ANAYO EZUGWU 
Dr Oby Ezekwesili is the President of Human Capital Africa and a former Minister of Education. In this interview, she speaks on state of the nation, rising insecurity, poverty in the country, and how to curb them, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
Why is it that we are still talking about killings and looking for solutions despite various committees and reports by previous administrations?
As someone who has been in government, we do know that the effectiveness of government is very much dependent on the capacity of the institutions of government to continue to deliver according to the mandate for which they are set up. On the matter of governance, you also know that indicators are very clear that we haven’t made the kind of progress that enables stable societies that we know around us. And so, the key question is: What are the political, historical and human social relationship drivers that we have failed to tackle in the course of the history of our country? But specific to Plateau, I think it is important that we settle some of these issues in ways that will enable us to ensure that accountability goes to those that it should go to.
I always do not appreciate situations where we begin to talk about issues in ways that brood the lines of our country. I think that today, accountability for what has happened in Plateau State rests squarely on the government that is in office. So, what it means is that before the government takes over, it needs to have read all of issues related to Plateau. But the Plateau State situation is so offensive to the spirit that it happened again. It was almost like an accident yet it happened in a gruesome manner, where we have lost more than 200 of our citizens because there have never been a consequences for the killing of the people in those villages of Plateau State.
They almost sit like ducks just wait- ing to be slaughtered and the government just carries on with a visit and sometimes no visit at all until the next episode happens. What is going on in Plateau State is the description of what happens in a society that has lost its soul. We cannot lose 200 people and all we talk about is who was killed. We don’t even honour the dead by giving them a name. We are becoming indifferent and desensitized to the death of our fellow human beings. I couldn’t take it and I did a march to the villa and some Nigerians were busy mocking and laughing but here we are today. It is not a good thing; this is a curse upon our land and we need to end it.
What would you give as a recommendation in the area of ensuring that we don’t have such incidents happen not just in Plateau but in other areas of the Middle Belt?
First, in being able to tackle a problem, a comprehensive diagnosis is usually very critical. A comprehensive diagnosis of the drivers of insecurity and the murderous activities that are never addressed conclusively by the government would reveal many of the dimensions that people know. But until you do a proper analysis, it is difficult to say that this is the key driver. But one thing people do agree is that when things happen around religious seasons then there is something to it. There is an underlying issue of religious intolerance that is going on there. There is also the point of the farmer-herder crisis that we know to be a problem that has been protracted. Some countries have known how to address this matter because frankly, it is a matter of contest for resources. These issues of competing demand for resources are not a no-brainer. Countries have faced it and countries have figured out ways to solve this problem. Now, to the heart of what I believe to be wrong with us, it is a complete breakdown of the Nigerian state.
The Nigerian state is supposed to be composed of values that underpin the institutional processes for addressing matters and we also have the constitutional mandate of roles that need to be played to address bad behaviour and also to reward good behaviour. So, we have a Nigerian state today that is in total collapse of institutions, processes and procedures that would ordinarily tackle the kind of issues that we are discussing today. But there is even a deeper problem when the state has failed and it has no consequence on those who are culpable for the failure of the Nigerian state. So, this matter of a complete breakdown of the Nigerian state and no consequence as a result of no accountability for failure is something that we must address. That is why in an article, I made the case that we are in a place where the pact way for us to make progress as a country doesn’t require little solutions. We do need a very deep conversation. We need to question a lot of things about the current set-up as a country.
We certainly don’t want to be a country that is operating on the fringes of our possibilities. Everything that you can think of in terms of the indicators that make for a viable country, we no longer have. I believe that the insecurity that we have in this country, which has led to the total loss of value for human live and dignity associated with it, is the key reason why we need a national conversation. We need a legally mandated national conversation, not the types the politicians or the military organised for themselves but the kind of conversation that brings in the citizens into designing a viable country.
We need a country where we negotiate what our core values are, a country where we all agree towards a common vision, a country where we can agree on some common identity regardless of our political persuasion, ethnic identity, status and we do need to recreate a Nigeria that is viable, functional and a country that does work for everybody.
You once led a movement on how to fix politics in Nigeria; are you still optimistic that we can fix Nigerian politics after the 2023 general election?
Yes, we are still moving on with the programme of fixing politics. The key one that people know is the fact that we are building a new political class that will not subordinate the common good of society to their interests. We do need political players who have character, competence and capacity and who have been deliberately raised to have those kinds of tools of governance of the state in ways that will ensure that poverty is a thing of the past. Eradicating poverty in countries has been proven to not be rocket science because in the last five decades of our human existence, we have seen many countries that we started on the development level with zoom past us and have been able to prosper and have lifted thousands of their citizens out of poverty. But that is predicated on the quality of thought that produces the leadership process in those countries.
That is why Fix Politics is essentially a movement that looks at three critical pillars that matter in correcting distortions that exist in any democracy. In our current democracy; when you look at those critical pillars, the first pillar is the pillar of the citizens. The second pillar is the pillar of the political class and then the regulatory pillar, which arbitrates the relationship between the citizens and the political class. The other message of Fix Politics is of course, what we saw with the young, the old and everyone suddenly realising that democracy belongs to citizens. It is the citizens that can determine the quality of the Nigerian state that they want and we saw that in the 2023 elections. This regulatory abuse and hooliganism that we have seen trying to dismantle everything we know as the definition of democracy is not viable. People can think that they can do all these things and get away with it infinitum; it is not possible.
There is something that I keep saying to people; no leader can overwhelm the citizens forever. It is impossible. There comes a time when there has to be an ‘enough is enough’ and I think we are getting there from what I saw in the 2023 elections. I feel that we have come of age; we are at a certain level where even the young ones who voted in that election felt disenfranchised by the actions of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and all the other institutions, especially painfully, the judiciary. What they have done is that they have said to themselves: We are not moving on. They are holding on and they are the ones who are going to deliver our democracy. But beyond democracy, I need to stress the point really that this country needs a national conversation. The structure of our country is not helping us whether in terms of productivity or competitiveness, which are the two critical things you should resolve in order to tackle poverty in any society.
We don’t have the structure within which can optimize the productivity and competitiveness of the Nigerian people and the Nigerian state. So, we must have a conversation. We need to discuss the structure based on functions. It is function that determines structure not the other way round. Look at the matter of insecurity; how can we have centralised system of security where everybody looks to Abuja for command in terms of matters of security of neighbourhoods, communities and states? This is an anomaly. We need to correct all of these distortions. There are too many distortions in our society and they need a quick address. And I believe that a majority of Nigerians love the idea of being Nigerians but they want a Nigeria that they know works; a Nigeria that is just, fair, equitable and a Nigeria that puts them in a place where they can thrive.
With the need for national conversation that you raised, there is also a need for a national identity, how do we begin to build a common national identity? It doesn’t just happen because nothing happens that something doesn’t make it happen. And so on this matter of getting what we call nation formations, there are nation formations and the values of a people are one of them. The national vision that the people have agreed on is second to them. The agreed identity especially of society where you have the kind of multiplicity that we have, that is the third part of it. On these three things, a new Nigeria can emerge but it needs to be orchestrated to happen and that is where the role of the citizens comes in. The citizens must compel the National Assembly, which most of the time spent its effort to make a budget for itself to the point where it has become the legislature that is the most paid in terms of the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country to the lawmakers’ contributions.
The National Assembly and the President have to understand the time that Nigeria is in. A second happening of a Plateau State must be forbidden. The killings around the South-East must be forbid- den. One of the things that sadly happen in this society is that even the citizens do not demand the accountability of those that have been mandated by the constitution. How can you be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and you are sitting in the villa, and it is your citizens that are being told to speak about something that has happened on security?
