palpable in the nation. So he set up this presidential advisory committee which had a very strict timeframe to work with and delivered and came up with a workable recommendation on how to put this together. It is to the credit of the president that one, he yielded to public demand by convening the conference and he has implemented the decisions of the advisory committee practically to the letter. That is indeed again an indication that even if this conference comes to the end, it is likely that this president will implement the recommendations. It is a conference that is going to be significant in the life of this nation.
Are there things you feel would have been done differently since the confab took off?
Honestly, the initial tensions that the nation saw in the first two weeks of the conference were normal, especially in the context of the state of the nation. We were already all worked up before the conference started; we had the Boko Haram issue, we even had external prediction about the break-up of Nigeria; there were people who were wondering whether Nigeria was worth preserving. As we were celebrating our centenary, there were people who came up with the silly notion that Lord Lugard said that after 100 years we are free to break up or renegotiate our existence.
Even if Lugard had said so, I thought it was very silly for any serious citizen to think that Nigeria would break up because Lugard said so, then it must happen.
Now we have the opportunity of coexisting for 100 years, it is up to us to actually decide to make it a great nation. I think we will be doing disservice to the black race and the whole of Africa if we mismanage Nigeria. So, the tension that was manifest in the early stages was understandable in the contest of this kind of background. However, it was well managed by the leadership of the conference and diffused already.
In the committees where the real work is, you can imagine how we were splitting hair about whether it should be 70 per cent or3/4 or 2/3 where as in reality most decisions in conferences of this nature are by consensus. It is either consensus or compromise solution. So we’ll have a situation where somebody wants a clause added in the constitution and another person says the clause should be expunged from the constitution, and at the end of the day you find a middle ground. That’s the way conferences normally proceed. This is not going to be different, we are going to have consensus on many issues; we are going to have compromises here and there. We will probably end up with everybody going home with a bit of something and nobody is going back home with everything he wanted because it is a give and take kind of scenario.
Another thing is that many Nigerians who are expecting some drastic changes will be disappointed because this not the way it works. When we have counter demands you end up making very little changes- too many people meeting in opposite directions at the end of the day. Common sense demands that you move back from your position and accept middle of the road solutions. So there are not going to be drastic changes in the constitution or the life of the nation. But the little bit of concession here and there will serve as reassurance that we care about each other, that we need each other, that we need to continue to communicate in a positive manner in order to promote peace and harmony in the land. I think many people who are watching Nigeria are in for big surprise. We will pull out from all our tensions in ways that would surprise the world. Boko Haram came up suddenly but I can assure you that Boko Haram will die suddenly and some people will be wondering “what happened?” Our case is always different because this is a very special nation. This is a unique nation; we are a vibrant people; we are most exuberant in our way of doing things but we are not mad and when we get to the brink we always know how to pull back in order to make sure we continue to enjoy the good life that God has given us in Nigeria.
Is Boko Haram self inflicted?
Yes, in a sense that we have created an environment in Nigeria that made it easy to recruit not only terrorists but mischief makers, even criminal groups. Whenever you have a situation where a nation has not adequately paid attention to their education system to ensure that every child in the nation has educational opportunity and acquires skills that would enable him or her earn a living, that nation is already sowing seed of tension in the future. Then to compound that is the fact that we have an army of young unemployed people, many of them largely unemployable, then you are surely in trouble, and it’s just a matter of time before it will explode.
Now, it is exploding here and there and we are panicking but it’s a way of saying “hey wake up and get your act right.” If we get our act right, we would have learnt the right lessons from all these tensions, I believe that we will get it under control. I have no doubt in my mind that these people from northern Nigeria can actually, constructively engage the Boko Haram people, they are not faceless and it is not true that they cannot be reached. Those who can reach them feel it is none of their business; some of them even think they won’t do it until after 2015, too bad for Nigeria, too bad for northern Nigeria, too bad for the north east because nothing is going to change in 2015; 2015 is elementary, it is predictable– Jonathan will win, PDP will win, we will now have a stronger opposition, opposition will gain some grounds and then it is over.
There will be those who will do the traditional thing of protesting, it’s silly. These things are not as complicated as they make it look like, it is predictable. So I believe that at the end of the day, Boko Haram, may be by 2016, will be over because by then, people would have seen the futility of that method of trying to gain power; people will have seen the futility of folding their hands in the hope that they will make political capital out of it or at the end of the day those who folded their hands will be among the victims if they don’t act fast.
On illegal entry points as revealed to your committee by the Comptroller General. NIS
Well, what the Comptroller General of Immigration came to do was to throw more light on the challenges of the immigration sector. Our committee had highlighted what we said were the possibilities and he came and indeed, more or less, confirmed that immigration will go a long way to solving a lot of security problems of the country and there is a wide gap between what can be or should be and what is and the main constraint is funding.
We believe that by the end of this conference, we will recommend that immigration department should now have a special squad put in charge of border patrol. Now that’s not me, it is an idea that has been on the ground before now.
There is even some provision for that in the current budget but it is a paltry sum compared with what is required. We will recommend that government should learn to put in place some preventive measures rather than fire fighting approach. So, if we are going to be more proactive and defensive, then we have to strengthen the immigration department to be able to achieve some measure of efficiency in border patrol. There is nowhere in the world where you achieve 100 per cent efficiency or effectiveness in border patrol.
If you put electric fence, smugglers and child traffickers or even those who want to come to your country by all means can construct underground tunnels like they do in the border between US and Mexico and they smuggle things in, or like they do between Egypt and Palestine. So there is no full proof method of border patrol but what we know is that we can reduce the level of porosity that is bedevilling our borders now.
That is what our interaction with the Comptroller General helped us to identify. It is like we have now covered less than 10 per cent of the need that is on the ground. There are too many illegal routes through which people come into Nigeria regularly. They are aware of it but there is little or nothing they can do about it. We are going to provide the laws and the executive advice to ensure that that is remedied.