Buhari Working Hard Towards Nigeria’s Janazah —Odinkalu

A frontline human rights lawyer in Africa, erstwhile chairman of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), policy advisor to global institutions and recently appointed professor of practice by an American University, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on the perceived lethargy in the activities of civil society groups, ventilates his take on the power shift controversy, assesses President Muhammadu Buhari’s human rights records, among others.

There are concerns being raised in the country that the civil society groups are not performing their duties of engaging those in government effectively. Apart from SERAP not much is being heard from others, particularly the pro-democracy ones. What is your observation? Is it the case that groups in this critical sector are on holiday? In the past, we had the Save Nigeria Group which was vocal when things went awry politically.

Holiday to where? President Muhammadu Buhari and his regime are pretty much ensuring that the sector is not on holiday. That is the kind of situation we have got at the moment. It is not the case that the civil society is on holiday. The fact of the matter is that, notionally, and I say this advisedly, we are under a regime that claims democratic legitimacy. You cannot approach a regime that claims democratic legitimacy like the one that does not. So, if we were under a military regime that had overthrown a civilian regime like Buhari did in December 1983 and took over power, we would be in a different situation because he would not be pretending to have democratic legitimacy.

We are under a regime that claims to have been elected by the people and have their mandate. Therefore, it can’t be treated like a military government because even if the head of the regime is a retired Major General who previously overthrew the constitution, he now claims to have the mandate that originates from the people through INEC. So, I think it is important to make that distinction. The skills that you bring to addressing that kind of regime will be different from the skills that you will bring to addressing a military regime. That I think is important to clarify.

You said we had groups like the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) and all of that in the past. If you go further down, we had NADECO who were making noise. NADECO flourished under a military regime. We are not there now. SNG was a front for politicians. It was not doing any pro-democracy activities. Pastor Tunde Bakare and Nasir el-Rufai who ran SNG were fronts for the Buhari project and it is so clear now. El-Rufai is a lot of things, but democrat is not one of them. He has long been interested in political power which is reflecting only his point of view, without necessarily allowing for plurality. This is why Kaduna State where he governs is what it is today and he will tell you he has no apologies for not allowing alternative points of view. This is why people can be smashed up in communities in the state, lives can be wasted and you don’t see much empathy from this lot.

So, let us be very clear that the civil society we are talking about is not a front for acquiring political power in the way the SNG project has been done. Nigeria does not even need a Messiah anymore. Make no mistake about it, if anything, the Buhari debacle, because this is an absolute utter debacle, shows us that Nigeria does not need any Messiahs anymore. What the country needs is someone who can confess to being limited and who has enough humility to want to work with other Nigerians who could create a Nigeria that works for every person in it and every part of it. Not someone who comes wearing a cape, telling you they are a superman who has all the answers to all the problems of the country and then shows up and not even recognise that the country belongs to everyone. That, I think, is the challenge.

That is why the civil society has been retooling itself and you rightly credited SERAP for the tremendous work it is doing. There are a lot of other groups that are doing serious work as well. Some of them you know, many of them you don’t. BudgIT is a good example. Media Rights Agenda and R2K in Freedom of Information, CDHR is still in existence, believe it or not. So, there are a lot of groups that work on diverse areas of public conscience, social justice and human rights as well as public policies. The Kukah Centre is also doing a lot of work. Every time Bishop Kukah sneezes now, the government catches cold and Garba Shehu is dancing makossa. It is a good thing that all these voices are flourishing and Garba Shehu is kept busy. I think it is important that we acknowledge all of that and not just think there is anybody with a monopoly of wisdom on this particular situation.

Particular reference has been made to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) which, in the past, mobilised its members and Nigerians in general against obnoxious policies of government. But that is not happening now. The NLC was very vocal against increase in the pump prices of petroleum products during the Goodluck Jonathan era, but under Buhari, that has not been the case. Nigerians don’t seem to have faith in the Labour movement which is one of the civil society groups.

Again, we have got to go back to a bit of history. Entities like the NLC and, in fact, latterly, NANS, are not exactly models of independence. The NLC in particular is a statutory body created, even with the latest reform by Olusegun Obasanjo the civilian when he was president is his second term which allowed for the creation of the TUC. Between 1974 and 1976 when the NLC was created under Obasanjo the military ruler, the Labour movement in Nigeria was driven between two major leaders: Michael Imoudu and Wahab Goodluck. The dispute then threatened to boil over and Obasanjo used that as an excuse to nationalise Labour, creating the NLC. To sweeten it, the NLC could be funded through the check-off dues that were statutorily permitted. And so the NLC had money, but also relied on government to constrain what it could do. Since then, the government has made efforts to either co-opt the NLC to nullify the organised Labour. You can go back as far as during the eras of Hassan Sunmonu, Ali Ciroma, Pascal Bafyau down to the current leadership, the government has always sought to co-opt Labour. There was something that Obasanjo did. He did not just nationalise Labour, he brought labour and productivity into the Exclusive Legislative List. By doing that, he created part of our productivity crisis today. This is because we do have divergence in the cost of living in different parts of the country. Whenever you have minimum wage settlement, it is nullified by the cost of living divergence that we have. An example I would like to give is the difference in the cost of living between Akwa Ibom and Zamfara states. While the cost of living is so divergent in these two places, we legislate the same labour practices for them. That has created a sectarian hemispheric dichotomy inherent in Labour. This is why, right now, the organised Labour cannot speak with one voice. We can’t nationalise organised labour in that sense by military diktat and expect it to work, given the divergences that we have. That’s really what it is.

People will say but we have nationalised the wages of politicians and high-level people, then why are we drawing a distinction for working people? The fact of the matter is that we have not nationalised the wages of politicians. Politicians in Rivers State make more, through different means, than politicians in Edo State who make more than politicians in Kebbi State. This is the reality of the Nigerian situation and this is why Labour has not been very effective. It is also the case with many of the demonstrations that started in January 2012 which were part of a rolling political programme that unfurled in the coalition that Buhari used to accede to power in 2015. Now, having got to power, they then sought to dismantle all of those things that helped them to power whether it is social media or organised civil society. Buhari’s regime has specialised in floating its own NGOs. People speak about GONGOS, government owned NGOs and MONGOS, my own NGOs. There are fully APC-owned NGOs that exist just for the purpose of chasing real and imagined enemies of APC government. They are funded for the purpose of terrorising Amnesty International, intimidating them and getting free airtime of NTA. Whenever an NGO wakes up and denounces AI and it is carried by NTA, you can be sure that such a group is funded by the APC government.  And you saw the report written by Matthew Page recently on government owned NGOs, indicating that over 90 per cent of them came into existence since 2015 when Buhari came into power. There are groups that have retained their credibility notwithstanding and I think those are the groups that we should focus on.

You once headed the National Human Rights Commission. Give us your assessment of the human rights situation in the country under President Buhari.

I don’t know why I am still relevant talking about human rights under President Buhari. I am no longer the chairman of NHRC. I now have a successor. Maybe that question should be posed to my successor.

But you have been there and you know what the standards ought to be in terms of human rights situation…

What view I have of what human rights should be is immaterial because Buhari never pretended, whether as a soldier or a civilian, to respect human rights. In 1984/85, he was beneath abysmal, abhorrently so as a military ruler with reference to human rights. I said that much during the Oputa Panel proceedings. Since then, he has returned to power as a civilian and has not been any better. He has shown no greater regard for human rights now than he did in 1984. To be fair, I did not expect him to have changed. The people who thought Buhari could change were simply not aware of the way nature works. A man cannot at the age of 75 become what he was not when he was 40. That is just not possible, unless the person has suffered a total meltdown of his central nervous system. The fact of the matter is Buhari has never changed and he is incapable of changing. His human rights record is not better now than it was in 1984, in my view.

So, what should Nigerians do in the face of no active civil society groups mobilising them to engage the government? In other words, you can advise Nigerians on how to recharge the batteries of their civic energies.

First of all, I am not qualified to advise Nigerians. It will be arrogant and presumptuous, in my view, to so do. Citizens vote and they are adults who can decide for themselves the things that matter to them. Those things can be affected by which part of the country you come from. If I were to come from Kaduna, my priorities may be different from if I were to come from Cross River or if I came from Maiduguri of Ijebu Ode or Fiditi in the South-West. Now, depending on where you come from and where you worship, the things that drive you could change. So, I cannot presume from my limited vantage to advise people on what they should do.

That said, I think we should also accept that the business model that sees NGOs or civil society groups as gatekeepers or public conscience of protest has changed. Part of what is changing is the digital environment. In the past, we used to rely on NLC to call us out to protest. NLC has since proved itself to be unworthy of that trust. But the digital environment has also helped to change attitudes to that. These days, you can simply use Twitter or Facebook to declare a protest. I think the #EndSARS protest proved that to us, that the influence of gatekeeper entities or people who see themselves as gatekeeper entities like NGOs or NLC is in the past has waned considerably. The JUSUN strike has also showed that people are not passive. Even now, there is a national strike going on with the National Association of Resident Doctors, against the background that President Buhari has been in London until recently doing his medicals. The governor of Kaduna State has been in London. Political rulers in different places are all finding hospitals overseas while our doctors are striking domestically.

I will contest your underlying proposition that we don’t have an active civic engagement. We do have. But it may not be the way it was under NADECO. The fact that Buhari is banning Twitter and terrorizing citizens with all manner of orders, abducting Nnamdi Kanu from Kenya, trying to hound Sunday Igboho into exile all show there is a contest. I am not all that despairing of the civic energies of Nigerians, not at all.

What is your take on the view in certain quarters that the acute Northernisation of the presidency by Buhari warranted the clamour for power shift to the South by the 17 governors of southern Nigeria? People complain of key appointments being in the hands of northerners…

I hear you emphasise the word ‘key’ in saying key appointments are in the hands of northerners. My own reading is that every appointment is in the hands of northerners and mostly Muslims at that.  Things have got so interesting that if the job is open and it is the job of a toilet cleaner, the president will find somebody from the North to fill it. That makes him suitable for a local Sarki, but Nigeria does not need a Sarki because the country is nobody’s Emirate. That is part of the problems.

It is interesting that the governors who were most vociferous in the Southern Governors Forum are actually APC governors. That should tell you something that there is a serious crisis of confidence about the president and how he has chosen to run the country as defined by his narrowness of worldview, lack of belief in the viability of the Nigerian project. Fundamentally, therefore, I don’t think Buhari believes in Nigeria nor does he believe he is from Nigeria. Buhari believes he a Northern Muslim from the North-West of Nigeria and he treats Nigeria as if it comprises the 13 states of the North-West and the North-East. The North-West is where his father comes from and the North-East is where his mother comes from. We also had another president whose father came from the North-West and his mother, the North-East. That was Umaru Yar’Adua. He also came from the same local government as Buhari. When we talk about the cleavages and the fault lines that define Nigeria, I point to Yar’Adua as an example of a Nigerian who was accepted across the country. From every part of the country, Nigerians supported Yar’Adua and were determined to give him a chance, irrespective of his origin. He believed in the country. He spent his energy fixing the Niger Delta situation.

When people say those from the South hate Buhari, I point to Yar’Adua as a counterfactual. Nigerians gave Buhari opportunity to prove himself. But he has shown himself as narrow and hateful. Buhari is narrow-minded and understands only narrowness. It is a very good thing he won the election in 2015, because if he did not win and was not allowed to rule, people would have said, if and when his time comes to go the way of all mortals, that he was the best thing that never happened to Nigeria. Now, we know he is a disaster. And he wasn’t just a disaster in 1984, he is a disaster now. When he is done with the country, we will need more than ‘hail Mary’ and prayers to prevent the world from having a [salat al-] Janazah for Nigeria. That is really how bad the situation is right now.

My attitude to the clamour for power shift by the southern governor is that it is good. But ultimately it is a choice between the options you have. There is no entitlement to produce the president from any part of the country. If the North insists on producing the president in 2023, who do they have? Who are their realistic candidates? Let me run through a few. Is it Atiku Bagudu, the Kebbi State governor, who was the bagman for Sani Abacha? He laundered money for Sani Abacha and there are judicial decisions to that effect from different parts of the world. He is precluded from travelling to many parts of Europe and North America as we speak. Or is it Nasir el-Rufai who has toxified Kaduna State and made it absolutely unlivable with his toxic brand of politics that does not admit other people can co-exist? Workers can’t protest in his state; the NLC president can’t go to the state without being declared wanted.  Is it Governor Abdulahi Ganduje? Or is it former Governor Abdulaziz Yari whose people were dying of meningitis and he declared that the disease was a curse from God? Rather than spend the resources of the state to address the meningitis crisis in the Zamfara, he spent the money deploying marabouts to go and pray in Saudi Arabia. Are those the people Nigeria needs? Let the North produce its candidates if it thinks it can take over from Buhari and let us assess them. Of course, the North has got somebody like Governor Zulum who appears to be making an effort. But he is still an unproven political quantity. He is still under the influence of his predecessor who installed him and whom he worked for. This is not about where people come from. I think it is important we give everyone a chance to be assessed.

By the way, in addition to the fact that the North does not have any clearly suitable alternative for 2023, there is also the fact that the ordinary person in the North does not have anything positive to show for the Northern presidency except a metastasis of death and destruction everywhere. So, it will be difficult to persuade much of the country to look up to another in the mould of Buhari as messiah.

It is not much different in the South-East where I come from. The South-East has a political equity case to make that it has not produced a Nigerian president. You can’t just produce anybody and say you have an entitlement to the presidency. If you come and throw up Orji Uzor Kalu, I will not support you. Are you going to produce Rochas Okorocha, who is being tried over 500 pieces of property? This is not about Igbo or Yoruba or Hausa. We should tell the truth about these charlatans who are trying to say they want to be president. The South-East will forfeit any claim to produce the president if it produces any of these people. Or is it Hope Uzodinma who people refer to as Supreme Court governor? He himself told the people he got to office through the Ben Johnson way.

There is a suspicion that someone from the South-East getting the presidency might use it as an opportunity to actualise the Biafra Republic…

The suspicion of the people of the South-East with reference to Nigeria about how it is, how it is not, is not well founded. As I like to say, when you look at the bedrooms of all of these people and the genitals of the people who say this thing, you will see that they have been sleeping with Igbo women. Ibrahim Babangida married an Igbo woman who produced four children for him and he slept with her till the woman died. IBM Haruna is married to an Igbo woman. He was GOC during the civil war. Buba Marwa is married to an Igbo woman from Owerri. General Yakubu Gowon, who led Nigeria during the civil war, had a son with Edith Ike-Okongu who was Igbo. She is now late. Gowon was sleeping with her during the civil war. Odumegwu Ojukwu, who was a Brigade Commander in Kano during the war, had a daughter with a Fulani woman. As I have asked before, if Nigerians were told that Ojukwu was sleeping with a Fulani woman and Gowon was sleeping with an Igbo woman, would they have followed them into the war? A lot of leading Igbo people are married outside Igboland. Philip Asiodu is married to a Yoruba woman. Emeka Anyaoku, ex-Commonwealth Secretary General, is married to an Egba woman and he keeps a home in Abeokuta till date.  It is now time we tell ourselves the truth about some of these myths we create about ourselves. Most people don’t know that there are Igbo who are indigenous to Benue.

Do you envisage PDP and APC picking presidential candidates from the North and the South respectively?

I don’t think we should make any assumption about that. We should allow the situation to play out itself in the political parties which have got the prerogative to sort out candidates. If you go back historically, in 1979, all the five major parties in that election  had their vice-presidential candidates from the South-East, such that it appeared there was a settled position among the political elite that, that was an opportunity to bring the South-East in from the cold of post-civil war psychosis. In 1999, the major parties all had presidential candidates from the South-West. In 2019, the two major parties to which our politics had crystallised, APC and PDP, both had candidates from the North who are Muslims and Fulani. So, I don’t think it is necessarily the case that the parties are going to polarise themselves in 2023 in opposition to one another in a game of political opportunism. I do think it is only going to be settled by consideration of hemispheric origin, that is whether it is North of South. I do think we are also going to sadly have a sectarian factor deeply involved in it because of what Buhari has done to Nigeria.

In 2023, no Muslim-Muslim ticket is unlikely to be viable in Nigeria, just as a Christian-Christian ticket is unlikely to be viable too.  I also think that a southern Muslim will have a very difficult time being able to make the presidency in 2023. It is not just because the current president is a Muslim. It is also because of the way the current president has configured the country in terms of sectarian sensibilities. Basically, a southern presidential candidate who is a Muslim will have to settle for a northerner who is a Christian. This will send out a lot of wrong signals and lead to loss of votes among northern Muslims. All the people who are lining up to be president from the South and are Muslims, including Senator Bola Tinubu, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, and they are going to have difficulty overcoming the particular problem. I can say this because I am not a politician. Most politicians are not going to be able to say this, although they will hint at it. The reality is that Tinubu as a southern Muslim, whatever else the issue may be, has a challenge over this particular configuration.

You are quite versed on the problems of the country and for you, there are very few models among the political class. When should we expect eggheads like you to join partisan politics so you can make things better?

I don’t think I know all the problems. All of us are Nigerians and we are suffering together. Look, we can’t all be presidents and we can’t all be governors, senators and so on. Some people have got to be citizens; some have got to do policy; others have got to do trade and commerce. I think part of our crisis as a country is that people have converted political office not as a platform for service, but as the easiest platform for making money and making it without accountability, honour and effort. So, good people who want to work and do service are priced out of the political market because the cost of entry is too high for them to get in.

The criminals who have taken over our politics, with all due respect, have made it such that credible people cannot get in. If credible people get in, they will alter the business model away from criminality. As a result, if you are credible, the only way you can get in is by being captured because you cannot really generate the money independently. That, sadly, is the way our politics has gone. If you are looking to run for governorship on a minor party platform in any of the states, you need over N1billion and very few decent professionals have that kind of money to waste. If you are looking to run on a major party platform, you will be looking at multiples of billions of naira. And even then, that may not get you anywhere. So, what kind of responsible people will have that kind of money? It is either it is stolen money or organised crime money that propels people to that kind of power in Nigeria. And that is why ordinary citizens have opted out of the political project. You will see that if we are voting for Big Brother, Nigerians in their millions will vote for evictions in Big Brother Nigeria [reality television show]. And that has total irrelevance to the fate of the average Nigerian. But tell Nigerians to come and vote for people who will decide whether they will have roads and hospitals and infrastructure generally, they will not show up because they don’t have faith in the people who are running or those who are supervising those who are running. That is our tragedy as a country. Can we change it? That requires a partnership of not just the politicians but also of the citizens. That is why some of us must continue to be citizens. A country in which everyone sees himself as an office holder will not have enough offices to accommodate the citizens.

What do you make of the rejection of electronic transmission of results by the National Assembly?

I don’t think we have heard the final word on that issue for obvious reasons. The matter is going to end up in court. Why? Because the provisions that the National Assembly has sought to adopt on that matter bring into question the independence of INEC. You can’t call it INEC on the one hand and on the other hand make it a wholly owned subsidiary of the Executive and the National Assembly. This is really what it is when you make a decision on such a fundamental issue as electronic transmission of votes subject to the concurrence of the National Assembly and that of the NCC. It is going to end up in court and I am not going to tell you what the court is going to decide because quite a few of our courts now produce voodoo judgments. The lawmakers have not done well on this. But I can tell you that the issue is contested and the territory too is contested. All points of views are being canvassed and that is how it should be.

Governors are reportedly pressuring the president to accede to their demand to raise petroleum product prices to about N380 a litre. There are growing concerns that with the advent of Petroleum Industry Act, that might become a reality that will further push more Nigerians into extreme poverty. What’s you take on this?

Again, like the Electoral Act, I would expect that the PIA is going to end up in court in many ways. The frontier exploration fund, which is 30 per cent of NNPC’s profit, and the three (3) per cent allocated to the host communities, will come up for serious attack. It may be beneficial to those who have instituted it to have that struck out in court because the alternative is to have it addressed through violence by communities and youths who are going to feel they have been shortchanged. And that is exactly where this matter is headed if care is not taken.

There is also the question of the legality of the legislation itself. There was no concurrence in the House of Representatives. As far as we know, concurrence did fail because they could not get agreement. The speaker then announced that they were going to find a way to return to it. We then heard that the president returned from the UK and signed the bill. Nobody is saying there was a subsequent concurrence vote on the bill. So, it will be interesting to see how that is addressed as an evidential matter. There are all manner of judicial doctrines that could be squeezed up. I disagree with Senator Adamu, former governor of Nassarawa State, when he said it is only God that can change it. The last time I checked, Adamu is not God. Like me, he is going to die some day. So, we are going to have to contend with how the dispute and the disagreement on PIA will be navigated.

Former military president, Ibrahim Babangida, granted an interview recently and said so many things, including the reason for the June 12 election annulment. He also touched on the issue of age limit for the next president, emphasizing the need for a generational shift in power paradigm in the country. Do you agree with him?

I don’t know whether you know I was born on June 12. I would grant IBB his right as a citizen to say whatever he wants to say, but I will also take him on, on his arrogance, hubris and his tendency to insult our collective civic intelligence. A lot of what he said in his Arise TV interview and the pageantry attending his 80th birthday are offensive. The man clearly has no capacity for self-reflection. His hubris is intolerable. He deserves some quiet. I don’t want to tell him to shut up. But it will be in his interest to keep quiet. Right now, he is inflicting his arrogance on us, with all due respect. Most people who watched that interview would probably say ‘May God punish him.’ I am not wishing that God punishes him, but he punished the country with a lot of what he did. And if we are to punish him with a fraction of what he did, the kind of banality that he visited on the country, he would not have the mouth with which to talk to us with the kind of arrogance that he is displaying. I don’t want to waste energy responding to him.  I wish him well in his retirement.

But don’t you think he made a good point on the age factor in the choice of the next president?

When did IBB discover that? First of all, when he became military president, he was in his 40s in 1985. He had pretty much been in government since 1966. When he returned to promote the Buhari project, because he was one of those who actually promoted Buhari in 2015, Buhari was in his 70s. So, when did he realise that Nigeria needed someone in his 60s as a president? Was in 2015 when Buhari was in his 70s or was it in 1980 when he was in his 40s? That seems to me a legitimate question for him to answer.

The issue [of age] is not as Bill Clinton said in 1996, that it is not about the age of anyone, but about the age of their ideas. Yahaya Bello is one of the youngest governors in Nigeria today, if not the youngest. But also, he is one of the most controversial. Governor Ben Ayade in Cross River State is one of the younger governors in Nigeria today. He is also one of the most Napoleonic. He suffers from an extreme case of Napoleon syndrome. Pius Anyim, when he became Senate president, was 39 years. How many people remember that he was Senate president? So, that is really the problem. Mahathir Mohammad, by contrast, returned as elected Malayasian president a few years ago at 82 years. The people decided that was the only man who could stabilize their country and politics after the God-forsaken reign of Najib Razak. That is the point that we are making.

The current president of the US is about 79. Bill Clinton, George Bush and Donald Trump were all born between June and August 1946. Clinton was born in August, Trump, in July and Bush, in June. When did Clinton come to power? 1993, January. When did trump leave office? January 2021. Separated by 28 years and born within two months of one another. This is precisely the point. This is not about the age of anybody, but the age of their ideas, dynamism and vision. This is what we should focus on very seriously. If we can get an 80-year-old who has the dynamism that can drive the country, let us have him. Senegal’s penultimate president, Abdoulaye Wade, became president in his late 70s. But he modernised Senegal in ways that many could not believe. And by the time he left the presidency, he was almost 90 years.

Some will counter-argue that the examples you gave of the US are of a country with very strong institutions that will run by themselves irrespective of the age of their president…

I knew you were going to say that. But I also mentioned the president of Senegal, the example I gave about Wade.

Nigerians, I am sure, don’t want to be regaled with the story of a president who will be jetting out of the country every six months to meet with his doctors.

When you have leaders or rulers as the case may be who are allergic to building hospitals where they can go to or schools where their children and wives and mistresses can go to, what do you expect? That really is the problem here. They have a sense of entitlement to be funded by state money. Tinubu, who is in London for medical attention, has as part of his retirement benefits to go out of the country for treatment. We have really got to settle on leadership that can be accountable. If I started shouting now, you would say I am doing so because it is Buhari, that when Jonathan was there, what did I say? If you started shouting, I would say you are shouting because it is Buhari, that when Obasanjo, your countryman, was there, what did you say? We don’t have people who believe that leadership should transcend sectional agenda or origin. We are always thinking a leader is as good as where he comes from.

No matter who emerges president in 2023, what do you see as the immediate steps the person should take to address the visible fault lines and divisions in the country?

It depends on who the president is and what their will and mission is. When there is a will, there is a way.
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