Guardian

Ladipo Adamolekun, Professor of Public Administration,  former university teacher, Public Administration Officer at the United Nations (UN), World Bank Public Sector Management  specialist  and  2005 recipient of the  Nigerian National Order of Merit,(the highest national prize for academic and intellectual excellence)  delivered the President Goodluck Inauguration Lecture in 2011 where he charted clear courses for the country’s development.  In this interview with NIYI BELLO, the erudite Fulbright scholar did a mid-term assessment of the President Jonathan administration and declared that the country has failed to tackle the problems of underdevelopment frontally. Excerpts:

IN 2011, you delivered the inauguration lecture that heralded the commencement of President Goodluck Jonathan first term in office where you made far-reaching recommendations. From your assessment, how has the president fared against the backdrop of your proposals?

It was a three-part-lecture, the first part focused on five fundamentals namely: electoral legitimacy, peace and security, government policy stability, rule of law and anti-corruption. Part two focused on three key result areas where transformation should be felt so that the public can see in 2015, that President Jonathan has emerged as a transformational leader. I selected educational rehabilitation, fixing poor infrastructure and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as three areas that if things were to be transformed to a higher level during the four-year tenure, would qualify the president as a transformational leader. Finally in the third part, I drew attention to what I called implementation issues and the issues are the centrality of the civil service as the instrument for implementation and the impact of inter-governmental relations in terms of implementing and there was reference to monitoring and evaluation. As you said earlier, the whole idea of transformational leadership seems to have been developed by the presidency from the lecture, unfortunately not much has been made out of it. Today, I don’t think there is a document spelling out President Jonathan’s transformational agenda but all the ministers are talking about it. There are very few exceptions though. Agriculture has actually produced a strategy to transform the sector but I am not aware of other ministries with such strategic approach. In the area of economy and finance it is very clear what macro-economic stability means between the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and that Ministry of Finance in terms of inflation, economic growth and the rest. All the parameters are clear and it is possible to measure the extent of transformation that is taking place there. Beyond those two sectors, I am not familiar with others.

Even without a document encapsulating your proposals, couldn’t government still go ahead to implement the propositions?

No! Because I am not part of them but, if it means adopting the model, these are issues we cannot run away from. Former President Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua had a seven-point Agenda, Ekiti State has eight-point Agenda which they are actually implementing. In the case of Ekiti, you can see the subject coming up every time because all the commissioners are familiar with it. And Lagos is sticking to its own strategy which they called PATH; meaning: Power, Agriculture, Transportation and Housing. That is the point I am making, there should be a direction to follow. Even if that lecture didn’t transform into a policy, there should be something on the part of government to map out the course of government. Somebody giving it in a lecture doesn’t translate to implementation but government has to come out with something to spell out what it hopes to achieve within a particular period of time. That is lacking.

Can we review your proposals in the light of the current realities?

If we select three of the five fundamentals stated in the lecture for review, and I would select electoral legitimacy, peace and security and anti-corruption. These are critical fundamental areas; anybody can add one or two though. When Jonathan won the 2011 election, there were contestations and post-election violence but compared to 2007, for instance, it was better. However, he has himself devalued the legitimacy with which he got into office. He devalued the legitimacy by latching into the second term campaign almost immediately. You remember he started talking about a single term of six or seven years almost the same time he commenced his presidency. That is derailment and turning attention from the real issue. After that he began the campaign for 2015. He is two years in office now for this term, and look at the time that the talk for 2015 started. I think part of the blame lies in the nature of his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which made the President the party leader. In the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) it is not so. Chief Bayo Akande is the chairman and former Lagos State Governor, Bola Tinubu is the party leader, not any of its governors. In Ekiti State, former Governor Niyi Adebayo is the party leader not the incumbent governor Kayode Fayemi. The problem with the PDP is that the President has expended part of his legitimacy on partisan PDP matters, and this is unfortunate. Jonathan has invested too much energy in party leadership. On that he has frittered away some legitimacy by playing crude party politics.

Look at the amount of energy being dissipated on the chairmanship of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) by the President and the heat the controversy has brought on the polity. Of course this is all about the 2015 election. I know the NGF is a body, though not constitutionally-backed, that is doing a lot in terms of providing a platform for sharing experiences among the governors in order to promote development in their various states. But all those good things have been reduced to issues of presidential succession. It is unfortunate that good things are being destroyed by partisan politics in this country and the office of the presidency is sadly, not insulated from crude politics.

However, it seems that electoral transparency is gradually taking roots. We have not had election at the national level since 2011 but the ones we had at state levels seem to have acceptability. It was performance that secured the second term for Governor Adams Oshiomhole even though the council poll in Edo State drew some criticisms. In Ondo State, Governor Olusegun Mimiko was re-elected with only 42 per cent of the votes. If it were in the days of rigging, he probably would have got more than that. The Ondo election, to me, was one that was keenly contested and it showed that the culture of transparency is being imbibed by the system. By and large, PDP has something to learn from separating the position of party leader from the President so that he can focus on governance.

On peace and security, clearly the position is one of failure. The state of emergency that was declared was to curb the insurgency because there were reports that Boko Haram sect had already taken over some territories in the North Eastern part of the country. It is what the French would call force majure or a situation of inevitability but the bottom line is that security situation is worse than what it was two years ago. However, I think that there are some basic issues that should be addressed in tackling insecurity. Intelligence gathering is one of them because in the final analysis, you depend on information and competent structures to solve these problems. Look at the way the Americans handled the Boston bombings where the culprits were apprehended within hours. That is the power of intelligence particularly as a preventive measure. The President once said that Boko Haram has infiltrated even the presidency and we are still living with that unresolved.

The state of emergency has not and cannot address that.

The other issue is implementing the reports of commissions and panel that have looked into conflict situations in the past. These reports are not being implemented. The crisis in Jos is a good example. I have lived in Jos ,  that once-peaceful city and followed keenly, the events that are happening there and I noticed that if we have implemented the recommendations of the past inquiries, some of the things happening now would not have happened. Till today, nobody can say which of the about five different reports on the Jos crisis has been implemented. So I think that we are leaving some basics unattended to, like the Yoruba would say “o fi ete sile, o n pa lapalapa,” meaning leaving leprosy to attend to ringworm. The next one is community policing which we cannot but adopt as the federal police cannot do effective policing at the local level. There is no way the federal police which does not understand the local terrain can succeed. Forget the talk of the opposition to the idea that the state police can be used as political instruments to hunt opposition. Don’t we have the same ingredients at the federal level? I mean the opportunity of being used for partisanship. Those are things that happen in an underdeveloped political culture whether at the federal or state level. But these are only aberrations that could be corrected as we go along.

But could it not be structured to prevent abuse?

Well, the federal police is not structured to prevent abuse. So let us agree that there would be abuse. Must the abuse be limited only to the federal level? I am not condoning abuse. I am only saying that these are things we should go through and not because of the fear of abuse, avoid something as fundamental as the state police and community policing which will address most of these security challenges that the country is facing.

Some people oppose the idea of state police because of the fragile nature of Nigeria’s unity and that decentralizing coercive forces may lead to disintegration

The talk about the fragility of the Nigerian federation is exaggerated. It is true that our unity is in the making but don’t let us use words like fragility to avoid tackling fundamental problems. I am a strong believer in state police. Finally on this security issue, we should not continue to maintain non-solution. If you have the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), why do you need the Ministry of Niger Delta? I suggested in that lecture that we should scrap the Ministry and increase the funding of the commission. Make the working condition of the NDDC attractive to get top-rate professionals. Most of the states in the Niger Delta are complaining of abandoned NDDC projects. So do you tackle that by creating a Ministry of Niger Delta? No wonder some people are agitating for the creation of a Ministry for the North. What is the meaning of that? I suppose we will then have the Ministry of South West and South East. What a crazy idea. Despite my suggestion, the advice was not heeded. When you give advice in this kind of situation, there is nothing you can do if it were not implemented. You can only continue repeating it simply because it is reasonable expecting that somebody would understand. And let me tell you this, unless people in the Niger Delta see concrete improvement in their living conditions, like in addressing problems of pollution, alternative transportation and improvement in their local economy, the problem of agitation will still be there and this cannot be solved by the current solutions being proffered for it. Whatever relative peace we are getting as a result of the Amnesty programme cannot be sustained until those issues are addressed frontally.

Finally on the fundamentals, I spoke on anti-corruption because I am one of those who know that corruption is one of the big issues that prevent our huge resources from translating into poverty alleviation for the generality of our people. I will however limit myself to three areas where the anti-corruption war is not being fought appropriately. First, public declaration of assets by public individuals is for preventing corruption but unfortunately President Jonathan says he does not give a damn. That means he does not want to fight corruption. Governors Fayemi and Ajimobi of Oyo State publicly declared their assets so they are good examples. Yar’Adua publicly declared his assets and that of his wife. They said Jonathan declared his own, he never made it public but I don’t think he declared for his wife. Transparency is the opposite of corruption. Corruption is darkness and transparency is light. So if you are not transparent, you are not fighting corruption. Secondly, unpunished corruption helps to institutionalize the menace. In other words, people are caught and not punished. Again here, we cannot heap all the blame on Jonathan because part of the problem is that the law does not appear to help matters. If a corrupt person knows that only a fine of  N750, 000 will be prescribed for somebody who stole billions, he will continue in it. The comparative study of the menace shows that unpunished corruption makes it difficult to control. Look at Brazil, since Lula left, as many as seven ministers have been sent to prison for corruption, how many ministers have been jailed here. In the U.S., the governor of Illinois, President Barack Obama’s state, was indicted for corruption. We don’t have that here and it does not occur to me that the President wants to champion that. And when the foreign media reports that you are not fighting corruption, you say they are lying. What kind of reaction is that? It is better to keep quite and not say anything at all. The problem of corruption is not a Nigerian problem or limited to blacks or whites. It is a human problem and you can only tackle it by putting some measures in place as it is being done all over the world. So if you look at the three fundamentals that we picked, Jonathan cannot be said to have brought any transformation, although we are only two years to his administration and we cannot write him off yet.