By Willy Eya and Mark Pippah
Despite the challenges facing the nation, many are still optimistic that Nigeria can still get out of the woods if the right strategies are adopted. One of those in this school of thought is eminent businessman and former governor of Abia State, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu. Speaking yesterday on the programme, “Democracy in Session” on the African Independent Television (AIT), he explored several options that could reposition the nation socially, economically and politically.
On proposed Federal Government loan from the IMF
I have heard the IMF is giving us zero per cent interest. We must understand that the IMF was established to cushion poverty among developing nations. So, why are we not going to take advantage of that? Why are we afraid of that? I know that people like some of our former presidents do not like to hear the name ‘IMF’ and that is not right. I mean, we are a full member of IMF and I believe we should utilise the opportunity. This is an opportunity; a 21st Century opportunity.
As an eminent businessman, what difficulties do you go through in doing business in Nigeria? Is it strict to do business in Nigeria or flexible?
No! Let me tell you something; we have vessels and for the past one year, from September 23 till today, none of those vessels has moved. Some of them pay $40,000 a day and if you have 36, 40 vessels lying down there, with investment of over two point something billion dollars, I have to pay the bank! So, how do you think I will sleep? It is not possible! That is what we are saying; it is a problem. You are manufacturing goods, you manufacture at less cost because everyday, the dollar is going up, going up, going up! In 2014, when I heard that they borrowed from banks to pay federal civil servants, I said it was wrong to have borrowed because, if you start borrowing for civil servants salary, it means you are already in recession! Most people in government then abused me and said it was because I wanted to do this and that and queried my comments. But, that is where we are today.
One of the arguments, today, is that, no matter the loan from IMF, if we are not disciplined…
(Cuts in) IMF doesn’t give you money without putting structures that would make the process transparent. Listen, going to IMF doesn’t mean that we must take money. Going to the IMF means they might just be able to cushion us and put us where we were supposed to be and then, we dismiss them saying we don’t need the money. This is how it happens. We must go to the IMF to set the framework, to set how we are going to utilise the funds. It’s not a part of the decision and the IMF is not a bad organisation. It is not a bad place to be because Nigerians would do this if we must grow. Remember that before, the Republic of Korea used to import wheat and rice. Before then, they were not genuinely a big country manufacturing electronics; they were not a country with hi-tech. It was when they imported rice and grain from Thailand and some countries that they saw that the people they were importing from were cultivating and they, too cultivated rice and grains. Now, there is big competition. They called the World Bank and restructured their economy. This was how they became a giant in electronics and hi-tech, building of vehicles. This was what happened. Many people hear that Lee Kuan Yew took Singapore from Third World to First World. It was not magic; it was a commitment to help his country. (Former President Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida tried to use the policy of IMF loan; we didn’t go to the institution because if we wanted IMF loan, we could have gone straight. IMF policies will remove a lot of imported goods from the streets and trade-jacket us and, most times, eliminate corruption. So, if leaders are afraid of going to IMF, they have something to hide.
What is the relationship between politics and running a good economy?
Well, let me tell you, the mistake we are making is that once you appoint somebody somewhere, the next he wants is to run for the position of the governor of his state or president, which is not what it should be. There are brilliant people including professors but if you are a good Economics teacher, that does not make you a good economics manager. Whatever we have learnt, we are not putting in our best resources to work. Yes, you can be a good economist but, that does not mean you will be a good president. You can be a good president but you will not be a good economist. What you do is to assemble the best of minds. If this economy can have these legs here and there, we will not be having this problem because if we have, then we have not started. The economy has not even started. Why anybody can become President of America is because checks and balances are there; the issues to resolve will be there, the issues to be countered will be there. When you say people vote for the president on religious basis, tribe, height, black or white, based on Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, or Yoruba, or Urhobo or Efik or Ibibio, how do you move forward? People should be voted into office because they have ability to do the business and run the business. Nigeria’s problem is not political; it is economic because once you solve economic problem, the political problem will be taken care of. Our greatest problem is the economy which we have not been able to solve since 1960. We need to solve it, otherwise, the whole arrangement will collapse.
What is your assessment of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration?
Well, let me tell you, many people are saying that Buhari’s administration has not done well. To me, they’ve done very well. I went to Maiduguri the other day and I went to some parts of Adamawa State where you could not have entered before and, for having fought Boko Haram for many years without much success and in less than one year, you can now go to all those places, you have to give him credit. The president has done well but, they have to be able to do more, in the areas of kidnapping, militancy and clearing the road. If a country wants to really be great, they will clear the road. People can go from the Sahara desert to the Atlantic Ocean without fearing anybody. When I was governor of Abia State, I met crime and I fought crime straightaway. I got the Police to be committed, I got the Army to be committed, I got civilians to be committed. In those days, from 1999 to 2007 when I left office, you could leave your car in any part of Abia and you would be safe and your property would be safe also. All those boys who use getaway buses, stop them on the road! We stopped it because these things are manmade. This is what you can do; this is what you can fight against.
Apart from the fight against insurgency by security agencies, will you also give the president pass mark on the economy?
No, I will not give him pass mark in running of the economy. I have had the opportunity of talking with the president. I know he is committed. When you speak with him one-on-one, you would see he is committed. The president means very well for Nigeria. He means very, very well but, I think they are missing one or two things because possibly, when you make a forecast and they are not able to read the forecast, it becomes a problem. We are in a confusion mode. The president is just one man, he is just the president of Nigeria. By the way, he has a good team of ministers. Nigerians pick on people as if Buhari has 15 ministers; the problem is not the minister; they should work more as a team. They should have more time with the president, they should have more time with the people they appointed, they should have more time with security chiefs and the ministers themselves. Mind you, I am not saying they are not meeting.
When you say the President has good intentions and means well, everybody begins to look at which president are we talking about? The economy is down and you say we have a president that is doing well. Where is the measurement?
I told you, in terms of security, the President is doing very well. In terms of the economy, he has not done very well. It is possible the economy is not what grows in one day; he needs to bring in more hands. People criticise the Minister of Finance but she is a good lady, she is on the job.
The president needs to put more good hands as advisers in the background so they can formulate policies on the economy for him. No one man can run this economy; the economy has to be done by you and me; you the journalists, have something to contribute; the President of Nigeria has something to contribute. Buhari is not the owner of this country. He is just the first among equals but you people think the president is everything, that he is the owner of the country. No, it does not work that way. I have more stakes than President Buhari in the economy. I employed 9, 600 staff. I have more stakes because this is a president that has no business; he has no company that is his own. So, this is the issue. I have a stake of paying workers every month. Toward the end of every month, I’ll be having high blood pressure. Without making money, how can I pay money? So, this is the issue. We have our own to do. If corruption must be fought; there is a lot of corruption in the private sector. People have been taking waivers and they never invest the money. People have taken all kinds of things. If we are addressing the issue of corruption, it has to be addressed across the board because the corruption in Nigeria, you cannot only fight politicians or the civil servants; you have to fight the businessmen who have stolen the money. A lot of businessmen collude with government officials to steal public funds. They are still there.
When you talk about corruption, the focus is on the judiciary now; you know what is also happening in governance; the searchlights are beaming on former governors like you who have ran the affairs of their states, the ministers and everybody who has been in a position of authority. How do we really make sure that this corruption is not just fought but fought decisively to its logical conclusion?
This is what I have also been telling the government. I have a case in the court. When I look at my conscience, my conscience is very clear. I have nothing to fear about anybody. I ran a very transparent government. I was the first to publish my income and my expenditure. The whole country knows that. I brought a new style to governance but a lot of the top time issue brought the best from the EFCC in people like me. If we didn’t fight the Third term, people who are president today, who are ministers today will not be.
But why is it that the case has not ended since 2007?
The case will end one day; we are prepared to end it and it must be ended. I don’t want to discuss about it because the case is before a court of law.
Four persons have said Nigeria is not ripe for democracy and that we are just wobbling and fumbling along and that what we need is a benevolent dictator in Nigeria and that we are not serious as a nation. Many believe the politicians are not serious and that is why this democracy is not running fast. What is your take in all of these?
No, no, no. We are very serious. It is because democracy has made people to make money in politics. When we were doing this, I knew so many people who came into office with N50,000 but today, they are multibillionaires. They build houses in hilltop; nobody asked them where they got the money from. If we really want to be serious, all our office holders from 1960, should be audited and everybody would say how he got the money. This is because you cannot be blowing what I know; we know everybody in the country, we know the businesses they have done, or they are still doing. So, you cannot come and generalize and call people thieves; it is not right because you know somebody, where he was before and where he is today and where he will be tomorrow. So it is not good.
Is public office in Nigeria one of the surest ways to become rich because that is what people have said?
For me and the team that I worked with when I was governor, I cannot say because we didn’t get the money.
But you’re being tried for taking the Abia money?
That is left for the court to say but I will not take that. That is not what drove me into politics. What drove me into politics was service. Remember when I went into politics, I had lost all my businesses. I lost the Hallmark Bank. The Managing Director of Hallmark Bank was disgraced openly because of me, because he didn’t open up to tell them what they wanted that I was the majority shareholder of Hallmark Bank and they put me in jail and bartered me. I lost the airline with 14 aircrafts on ground. Anyway, we are in the court with the Federal Government on N30-N44 billion damages. I cannot discuss that now. My only block was taken away from me all because of politics. For people who financed PDP in 1999, I was one of the biggest spenders on the party. When people couldn’t believe that an individual can pump N100 million, N500 million to the party and after doing that, we are now being tried of stealing and those who came with nothing are billionaires and nobody mentioned their names. This country is funny. The country must come back to new basis.
The beauty of democracy is popular participation. People seek offices through political parties and get elected. Are we doing it right?
We are not doing it right. Both to hold and the beholder; both to those we vote for and those voting, nobody is doing it right.
Let us begin from those who vote – the electorate…
How can you collect millions of naira from somebody and you want him to go and win and give you leadership? The N2000 or N3000 cash inducements some voters collect on election day are for four years. The politicians will not come back to them.
Is that attitude of the electorate caused by poverty?
It is not caused by poverty; it is caused by greed. Our cultural value has gone, and I say that we should bring back our old reorientation of our cultural value. Cultural value is zero. The power of state is also zero. It is not poverty. We have a lot of land. We can cultivate a lot of land. People want to come to Abuja and live. People want to live in Lagos. People want to come out in Enugu, Kaduna, Kano to live. People don’t want to live in Jamari or local governments of Kastina or some other region. People want to come and live in Abuja. That is what is causing the problem. And when they leave, those of them who don’t have work to do, they go in from one house to another house. How will they survive?
But you should also know because you are a politician that those who actually collect the money are those people who live in the rural areas.
Elections shall be held in the state and electorates collect money to go to the poll to vote. Is that a problem of?
It is a major problem of the media because the truth is that elections are supposed not to cost money. The populace supposed to contribute for politicians to win election and give them good service and the politician is getting money to dole out and every day, we are encouraging stealing. People are telling you, you need a lot of money to be governor; you need a lot of money to be member of House of assembly. In the country that this thing is going on and everybody keeps quiet, it means that we all encourage stealing. Politicians sell their houses to go and contest for election, which country can this happen and the security agencies are looking at them, and everybody is looking at them and clapping hands every day? In which system will this operate? When they get to the office, the first thing is to recover and get those houses back.
The politicians who are desperate to get into power, are they not the ones corrupting the electorate?
No, no, no. When you check the statistics of the politicians, 65 percent of them don’t have work to do than playing politics. When people like us went into politics, we went to politics because we want to play politics. I cannot stop playing politics for the rest of my life. Nobody can make me to stop playing politics because if I don’t do it, fools will come and rule me. So, the kind of commitment you need is the kind of commitment you see in President Buhari. He lost being President three times and the fourth time, he became President; it is commitment. Nigerian people are hoping that he can transform that commitment to their own benefit because they believe him. It is the first time in Africa that an incumbent president loses power and leave. So, you praise him for winning and you praise the man that also left the office.
You said if you stop playing politics, mediocre and people who are not qualified would come and run. So, you have been desirous to run elections. You were governor for eight years, after that you have not successfully run elections to get to the office. You have always been pronounced a loser in all elections you have ran…
Let me tell you, like the last one, you know what happened. You are a journalist, your AIT covered that election. How can you have election that somebody won at 6a.m and an INEC national commissioner will come and say it is inconclusive? And after inconclusive, what did the law of Nigeria say? You cannot have two results on the same day – true or false? If it is inconclusive, it is inconclusive and you come out at 2p.m and you say you have results and such things happen in a country like Nigeria?
So you were cheated out?
Do I need to tell you that? I am not a court; the case is before a court. It is up for a court to say whether we are cheated out or not. Can this kind of thing happen anywhere? The SSS, the Police, everybody, they know what happened.
Can you tell us exactly what happened?
I cannot tell you because we have transmitted the process of appeal to the Court of Appeal. So I cannot. No, it is easy to tell you what happened but I cannot. What happened is that they cheated us. They wrote the results.
The man who was pronounced the winner said that the issues were very clear on ground and that you didn’t win any election. He said that when he was busy working, you were not campaigning and even if they conduct the election 500 times, he will still defeat you…
You know that is not true. Why did they suspend the election at the middle of the day? Because they wanted time to write the result. They couldn’t have done it there. If they had done it there, the people would lynch them. They couldn’t even do it at the level of the police station. So, if he will win 500 times, they could have polled from zero one. You saw the judgment of the Court of Appeal in Owerri last year; the judge virtually called PDP and INEC all kinds of names. They are on record. I don’t need to repeat what the judge said. The judge said he had never seen such a fraudulent thing.
Mind you, we went to Court of Appeal earlier. We’ve already proven that there were over voting. That one recording was 75,000 who voted but was increased to 180,000. Because when we were in the lower tribunal, the lower tribunal had already rejected all those things and we went to Court of Appeal. Court of Appeal ruled that we are in order. So, because they’ve already ruled, the later law said anywhere you find issue of over voting, election should be re-run. That was why the Court of Appeal abused both the lower tribunal and abused the INEC and abused almost everybody that conducted that election because it was too obvious.
Now, how do we make sure that we run elections and the vote actually counts and there is no repeat because even the one that just happened in Edo now, there is an allegation that the election results were rewritten?
All we need to do is that the earlier we know that both the Federal Government and the state government should be honourable enough to remove their hands from rigging elections, the better for the country. And moreover, having these two houses like Senate and House of Representatives, we should abolish it. We must stop rigging election by people getting committed to the process. There are some people that have no money but they are good people and they can give quality service. But in Nigeria, election is about money; the US where we borrowed the presidential system of government, people donate money to those running for election because they know they will give service. Osoba who was governor at a time was a journalist. Can we still have the same day for people like Osoba, a journalist to come and contest and win election? The answer is no. So, unless he sells one of his houses or get a sponsor. So, if we really want to return to those good old days, Nigeria people should learn. They should ask themselves, this system we are operating, is it profitable to us?
Some people say that we are going the wrong way. The argument is that we cannot have 360 members in the House of Representatives and 109 people in the Senate and develop as a nation. Those in this school of thought believe that governance is too bogus in Nigeria. In their view, the alternative is restructuring Nigeria. What manner of restructuring comes to your mind?
Well, I have always said it. I am a believer of small government and big enterprise. Small government and big enterprise means the states should fend for themselves, and contribute to the Federal Government.
Can we sustain the 36 states structure?
I say yes and no. It is difficult to keep 36 states if we want to tell ourselves the truth. It is more realistic to have nine or ten units instead of 36 because you have to protect the minority. So if not six, then between eight and ten; you can have components of governance in Nigeria and the Federal Government will be in charge of foreign affairs, currency, military, immigration and all those things will be with the Federal Government of Nigeria. So, all these urge to become President will not be there because you see, people have trivialized leadership which is not supposed to be. In real manner, leadership is supposed to be service, service, service to the people and a strong service to the people.