2019: Election violence fear is real, Matthew Kukah warns

Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese is the Secretary of the General Abdulsalami Abubakar-led National Peace Committee. Kukah, in this interview, speaks on the mandate of the committee to ensure that the 2019 polls hold in a peaceful atmosphere among other issues in the polity. Bishop Matthew Kukah After concluding your work in 2015, why does the Peace Committee still have to come into the current electoral process? You need to appreciate the fact that democracy is work in progress and, in nation-building, we are relatively very young in this process and, sometimes, relatively unfair to ourselves. Because designing the template, designing building blocks, managing an environment of this nature, and government not coming terms with the reality of the peoples’ existence has also brought to the fore the difficulties of building democracy. Look at the United States of America and some other parts of Europe; our journey has been severely slowed by the successive years consumed by the locusts and, in this particular case, the military. And I am not talking of the military in any disparaging sense because they were agents of democracy. It is a measure of how far we have travelled but going nowhere. Even after 20 years of our so-called return to democracy in 1999, we are still in the hands of a retired general. We have only had briefly the administrations of Goodluck Jonathan and Yar’Adua who never finished their terms. If you divide the period of time we have had with one that has been taken over by General Obasanjo and now General Buhari, you will understand that our democracy is severely slow. Yes, we thought that, as Peace Committee, we will finish our work and go home but we discovered that the baby has something like jaundice that requires more medical attention and we are just like midwives. So it turns out that the midwives can’t go. But we hope that we can continue to nudge and encourage our people so that Nigeria’s system is supported by infrastructure and institutions that can make a process that can become routine. Does it mean that our institutions are not strong yet? Our institutions, almost all of them exist nominally. You have to look at the number of parties General Buhari had to go through to get to power. We have such a volatile political system that there is no party today that has a history of any serious antecedents. We are just lucky that the military is gone. But if you recall, every time the military came and they decided they wanted to go, new political parties were invented. Booing of Buhari: ‘PDP lawmakers behaved like kids, gangsters’ We have not seen any party that grew out of the exigency of the moment taking into consideration our culture, the level of our literacy or lack of it, or a range of factors. Every time we have had things cobbled together to serve as a receptacle to receive power. This is how APC came to be, this is how PDP came to be in 1999. We have not have had political structures with any form of ideological commitment. We talk of like-minded people but what we mean is a bunch of people who simply come together so that they can receive democracy. And many of the actors have always been people who were business partners of the old order, the military people were also very careful and they weighed the consequences of handing over to a particular person. And that continues to hold us back up till today. We are really expecting too much from ourselves. Our politics is, for example, highly violent and may remain so for a while until certain things fall into place and the incentives cease to be what they are. You cannot run the kind of system we are running…and getting into the Senate… the thought of collecting N13million every month as signed money, not to talk of the kind of money people are making and you can make by what you call oversight. So to enter the National Assembly is to enter paradise. So you cannot expect that people are just going to take it easy to go in and out of those places, to enter government houses. I have seen people in Europe and America, who have been in public life and they finished and they came back to the classroom and riding bicycle like everyone else. The incentives that we have in our structures are designed for the system to remain volatile, and almost for the system to fail. It’s like we are going to be on this road for a long time but, hopefully, one of the things we took away from INEC (during our meeting) is that they have done a pretty good job trying to get the systems in place. And until we get to a point where systems replace human manipulation and interventions, we cannot be talking about free and fair elections in Nigeria. Your committee met with INEC. What about the political parties? There are 91 of them, and the number is more than what we had in 2014. What did your committee take away from the meeting with the parties? People say there are too many political parties, too many churches, too many mosques. You have to look at that against the backdrop of what is happening in the country. Right now, the only way to survive or to be relevant in Nigeria is to be connected to the state. The way politics runs in Nigeria, you really cannot go wrong. You set up shop, you get registered and everything comes with cost and benefits. You heard the accusation about bigger parties setting up smaller parties. So either way, you cannot end up poorer than when you went in. But most of what you have cannot pass as political parties. We have been independent for how many years now and we do not have any party that has had a shelf life of 20 years. A lot of these contraptions cannot bear the weight of the demands of democracy. Most of what you see as violence in the parties’ primaries is the evidence of the quality and calibre of the structures themselves and the people who operate the structures. If you ask me, the more the merrier and l think the system will somehow correct itself. Somebody made a valid point, that young people are finding their voices in smaller parties. But people must also understand that people don’t just go into politics to contest and win election. There are many parties like that in other countries where the issue of bread and butter is already settled. But we can also pray that we have enough institutional mechanism to regulate who comes in and what qualifications he has. You have alluded to the fact that in many other countries, there are two tendencies supported by smaller tendencies and things are working. Why is our own case different? Because being in power or out of power in Nigeria have severe implications. There are about 11, 000 abandoned projects across this country, and on just four projects our government has spent almost what we have and (incurring) foreign debt. Also, there is what is called the instrumentation of politics in Nigeria and its pretty challenging because, as a journalist, you would have gone through a period of mentoring. A lawyer would have had to go through law school and a priest through seminary. Politics in Nigeria is the only game that you don’t need any qualification. So what that says about our system is that it is only in Nigeria that people rule by experimentation. And the system is not even resilient for citizens to ask any of those aspiring to be the President of Nigeria, ‘can we have a sense of your antecedents?’ There are so many carpet baggers who can say ‘we have the money, let us key you in’. That is why when some people get into power, they start asking, ‘What are we supposed to do?’ We never ask those difficult questions? In my view, I don’t think what we have on the ground qualifies enough to be called democracy because a lot of the focus for us is elections and this is not what democracy is all about. And like somebody said, in our own case, what we have are the electorate and the ‘selectorate’. The ‘selectorate’ may be a governor who decides who is going to be the next governor, the ‘selectorates’ may also be those who decide who is going to be our President. And if you look at the trajectory of our Presidents
from Buhari down to Tafawa Balewa, it is very difficult to find one person that didn’t come in by accident. So the kind of intellectual rigor that is required to scrutinize the environment and what you are committing yourself to is lacking. Former US President Barack Obama, for example, after being President, is a bloody good lawyer, he knows what to do with his life but, in Nigeria, you ask yourself after being President or governor, what next? This is why there are very few people who are no longer governors not living in Abuja. It is very unlikely to find many governors going back to their communities trying to see what they can do, running law firms, going back to their engineering professions among others. Everybody is in Abuja because that is where the cake is. To me, we are a little bit still far away because it is a pretty long journey for us to come to a point when we can talk about democracy in its pure form. Kark Marx once said “you have to settle the issue of bread and butter before you can write poetry.” So we are not there yet in the sense that our system does not have a mentoring system for young people to figure out if they follow so and so people, where will they end up tomorrow? The system is so unsteady and, if you look at the last three, four years, people who were in PDP suddenly decided to change party by moving to APC and they expected members of their villages to move to APC. All of a sudden they made tons of money and they found that they could not realise their ambitions, and they moved to another party and they expected their people to also move with them. The volatility as a result of the inefficiency of the system means that it is very difficult to have an environment where democracy can actually grow and be nurtured, that is, where young people can learn from the elderly ones. What we have is largely a transaction. For the first time, we had a transition of power from one party to another in 2015, a situation many people described as a watershed. But some people think we lost the momentum. I agree with you but l think you overstate the issue when you talk about transition. We never had a transition. And l will tell you why. We may take what the British managed to do but the British decided to try to cut their losses and leave Nigeria because the idea of running an empire had become unprofitable. Now when you talk about transition in Nigeria, we never had one. Every phase has purely been by accident, from General Sani Abacha who suddenly died to one coup after another. Now if you want to talk about transition in the true sense of the word, we can talk about South Africa, a good example l always like to cite, where the people decided that an old order was going to be terminated. Mandela (former President) came out of prison in 1990. Now imagine how long it took Mandela to become President in 1994. The people of South Africa had four years to debate a range of issues. So when they finally conducted elections, the people elected into the National Assembly simply went there to append their signatures to the constitution that was made. Here we are in Nigeria still debating what to do with a document my friend Femi Falana called a glorified military document. We are nowhere because, unfortunately, we have a National Assembly where the lawmakers have limited intellectual capacity to understand what the issues are. People are in the National Assembly for all kinds of reasons with the high mortality of people coming and going. So if you ask yourself, what is the contribution of a component of democracy as important as that to our democracy, the contribution is very little. So when talk about transition in the real sense of the word… Again, APC will tell you, they are now admitting ‘actually we didn’t know we were going to get this, we got it and we found that we were really not prepared’. We have not really had the thinking that is required to run a diverse and complex country like we have, otherwise we should not be where we are, hemorrhaging so badly, losing human lives, and you ask yourself, is this what democracy is, did we vote to die in the kind of numbers that we are dying?   And this tells you that something is fundamentally wrong. Democracy in other parts of the world is highly intellectual, highly theoretical. You have to have a sense of what kind of society you want. If you look at the ‘Declaration of 1776’ (of the US independence), the founding fathers said very clearly that they were committed to the proposition that all men are created equal and, as a result of this, the pursuit of happiness is inherent and each and every one of them is entitled to it. So democracy then focuses on human freedoms, you can be what you want to be. America is the greatest country today because you can be what you want to be. Obama has passed through the door. They may not have another black President for the next 10 or 100 years but the fact that Obama passed through the door means anyone can be what he wants to be in the US. But here we are in Nigeria, we have communities, we have regions, we have areas where people have decided, if you are not a Muslim, you cannot enter; if you are not a Christian, you cannot enter, if you do not come from this clime, you cannot enter; and the barricades are created with building materials derived from the state itself. I have never seen in speech or action evidence from anyone who has governed this country that he has the kind of mental understanding of what it takes to manage a country like Nigeria. The average Nigerian President has to spend his time dealing with NNPC, with oil without paying adequate attention to the issue of infrastructure. Meanwhile when you talk about infrastructure, people think it is highway, it is bridge or whatever. But the most important think is the intellectual infrastructure. So we have a situation where a lot of people are in power, good people, but without the capacity to understand the nature of the environment and what we really need to build a democracy. You were a member of the Electoral Reform Committee. The committee did its work and submitted its report. There were certain key points in it. We also had the Oputa Panel in which you served. What l am saying is that a lot of work gets done but we do not make use of them. I will tell you something about the late President Yar’Adua. I was in Katsina while he was governor and a friend asked whether l had come to see the governor and l told him that l had a mass to do early the following morning and a programme in Kaduna immediately thereafter. But when he became the president – elect, I went to Abuja to deliver a lecture and Dr Modibbo who became the Minister of FCT approached me to say Yar’ Adua wanted to speak with me. I went and l was shocked about the reason he wanted to speak with me. I thought it was going to be about five minutes’ conversation but we ended spending about one hour. We sat down, we chatted about my articles some of which he had read. He wanted to know about the Niger Delta which he had been told l had pretty knowledge of. I was struck. I told him that the statement was grossly exaggerated because l was not an expert on the Niger Delta but l could share with him what l knew. The rest is in the book l am writing. But what l am bringing out of that is that a President or a governor or a leader must, first of all, admit the things you don’t know because if you don’t have enough intellectual curiosity, you may be doing the best you can but there will be no result. I go back to this administration and the fight against corruption, l keep asking, could you have impacted on the fight against corruption without identifying the disease? It is not enough to declare a war; you can have the most potent weapon… I insist that we need to introduce a sense of intellectual curiosity. When you talk about the Uwais Committee, Oputa Panel, all that we need to build our democracy is there. We shouldn’t be where we are. Look at Boko Haram. Leaders can be vulnerable. But if you decide to put a concrete around yourself, you want to surround yourself with people who are
of your party, people who pray or talk like you, then you don’t have the window to look at the complex and complicated situation like Nigeria. I am very sad that almost all the problems nagging Nigeria, answers have been found, there is very little that still needs to be done. What l see about governance in Nigeria is that people are interested in office holding, not in the power that comes from ideas. And you are in an environment where people are hostile to new ideas, this is what happens in a situation where leaders surround themselves with people who look like them and pray like them. They end up inheriting enemies and prejudices because people who surround them tell them ‘don’t talk to Kukah, don’t talk to this person; don’t talk to that person’. This is why l say we are still far away from building democracy. Because if you go and look at the calibre of the people who signed the Articles of the American Independence, out of 59, only two did not become President. And if you look at the profile of an American President, even if you didn’t go to school, try to surround yourself with people who have gone to school and understand how the society works. The real people who should be helping us on this issue of Boko Haram are psychologists. But you must ask yourself, what has brought us to this stage. It is bad politics but you must also look at the causative factors. We keep around in a cycle until the next battle comes. Is the idea of restructuring viable? Is marriage viable? Until you marry, you don’t know that a boyfriend is not a husband and wedding is not marriage. Anybody pretending that restructuring is the solution to our problems, there are no solutions. But there are coping mechanisms that we can design. People focus on power. In Nigeria, people talk about power in relation to the ability to give a big cheque, ability to sign contact, ability to put people in NNPC, ability to give oil block. But it is absolute nonsense because it doesn’t carry with it moral authority. The day Mark Zukerberg went to Congress, it affected the stock market. Now the mystique of power no longer exists. Again, we are captives of vocabulary. When you throw a concept, after some time, it becomes a weapon. Someone will say we want a sovereign national conference and every one begins to congregate around that. People think the North does not want restructuring because it means dismembering Nigeria. But in reality the beneficiaries of restructuring are northerners. But as the chief of army staff and the President and everyone has accepted, Boko Haram is a product of poverty. The poverty levels in S/West are hovering between 13 and 17 percent. What is Zamfara today? A cesspit of violence. But the poverty levels in Zamfara or Sokoto or Kebbi or Katsina or any northern state are hovering between 70 and 80 percent. So it is in our interest to understand that the only thing we have monopolised in Nigeria is poverty, because if being in power were enough, northerners have been in power more than people from other regions. So the power we are talking about is the power of ideas. A lot of things have been so demystified now, and l will give you an example: 9/11. It cost al-Qaeda $500, 000, that was their budget, to destroy the New York twin towers but from reconstructing the twin towers and finding Osama, the US spent $3.3trillion. So the world is changing. It is now a world of ideas; it is no longer a situation whereby some people are monopolising power because they are Muslims. It will take a few more years for the situation to change. Whether President Buhari wins or loses, the next election in Nigeria will be completely different. I will give you an example. I am looking forward to the debate between the VP (Prof Yemi Osinbajo) and Peter Obi (opposition PDP vice presidential candidate) to know the quality of minds l will be listening to. We are at the threshold of the future where people with ideas will be in government and not because a clique has anointed them. Restructuring is about the future, creating an environment in which everyone can excel according to his potential. Those who think it is about breaking Nigeria or some people are the beneficiaries are grossly mistaken. It is a conversation that is on. This government came into office because young people using the social media supported them. It came on the altar of well thought out slogan, ‘change’. This is a knowledge driven era. Restructuring is all about intellectuals replacing our traditional ways of running politics. On reconciliation of Atiku with Obasanjo I am 43 years in priesthood, and l have 30 years of active engagement in this country. I always go with my conscience. This country has been fair to me. Having written and delivered lectures for about 30 years, the average approval and appreciation l have received is about 98 percent. I am not a politician. I once resolved a problem between a husband and his wife, and the angriest person was the lawyer who was deprived of making money from the divorce papers he was going file in court. There are people who thrive in conflict. They are entrepreneurs who make good money from conflicts and will like such conflicts to continue. There are people who were abusing Buhari before he became President, now they are prepared to prostrate for him to walk over them. Tomorrow when he leaves power, they will not pick the phone to call him. I know this very well. The more l am criticised, frankly, the better l feel. I am not looking for adulation or approval. I have very strong convictions and l speak about them. I am a citizen of this country. I care about how this country is organised and l am impatient because l am convinced things can be better. Many people had emotional investment in the conflict between Atiku and Obasanjo. But if two of my friends are having issues, if there is something l can do about it, l will do my best. Some have been successful; some are still in the works. But as a priest, it is a personal conviction.   And lik he l told Obasanjo jokingly, l am not interested in Atiku’s politics. All the time – three, four years – l was discussing the issue of reconciliation with Obasanjo, l didn’t mention it to Atiku. President Obasanjo was the one who had been talking tough and Atiku went to him in Ota to say he was sorry. I didn’t know the cause of problem. What l am saying is that as priests, we are in the business of dealing with problems; it doesn’t have to be President, it doesn’t have to be presidential candidate. I do not owe anybody apology. My critics today will be probably too ashamed to look for my help but if l know they are in trouble and l can help, l will be more than happy to do it.
Read more at: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2018/12/2019-election-violence-fear-is-real-matthew-kukah-warns/