General Alani Akinrinade, former Chief of Army Staff and pro-Democracy Activist, in this interview with Soji Akinrinade, Executive Editor, Newswatchplus, discusses what needs to be done to grow democratic governance.
Newswatchplus: How would you assess the practice of democracy in Nigeria since its return nearly 25 years ago?
Akinrinade: When we look at the journey till date, I find that the last time we had real democracy was before the coup of 1966, the first coup-de tat because then there seemed to be every effort made, at least at the regional level, not just to make representation very general and very intimate to people, but also to allow Nigerians to elect people of their choice. Then there wasn’t this much influence of money. If there was money influence, it was certainly to help run the parties and aid their campaigns (which needed a lot of money to move around). I think that was the focus. I think we made one big mistake, the military, I mean. We thought by changing the guard and going down the ladder to bring in new people, fresh people, and young people, things would be okay. Particularly in the time of Ibrahim (Babangida), there were efforts to bring in young people. The approach had some merit, but the people didn’t have the experience. And what is more, our economy wasn’t too good. We were desperately looking for money. So, money started having the influence it never had in our first republic. That is how the matter became rusty for me because I can’t remember anybody I voted for who came back to the community to address the people. At least in my state Osun, I can say that I didn’t see the kind of rapport necessary between those who are governing us and the ordinary citizens. The politicians of the earlier era were mainly professionals, most of them. I know that in my state then or the West in general, politicians were mainly professionals who were teachers, retired and otherwise, and lawyers, who came from their chambers to represent their people. Now when I look at my local government, I keep arguing when they say “give money directly to the local government”. If you give it to my local government, nothing different is going to happen because the people there are not self-sufficient, I mean the people we say we’ve elected. They are not self-sufficient people who are ready, confident and with a programme to help the people. Until we have people who will stop lying to us on the soapbox, we will not experience democracy as it is defined. This one, to me, has never really been the government of the people, by the people and for the people. That confidence which people have in their leaders, at least those who represent them and the kind of dialogue that should be going one among the politicians and among our elite, is not there. We have refused stubbornly to have an elite consensus in the country, so where is the country going? What is the focus? Where are we going? We don’t have a plan that allows us to measure each year how our governments have performed. What we do is sporadic. I think until we have leaders who decide to bite the bullet and say “This is where Nigeria ought to be, but this is where we are. But we will still get there but this is how we are going to get there.” There must be an elite consensus on that. So, if there are pains and pangs and complaints that people are giving, as they are doing right now, everybody will know that there will be some glorious dawn, despite the problems, but, maybe not as soon as we are envisaging it, because the system had been so badly damaged.
It is this leadership that we need. I expect, for instance, that the APC would have a group of elders who will sit down in some private place and decide that because we have so many years to govern, this is what we must do. But these are the pains that people are going to suffer before we achieve our goals. They must be ready to explain to the people that “yes we are going to some destination but there are all sorts of obstacles on the road and we just have to cross them. Politicians have to live by personal examples.” Do as I say, is not good in this kind of politics, it should be doing as I do. The people we are imitating, have their checks and balances. They have times when they throw out their leaders, or as in England, impeach their prime minister. His party sends him packing. They don’t even wait for the country to do so. We don’t have that kind of system here. Even if we have it, it will not work. We know crooks who are in our Assemblies, people know them. There is a provision in our constitution that allows you to recall your elected representative, but I am afraid once you elect a legislator, you have no hope in hell of recalling him for bad behaviour. We have seen some of them who have behaved badly and their people are not happy with them, but they cannot remove such misbehaving legislators simply because of the power of money.
NewswatchPlus: Can we reform the system?
Akinrinade: The system itself is not bad, at least the theoretical part of it, where every four years you vote to elect a government; that sort of thing. But what are really voting for? You can’t hold anything against them when there was no big substance on the table offered by them before they were elected. So, things are left to their discretion. Some we trust, some we don’t but whatever the case, we have to elect somebody and put him there. Once they get there they don’t represent our views, they represent themselves.
Of course, there is a sprinkling of respectable people there, but I don’t think they are enough to have the clout to make fundamental changes to society. And this society has to change. The first thing is corruption. What are we really doing about it? Journalists tell us about people rounded up or accused of corruption, but where is the result? What lesson have we learnt from the cases? Nobody is leading by example. What we have is all smoke but you can’t find the fire. Our kind of democracy doesn’t need panel beating, it needs people all around the country who will rethink exactly how this thing should be moved forward. It is not about PDP or APC of LP; I am talking about the elite who would move this society forward. They have to sit together one day and talk among themselves. Yes, we have a terribly bad constitution but people can work with it up to the point that it is clear to them that they could have done better but for the constitution. At that point, people can arrange to change all those clauses that impede the progress of democracy. Right now. I am a supporter of the constitution spelling out how each entity will look after itself by not looking up, down, or anywhere but looking at themselves. That constitution should be able to do that. And we had something akin to this before 1966. We threw it away. And then when the politicians came in, instead of correcting what was inside that was being used as an excuse for non-performance, they didn’t do that. Why we have pockets of trouble in different states and people rising against each other and the state, is because there is no elite consensus that says this is how we are going to move and this is the contribution of everybody to it and a process will account for the contributions of everybody. There is no such thing. I don’t know how much money is sent to my local government every month. All the complaint is that Oshogbo is not giving them money. We pay taxes, you get money from the centre and they can also raise money, which they don’t care to do. Even if they do, they send people to the market here and they use all sorts of ways to harass and collect money from the people. For me, the process is not working and I think it is because of the way we are configured. If everybody knows he has to look after his household first as his first responsibility, I know people will try their utmost best to do so. And that goes for my local government and that goes for the state government. And the federal government should recuse itself from a lot of things. You ask somebody to patch my road from Oshogbo to Ife and you are sitting in Abuja. However energetic the minister is, he will still have to send people around. And what you don’t see, don’t testify to it because they will lie to you. That is why most of the roads are bad. It is not that if they look in the books nobody has been spending money, but what is on the ground. Abuja is too distant for a lot of things. It is the military that turned education, agriculture and most things into one channel system where only the federal government gives this and gives that. For what reason are you doing that? How do you want accountability to be effective so that people can see exactly what is going on? It is very difficult for the president to sit in Abuja and not be told lies about what is happening. Maybe when we are lucky and we get a group like the one that is there now, if they stop the bickering and all the kind of nonsense we are hearing around the whole place, and come out straight to let us know where we are going, and everybody in the president’s team keys into it, (and those who don’t get them out), we can begin to make some sense of how to sort ourselves out. But here, you may have a free hand to put somebody in your government, but to get them out becomes very difficult. It becomes, personal, it becomes tribal, it becomes religious and all sorts of things hindering even a president from doing many things. He has to balance this and balance that, in the process of wanting to get things done. I admire those who are doing it without too many complaints.
Democracy, they say, is the best form of government but some of the people who have succeeded with it, even from Socrates time, have been leaders who their people allowed to use power judiciously. Yes, there is democracy, but the definition must be thoroughly examined and those who will operate it will be men and women of integrity, valour, etc. We are too centralised for us to pick those people. There is no training curve yet people find themselves becoming legislators
NewswatchPlus: Do you think if we had followed the parliamentary form of government, democracy in Nigeria would have done better?
Akinrinade: I think so. To me, it is closer to the people. The people who represented us then were people that the public knew and when they failed they were ashamed to face their people. Now it is not like that. The system has been abandoned to all sorts of characters at the local level and they do what they like. Everybody wants money. It is no longer a job for serving the people. Even the constitution that we complain about every time has certain provisions that can solve some of the problems that we are facing. Look at Ondo State now; the constitution has enough provisions to help them sort out the problem. They know the person they elected, so why worry about his family or his friends? They are not part of the package. You elected the governor; he is the one you should deal with. Use the Constitution to deal with the issue.
I agree that we have to work on the Constitution, at least some aspects of it that will bring its provisions closer to the people and compel those people we elect servants of the people for whatever number of years they are elected for.
NewswatchPlus: Would you say that in nearly 25 years this is a failed experiment?
Akinrinade: We have made some strides. It is not all woes. But we look away when malfeasance happen, maybe because the Constitution didn’t envisage some things. At least, whether we like it or not, the citizens still feel they are free to go about their business; they feel free to express their thoughts and they feel free to make suggestions to anyone; nobody has been raiding the press to collect all the editors and dump them in jail without prosecution. We have made some strides. What I am really about is how can we go that far as if we didn’t have somewhere we are coming from. Without making sure we get a better deal, year in, and year out. People who make strides are semi-dictators. They have a mind of where they are going. Admittedly most of them are smaller countries than ours. Most of them are not as complicated as this country. Even with that, with any consensus in your state, regardless of which party I like or which one I don’t, what will be good is if the rest of us like what we see, we can always achieve it without us bothering about one party or the other. These things should not be treated along party lines. We should treat our people as indivisible people, not party members. I think by and large, some of our states have done better than others. And it is not because they were dictators but because they knew where they wanted to go and they were able to convince their people and their people were able to see steps in that direction. That is what I think President Tinubu has to do. He is trying to do it but he must do it more vigorously and use everything within his power to achieve his goals. I like the Minister of Works when he talks about his tasks even though he is fighting all sorts of battles with naysayers. That is the attitude we have to cultivate. That is to say: we are serving the people and their interest is paramount, and we should stop people who are pilfering and stealing, etc. How can you tell me an accountant has access to N1 billion, not to talk about N90 billion? These are outrageous figures. If that size of money went into our economy, even one-quarter of it, it wouldn’t be as difficult for us as it is now. We won’t be owing so much money. Of course, people owe money, but the question is: what did not do with it? It shouldn’t be that official locked it up in his house or it is in his bank account. What have we done about corruption? Who have we used as an example? Even some of our own people are disciplined by courts outside our jurisdiction. Why can’t we do the same here? What are we afraid of? We can go by your words we look at what you do yourself. There is nobody who fights corruption from the grassroots. The pickpocket in Kano is hungry. He is at his wit’s end. The man who eat, drank with his friends, and can send his children to school still stole our money and we dilly-dally about it. We want to plea bargain; they want to return some of the money. No way, you return what you stole from us and we’ll calculate the interest, in lieu of any other way to punish such a person. And if the offense attracts a prison sentence, then you must go to jail. If you do that to around 50 of such people, put them in the sun to let them see what the farmers have to do to get his produce, you will appreciate not just life, you will appreciate your people and have a rethink that stealing country’s money is not a good idea. But we are afraid to even do anything with those people. We are misinterpreting our constitution. No constitution ever allows people to pilfer the commonwealth. A few days ago, I read in the news that they want to remove the punishment for writing dud cheques. Why? Why must we be going backwards? We are trying to clean the country and people are trying to go soft on criminals. Why is the government afraid of the laws that can cleanse the society? Yes, democracy is run by people but we still need the leadership that will point us in the right direction; a leadership that knows where it is going and how to get there. Constitution or no constitution, let us use all our energy in the positive way to get ourselves out of the woods.
