Former Vice-Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, and Founder of Ifa Heritage Institute, Prof. Wande Abimbola, in this interview with some newsmen, spoke on how balkanisation of regions became an albatross on national development. He also emphasised the importance of promoting the African value system to combat corruption and other societal issues in the country. SEYE OLUMIDE was there.
At 93, you must have witnessed the flourishing era of Nigeria and where we are as a nation today. At what point did things start getting bad in the country?
I have discussed this issue over and over with several people both the old and the younger ones. The fact is that things have never been good for the people of Africa. If there was a time that was wonderful and good when we had enough to eat and drink in Africa, it was a time immemorial that you can’t remember. The time that was a little bit prosperous for Nigeria was shortly after the Civil War when we had plenty of petroleum to export, but we squandered it.
How we started squandering our God-given wealth was when the military scrapped the three regions structure left by the British and created 12 states, then increased it to 19 and to 21 and from 21 to 36 states. Now, we want to add 14 more to become 50. There has never been any place in history where a small country like Nigeria, has divided itself into so many governments and it survived. Nigeria has divided itself into several governments like the federal, states and local governments. That is the source of our penury. And until we revisit that, things will go from bad to worse.
What is the budget of Nigeria in this current year? It is about $28 billion when we translate it from naira to dollar. We have 36 states, if we don’t take population into consideration, let us divide $28 billion by 36. There will be no state that will get up to $1 billion. What is one billion dollars to Oyo or Ogun state or any other state? Less than $1 billion is our revenue for one year.
If you look at the budget of Harvard University, where I lectured when I left Nigeria, the budget was almost that of Nigeria. That is just one university and there are thousands of universities in the United States. The cities that will budget more than $1 billion dollars a year in the U.S., will be more than 50. What’s going on? Ask them to divide the $28 billion by a population of 200 million. I don’t think anybody will take two dollars home.
Nigerians are very poor people but we don’t know. Nigeria has always been poor. When we were living in the villages where I was born, from January till June and December, there was hardly any farmer who had a British penny in his pocket after all his farm products had been sold. So, we have always been wretched.
Oil was later discovered in commercial quantities in the mid-50s to save us. That was the first time we had an abundance of something to export. Cocoa too, though not for the whole country, we squandered the proceeds.
I was granted an interview in the Sketch Newspaper in February 1993, when I was the Senate Majority leader, I said unless and until we subdivide Nigeria, collapse the 36 states into three, four or six units, poverty will remain. That is the source of our problems.
But some people said corruption is the major source of our backwardness and poverty. We have to revisit the issue of corruption too but yet our earnings do not measure up. In the U.S. where I live, there are people who have companies that make more than half of Nigeria’s budget in a year.
If political leaders are to swear by Sango, Ogun, and other native gods, corruption and other social vices may not be as prevalent as we have them now. That is my stand till today.
When I became a Special Adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo between 2003 and 2008, I swore with Iroke, the staff of office of the traditional practitioners (Babalawos). I believe this will help curb corruption.
Another reason why we are in the condition where we found ourselves today is because of the loss of our indigenous value systems. When I was a child in the whole of Oyo town, you can hardly hear of burglaries where somebody’s house was burgled. I never heard of kidnapping. As poor as we were then, I never heard of anyone who ate yesterday and doesn’t have anything to eat today.
We abandoned all our traditional gods on the altar of being modern or being civilised. I have been a Babalawo all my life and I am still one. Everybody wants to be an elite. It is not only the people in government that we should blame, we should also blame ourselves. I chose to live here in my house in Oyo town and live the way I am living because I don’t want to be counted among people who don’t care about the lives of their fellow men and women.
I don’t have a house in Lagos or in Abuja. This is where I live. Another issue is that our local government administrators have not been able to manage the little pay allocated to the councils, even the state, otherwise it would have been a different matter.
We don’t care about management, we don’t care if some of our neighbours are starving. Everyone wants to celebrate their birthday. People may complain about the current hike in fuel price but the said hike has reduced the mileage everyone has to cover to attend parties. The little money we have, we use it to buy petrol inside our cars to move frivolously here and there and nobody cares.
It is obvious that corruption is a major factor causing our backwardness as a country. How can we get it right as a country?
First of all, we have to collapse the 36 states into three, four or six regions. Two, Nigeria should be modernized. What do I mean by that? We have to curb the excesses of religious advocates. Nigeria is a secular state. Think of all the money we are wasting traveling to Hajj. Think of the insecurity that we have because of religious efforts in the country. As a result, people can’t go to their farms in some parts of the country. All that should stop so that there will be peace.
We should do away with the presidential system. It’s a colossal waste of money. The British that colonised us till today, don’t practice the presidential system. I don’t know what led us to that wasteful form of government? We can’t afford it. Let’s go back to the parliamentary system. Again, we should take tourism seriously. If we allow peace to reign supreme in Nigeria, tourism would blossom and tourists from all over the world would visit Nigeria to boost our economy.
Infrastructure should be in place. Nobody talks about pipe borne water anymore. Let us task ourselves home and abroad. I lived happily in Atlanta in the U.S., two companies were providing electricity and one of them usually declared their profit at the end of the year and they spread the profit on their subscribers by reducing their electricity bill the following year. Why can’t we do that? And we have people who can do that.
In the next 10 years, the advanced nations of the world have agreed not to power their vehicles with petroleum any longer so what will happen to our crude oil, which is the major source of our income?
In the next 10 to 15 years, we may not be able to sell more than 40 per cent of our petroleum or less. By then our earnings will shrink by less than 40 per cent of what we now have and nobody is doing anything about it. I don’t want to say anything negative because of my title as Awise.
I would have loved to see a peaceful and prosperous Nigeria in my lifetime. I want to see in my lifetime in Oyo State that everybody has a water system. We can do it, where electricity is available for 24 hours. We should move from a consuming to a productive and manufacturing economy. We should produce what we consume.
What’s your take on the controversies surrounding the Tax Reform Bills, it appears to be dividing Nigeria?
I am yet to study the tax reform bill so I might not be able to answer your question as you would want. But for a long time the local government has been cheated and we need to do something about that so that money that is coming there is appropriately utilised. Nigeria is a unitary system of government even though we call it a Federal Republic but it is more or less a unitary state. We need to take another look at that.
But as I said before there is not much we can do until we collapse the many states we have created into a handful of regions. And we need to inculcate the value of contributions. Everybody needs to contribute, we should not all be looking up to the government to do everything. In the U.S., if you don’t pay your tax you may go to jail whoever you may be. And those who cannot pay their taxes already know and it doesn’t worry them. But the rest must pay their tax. How many people are paying tax in Nigeria? The money we collect as Inland Revenue is not even enough. It is so paltry that we can’t even do anything with it. It should not be like that.
One of the major problems of the Tax Reform Bill is the VAT aspect of it. How do you see this?
These are the things that must be sorted out at the federal level and I mean they need to sort it out as fast as possible so that every state can increase its productivity. I am sure there are states that don’t contribute much because they don’t produce much. If it is agriculture, there was a time when northern Nigeria used to produce a lot of groundnuts but where is that now? A Chinese adage, which I learnt in primary school, says the welfare of a nation is like a tree, farming is its woods. Agriculture and commerce are its leaves and branches. If the root is harmed and the branches break down the leaves fall then the tree dies. First of all Nigeria should be able to feed itself and should not be importing anything from abroad to feed ourselves. We should produce all we need to eat here through farming.
And then what we produce in our land we should be able to refine it here and not be exporting them as raw materials to other nations to turn them into finished products for us, which we now import at higher price. Any nation that depends mainly on primary products from agriculture will forever live in penury.
Going to three years Oyo has been without a king since the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi passed on. What is happening and what have you done about it?
I am worried. I know we need to do something about it. But the major issue is because the kingmakers are not united. The kingmakers are seven in number, two positions are vacant because those occupying them have passed on, out of the remaining five, three are backing one candidate, two are opposing. Since I came in, people have been calling me to do something about it. Well, I will do what I can but I always tell them I am not a kingmaker and I don’t want to tamper with the laid down processes for choosing a king.
The issue of kingship is another challenge. I think it will be a good thing if only we can structure the traditional office and connect it with tourism. You know why the British did not remove their king? It is because of tourism. Every year, the United Kingdom makes billions of pounds from tourism because of the people going to see Buckingham Palace and the queen. We should modernise the caliphate or our kings so that people will come there to see them. So, if we can connect the institution of kingship to tourism it will become relevant and it will yield a lot of dividends in terms of money.
