Interview of Dr. Uma Eleazu by Dan Kanu of Sun Newspaper
Originally published on Sunday 16th April, 2023
Dan Kanu (DK):
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 offense?
Dr. Eleazu:
I don’t understand what the Hon Minister 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 APC people are concerned, INEC has spoken. Everybody must be silenced. They manufacture stories and hang it on somebody so that while the person is struggling to deny it, he 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 this administration, we should expect it to continue if BAT finally becomes President.
Fascism.
People like Lai Mohammed should be very careful in their utterances so as not to put Nigeria in flames.
Peter Obi is not inciting the public; I have been following all his speeches since after the elections. He is no longer campaigning. They said “go to court” and he has gone to court, INEC refused to allow his party to inspect the disputed IREV, nor the forms EC84. Then, Mr Lai Mohammed turns round and says, Peter Obi is causing insurrection.
How?
Between INEC and Labour Party, who is inciting or inflaming the public? If the youths now rise up and complain about the recalcitrant behavior of INEC, they will say “Aha!.. 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 by any stretch of imagination be termed or 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 order to create a situation in which they can impound or arrest the Obi-Dients. He has to watch those tactics, Nigerians now know better.
DK:
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?
Dr. Eleazu:
(Cut’s 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 Yorubas as Yorubas. Yoruba people extend from Lagos to Kwara and Ndigbo occupies 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. This country being a federation the constitution allows every citizen of Nigeria to vote where ever he or she lives, not necessarily where he or she was born.
In the last Presidential and Governorship elections, Nigerian citizens living in Lagos (Igbos, Yorubas, Itshekiri’s, Hausas, Efiks, Ibibios, Ijaws, Fulani’s etc,) who live and registered in Lagos trooped out to exercise their right to vote in Lagos. Those who went out to try to prevent people from coming out and voting 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 wouldn’t let him pass, they told him “you look like an Igbo man.” They asked him to speak Yoruba and he couldn’t because he was 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 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, Igbos 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; in addition, they burn 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 18th 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 eight hundred thousand (800,000) in one weekend in Rwanda. That is what led to three hundred (300) military officers of Eastern region origin, Ibibio, Igbo, Efik etc, being killed in one night in 1966. It was ethnic profiling that caused over fifty-thousand (50,000) Igbos in the North to die 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 public schools?
We can go on and on to document such events, that was what made the easterners say, if you don’t want us in this country, then let us go and form in our own country…we called it Biafra. And then somebody said no, no, no, we have to go and bring them back. Some of you young ones may not have heard the slogan in the sixties. “To keep Nigeria One Is a task that must be done”. That led to 3years of war in which over a million people died on the battle field on both sides, 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 year, 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 Yorubas 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, I believe no right thinking person wants war in Nigeria today. At least those of us from the East 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 Lagos or the West where we now live, because if there is any war all 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 start a war in Lagos, in less than 6 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 went to Sierra Leone in 2000 as a UNIDO Consultant, and I could hardly recognize Freetown, where I lived for two years in the ‘50s. It was completely in ruins.
DK:
How will you evaluate the 2023 elections though you have briefly touched on it when responding to the question on hate speech?
Dr. Eleazu:
How many days do you have to listen to my evaluation?
Is it the preparation, the logistics, the conduct on the election day, collation and announcing of results etc. Is it the blatant disregard of the rules by INEC officials not to talk of the brigandage of the politicians?
This is not something I can cover in a brief interview. Suffice it to say that Mahmoud, the INEC chairman, promised more than he could deliver. He mishandled the interface between the BVAS, i-REV 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 people were 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 behavior will continue unabated. I am still analyzing and processing what happened on n Feb 25th and March 18th.
The election was a sham.
It leads one to speculate whether 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”.
DK:
Looking at Nigeria today, what can be done to salvage the country from drifting further, what do you think is the way forward?
Dr. Eleazu:
Well, in the past I have written articles published in some newspapers on the 1999 Constitution. 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 which the centre cannot manage. Why can’t each state set up its own election machinery and conduct state and local government elections leaving INEC to handle federal elections? This is just one example.
See what they are messing up with security. We need to review the Legislative List and whittle down the powers the military arrogated to itself during the military dictatorship. We should go back to self-governing regions. Maybe we keep the present geopolitical zones as the new regions. We should devolve more powers to the States and Local government.
Two, 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 responsibility in governance.
A 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. 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.
We need to review revenue allocation and fiscal policies. 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) showed 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 thought they had 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 PVC’s was about 87 million, it means that about 6 million people did not care or did not know that they were registered voters. Either they did not care to go for their 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, (the 200 million minus 93 million) are children under 18 years.
Think about that.
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 including the way we do politics.
Democracy is about making informed choices about who gets what, when, and how (apologies to Harold Lasswell)
Let’s go back to where we started in 1954.