Vice Chancellor of the University on the Niger, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, in this interview with LAWRENCE NJOKU, speaks on the situation of the country ahead of the 2027 general election. Nebo, who served as Minister of Power during the Goodluck Jonathan administration, says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), as currently structured, cannot deliver credible elections in 2027.
Did you become a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to gain appointment into Goodluck Jonathan’s government?
I served as a technocrat. I have never been a politician. It was just that I was invited to serve my country but at that time, if I had a political preference for a political party, it was obviously PDP. But I never really became an active member of a political party. It was just after I was made Minister of Power that somebody suggested I should join the party at least at the ward level. They brought me one small card and filled in my name and I became a member. But that was it. I was never involved in any of the meetings and what have you.
So, while I was a minister, I served as a technocrat to the glory of God and former president Jonathan was a wonderful mentor to serve under. The membership card of the PDP they gave to me might be somewhere in the file. I thought if you belong to a political party, you pay annual dues and what have you. I never paid annual dues but if you ask me, my sympathy is with the PDP. That’s what it was all along. The only thing that changed it was when Peter Obi ran for president and of course, I gave 100 per cent to him as presidential candidate. I have no regrets about it.
With the current state of things in the PDP, do you still retain that sympathy?
The PDP is falling apart. But I would choose PDP over APC any day.
Why?
APC in my opinion has glorified corruption. Corruption has become part of our civil service and political system of the three arms of government, Corruption has taken over the entire fabric. So you can say that APC has entrenched corruption as the mainstay of Nigeria’s political class and for that reason I don’t have interest in the party. There are people in APC that are wonderful people, but they are very few and far between. You can count them on your finger tips .
There are arguments that whatever the APC is doing now, the PDP had done even worse in the past?
In the PDP government, there was a lot of corruption, but it was nothing to be compared with the APC. As a political party, quite often, they go for the worst and not the best. I am concerned about the level of corruption. Nigeria has never been this corrupt since I was a child. It is oozing from every fabric of Nigeria and it would destroy this country because the resources are not being utilised for the development of the country. Any one naira that the government brings as budgeted; about 40 kobo of it is shared as corruption money. That is to say that when you look at our budget, it is so over bloated and this is money that will be shared among the people in power. That is why I am not interested in any political appointment or things like that.
Are you not bothered about the way politicians switch political parties in the country?
Defections occur because people are not there to serve the electorate. They are there to protect their interests, steal as much as possible and retain power. That is why they defect. If they see that their party is not going to win, they will defect to another party and begin to plan how to retain power. That is the reason for defections.
These defections are not based on principles. Have you ever seen the APC manifesto? How many of them did they put into practice? Have you seen the PDP manifesto? How many of them are put into practice? There are no principles; there is no definite line with regard to principles between APC and PDP.
Politicians in Nigeria are mostly socio-political prostitutes. They jump from one place to another. If our politicians see that they will grab more somewhere, they will leave their party and join that one. They don’t care about the electorate that elected them. It is so shameful. It is the bane of Nigeria’s party politics and I don’t think anybody who behaves like that is worthy of being returned to office. It is not right and it should not be done. Yet, it’s all possible because money bags always win and there is no internal democracy within political parties.
We begin to ask how we can checkmate this. But let me ask how you want to checkmate it when the ruling party wants everything. The ruling party is encouraging it with the manner appointments being made and the cover given to those who ordinarily should be facing corruption cases in courts. Remember at the end of our tenure, it was a horrifying situation for anybody who served in government because of the way the APC government in place prosecuted those appointees. EFCC was everywhere. But now people serve and declare loyalty to the ruling party and their sins are forgiven and all cases against them are dropped. If you have something to hide at the moment, you hide them under the ruling party so that they won’t come after you. They know that coming after you means coming after themselves. Thankfully, the trend is changing now and the EFCC can go after former governors who were in the APC. Before it was not like that. However, this is giving the wrong signal to the upcoming generation and it is unfortunate.
Why is it that despite all that the EFCC is doing, there is so much corruption in Nigeria?
When you get people who have no pedigree and character in governance, momentary feeling of power will make them feel that at the end, it will not affect them, but it does. Like armed robbers, once they have their guns, they would think they can kill anybody and do whatever until they are caught. It is like giving criminals so much political power and they will use it to raid, to plunder, to pillage the people and at the end of the day leave the country desolate. So the feeling of executive power, invincibility and that they can bribe anybody or get away with whatever situation encourages corruption. Is it not a shame that a national parastatal came up recently to say that in the index of corruption, the judiciary is seen by Nigerians as the most corrupt arm of government, followed by the Police Force? Has it ever happened before? So, when the judiciary is viewed that way, you can then imagine what criminals would do. That is why they usually say if you don’t like it you “go to court”; because they know the court will do the bidding of the masters and those who have the money and government authority. So, we really don’t have an independent judiciary in the country.
Some opposition politicians are beginning to coalesce apparently to stop President Tinubu in 2027. How do you see their move?
If you look at Nigeria, no amount of opposition will stop Tinubu in 2027 if the corrupt Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) we have now continues. In other words, if you have an umpire who is corrupt, who doesn’t care what the electorate says, no amount of voting will change the result of 2027 elections. We need an unbiased umpire; the current INEC cannot deliver a free and fair election in 2027.
Why do you say so? Don’t you think they’ve learnt from the last elections?
They have not learnt anything and have kept moving dangerously. They delivered in some places in the last elections to give an impression that they can do something that is acceptable to the people but generally they don’t care about the will of the people. I keep saying that the greatest coup d’etat is not military coup but the truncation of the will of the people during elections. A coup d’etat is taking away a government but an electoral coup d’etat is sweeping away the will of an entire nation. But how many people look at it that way? So, we have a serious problem.
How can you trust an electoral body that did not experience glitches during transmission of the results of the senatorial and House of Representatives elections but suffered glitches in that of the presidential election conducted at the same time and day? It is a compromised institution and the people have lost faith in what the commission can do. All the mobilisation that made people believe their votes would count in 2023 were thwarted overnight and nothing has been done to remedy it. So, 2027 is almost doomed with the current INEC and if our lawmakers don’t put necessary laws that will make election results to be uploaded directly from the polling booths without any alteration to the IReV portal, 2027 is a foregone conclusion.
How would you assess the Tinubu administration so far, given his body language to continue in 2027?
Tinubu is making some impacts and in some places it is clear and obvious. But I am deeply concerned about his nepotistic attitude. He is very tribalistic. Virtually every appointment that comes out goes to the Southwest. We complained about Buhari but Tinubu is much worse in that regard. I cannot discourage anybody from contesting but if the opposition is strong enough, they should go to the grassroots and convince the electorate not to allow anybody to steal their votes. This would make the needed impact. Nigeria has come to that point where nobody takes elections seriously because if they lose, they will make sure that the judiciary wins for them. That is why I said Nigeria is not a democracy; Nigeria is somewhere between ‘judiciocracy’ and ‘INECtocracy’. They are the ones who determine who rules Nigeria. But I think one way to do it is that if you must beat a giant, beat him down enough that everybody would know you have beaten them. If election results are very close, it is easy to rig but if the margin is wide, they won’t have room to manipulate it. That is why the opposition cannot do anything unless they are fortified and united. Without that the APC will have a field day in 2027.
How do you see the isolated measures being taken by Southeast governors to solve insecurity in the region?
It is so unfortunate that in the Southeast, the governors have refused to work together. Think about the political parties they belong to – you have APC, APGA, PDP and Labour. In Igbo adage, we say “Igwebuike’ (large population is strength). A situation where you do your things individually will have an effect, but the cumulative effect of working together would have strengthened their efforts even much more than what they are doing individually. Enugu is probably the most secured state in the Southeast. The governor has done a lot with putting cameras all over the place that within minutes, there is rapid response to the point of attack or crime. But we still have problems at the farms where Fulani herdsmen are sacking our farmers and raping our daughters and wives and kidnapping people and some Igbo youths are joining them. Such situations require us to come together to equip local vigilantes and those doing their best to secure their communities. Many businesses have been lost because of insecurity and that does not augur well for Nigeria.
How would you react to arguments against lincencing of more universities by the Federal Government?
I don’t think there are too many universities in Nigeria. A situation where more than 60 per cent of all those who are qualified yearly or those who take the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination never find placement in the universities is an indication that the universities are not too many.
My problem is that the federal and state governments are killing education by competing with the private universities unduly. They have all the money, they build laboratories and all kinds of things but the individual and churches have to work hard to build the private universities. But the way it is, private universities are coming up and will in time be better than public universities. You can look at Covenant University; it is number one today in the country. So, instead of the Federal Government making university education something everybody will benefit from, it is busy trying to compete with private institutions by setting up their own, giving facilities only to their own and sometimes state universities. Now they are saying that if you go to a private university, you will not get a subvention or bursary award and that is most unfortunate. There should be a system where every university is somehow supported by the Federal Government to show that it is the same country, the same people.
We have been working with old curricula all over. We need to continually update the curricula so that our graduates will be nationally relevant and globally competitive. We need to declare a national emergency on education. Our graduates are ill performing, depressed and demoralised.
After serving in various public institutions, you are now serving in a private institution. What is the difference?
I must admit that there is a world of difference. If you are in a federal institution, the resources are often much more abundant than private institutions. In other words, if a federal institution is very well managed, the result would be fantastic. For the tertiary institutions that are private, they have a lot of challenges with finance. Revenues are not as ample and enabling as one would say of a federal university. That is the problem.
So, federal universities have undue advantage over the private ones unless those private ones have a way of deepening their research and development to be able to attract funding and support. It is for this reason that private universities charge very high tuition, pricing themselves beyond the reach of the average family and placing undue pressure upon public universities to admit beyond their carrying capacity.
