Restructuring is Necessary for National Development
ment while the election was still ongoing. It was a significant message sent by the Court as a deterrent to others who want to indulge in such conduct; that electoral manipulation is unacceptable. That is the kind of thing we should see happen here in Nigeria rather than reward electoral offenders and those who sponsor them to undermine the electoral process.
You have been critical of your constituency, the judiciary and the role of lawyers over the 2015 election. How can the judiciary stem the tide of electoral irregularities and fraud?
Yes, I have been critical of my constituency in many respects borne out of my love for the noble profession, as one calling that is not only to earn a living but as one profession that has a special place in a society for the maintenance and preservation of social order. Lawyers either in the bar or bench are supposed to be trusted and that is the reason why people go to lawyers to solve their problems but we are today losing the trust and relevance because of the collapse of values and professional ethics. We have jettisioned and sacrificed integrity and honour hitherto associated with lawyers because of politicians who are ever ready to buy their way to keep power not minding the damage to our institutions as we have witnessed in this country. But see what our colleagues in the bench at the level of the Supreme Court did in Kenya annulling a presidential election for failure by the IEBC to adhere to what it called the “dictates of the constitution” even though we are still awaiting for the detailed reasons of the court.
That was what the Supreme Court should have done here with the 2007 presidential election conducted seriously in breach of both the constitution and the Act when ballot papers were not serialised and some ballot papers for the same election where still in South Africa. Standards and ethical values are falling in our society. Our colleagues, especially a few celebrated senior ones that should show good examples are not doing so but have abandoned long held and cherished legal traditions and practices for short term expedient benefits at the expense of core value of professional integrity. We now see Lawyers in court fighting over representation of litigants, when they have not been briefed, Lawyers instituting multiple suits on same matters and parties in different courts or Judges of concurrent jurisdiction literally sitting on appeal over decision of sister courts, cases of lower court judgments that defied precedents laid by the Supreme Court, cases of illogical legal hermeneutics and corruption related problems. If you love the profession, you cannot help but be concerned by these ugly developments and the devastating image crisis, even for the many respected and upright members of the profession in both the bar and the bench. High profile election petition matters since 1999 created a nursery for these issues to breed by fertilizing them with gargantuan rewards. We have a professional obligation to see the inherent dangers and to stem them.
Are you attributing most of the failure of performance to structural problems as the advocates of restructuring maintain?
We should be honest enough and be able to tell ourselves inconvenient truths by acknowledging the genuine and patriotic argument of those you referred to as advocates of re-organisation or restructuring, which is necessary for self-discovery, for the attainment of the potentials of the country instead of stagnation. More governments would come and go and we will not make real progress with this kind of gridlock that we find ourselves except we return to the original template of 1960 independence federal arrangement that brought about the phenomenal competitive developments in the first Republic.
Recall our excitement for independence and the lofty aspiration then about the potential and greatness of Nigeria, which led to the declaration by United States President J.F Kennedy then that, ‘’a great child had been born in Africa that would be like America in twelve years’ time”. Today how old is Nigeria as an independent country ? l’m asking you . Almost 57 years and here we are still grappling with the intricacies of how to even live together as a people. American greatness and prosperity is inconceivable if every Secretary of the Treasury of the 50 states in the US or commissioners of finance as will have them here, will have to be going to Washington DC at the end of every month to collect allocations to run those states. The counties and states are centres of development in the US but in Nigeria states are castrated by laws that took control of all resources and so do nothing and at the end of the month commissioners go to Abuja to collect allocation to run the states. It is illogical to operate with this assumption, that the federal government can address the multifarious problems of localities from a central point and here lies the burden
But some public officials claim that they rely on metrics such as the consumer price index, employment rate and economic growth, in fact some elected governors are claiming that they have until 2019 to demonstrate their impact believing that even when they start slowly they can finish strongly; are they wrong in this assumption?
First, they do not have until 2019. Between now and the general election in February 2019, they actually have only about four effective months for actual governance free of distraction now that we are in September . Next year 2018 is election preparation year, filled with activities such as party primaries, nominations, conventions and the expected fallouts of these exercises in form of litigations and more such as politicians jumping from one party to another coupled with campaigns. So, next year is out for meaningful business of governance regrettably. Then the general election is in February 2019 that office holders are erroneously referring to as enough time, but which is not available at all. In fact, between September 2017 and February 2019 you have basically four months of what is left of this year only for effective governance and by the time you comply with the 6 weeks adverts required by the Procurement Act and another 5 months for the entire due process before embarking on the execution of significant projects, they basically have no meaningful time left for real governance. This means that they must either have begun whatever they plan to do in this first two years to finish strongly, otherwise they must have trustworthy and effective delegates to hand the task to in the intensely political period that is left. On the metrics
Given the concern many express with our educational system, should INEC be concerned because of its reliance on NYSC for most of the ad hoc personnel used during general elections?
Beyond the needs of INEC we should all be generally concerned. Quality education is the nursery of a nation’s future, not to pay attention to the quality and outcome of the public and private education at offer in the country is like a specie eating its own eggs; It will go extinct. Take the recent JAMB admission cut-off point dropped to 120 out of 400 marks; that is quite a regression. The way I see it, if you want to improve education you can’t do it by lowering standards, if the scores are low, it should mean that fewer people qualify or meet the standard. There was a time in this country when only 10 people in a school of 80 made WAEC, the standards were not dropped to give more students good grades, they studied harder to make up. I guess the point is evident that we are not educating our people for their utility in Society but mainly to earn grades or earn paper certificates. We should have a strategic approach to education based on our needs and the aspirations of our people. We need a complete 360 degrees on the purpose of our education. What are our critical human resource needs for development, how are we working towards those targets from our education policies? We cannot just be going through the motions, if we seek genuine answers to such questions, we will not need to worry about the quality of NYSC Corpers we will get for future elections.