Chief Femi Okurounmu, a chieftain of Afenifere, was a former Commissioner for Works in Ogun State and served in the Senate of the Federal Republic in 1999 -2003 representing Ogun Central constituency. He speaks with YINKA OLUKOYA on the Nigeria’s political leadership and reasons the country’s socio-political configuration will not support the enthronement of good governance.
There is an ongoing bid by the National Assembly to review the 1999 constitution as amended. What is your opinion on this?
All efforts by the National Assembly to so-called review the constitution are just attempt to make money for themselves, for their pockets. I was in the first Senate of this [current democratic experience] from 1999 to 2003. Since then, we have been reviewing the constitution and the budget for reviewing the constitution is getting heavier and heavier with each subsequent Senate. So, every subsequent Senate since 1999 has been going through the exercise, saying they want to review the constitution. I think it is just a way to enrich their pockets. The kind of review they are doing is meaningless. All of us know that this constitution is a quasi-unitary. It is almost like Nigeria is a unitary state, which it is not. Nigeria is supposed to be a federation; we should have a federal constitution. So any review should try to be in the direction of making the constitution more federal, but some of the reviews they are doing are tightening the unitarism. They are making it more unitary.
As an example, the latest they have done with the support of President [Bola] Tinubu is to make local government a third tier of government, which would be then receiving its allocation directly from the federal government. That means we now have three tiers of government, federal, state and local. That is not a federation anymore.
A federation, truly speaking, should be a federation of the States. It is the States that are federating. The States are federating to form a federal government. The affair of each State is not the business of the federal government. It is each State that will create its local governments, as many local governments it thinks it can fund. It is not the business of the federal government to create any local government for any State. As it is now, all our local governments are created by the federal government. That is wrong, that is not a federal system.
In short, you are not an advocate of local government autonomy?
I have said so; local governments cannot be autonomous. They cannot be a separate tier of government. Local governments are the babies of State governments. It is the State government that should create and fund their local governments and devise how they will be administered. It is not the business of the federal government. That is the legislation that Tinubu, who has been a proponent of restructuring, true federalism all along, now he has got there and the first thing he will do is to make Nigeria more unitary, and work against our federalism. All that the National Assembly, the executive are concerned about is to be feathering their own nests and lining their own pockets.
There is this call by The Patriots for a Constituent Assembly to draft a people’s constitution for the country, as well as a referendum thereafter on the draft. What is your view on this?
There are many respectable [personalities] in The Patriots, many people who I respect. There are so many eminent Nigerians. People like Emeka Anyaoku. I respect him a lot. Even Papa Adebanjo is a member. I am equally a member, but a sleeping member. I am not active there. If you look at their list, my name is there, but I’m not active there. I don’t contribute on their platform; I only read what they are saying. I respect many of them, but they are misguided. Once you look at The Patriots, you will see party, because the first chairman is Chief Rotimi Williams and succeeded by Ben Nwabueze. These two people were the ones that gave us the constitution we are complaining about. Whether it is the 1979 or 1999 Constitution, it is the work of these two gentlemen. They are the ones who gave us these bad Constitutions. Now that they have realised how useless their work is, they are now at the forefront of those [calling] for a review of it. That is always the problem with Nigerians. When they are in a position to do something good, because of some other influences, they will not do it. After they have messed up the thing and are no more in a position to do it, they start shouting like [former President Olusegun] Obasanjo. When Obasanjo was in a position to put this country in the right direction, he did not do it, but, now, he is the greatest talker. He is the one who knows best about how Nigeria should be governed. He knows how to tell people how to do the right thing, but when he was there, he did not do it. I don’t support the convening of any Constituent Assembly again. Nigerians like to talk. That is the only thing Nigerians like to do, talk and talk. If you put Nigerians in a room to start talking about a new Constitution, they are ready to talk for the next 100 years. They will just keep talking; when it comes to action, they will not do anything. We have done enough talking, when it comes to things that we should do to make our Constitution federal.
The 2014 National Conference went quite a long way in trying to introduce measures which will make our Constitution more federal. For instance, we agreed that there should be two tiers of government; that is where we started from. That was agreed upon at the 2014 National Conference. Only two tiers of government constituting the federation: the federal government and the States. We agreed that the States should be the ones to create their local governments as they deemed fit. It is not for the federal government to create local government for the States. We agreed that each State should fund its own local governments from its own resources, so that the revenue from Abuja should be shared between the federal and State governments, and when each State realises how much it is getting, it can then decide how many local governments it wants to create from its resources, both from the federation account and its own internally generated revenue.
So, we won’t have a situation where Kano is having too many local governments, and Lagos State is having just a third or so. I know that in 1979, Kano and Jigawa were both one state then. The two together had the same number of local governments as Lagos, but with this lopsided creation of local governments, Kano alone has almost twice or three times as many as Lagos. The same thing with Jigawa. So when they share revenue, that gives Kano and Jigawa multiples of the revenue that goes to Lagos., That is unfair. This was deliberately done by the military who created these local governments and states. It was one of the ploys by the North to dominate us, both political and physical dominations. We cannot continue that. That is why when each State gets its own revenue, it can decide how many local governments it wants and which it can responsibly fund.
Again, at the 2014 National Conference, we all agreed that each state should have its own constitution. Every region used to have its own constitution during the regional system. The Western region had its own constitution; the Eastern region had its own constitution, and the Northern region had its own. The federal government had constitution for all of us. To the extent that that the provisions of the state constitution did not conflict with the national or federal constitution. Each state was free to have its own constitution, so we don’t all have to do things the same way. You can decide to do things the way that it suits your environment.
We all agreed on State Police, that you cannot say a man is a Governor or Chief Executive of a state when he has no police to enforce laws passed by the House of Assembly. Our Houses of Assembly can pass laws and if the Commissioner of Police decides not to help in enforcing those laws, the laws are worthless, because the governors does not have enforcement powers. All the security in the state is not under the governor, because he has no police to enforce security. There were many powers we took from the centre and gave it back to the state, so that they can exercise more powers in accordance with the dictates of their states. All these were taken care of at the 2014 National Conference. There were only two areas which, in my opinion, at the 2014 National Conference, we discussed but we took wrong decisions. One of them is the kind of democratic system we should continue to practise, whether it should be presidential or parliamentary system. We discussed that and the conference decided we should continue with presidential system. That cannot be surprising because most of them have vested interest. Of course, if you are a governor, you don’t want to lose the power of the Executive Governor, and that if you are an aspiring governor, you would not want to lose that power. Even the question of immunity, they enjoy it. Most of the people at the conference did not support our abandoning the presidential system of government. That was a mistake and, in my own opinion, that was one of the shortcomings of the 2014 National Conference. Until we go back to the parliamentary system, Nigeria will not make progress. To say we should have more and more talking is a waste of time. All we need now is action, not talk.
Recently, Afenifere called on the federal government to save Nigeria from sinking. What are the steps you think the government can take to rescue the country?
It is a deep problem. To begin with, Nigeria is having bad governance because we are having bad people in government. When you have bad people in government, you cannot have good governance. What kind of people do we have in government? Not just now, it has started long ago and it is getting worse with each succeeding government. And people begin to take it as normal. Certificate forgers, plenty of them are in government. People who have committed crimes or different types of frauds are in governments, plenty of them. People who have stolen money from previous political offices, like former governors, and so on, who have been indicted even by our own EFCC [Economic and Financial Crimes Commission], whose indictments are there, but their cases were not prosecuted because of their influence, weight or connections, they are there…
There is no question of trying to be honest in this regime. Dishonesty is what is being promoted. Honest people cannot get to serve Nigeria in this kind of government that we are having. So, when we have a government that has preference for crooked people, we cannot have good governance. That is why we can’t punish people for corruption. Who is going to punish a man for corruption, when all of them are corrupt? The person who suffers in this kind of a society is the honest hardworking man; he is the victim. There is no encouragement for people to work hard and be honest, because all those making it are filthy corrupt people and nothing happens to them because they are all protected. In a society where you don’t punish corruption, that is a direct invitation for everybody that this is the only way you can make it. This is not good for our youths. We are not giving good examples to our youths. The only thing we are telling our youths is that you cannot exist in Nigeria if you live an honest life. They have no proper models to follow, to emulate. That is why the society gets corrupt right from the youths. The youths cannot make it without the corrupt godfathers. Even a person who leaves the university today with a good certificate cannot get a job without good connections with these corrupt leaders. That is why our society is breaking down. Until we change the system, we cannot get a better society, and that is where restructuring comes in.
We must have different ways of choosing our leaders. We must have a different system of government. This presidential system cannot help us. This presidential system encourages corruption. It encourages autocracy, because once you become president and you can pocket the legislature, the judiciary and give them money, then you can do whatever you want. That is what we are having now. The country cannot get better under those circumstances. We must change our leadership recruiting system. I believe the only way forward is to return to the parliamentary system of government. This executive presidential system is a prescription for rotten society. A society of autocrats. A society of untouchable thieves in government. They have immunity; they can steal all your money and you cannot do anything to them. They can even kill human beings and you cannot do anything to them. This type of government is not suitable for us. In the parliamentary system of government, the cost of governance is very low. In the parliamentary system, the cost of elections will be far less, compared to what it is in the presidential system. Can you imagine, in the presidential system, if you are not a billionaire you cannot contest election. You must pay heavily for nomination forms or expression of interest form; you must go through primaries, and you must bribe every delegate. if you don’t have enough money to bribe delegates, you are going nowhere. In the last election that we had, every delegate that went to Abuja to take part in the convention of either the APC [All Progressives Congress] or PDP [Peoples Democratic Party], the aspirants had to pay for their accommodation, transport fare, feeding and each of the delegates returned home with dollars. That is just for you.
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