Lamido: Nigeria’s Problem is Not with the Constitution But the Operators

Former Governor of Jigawa state, Sule Lamido, in this interview with Chuks Okocha speaks on salient national issues stressing that there is no problem with the 1999 constitution but the operators of the 25 year-old ground norm.

Do we actually need a new constitution or strict constitutional operation?

A – If you see a smoke from the chimney and it is blocking the entire environment, and it is very black and you are choking from the  smoke, what you have to do is to find out where the smoke is coming out from. Don’t blame the chimney, calm down and find out the source of the smoke. Find out the problem and deal with it. The symptoms are only a manifestation of something that has gone wrong.

Why do you blame the constitution? The constitution does not reason like human beings. It cannot contain every solution to your problems. It is supposed to guide you and not solve your own problems.

The people who are supposed to observe it are Nigerians. Now tell me who is doing the right thing in Nigeria: From the motor parks, to the schools to the banks. So why are we running away from our own shadow. So, no matter what you write as a constitution, so long as the operation is subverted, it can’t work.

Look at the country,  people are fighting each other: in the Southeast, Southwest, South south, Northeast, Northwest, people are fighting each other. Clans are fighting each other, anywhere you go, people are fighting each other. Is it the constitution or because of the constitution?

It is not the constitution; it is the operation of the constitution. There is no perfect human being or perfect constitution but people become good through the way they are managed. So we cannot run away from our shadows. No matter how fast you run, your shadow will follow you.

Don’t you think that changing from the Presidential to the parliamentary will solve the problem of the country?

Both the presidential and parliamentary systems are all alien to us, they are all imported. Nothing there is original. We imported it from other cultures so if we fail to operate it like the cultures  from where we imported them, then we should not blame anybody. It is not indigenous.

Don’t you think that it is because it is not indigenous that people are saying that it should be discarded?

Then if we want to go to the old system, then declare the Ooni the Head of the West, Sultan of Sokoto the head of the north, the Shehu of Borno the head of the Borno Empire, declare the head of the Jukun, the head of the Kwarafa kingdom.

As I said earlier, the problems are not in the constitution but we the operators. There is something fundamentally wrong with the implications of our various constitution.

Second, I align with the views expressed by former President Olusegun Obasanjo that the core problem facing Nigeria is not necessarily the constitution or the tenure of office. The crux of our challenges lies in the attitude and character of those who operate the constitution.

How will you describe the recent #EndBadGovernance protest? Do you see it primarily as planned for regime change as people have claimed?

The problems are all parts of the Nigerian contradictions; they are all the problems within us. How do we lead ourselves, how do we believe in ourselves, how do we govern ourselves? And where there is failure, there will be protest.

In practical terms how do we solve the problems?

It should be solved holistically, you don’t solve problems in isolation. Why was there protest in the first instance? The work of government is not to give palliatives, the work of government is to develop an environment where people will be able to earn a living on their own. End insecurity and people will be able to unleash their potentials.

The work of government is not giving palliatives, it is simply destroying the dignity of the people. By giving them palliatives, you are destroying their capacity and ability and making them more dependent.

By that, government becomes more condescending. Palliative is a temporary phenomenon to solve a problem that is not human made like flood, draught, fire, earth quake or other hazards which are made by nature.

For how long will government continue to give palliatives?

The Nigerian problem is not something caused by nature like draught, earth quake or fire. You stock a warehouse where there is hardship, misery, hunger and food are locked up there. So why do you open the door of that misery, of that agony where misery and hunger are locked up perpetually?

So palliative is not part of government duty at all. Palliative is giving only to people that natural disaster has destroyed their livelihood, their business. But in Nigeria, giving of palliative is deliberate, it is a weapon to make the people dependent on the system. Create the necessary environment and there would be development. If the necessary environment is created, no one will need any so-called palliative.

How would you react to the comments by former governor of Osun State, Chief Bisi Akande who was the pioneer national chairman of APC that the party is the dormant party that could win the presidential election without any alliance

Recently at a function in Abuja, former Governor of Osun State and Ex-Chairman of APC His Excellency, Bisi Akande made some very unkind, disparaging and discourteous remark on my beloved party, the PDP.

I have made every effort to suppress the urge to respond to him hoping and believing that the NWC of the PDP or at least its National Publicity Secretary will stand up and give Chief Akande an adequate reply in equal measure. But having heard nothing yet from my Party, I can no longer suppress this urge to respond to Chief Akande in my personal capacity.

Let me take Chief Akande down the memory lane of PDP history from 1999 to early 2014 before the birth of his party, the APC. If you look at all the results of the Presidential elections of 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011, one could see  that at each election the results scored by the PDP are more than that of all the other political parties put together!

From the above statistics, it is clearly obvious that whatever arrangements put by whatever alliance and by whatever nomenclature named, APC or whatever, the outcome will not change or threaten the dominance  of the PDP in any future election more so that of 2014. Baba Akande must have known this as an indisputable fact because he was mentally alert at that time.

So when the APC alliance or contraption was formed in 2014, anybody with ordinary common sense knew that it was a barren woman who could not conceive unless it is fertilized by special seed! This much is a very undisputed fact!

The major task then before the desperate barren APC after formation/contraption was how to woo and elope with any seed that could fertilize it. Of course this period coincided with the then ‘Civil War’ in the PDP! In this desperation, the APC took in the PDP seed which it had all along disparaged and ‘evilized’ to no end. Bisi and co called PDP ‘looters, Boko Haram, a plague’ and everything unimaginable! As God will have it, it is this ‘evil’ that gave birth to what catapulted Chief Bisi Akande from an obscure local little AC/ACN into national limelight.