NIGERIA @ 57: Opportunities Abound everywhere but remain Untapped-Comrade Ohens Kingsley.

Kingsley Ohens

In an interview with Comrade Kingsley Ohens who is the President of Esan Youths Movement International and a known Community Crusader and Activist, Martha Ovia sees in Comrade Kingsley Ohens during the interview some salient answers to million questions unanswered over the years.

Excerpt below:

Nigeria has just celebrated her 57 years of independence, how do you see Nigeria at 57?

At 57, we don’t have choice but to congratulate ourselves, at least for still staying together and having a high hope that tomorrow will be better. But when we do a sort of conscience searching and have a sober reflection of the journey so far in the last 57 years, we will say it is a sorry case that we remain in a sort of parlous state. This is because when we look at those other countries that we were at par in 1960 both politically, economically and socially, then I don’t think we have anything for which to beat our chest for. So if we do proper searching on the journey so far and we look at our present position, then we need to thrust forward with a very greater hope for tomorrow. Opportunities abound everywhere, but they remain largely untapped with so many factors militating against that thrust.

So, I will say that with the 57 years gone by, we are no longer a toddler. I mean it is a long time in the life of a nation, so all hands must be on deck, both the lead and the leaders must just have to come to terms with the realities that we have to change positively our ways of life.

At 57 we are still struggling on how best to live together as a nation as there are renewed calls for restructuring of the nation on the path of true federalism. What is your take on this?

Restructuring must not be misunderstood, it is simply just as I said that we look back from where we are coming from, we view ourselves from the current position and we veer into the future, we look at opportunities. When we look backward you look at the missed opportunities. Are we satisfied as a nation that we have missed such humongous opportunities? Are we satisfied that we are having opportunities that are beckoning for our tapping and we refuse to do it for certain things? And if we put all these factors together then are we going to say that we have a dilapidated house, then we will continue to endanger our lives, by living in that house at all cost without restructuring it.

Restructuring is not calling for the disintegration of the nation. We are unanimous through the length and breadth of the country and in total agreement that we are better thrust together with our size, with our unity in diversity and with the fact that the cultural blend is a beauty to behold. What we need to do is to understand ourselves and to ensure that for the unity to be upheld, there must be justice. And when we say justice, it is not justice between one zone or the other, it is actually justice between the haves and the have not. Justice from those who have benefited from undue advantage for those who are perpetually disadvantaged. So when I say that one, I don’t mean looking at it from South, West, North and East divide. My thinking is that what is it that is making those who are extremely very rich to be rich. Can we close the gap judiciously so that with justice we can have a unity, the unity can exist and then it is in unity and under justice that we can make progress for all development and growth which we all crave for and we are begging everybody to join hands together so that we can move forward and catch up with those that have left us behind, that is what we are saying.

So if people are talking about 1963, we knew where our forefathers left us and we knew the locust years where, with the advent of oil everybody were just busy feeding on the nation and nobody cares about the well-being of the nation. So President Muhammadu Buhari is now in the saddle and he is talking about fighting corruption. He is struggling to ensure that attention is paid to agriculture and solid minerals as well as other ways of diversifying the economy, whether we like it or not the rent collection mentality just have to end.

Yes we have been lucky the oil price is still going on, the demand is totally weaning, though we heard they were cutting the output in order to shore up the price, but be that as it may I still believe our sun is still shining most and we can use the money from the crude oil right now to develop other sectors. It is part of restructuring. Then we can go ahead and look at our constitution which is the foundation of our existence. So, if the foundation is not right, the lawyers will say you can’t build something on nothing and you expect it to stand. The engineers and architects will say without adequate column, no structure can stand. The agriculturists will say you put a seed in the soil it will first of all degenerate, get rotten before germinating.

So let us believe it is the rotten stage we have passed in the last 57 years , then we now look forward to the tender output, offshoot that will make the foundation to be solid so we have good grip on the land we are standing on. We have tried so many constitutions, we had several national confabs, we are brothers and sisters, let there be spirit of give and take, let everybody realise that it is when all are fairly happy that we can work together and have a positive synergy. Yes, the nation is non-negotiable as many are chorusing, but it shouldn’t be iron cast. You have a wife and husband even after staying together for 80 years they are still divorcing. We are not calling for it, because husband and wife are better together, but let there be justice. So if the husband used to abuse the wife, that should stop. Let us stop insulting one another, let us do what is right. And if we don’t know where we are going let us go back to the starting bloc. 1963 constitution is still there. All the earlier constitution review, the national conferences, put everything together. Let us look at power between the executive, the National Assembly, yes anybody can claim the right to say it is my right to exercise the power, the power belongs to God and we are serving the humanity, we are serving the collective interest of everybody. And we derive this power from the people, let us forget our ego, let us be more patriotic and be ready to sacrifice anything for that unity that we are craving for. And that is why restructuring, knowing how to do things better, no heavy center, devolution of power, true federalism both fiscal and political, all these let us go back to the building bloc and get the things done rightly.

What do you think should be the approach of achieving the restructuring, different zones are stating what they want. Even the ruling party, APC is dialoguing to have its own stand on how to restructure. How do we put all these together, are we going to hold another Confab?

We need not waste money on national conference and if need be of course the money will be worthwhile to have a solid foundation. One we have those who specializes on these constitutional making. All these zonal arrangements, ethnic arrangements, political parties, National Assembly, executive, yes they have freedom to review and to submit a stand on what the restructuring will be, what items are to be listed, what mode to follow, what concessions from each side, what will make each zone happy. It will now be the duty of that body to put everything together, sieve the differences, blend the similarities and then we reach a consensus. It is then we can all subscribe to say yes, this is a constitution by the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, for the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. That is the time to say yes, let us move forward. So as far as I am concerned it is not too much even if the religious bodies want to be involved let them submit their own memorandum and then we move forward even culturally. There shouldn’t be a barrier to it, because we have equal rights and our rights must be guaranteed in the constitution.

 But some people are skeptical because they believe we have had several confabs in the past with nothing to show for them, are you skeptical too?

If within a family unit you have different ways of doing things, that doesn’t disturb regular consultations, regular compromise reason and the spirit of give and take so that it doesn’t matter if for whatever reasons a balance is tilting to my side, it may tilt to your side tomorrow on another level. So if we have clear understanding and love for one another, yes we may not use force in saying this should be this or that. And then the undue advantage we are talking of we have it in various presentations. When you talk of education, the imbalances are there. You talk of road construction, you talk of so many things, then you talk of the civil service structure, there are a lot of imbalances. So our best bet is to say yes, one we resolve to stay together as one, yet things must change in all acceptable way to all manner of people.

 What is your advice to President Muhammadu Buhari because many people believe that the current ethnic agitations is being fueled by his unbalanced appointments. They claim that some zones are getting more appointments than the others?

If there are unbalanced appointments, we can sit down and resolve it through dialogue, just as we are saying that deployment of arms should not be, so also we need to dialogue at left and right because dialogue is the ultimate, even if you go to war, you still come back to the round table to resolve it. If there are imbalances, make submission, give justification for it and push for it so that the wrongs can be righted.

When you are talking of restructuring you mentioned the 1963 constitution, are you saying we should go back to the 1963 constitution?

What is happening is that the 1963 constitution was working for us, so I said if we don’t know where we are going, we ought to know where we are coming from. So let us make our working bloc from the system that was working for us with modification and if at all we must copy let us be good copier not a bad copier. And most importantly let us domesticate whatever we are copying to suit our local imperatives so that the plurality, the multiplicity of our ethnic background, culture and everything, even religion may not be the same with another country. If we starts from there we will start building up. When we say restructuring, we are not saying we should turn everything upside down, but we must have a starting point.

Recently, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said that Nigeria is out of recession, but the ordinary citizens on the streets are not feeling that impact. How do you see this proclamation by the NBS?

We will be deceiving ourselves if we want immediate exit from recession. Recession crept in like a thief in the night. But I may not be totally right to say like a thief in the night, but it crept in gradually in front of our nose and we all contributed in one way or the other. If we take structures and I will make it the extreme, the World Trade Centre, 9/11, the destruction was under five minutes. The whole structure went beyond to ground zero. To reconstruct it is going to take years. So it is easier to destroy than to build. So, if the destruction of the economy, of the polity, took many years to get to where we are in, with no plans and poor execution of the plans that we had, for anybody to expect that recession will vanish immediately, we are deceiving ourselves. It is along the same restructuring we are talking of, so it is going to be gradual. The recovery is going to be gradual and if we look at it like a rolling ball from the top of the hills moving towards the valley, what we can do is to first of all apply the brake. So the sliding is arrested, may be that is what we are trying to say now. That the downward fall has been arrested. We are now expecting energizing, it is that energizing that will now be moving against the gravity, push back to the level we were in hitherto.

That energizing will require a lot of input. I will expect that we may not get to where we were before until probably, four or five years time. I am not sounding pessimistic, but we can be making appreciable improvement until the time we will be able to restore ourselves to the level we were. If we are to exit recession, once upon a time our naira was exchanging for one dollar, so that is one of the indices. Once upon a time we were having agriculture as our mainstay, the oil has taken over and the money from oil we have not been able to utilise very well. Let us get back there, and our GDP is being accounted for by other sources other than the oil then, with the recovery from recession we will be producing more, our production will be enhanced. So as far as I am concerned, yes recession arrested, okay, we are closer to it, but exiting recession not yet.