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Chief Olabode George, elder statesman and former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in this interview, speaks on national issues, including the senate’s response to the call by Governor Seyi Makinde for the United Nations to probe the recent Kidnapping incident in Oyo State, among others. CHIBUIKE CHUKWU brings the excerpts.
What is your take on the position of the senate regarding Governor Seyi Makinde’s call for the United Nations to probe the kidnap in Oyo?
Listening to what Oshiomhole said shows that they have politicised this kidnapping. Makinde was helpless in Oyo State. He couldn’t get any help. There was no way by which he could move the people or do A or B or C. It is unfortunate that they are politicising the sad incident because children and their teachers were abducted over two months ago and we seem to move on as a nation. We are talking about the security of the lives and properties of Nigerians. Today, it is Oyo. Tomorrow, it could be another place and it has happened. There was a time we had this thing in Borno. We have had it in Benue. We have had it everywhere. So now, it has become a national issue that requires response.
There has been this debate on the status of state governors regarding protecting lives and properties in their domains. Are state governors truly chief security officers of their states? This question becomes imperative given that the governors do not even command their state commissioners of police
Let me tell you something. We copied the American system of governance in our constitution. For the state governors in America, do they have the state police? They also have the National Guard that can only be deployed by the governor of that state if the matter gets out of his hand. Normally there is the FBI, which is the national police, and is also stationed in that state. The moment the marshals are working, that’s the state police, are working looking for A or B or C cases, the FBI will join remotely. Eventually, if it is too much, they will deploy the National Guard without their national president. And then later, if it gets out of hand, the national president will come in. We brought this issue into this country. You copied something, but you didn’t copy it well, and you are turning it into a senseless, terrible, political issue and creating instability in the system, and we are heading to election year, and people are talking and saying all kinds of. I have been in the military. I saw what happened in 1962 in Oyo State, how we went to war, how the people who were not even involved in the war were killed. So, now here we go again. You can only know the beginning of the mess. The statement from the Senate is disgraceful. For me, they have no empathy for those children. Look at the vice principal that was beheaded. Look at the innocent people that were killed. Is that the state of the nation? Is that what we can be proud of ? Please, let us for once be sane. Let us for once be factual. Let us for once be humane. The first responsibility, like I said, for any government, whether local government, state government, national government, is the security and protection for the lives and properties of the people who are living there. So for Oshiomhole, I am shocked. These are the qualities of people who are there and then they think they are in power.
Do you think that having a state police can solve all these security problems we are witnessing in the country today?
I bet you we will not be in this mess if we have it before now. When this country started, there was something like community policing. The community police will be the local children of the area. They will know themselves. They will know who lives in this house or that house. If they see you in the night, they say, where are you going or coming from? They know those people who are living there. This issue of state police was discussed when President Jonathan enabled a national constitutional conference. We recommended it. We should have had it when Buhari was there. When he got in as president, he took the report and sent it to the archives. Now, Tinubu is there and I have told them publicly, that yes, I was so happy the day he said he was going to create a state police to make it number one internal security in each state. Look at the western region. They had something they call Amotekun. The Amotekun was there but it was not empowered. How could they have protected lives when they were not empowered? That’s the first line of defense. You don’t just think that the national police are there, how many of the people are there? How many are they? When they deploy them, they mix them all up. Some go to areas where they don’t speak their languages. They don’t know their norms, the culture and the deeds and the non-deeds for that area. They will never be able to understand how people move in that place. Another advantage is that, if they start this state police, they are going to give employment to millions of these young men who are helpless, who are looking for jobs, who will be so happy to at least be employed and feel that they are concerned. And it is going to be collective, the whole collectivity makes a nation grow.
Back to the Oyo kidnap. Let’s examine the communication channel between the state government and the Federal government. We heard that the president did not reach out to the governor throughout this period. Apparently, the governor also did not reach out. When a presidential delegation went to the state, headed by the national security advisor, they visited the community, there was no meeting with the state governor. What should be ideal in a security situation, a national security threat like this? What should be the form of relations or communication between a state governor and a president?
I was a military governor. I was in the military for a long time. I was opportune to have been in the political party and to end up as the deputy national party chairman; deputy national chairman of the largest political party in this country then. We worked in tandem. Just because you are in opposition doesn’t mean there is a red line between you and the villa. Maybe what Makinde said was that he declared that he had intention to be a presidential candidate, and so, they blocked him. When the national security adviser and his delegation went to that state, where should they have gone first? They should go to the governor’s office. That state is the governor’s state. But they went to the village to meet the head of the village with some people. And you know the answer they got? ‘We don’t need your money. We don’t need your rice. We don’t need your food. We need our children. That is very foretelling, of the matter, meaning don’t politicise the issue, that they are missing their children. They said ‘our hearts are broken. They should go to the governor’s house or office first. Let him say he will not see them. You know what I’m saying? Once you are the head of an organisation like this great country, Nigeria, you are the president of everybody. Whichever political party you belong to may not matter at that time as you are the number one.
There is this thinking in some quarters that like Plateau State governor once went to the Villa to see the president over killings in his domain, Seyi Makinde would have done so when the incident happened. He would have sought an audience with the president to brief him.
Does it really matter under the circumstances at hand? As the president, it’s your nation that is burning and if so, do you now sit until the crisis engulfs the whole country? If Makinde doesn’t know what to do, the president is older than him, and he knows the do’s and don’ts. He had been a governor himself for eight years. If A doesn’t go to B, then B will go to A. It’s your nation, and it will spread if you don’t act. You see the politicisation, and then Fayose came from nowhere to insult the sitting governor. It doesn’t make sense. What is really the reason? What about the people in his own Ekiti State, who were released recently? Look at the shenanigans. They turned it into politics.
You have been in government before and witnessed how democracy evolves; how did we get to this level that security has become a very big issue in the country for almost two decades? And how do you think this can be solved with the level of poverty, ignorance and violence all over the place?
In governance, the moment you are declared the winner in an election, your party is put aside. You take the complete nation as your party, and every Nigerian must be made to be happy. You put smiles on their faces. There will be no discrimination. There are problems confronting our people. So many children have graduated. Some didn’t complete their secondary school. Some are just roaming about and looking for jobs and all these things fuel insecurity. During our time in government, I mean under the PDP, we designed what we called a skill acquisition programme open to all Nigerians. And I remember that at that time, President Jonathan put the vice president in charge of the operation and gave billions of money for that programme. Once you enlist, either you want to be a tailor, a mechanic, a sewing mistress, a hairdresser, bricklayer, or whatever, you are accommodated. They went to that training school in Oshodi in Lagos, and the trainees came from all over Nigeria. They were trained, depending on the number of weeks, and at their graduation, the government would fund them to buy their tools, which they would use when they get back to their own village. Then if you were tooled up, you had training, as I say, a tailor, a carpenter, a mason, or even those who want to do micro-industries, they gave them seed money to start off. But immediately President Buhari came, he canceled it.
But how do we end the insecurity with arms proliferation? In what way do you think we can end this problem?
This is what we are going to do. The kids that they are using to perpetuate insecurity have no jobs, even though they may have skills. The insecurity thing that we are talking about is a reaction, because I cannot, as a general, see that these bad people will pass through our border and our border people will not know. So it is within. The anger is within. I want to plead with Mr. President and his group. This is not the time for politicisation of issues. Let us sit down and look at how to make the lives of these young people more meaningful to themselves, to the country.
Back to Makinde, do you see anything wrong with his call for the United Nations to investigate what happened in Oyo considering that then opposition political parties, then led by the current president, made a similar call during the time of Jonathan?
To me, what Makinde did makes a lot of sense. In fact, if he had contacted some senior members, some elders who have the experience, his approach would have been different, not different in terms of whether what he did was legal or not. He couldn’t get help and that is why he cried out, he reached out. You know, the United Nations is not only for discussing politics. They have so many agencies for security, for preservation of life, human rights, the International Judicial Court. So it is not just a political thing they do. They handle a lot of things. So to me, if Makinde was so confused and so angry, why not reach out to them?
This one concerns intelligence gathering. As a senior military officer then, do you think our intelligence services have helped us or have they failed us? This is because despite the success of ensuring that the Oyo victims are out, there are many still in captivity. In Borno, in Katsina, in Kaduna and a lot of other places, many are still in captivity
You know, when you talk about my time, the president then was still a military general. So we had a system by which you report, you do due diligence, you strategise, you come to your tactical table for the operation and then after you had gone out for your operation and you came back, you go back to the same tactical table to do a post-mortem analysis to know where you had failed. I don’t know what they are doing presently. I have advised before; as president, Tinubu should know he should be the president for all. I have advised twice on issues that I knew. When his wife said she wanted to set up a national library and people should contribute to her. I said, Madam President, I beg you, put that money straight back into the public. Let them use it for a skill acquisition programme to enable the underprivileged children to have something. The second thing I told them was that this state police is a must. And I’m happy they have done that. And I am eager for it to start soon. Some people are saying it should start even before the election while others are saying after the election. The present police people are not having it easy. I want to take the example of Lagos. I commend those officers honestly. All their barracks have been taken over. The Oyibo people built barracks near their police stations and it was for quick reactions and response. Now you’re giving them N2 million to get out of the barracks. They have sold the land in the barracks. The policemen are now living in Ikorodu where they can get cheap houses. How do you report? Where is the transportation money? You’ve added so much burden to them. There is no coordination. We have totally misinterpreted the functions of these people.
How do you see the various court cases and the judgements that keep coming up; today, it is positive, tomorrow it’s negative, and opposition parties appear to be in disarray right now?
There have been previous decisions in the Supreme Court. I’m not a lawyer. I’m an engineer. But I have lived long enough. I have children who are lawyers. There are judgments from the Supreme Court that should stand. It’s what they call supra. Unless the Supreme Court reverses itself, you can’t go against that. What is shocking to me is that you listen to some of these judges, the statements they make, you analyze them and even me as a layman, is amazed. Amupitan, the INEC chairman, is a professor of law, and a S.A.N. is also misleading this country. For what? Whatever it is in life, it is the end that justifies the means. If you don’t do well, and you end badly, it will go from your generation to generation. I’m over 80 now. I look back on things that I have done. I have been eye to eye on the mountain. I have also been in the valley, in a prison at the bottom of the valley. I didn’t do anything. But they just wanted to demean and condemn me. But the almighty God was there. That’s why I have sworn, as long as I live, no matter whose ox is gored, I will tell the truth to power. If you do well, I will tell you, no matter your political leanings. One, for us to be safe, allow all political parties as they are, to run their affairs, compete. If you win, we clap for you. If you don’t win, you come back some other time.