Mr Akin Osuntokun was the Director General of the Obi-Datti Presidential campaign Organisation in the 2023 elections. He had also served as a former Presidential Adviser and Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). He speaks with TAIWO ADISA on the journey of the President Bola Tinubu-led government so far, among other issues.
YOU played a prominent role in the last general election at the front of the Labour Party. Your party did swing some surprises but failed to win the title though you pulled it to the Supreme Court. Now that the APC government is in place, are there things you’ve seen your candidate would have done differently?
Oh, yes, of course. It is all about the utilization of a time between the time you were declared elected by INEC and the day you are sworn in as president. That gap is very critical and it requires to be maximized. You must have an optimal use of that time towards the next step you are going to take as elected president. The first is in terms of trying to prioritise what you are going to do as you are sworn in as president in terms of the policy. The most utilitarian step to undertake at that time and even up till now, is what you do with the oil subsidy scandal that has personified the economic problems of Nigeria, corruption from different perspectives. It poses a lot of challenges in the short term that you need to confront.
There is something you are looking at now that requires your immediate attention and decision on what to do. So, how you handle that gap allows you to present yourself for the commencement of your government, which is always critical. That is when you are sending the signals to the public that you need people to get the message that you are well prepared for the job; that you are serious, dynamic, and competent. For example, if you are announcing a policy of subsidy removal, you would have known what you are going to do. Even before you remove it, there are some steps you have to take before the removal. But on the contrary, we heard President Tinubu say that it was not in his speech. He was saying he had no plan in his inaugural speech and he said that something suddenly came upon him like a revelation flash, to say ‘subsidy is gone’. That is not how you govern a country. You don’t govern a country on revelation flash. The message the statement sent reflects poorly on him as the President. That is the most critical area that has been haunting his regime. He would have done the right things in those three months about preparing things instead of his fire brigade approach to governance. So, he had needlessly thrown Nigeria into crisis.
I am not disputing the necessity of removing the oil subsidy or floating the Naira, what I am saying is that he should be better prepared for it, otherwise, what you get is these problems here and there.
Members of the ruling party will say that you can’t be right criticising the president for removing the oil subsidy because all the presidential candidates promised to remove the oil subsidy. What do you say to that?
Nobody is criticizing them for removing subsidy. How you do it is the point. You should have a comprehensive idea of what you are going to do in the short, medium-term, and long term. For me, in the short term, what I thought he would do first was to set in motion almost immediately how we are going to make the effect not to be harsh on the large percentage of the people in the country, and the second is looking at how to contain the immediate fallout. I cannot doubt the inevitability of the policy.
A former governor, Isa Yuguda, once said publicly that he had a friend who told him he was tired of making money from subsidy and asked the government to stop it. And I wonder up till today what the president has done with that information. Secondly, how do you justify the retention of the principal figure, who is the GMD of the NNPC, within the oil subsidy crisis? It baffles me. Even his position is centred on what has become of this scandal. So, he has questions to answer and has not merited being appointed to that office because he did not just create a problem but the dimension of the problem was huge. I don’t know the power politics that retained him and does not make any sense to me. I cannot see how you reconcile the public interest with somebody who has paralysed the Nigerian economy.
Besides that, are there political steps that the government has taken, that you think your candidate would have taken differently?
Take the issue of state police for instance. If we are talking about state police, of course, that is a constitutional issue but that is inevitable. I think there was a time when all the governors proposed decentralising the federal police system. It is just that in Nigeria, we are fond of attending to problems when it is almost too late to manage and contain them. The dimension that the insecurity crisis has taken in Nigeria is that you cannot solve it in isolation. If you are not attending to other problems, you cannot just isolate the security crisis and leave the other areas unattended. This is what the political scientists will call a systemic crisis. That is why the solution to it is to overhaul the whole system and that is why some people are talking about constitutional amendment. You have to convey a sense of urgency in addressing the problems of Nigeria because people are panicking. On the security crisis, we have a short-term response. He has changed the security service personnel. Security also entails economic stability in the welfare of the citizens. Like the late Prof. Sam Aluko used to say: “The rich cannot sleep in the night because the poor are hungry.” A hungry man, who has not eaten for two days, has no vested interest in the stability of the country and he has an incentive to take to criminality, as a way of life, kidnapping, banditry, and so on. So, that is why we cannot isolate the security crisis. We can say that as much for all other aspects of the economy – agriculture for instance. If you cannot secure, the people, they cannot engage in agric. Agricultural activities have been drastically curtailed by banditry and other vices. That is why I keep on saying that it is difficult to isolate one of them. Even corruption is affecting the economic crisis. There is a scientific study that in every society, there is a positive correlation between the escalation of corruption and the escalation of crime. So, that is also there. All the low-class people see evidence of corruption all over the place. They see an employer whose son has four cars and living large and maybe he has 20. These are the things that provoke a negative reaction in people. The idea comes back to the constitutional review of the country.
Already people are talking about the parliamentary system…
Yes, people are talking about the parliamentary system of government, but the system is not the most utilitarian of the steps that can be taken. It is the decentralization that is more important.
Decentralisation in what form?
Look, there are three spheres of powers in the constitution, which are exclusive, concurrent, and residual and those powers are shared by two tiers of government. Federalism does not envisage a third tier of government. So, we got that one wrong within those two tiers. Some are exclusive like Defence, Currency, etc to the Federal Government. We have those that are concurrent like Education, Agric, and the residual reverses to the second tier. So, what has happened is that there has been a steady redistribution of these powers since 1966 in favour of the Federal Government. Like the Police we are talking about, which used to be on a concurrent list but is now exclusive. What has happened is that, since 1666, there has been a distribution of these powers mostly because of military dictatorship with the military philosophy of top-down command system and over-emphasis on national unity and integration after the civil war. We are centralising power for one Nigeria. Unfortunately, it has not worked.
On the contrary, it has compounded the problems of Nigeria. The only constitution that Nigerians consciously and deliberately came together to establish is the Independence Constitution, which had four parties to its position, which were the British government; the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo; Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Sir Ahmadu Bello. They personified the idea of regions and even the peculiarities of Nigeria. They sat on this for almost a year. Practically, your first instinct when you see a territory like Nigeria will be that these people should not be together. But if you must, federalism is indispensable. That is how federalism came to be. Not just ordinary federalism but federalism with substantial decentralisation of power where there were regions that had a semi-autonomous constitution. Of course, it has been in existence since 1954 to 1966. And that’s about the golden era of Nigeria’s development because that’s the constitution that best suits the people.
A group of soldiers then came up in January 1960 and threw it away and what they brought is unitarianism. They brought the abolition of regions and the merger of provinces which ensued since 1966. Don’t forget that there was never a time when Nigerians sat together and said they wanted a unitary system of government. It was the soldiers who brought the idea and imposed it on the people. So, you cannot say what an accident has brought is the best, because the coup was an accident. There is an element of illogicality in that. So, this is where we have found ourselves where Nigerians will have to be suffering the dysfunctions and the mess we are in today tells us all the stories we need to know why things are not working.
It seems that you are in for a return to the 1960 Independence Constitution. Instead of the National Assembly going around the constitution review and amendment of the 1999 constitution, are you truly advocating for a return to the 1963 constitution?
It was the independence constitution that became essentially the 1963 constitution when Nigeria became a Republic For how many times will the parliamentarians be going around the country? This is sheer unseriousness. Anybody interested in the constitution review of Nigeria today has enough documents at his disposal. There is one around the 2014 Constitutional Conference. That alone is sufficient basis. Then, what you then do is if you want to have a plebiscite. After that, you can go around the country, requesting people to vote for it or against it. They don’t need to start going around now to hear what the people have to say. It looks like a misuse of public resources.
Besides that, the issue of restructuring has also been vital to a lot of Nigerians. It has been on the front burner for a while but critics are also unrelenting. Now if you want to break it down to the critics who say they don’t understand restructuring, what will you say we are looking at?
You see, it is not that they don’t understand what they mean by restructuring but what they want to say is that they are opposed to their understanding of restructuring, which is they think that we want to redraw the physical structure of the country. That should not be at the primary stage at all. What you do with the existing structure of states has to be part of a constitutional process and it is not something that you toy with. But you see, I don’t know who started using that term, but what it means is the restructuring of power relations within the first and second tier of government. In those spheres of power, the redistribution is the restructuring of power relations, which can now extend to physical elements. It is part of the problems with how federalism came to Nigeria. Most federal states came about by the constituent states forming a federal government. In our case, the reverse was the case. The states we have were created by the federal government, especially in 1963 when the Middle Belt region was created. Between 1963 and now, all the additions that have got up to 36 states were done by the military government. Essentially, they restructured. But that did not restructure Nigeria. In the real sense, those who are clamouring for restructuring are clamouring for restoration. Those who took Nigeria from four regions to 36 states are those who restructured Nigeria into the problems we have today. That is the irony.
So. People talking about restructuring today want restoration. If anybody chooses to confuse himself, let him do so. A lot of people keep saying they don’t even know what restructuring means. If you don’t know what it means, you can limit yourself to decentralization and devolution of power. If that is what you want, all is well and good. Either through mischief or ignorance you want to make restructuring contentious and controversial, then forget it, just support decentralisation and devolution of power.
At the same time, a lot of the proponents of restructuring have not been able to sell it. They fell into the trap of those who don’t want it. What restructuring means essentially is the amendment of the Nigerian constitution. You are restructuring what is in the constitution – redistributing the powers.
How can the parliamentary system help the Nigerian system?
Well, the first thing is it redresses the monetization of politics in Nigeria. The presidential system is too expensive in terms of what will be spent on election, and the president is directly elected under the presidential constitution whereas the Prime Minister is not elected. Then, as the leader of his party, he becomes the Prime Minister, the first among equals. Essentially, it redresses the over-centralization of powers that the presidential system is prone to. The Presidential system is prone to Unitarianism in a way the parliamentary system is not. What we need is decentralisation of power. The parliamentary system is good for those reasons but not so consequential to what we have now, but for me, it reduces corrupt tendencies in politics. You will see the president or the presidential candidates who will practically buy their way into office. People now talk about recouping campaign expenses. that’s a profane thing to say. Right from the word go, banditry, and looting have been built into the process of election in Nigeria. When people spend so much money to get to positions they now steal to recoup what they have spent.
We got the parliamentary system of government directly from the British colonialists. That was the legacy they left behind and it is potentially workable. Nigerian, being a creation of the British itself, has evolved along that line. The presidential system of government came about as a result of the Civil War from 1966 to 1970, then of course the issue of military dictatorship. Emphasis now is on national unity to the detriment of any other idea. So, in Nigeria, national unity has been made the end rather than being the means to the end. Nigeria should be a means to attain prosperity for the greatest number of people.
Looking into the future of the Labour Party, do you see its candidate in the 2023 elections, Mr Peter Obi sustaining that kind of momentum he pulled in the 2023 general elections?
First, there is a negative reasoning, which is that the present government will be disastrous. He won’t do well. That would be a way of reasoning. If this government does well in terms of security, peace, and stability, the question then becomes if it isn’t broken, why fix it? So far, I can’t see that, because they say morning shows the day. But in the absence of legitimacy of the government in place, of course, Obi and the Obidients can still go far and reenact the magic. Obidients are mostly the younger generation, and I hope they keep their fidelity with Mr Obi. It is growing. We have in Nigeria today, with regards to the ‘Obidients’ and Peter Obi, people who are talking and a party can derive from what we have now and it will forge a combination of people who believe in the same ideas and it has the potential to become one of the most authentic political organisations. There is a combination of people who try to share ideas about where they want to go. These are individually driven, a crop of individuals who know the way to go, it will not be like the one driven by those with corruptive tendencies. It could grow to become one of the authentic political parties and party of ideas at the end of the day because the coming together is of interest and defined by any ideology. It is not the other way round that see how leaders emerge.
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