Guardian

• Tinubu And Former AD Governors Are Behind Divisions In Afenifere

Senator Femi Okurounmu served as senator between 1999 and 2003 under the platform of the Alliance for Democracy (AD). The outspoken senator, who represented Ogun Central Senatorial District, spoke to CHARLES COFFIE GYAMFI on a number of issues, including politics in the Southwest, granting amnesty and recognition to ethnic militia and why corruption has become intractable.

How will you rate the Jonathan administration, in terms of performance?

Jonathan’s administration has been handicapped by his predecessors, the baggage he inherited and the manner in which he came to office put him at a disadvantage.  He inherited baggage of liabilities from the preceding regimes, starting from Obasanjo’s regime to Yar’Adua’s; he inherited a baggage of liabilities that is hampering his effective performance. He cannot fight corruption, corruption has got worse but the blame is not all his because it is part of the liabilities he has inherited.

But some people see him as a very weak leader, not firm enough to take tough decisions?

You know in politics you have to give people a long rope to pull, sometimes, patience is important in politics. Sometimes if you rushed to take some actions people will blame you even though you are right. He gave these people (Boko Haram sect) a long rope to pull, he even gave them offers, which annoyed many Nigerians and if these people were clever and embraced those offers, this latest development (State of emergency) wouldn’t have come up.  Most Nigerians didn’t like these offers, offer of dialogue and offer of amnesty.

In fact, a lot of us were hoping that those things would not be accepted because we didn’t like them, but at least by offering them, the President has shown the world that he is a leader who was ready to operate in a peaceful and fatherly way to stop this rebellion. But since those people rejected the offers now that Jonathan has come down heavily on them he has the whole nation’s support behind him.

On a national scale now, would you say the federal government is doing enough to fight corruption?

Well, those who are familiar with my writings and statements know that I have been attacking various governments, right from former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government, for not doing enough to fight corruption. When I was still writing my Tribune Column, I hammered Obasanjo seriously for not doing enough to fight corruption. I accused him of being corrupt himself. In fact, I accused Obasanjo of breeding corrupt leadership, encouraging corruption and cultivating corruption.

Would you say things are better now?

Of course not. In fact, things are getting worse. Obasanjo ensured that things would get worse by the way he handed over power. To begin with, before he handed over, he had his third term ambition, which in fact, capped his corruption through the way he bribed and bribed the National Assembly. In fact, he escalated corruption in the National Assembly to a level we have never known before and you know once a lion tastes blood, it will start to kill and eat human beings.

So the kind of corruption that was never known before in the National Assembly, Obasanjo introduced it by bribing them to have a third term in office and since then, nobody has been able to reduce the corruption in the National Assembly. It is mounting everyday and before Obasanjo left office, after he had failed to have his third term, he decided to install somebody who would more or less, boost his ego. He handpicked Yar’Adua and Jonathan for that purpose. But in handpicking Yar’Adua, he ensured that Yar’Adua would not be able to fight corruption, because who are the people who funded Yar’Adua’s campaign at Obasanjo’s request, people like James Ibori who were already indicted for serious corruption. He had their files, they were already indicted by EFCC, he had their files in front of him, they too were aspirants for the Presidency, so he (Obasanjo) called them and said look, you cannot contest, if you do we will bring out your file and you will go to jail. He therefore ordered them not only to step down for Yar’Adua but also fund Yar’Adua’s campaign. So with their corrupt money, they funded Yar’Adua’s campaign. Those who should have been put to jail by Obasanjo were made to go and fund Yar’Adua’s campaign with the money they had looted. That made Yar’Adua to give them soft landing when he got into power. Yar’Adua could not therefore prosecute them, in fact, they became the closest associates of Yar’Adua, wining and dining with him at Aso Rock. That is why nobody could prosecute Ibori, even when they prosecuted him in Nigeria, they could never convict him. All these people were the people who actually financed Yar’Adua’s campaign, to enable him to become the President. Corruption got worse under Yar’Adua because he could not do anything to these corrupt people and that gave licence to everybody to be corrupt.

That is why impunity is so bad; impunity demonstrates to other people that if people can steal so much money and nothing happens to them, why shouldn’t I steal my own? That is why those in government or close to the government began to steal money, believing that nothing can happen to them and truly up till today nothing happens to them.

Civil servants have learnt the lesson, everybody has learnt the lesson, all Nigerians have learnt the lesson that the way to survive in Nigeria and be a big man is to steal money. Sadly, the notion is that you better steal a lot of money because if you steal small money they will put you in jail because you won’t have enough to bribe the Judge, but if you steal a lot of money you will have enough to bribe everybody, including the Judge and you will still have enough left over.

Things have gotten to a ridiculous stage now, in fact, the Judges are the most corrupt now, the level of corruption in the judiciary is higher than anywhere else because they know that these people have looted a lot of money. When you take a corrupt man before a judge, the judge is happy at the opportunity to take part of the money and allow the case to hang on forever, it will never be concluded. What are the ways to reduce corruption to the barest minimum in Nigeria?

There are two ways; one way is for the people to wake up and begin to condemn corruption. As it is today, a lot of us just pay lip service to condemning corruption, because we are all waiting for our own opportunity to also have the chance to steal our own. A lot of young men today are all looking for opportunity where they too can have their hands in the national purse and steal their own. So they are not against corruption, but rather they too want to partake in it.

Unless we change that, unless we have a way of changing the attitude, orientation of our young people, if we can have a way of mobilising the young people, change their orientation, a kind of national orientation for the young people, if we can have that, it will promote change.

Another way, I think is to give stiff punishment to convicted corrupt persons. If we are ready to do that, that is the easiest way, but the government at the top will not do that as I have said. The government cannot do it. If am the president and you are the one who funded me to be president and you are the most corrupt man in Nigeria, will I imprison you, if all my associates and friends are corrupt, will I imprison them? That is the problem we have today and our people don’t have the mentality of the North African countries, where they can continuously rise up and say no. Nigerians do not want to die and in any country where people are so intimidated by death, where they are so afraid to die, it is difficult to come about progress.

Progress through public reaction is very difficult because every public reaction involves some danger to yourself, your person and in the Nigerian society nobody wants to expose himself or herself to any danger. That is the problem we have.

Does the pardon given to Alamieyeseigha affect the fight against corruption?

It falls under what I have said; Alamieyeseigha was a substantive governor while Jonathan was his deputy. Definitely, the President doesn’t see Alamieyeseigha as a person to be disgraced,

convicted or humbled. He sees him as somebody that has already been disgraced, who must be liberated and brought back to prominence and rehabilitated. Such behaviour encourages people to become very corrupt.

What do you think of recent revelations that the Federal Government is planning to contract Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) to protect NNPC pipelines in the South West?

Well, to begin with, what is the rationale for having OPC; OPC came into existence to champion an ethnic nationality struggle, struggle for freedom from oppression, freedom from marginalization, to see that the Yoruba are not second class citizens, that was the reason for OPC’s emergence. In other words, OPC was a response to the failure of government to provide fair and just governance for everybody. That is what OPC was found to respond to.

A good government should make it unnecessary to have ethnic militias like OPC, what the government should do is to encourage good governance, improve security for everybody through the police and other security agencies and ensure fairness and justice, so that nobody feels he has to organise any militia to fight for his own right or to fight for justice; that should be the proper duty of governance.   Government should not succumb to recognising these ethnic militias, as if to say they are now part of institutions of governance.  They are not part of institutions of governance; they are responses to bad governance. By the time the government begins to award them contracts, government have, in fact, accorded them recognition and you give them such lucrative contracts, you encourage other militias to spring up because people will now feel that the easiest way to have government’s recognition and have a piece of the national cake is to organise and threaten government. That is why for a long time we have opposed Boko Haram and amnesty for them because amnesty for Boko Haram is rewarding terrorism and as we have always said, it will encourage other terrorist groups to spring up. So I am opposed to awarding oil pipelines protection contract to OPC, the same way I am opposed to awarding the same to the militants of the Niger Delta. It is wrong, it is the government that is giving these people recognition and rewarding the taking up arms against the government. Whether we like it or not, these people are taking up arms against government, we cannot be rewarding that so I am opposed to the contract.

There seems to be division in the Progressives’ camp; what is responsible?

It is an open and public knowledge that the Progressives are divided. For example, when we talk of the Progressives in this country, the ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria) as of today are believed to consist of Progressives, because a lot of the members of ACN were members of the AD (Alliance for Democracy).

In fact, it was the AD that became the ACN and the AD was the one that really championed Nigeria’s democracy and opposed Military rule as Afenifere.

We opposed Gen. Abacha’s regime and later formed the AD because we didn’t want to operate with the conservative parties of Abacha; we thought we couldn’t work with those conservatives who supported Abacha all along, that was why we formed the AD. One could say the AD, which has now transformed to ACN are Progressives. At the same time, the Labour Party (LP) in Ondo State was part and parcel of this AD, so they too are Progressives and that is why we supported Ondo State during the last election. There are others who don’t even belong to either ACN or LP, but are leaders of the NADECO Movement. Though they are Progressives, they don’t belong to either of these parties because they don’t believe these parties quite represent what we stood for originally, they have lost focus.

We are still progressives; for instance, I don’t carry a party card today. Chief Olu Falae, who was our AD presidential candidate doesn’t belong to either of these two parties and there are many of us like that who didn’t belong to neither ACN or LP or Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The truth of the matter is that the Progressives are scattered, there are Progressives now in LP, ACN, AD and even PDP. As soon as the AD was dislodged, many of the members went to PDP and today they are part and parcel of PDP; so it is no news that the progressives are scattered, we belong to so many different parties now and to make matters worse, there are moves, to more or less revive some of the past progressive parties like the UPN (Unity Party of Nigeria). You would have known that Dr. Fredrick Fasehun is trying to revive the UPN and there are also moves to revive

the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In fact, the SDP is already revived, so there is now a party, which is now known as SDP, this is supposed to be for the Progressives. How we are going to get all the progressives to belong to just one party is the next target.

Is that possible?

It is a big challenge, nothing is impossible but it is a big challenge.

Afenifere is also divided, what is responsible for that?

Again, during the NADECO struggle from 1995-1998, the struggle against Abacha was championed by NADECO and as Abacha’s terror was unleashed on the people, especially on NADECO, a lot of NADECO people withdrew, leaving just a small group of people, committed, dedicated people, mostly Afenifere leaders to fight Abacha to the end. So these Afenifere leaders were the ones who midwived the political party that contested the election as AD and when the people saw that AD was very popular with the people, a lot of progressives came under the AD umbrella as Afenifere, as at that time there was this slogan that “AD is Afenifere and Afenifere is AD.”

So when we became a party, we were still Afenifere, we just became a political party just by coincidence, because the rest of the country then had already been

swallowed by Abacha and AD did not have the resources and the time to really go and canvass throughout the length and breadth of the country, because the time was very short. So, AD was more or less confined to the Afenifere within the Southwest, so that was why we have the slogan, “AD is Afenifere, Afenifere is AD.”

But after we got to power, the first indication of a crack was the struggle for the presidential candidacy of our party. We had two candidates contesting for the position, chief Olu Falae and the late chief Bola Ige. The choice of one candidate created some misgivings among certain people within us and that was the beginning of what you may call a crack and this continued till we got into government.

People who have other agenda, apart from having misgivings about the choice of our presidential candidate, others who had their own private agenda exploited this crack.

For instance, our AD Governors who always wanted to assert their independence from the Afenifere leadership felt that now that they had power they could assert their independence. They saw it as an opportunity to exploit that division and assert their independence.

This led to some kind of rebellion by the AD governors against the ACN’s traditional leadership, the traditional centre of authority of Afenifere. That was the beginning of the crisis that led to all the splits we have today and that is why a lot of the traditional Afenifere leadership are not in ACN because they don’t support the leadership of the party, which is deemed to have departed from the original principles and ideology of Afenifere.

Would it be right to refer to those who caused the division as rebels?

Well, I won’t call them rebels because that might suggest something negative, but certainly they refused to line up behind the leadership, so they went their own separate ways and refused to acknowledge the authority and the leadership of Afenifere and that led to the split.

Is it not a good idea if Afenifere came together to speak with one voice on behalf of the Yoruba?

There are many ways in which Yoruba can come together to fight their cause. We may not call ourselves Afenifere, we can call ourselves different names. The important thing is to fight the Yoruba cause, we may even come together under a non-political umbrella, but as long as we agree on the Yoruba interest and how to pursue them, even with us being under different political parties, we can still fight a common cause and join forces in the common struggle. When it became difficult to get the various factions to come together, some of us approached our Mama, HID Awolowo because she too was involved in efforts to bring everybody together under Afenifere, but even her own effort failed. Efforts were made, more than five years, trying to bring the group together; traditional leadership, the governors and everybody came together, even before Papa Abraham Adesanya died. The split as I told you started immediately after the 1999 election, it became worse in 2003 when we had two different conventions, one convention was held in Abuja, the was held in Lagos. The one that was held in Abuja was the authentic convention, but because their (AD Governors) intention was to hijack the party, they organised a separate convention in Lagos, which was organised by Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Of course, they had all the resources, so the crack became very wide. We then had two different people pretending to be national chairmen; we had Senator Akinfenwa, who was elected in Abuja and chief Bisi Akande who was elected in Lagos. It was Akande’s faction of the AD that metamorphosed into the ACN. In spite of that, we continued to make efforts to bring everybody together, Abraham Adesanya, Afenifere leader made reconciliation efforts until he died, but he did not succeed. Before Adesanya died, he made Fasoranti to act for him, even on a sick bed. He said Fasoranti should act as a leader but the governors refused to recognise Fasoranti as the leader, they chose Senator Ayo Fasanmi of Osun State as the leader.

We now said if the two groups are to come together, then we must have a neutral person to bring them together. We set up a neutral Yoruba leadership committee comprising people who are not partisan politicians, but who enjoy respect in Yoruba land. We appointed that committee to effect the reconciliation of the two factions. The late Justice Kayode Esho headed the committee and everybody knows that Esho was not a politician. He was a respected leader of integrity. He was appointed to head this committee, members of the committee included Rt. Bishop Gbonigi, Rt. Bishop Ladigbolu, Prof Toun Ogunseye and others.

They held several meetings to try to reconcile the two groups, the former AD governors, in fact, refused to attend the meetings. Several meetings were called but they refused to attend. They said they would not even seat together with traditional Afenifere leadership – Fasoranti, Ayo Adebanjo, Olanihun Ajayi, late Ganiu Daudu, myself and others. They refused to attend the meetings and when we found out that this committee could not succeed, we went to brief Mama Awolowo how far we had gone. We felt she was the only one left who could try to bring the two factions together, so she too tried. She invited both sides to several meetings, but if a meeting were scheduled for tomorrow, the former governors would go and see Mama a day earlier, to tell her that they will not be at the meeting. When we showed up for the meeting on the appointed date, the governors wouldn’t be there. Mama still called other meetings, but all the meetings she called were not honoured by these governors, so when we found that they would not honour the meetings, a number of us advised Mama at that stage that, instead of just giving up and allow Yoruba land to disintegrate, there was still something we could do. We said if we could not come together politically because Afenifere was a socio-political organisation, if we cannot bring all of us together under the same socio-political umbrella, at least all Yoruba could be brought together under one forum, where we can talk about Yoruba interests and people of all political persuasions could be free to be in that forum. That was the origin of the Yoruba Unity Forum (YUF).

The idea of the YUF was to have a forum where, even the quarrelling politicians could all feel a sense of belonging as Yoruba people, all you need to come there is to be a Yoruba man, whether you are in PDP, ACN, APC or any other party; a forum, where all Yoruba can come and sit, identify Yoruba interests, articulate those interests and see how we can together champion those interests.

How far has YUF achieved that objective?

The former AD governors still refused to attend, they do not attend but some of their members who feel sufficiently persuaded attend as individuals, but the former governors try to discourage them from attending as they themselves do not attend.

Would you consider Afenifere Renewal Group a breakaway from the main body?

It was a splinter group of younger elements, who in attempt to, more or less, pull the rug from under the established leadership, was formed by Tinubu. He thought one of the ways he could fight them was to get these young men to do the job for him and of course, you know our young men of today, if you give them money they will follow you. So he funded them and made them to establish this Afenifere Renewal Group, with a view to more or less, supplant the real Afenifere but the experiment has been a failure.

The Advice I will give is that we should, for now consolidate the Yoruba Unity Forum. If we consolidate the YUF and fortunately, as I have said earlier, when you come to the YUF, you don’t come as a party man, you drop your party affiliations and just come in and we don’t ask any party member not to come in, every party is welcome, every political associations is welcome. May be if we consolidate the Forum and we are able to articulate the Yoruba interests and join hands together in pursuing those interests, ultimately a number of us may find out that we are so identical in our interests that we could then go out and form another association, which is political. That will not take us away from the Yoruba Unity Forum, but we can then still find people of enough identity goals that can then re-establish Afenifere, the way we use to know it, which still belongs to the Yoruba Unity Forum because even now, Afenifere belongs to YUF.

What is your view regarding the emerging All Progressive Congress (APC)?

The move to have APC is a good one because a party must have national spread since we all still believe in one Nigeria. The more national spread a party has, the better for our democracy and if you have a party that can contest effectively against the PDP, the better for our democracy. I think the most successful election we have had was the one between the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) when Gen. Ibrahim Babangida mandated a two-party system. If we have two nation-wide parties that are very widely spread it is good for our democracy.

I have already said my reservations about the ACN, but as for the principle of a political party having more national spread, I will say it is a good idea.

Can you foresee the APC making any impact or being a strong alternative to the PDP in the 2015 election?

It depends on how Nigerians react. Now there are attempts to bring back other parties; for instance, the SDP has been revived, the SDP was a party that had a lot of national spread. If all the people who were in the SDP embrace this new SDP, it will also be a very formidable party, which will give the PDP a run for its money. If we can have more of such formidable parties with national spread to provide viable alternatives to the PDP and the APC, the better it would be for the country’s democracy. Today I must tell you, people are not happy with the PDP and people are not happy with APC either. There is only little difference between the APC and the PDP in terms of their leadership attitude to democracy, attitude to governance, their attitude to corruption, just a little difference between the two. so if you can have another party, which people can see as truly different with patriotic goals, truly made up of people with vision, positive vision for Nigeria, then that party will give both the PDP and APC a run for their money, it possible to dislodge the PDP.

There are insinuations that Dr. Fredrick Fasehun’s effort at reviving the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) is geared towards destabilising the Southwest; do you think so?

This is the rumour circulating. I call it rumour because I don’t know if it is a fact. You media people have to do a lot of investigations to do to let us know the facts. The media itself should not engage in rumour and speculation. We want the media to come out and tell us the facts, whether is it true that Jonathan is the one financing Fasehun and that it is meant to destabilise the Southwest. These are the things we want the media to fish out and tell us. If this is true, I think Jonathan is just wasting his money. To revive UPN is not a smart idea, especially as there are also efforts to revive the SDP. If the UPN is revived and the SDP is revived, the SDP is a better choice than the UPN. I don’t know who is going to fund the revived SDP, may be it will be Jonathan himself that will do it, because SDP has a national spread more than the UPN. SDP is younger in Nigeria’s history and a lot of people today who are under 40years don’t remember UPN because it was in existence between1979 and 1983, that is 30 years ago. Besides that, Fasehun has never being a politician and I don’t see him succeeding in reviving the UPN. He was never a politician, was never a UPN leader, so he stands disqualified from reviving a party of which he was not even a leader and again the party has already receded far into the memory.