Musa Jibril
In a season characterised by political uprising and the emergence of a Third Force, Adamu Garba has been making his stand as a man to watch. Though not aligned with any of the existing political parties, he is the arrowhead of a new movement seeking a youth-inclusive government politics in a new dispensation of good governance.
Garba, CEO of IPI Solutions, a business technology solution provider in Africa, is gunning for the seat of the president of Nigeria in the 2019 polls.
He has consistently articulated pragmatic and radical solutions to the so-called confounding problems of Nigeria. In this interview, he spoke on his 2019 plans and other issues of national interest.
A lot of presidential aspirants in the past articulated their agenda but once in power, they found it difficult to translate campaign promises into achievements. How sure can you be that you can push all your ideas through?
Somebody can campaign and say I want to build roads, I want to build bridges, and I want to build schools. But, is he giving you metrics? Our approach to that is we are going to release our entire metrics to journalists especially, to track and measure us. If you said you are going to construct one kilometre of road in the next one hour, people should be able to question why you didn’t achieve it.
Second, there is a high-level bureaucracy in our system. Given the resource constraint that we have in the nation, if you focus on bureaucracy, your ministers are not going to achieve results. What we are going to do is to create the National Delivery Units. Those NDUs are going to specifically target areas of relevance to economic sustainability, which are then put under a task force that will be monitored directly with the highest level of authority. If we want to have 10, 000 megawatts of electricity, it should not go under the minister of power or minister of energy, because he has a lot of bureaucracy to handle before he can enable one document. One clerk may delay the delivery of this.
Take that out completely. Create a new structure that has less bureaucracy that you can monitor, that you can track and ask questions that can make sure the delivery is done on time.
The country’s unity appears to be threatened, what do you make of this?
At independence, we have regional leaders who thought first about their region ahead of the centre. There was more thinking about regions than the making of Nigeria as a nation. The colonial masters who carved out the Niger area understood this area to be one of the biggest markets you can get in Africa. They see us as people who are very enterprising, very hardworking; people who have established kingdoms, who have systems of governance working for them, people who were trading among themselves and even had their currencies; this place is a very large market and the only way to profit from them is to draw a map around them and say they belong together. They did that and they made a fortune out of it. When they pulled out and left us with the map, we should have been thinking of how to grow our size, how to interconnect more and trade more in a way that each section of the country can grow bigger. The role of the Nigerian president is to be a salesman – selling the importance of this country’s unity to each and every region.
Once a person has identity crises, that person will live his entire life trying to look for who he is. We Nigerians have several identities. A Nigerian can be a northerner; as a northerner, he can claim to be from the north-east or north- central, from there, he can be a Muslim; as a Muslim, he can identify as a Sunni, and therefore, he can only pray in one mosque and not in other. All because he didn’t know who he is. Our intention is to come out with a deliberate two-year media campaign to define the principles of what is called Nigeria. We call it the Three R-System: The Rejuvenation, Reawakening and Renaissance of the Nigerian nation. The definition of the fact is that Nigeria is a confederation of a marketplace where people are richer because of their sheer size, where people from different regions need to live together because we will get more if we stay together and he who goes alone get less. We will come up with a deliberate campaign to make people see the reason for us to stay together as one nation, make them see the great strength we have, our strength in this diversity that we have.
With a market of 180 million people I don’t need to cross borders to be rich, I am great as a citizen of Nigeria. If somebody is coming from Ghana to trade with me, he has to spend a lot of resources to assess this market. Why then do I need to go out of this market? The problem is we have consistently had leaders whose thinking is not about the economy first. Their thinking is their allegiance to their region. We need to build a nation that can espouse the civilisation of peace and prosperity. There is nothing that needs to divide us because divisions make us smaller and weaker.
Nepotism seems to be waxing stronger in the nation, do you agree?
Yes, because we have some inherent structures that encourage it. There will be no federal character in our manifesto. We believe competence should drive appointment to government office. We need the nation to work for everyone, not for some interests. Second one is that Nigeria is a secular state and we will not institutionalise religion, nor identify with any religion as an institution in the governance system of the country. My allegiance is to Nigeria first, not religion. We need to address it to solve some of these issues of religion that we are having.
What different approach will you take towards agriculture?
We need to look into value chain in terms of crop selection. We cannot just go into agriculture because you want to eat food. We should have a state-defined policy and then regulate our agricultural practices. We have rubber, cocoa, cotton, groundnut, palm kernel––all these have high-yield value and they have good industry value chain. Why can’t we focus on them as a state policy? Such that anyone investing in, say, cotton, gets some incentives. For example, if you are bringing 100 million dollars to invest in cotton in Nigeria, the government can subsidize that process for you. But I cannot subsidize rice because it is a product that I can import from Thailand at even a cheaper rate. What we need to focus on is the agricultural value chain. The agricultural output in the country should power the manufacturing industries; therefore, we should focus more on cash crops.
There seems to be no end to the Almajiri scourge in the north. What is the practical way out?
While growing up, I attended Jambutu Primary School, but before then I passed through the almajiri life. I was always fishing in the river or scavenging on dumps picking rafters and Aluminium to sell in the market. So, I know what it is like to be an almajiri. I can tell you it is not that 90 percent of their parents do not understand that going to school is important, it is just that they cannot afford the N100 PTA fee.
But a policy of free, basic education will force parents to send their children to school. According to UNICEF, Nigerian’s pupils in the basic education bracket are 24 million. On 500 dollars per one pupil, the country will not spend more than one trillion naira to take care of education in Nigeria at the basic level for all the children. Education policy at primary school level will encourage 100 percent enrolment. Why won’t parents across the country send their children to school, when all you ask of them is just send your children to school? Then make it mandatory to do so.
Second, introduce a programme to keep the children in school till 5 pm because once you allow the children to go back to the streets, they will join the delinquents. Keep them in school for some time and introduce a lot of recreational activities to engage them for a longer period.
What is your plan for addressing gender inequality?
Personally, I am looking forward to having 47percent women in elective positions in Nigeria. Personally, I would prefer a woman Vice President. Women are focused. They keep their eyes on the balls. Shutting down a woman’s possibility is shutting down a national possibility. I am proposing that we have many women in public offices, not just by appointment but also in elective offices. My expectation is to have women coming out strongly so that when we are looking at aspirants for the governorship of Katsina, Calabar or Ondo, we will have women aspiring to this position. We don’t believe women are restricted by their gender. I believe they are capable and competence-defined. They have the capacity and competence that every man has.
The world is witnessing a subtle realignment of interests by nations. Where should Nigeria stand in this realignment?
In statecraft, your geography is your reality. Nigeria is an Atlantic nation. We face South America and North America on one side and Europe also. Those should be our natural allies. Our direction should be influenced by whatever America or Europe is doing. Whatever the Middle East or the Far East is doing should be of less concern to us. When there is an issue in the South China Sea, it is never our business; when there is an issue in the Middle East, it is never our business, because those are not our reality. If there is trouble in Nigeria, you don’t expect China to send a vessel to reach Nigeria quickly; rather it is the United States that can send a vessel to reach our shores in few hours. Strategically, our allies should come from there. We are members of the Atlantic alliance; we should put our hand on everything Atlantic. This is our reality.
Today, however, our foreign policy satisfies only our pride and not necessarily the best interest of the citizenry. Our foreign policy should be influenced largely by trade and strategic interests.