Set Goals Since Babangida Left Power’
Did the war affect that?
When the war started, I was 18 years old and in secondary school. The crisis started in 1966. The war itself began in 1967. My perception then could not be used as a yardstick. I was in school in Onitsha, Christ the King College, when the crisis started in 1966. When it started, it didn’t mean much to young people like us until we started seeing the exodus of people from the north to the east. Many of those people tried to trace their relatives and where they are from. It destabilised the system. There was a cause for Biafra but the major thing is that we were trying to protect ourselves because the fear at that time was that the soldiers were coming to eliminate us.
Some of us took the decision that we would rather die by fighting than die doing nothing. And the Asaba massacre in a way justified the fears of so many people. There were so many mixed feelings. When the war started, the issue of sectionalism in the Eastern Region wasn’t obvious as when the war started going wrong. Some of the things that happened to alienate the Igbo man from the Ijaw man or the Efik man were most unnecessary but it has happened. Some people blamed different actors for what happened but the major thing was that easterners were being killed in the north and they came back home. Nobody can deny that fact. But at the end of the day, Gowon declared no victor, no vanquished. And that encouraged a number of people to go back to their previous stations.
Another interesting thing that happened out of the war economically was the issue of flat 20 pounds; anybody who had pounds in the bank got flat 20 pounds. That thing came up and it affected a lot of Igbo people.
They had three divisions of the Nigerian army. The first division was pushing down from the north to Enugu area; the second division was pushing from the west into Onitsha area; then the third division was coming from the riverine areas. So, at the end of the war, you had the three divisions stationed in the east, basically southeast. Three interesting things happened.
Every month they get paid their field allowance and soldiers would start spending money. Suddenly, people started getting money. That started empowering the people of the southeast. These soldiers were stationed there for quite a while. Before you know it, the average person from the southeast could survive. And it enhanced the trading capabilities of people from the southeast because they had to trade to make quick money and turnover.
Another interesting thing that happened was that a lot of the Nigerian soldiers ended up marrying people from that area including President Babangida. So, the issue of reconciliation started happening without being planned.
One other thing that happened was that it started affecting the educational system in the southeast. Trading then became more important; people got money. It’s only recently that awareness was created on why people should go to school. These are the three things I take away, based on my personal opinion, on the consequences of what happened. Another thing that happened simultaneously after the civil war was the issue of oil business. The oil heat Nigeria up to the extent that our then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, said that money was not our problem but how to spend money. That led to so many things. When the government decided to resettle the soldiers in various areas, they started ordering cement to build barracks and the Ministry of Defence was in- charge of that. A mistake was made; they took the agreement of one person without taking into account a number of other things. Before you knew it, they had over a hundred ships bringing cement to Nigeria. And that came about the Cement Armada. Our ports were blocked. That gave rise to the building of Tin Can Island ports. However, the Port Harcourt and Calabar ports weren’t deep enough to accommodate big ships. All the ships carrying cement headed to Apapa. Those are some of the things that happened as a consequence of the war.
Let us talk about your time in the Senate. Now senators are collecting N500 million as constituency allowance; was it so during your time at the senate?
Whenever I hear about it, I get upset. This issue started during our own time. Chief Pius Anyim was the then President of the Senate. When you win, one of the things they expect is development in your area. So, there was a negotiation with the executive that for each constituency, they should vote an amount of N500 million to do a job in the constituency.
That money was not meant for the senators or members of the House. That money is resident with the ministry.
What happened during my own time was that I held a meeting with members of the House of Representatives from my senatorial district and we agreed that we will provide boreholes. We wrote to the Ministry of Works that the N500 million allocated should be used for that and I was the Chairman,
Senate Committee on
Judiciary and Legal Matters. It is not the duty of any legislator to execute any project; that it is the duty of the executive. But as the legislator, you have to vote money for projects to be carried out.
During my time, there was no legislator that was involved in the disbursement of money. What happened, thereafter, I cannot vouch for; but in my own time, we had people in the Senate who meant well.
For example, from Anambra, we had Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, Dr. Ori Obula and myself. Then from Abia, you have people like General Ike Nwachukwu and others from different parts of the country. We had people of substance. The issue between 1999 and 2003 was to put the government on a sound footing after the military rule so that the military doesn’t have any reason to come back. This issue of N500 million is not money meant for the senators. It is money meant for projects to be executed in a senatorial district.
How much was your take home at that time?
Honestly, I cannot remember but it was a ridiculous amount like N7,000 or thereabout. I never even bothered touching it because I had a business. We don’t pay ourselves; the revenue mobilisation decides how much we get paid. So, we did not fix our salaries. At our own time, the Revenue Allocation and Mobilisation Committee was responsible for that. That is what the constitution says.
When the military was in power, there were some things that Nigerians couldn’t comprehend; the same thing is happening in democracy. How did we get here?
I am thanking God for a healthy life. God has saved me on both big and small occasions. One, during the civil war, I had bullet wounds; I could have died. I had cancer and the Prostate- Specific Antigen ( PSA) was over 40 and once it is 10, it is trouble. I survived it. I had COVID- 19, alongside my wife and one of my kids and we survived it.
Looking at it from the outside, because I left that place in 2003, some things happened. One, we have never from then till now had a visionary leader, somebody who says I want to take Nigeria from here to there. The only person that tried to do something was Chief Obasanjo. He had been a head of state, so he came with some experience; but the experience he came with was only enough to stabilise things but not enough to push Nigeria out of where it was into a developed economy. The only person I was happy with what he said was Peter Obi. He has a basic philosophy to move the country from consumption to production. At least he knows where he wants to go and how he wants to get there. Whether he could have achieved it or not is a different thing. The other contestants, I cannot tell you I understood where they wanted to move us to.
Our current President, Bola Tinubu, has had a stint as governor of Lagos State. He had an idea on how to develop Lagos State but he didn’t communicate to Nigerians what he wanted to do for Nigeria. What he said was that because he developed Lagos State, he would develop Nigeria but I don’t think the two can work. But whether we like it or not, he is now the president of the country, so we must do what we can to ensure he succeeds because if he succeeds the country succeeds. I like us to be giving him constructive criticism. We are no longer running an election; now it is the issue of governance, how to get Nigeria out of the mess we are in. But if we look back, the only person I have seen who had an idea of what he wanted to do and came into the scene was President Babangida. At least up to the time of the Orkar coup, he had brilliant ideas but a lot of things went wrong because if you ascend the throne by battle, you have to ensure you maintain the loyalty of the people around you and in trying to maintain their loyalty a lot of things may go wrong.
Some people think that Nigeria lost an opportunity to establish itself as a satellite television provider when you got into politics. What happened to Minaj?
Minaj story is quite interesting. Before Minaj, I wanted to establish an African network. I was on satellite and that was the first television station on satellite and I was the first in Europe. What happened was that in 1998, when General Abdusalami announced his political programme, I was building Minaj. I had an arrangement with a satellite operating company called Panamsat for them to give us receivers, which we were going to put around African countries. I put them in some places like Cameroun, Namibia, Kenya and Ghana. I was in Kenya with my team when my wife, who was in London, called me and said that Chief Alex Ekwueme called and said he wanted to see me but she told him that I was in East Africa. He said I should try and call him. She gave me his number, so I called him.