The Obi of Onitsha, Alfred Achebe has charged office holders in the country on tue need to place Nigeria above every other things.
Achebe spoke at the public presentation of Senator Chris Anyanwu’s 600 pagr autobiography, BOLD LEAP held in Abuja.
The book was reviewed by the former Specail Adviser to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua amd Chairman Editorial Board, Thisday Newspaper, Mr. Segun Adeniyi.
Other dignitaries in attendance include former Senate Presidents, Anyim Pius Anyim and David Mark both in attendance on double role representing themselves and President Goodluck Jonathan and Olusegun Obasanjo respectively.
Senator Ned Nwoko, Peter Obi, Eric Osagie,Chris Ngige, Minister of Special Duty, Zephaniah Jisalu who represented the president, Josephine Anineh, Prof. Udenta Udenta, the husband of the author, Mr. Anyanwu, former SGF, Boss Mustapha, among others
Achebe said as a nation, we cannot continue to do the same thing by milking the cow.
He said should we continue milking the cow, it would die.
He said: “In this country, since independence, we’ve been talking and talking and talking and talking and talking.I think it’s time we begin to think about doing something, because we have two alternatives. Keep milking the cow until it dies, because of our sectional interests, which we tend to protect, and our personal interests. People go into public service, not to serve the public, but to serve their own interests.
“Either we keep doing that and milk the cow to death, or we do the opposite and place Nigeria above everything else.
“And I would like to add that time is not too much in our favor. It’s either we milk the cow to death very, very fast, or we can turn around the country very, very fast.”
He also spoke about the need to break old held believes that works against the girl child.
He said: “In the 21st century, we have to realise and accept, well not accept, but realise that there is still institutional discrimination against the female gender, not just in Nigeria, in America also, and in the rest of the world. Maybe some parts like Britain have gone even further, they have had three female Prime ministers in the UK, so why can’t we have a president in Nigeria who is female, and a governor in Nigeria who is female.”
Reacting to the area of Senator Anyanwu’s book where she said she was rejected for the position of governor of the state on the excuse of “who will break cola nut”, the traditional ruler said, “And I think they will agree with me that there is no magic about women breaking the cola nut when it comes to developing the country, when it comes to moving the country forward.
“When we go to our palaces, we have a different routine. But then, even in the job description of the government, I don’t think that breaking the cola nut is part of the job description of the governor.”
He also cited the case of a female acting Governor Dame Etieba, saying during that period, “we broke the cola nut in Anambra State, but she was our governor. So there’s no magic about it. But again, if you we need to change that situation, we need people like Senator Chris Anyanwu to do so, because she fights for what she believes in, and she fights, indeed, I keep saying to her that I never like to be on the opposite side of a battle with her, because if she believes in something, she’s going to fight to the end.
And I think we need more people like her.”
He also added,”In Chris’s work, in her writings, in whatever she’s done, she’s always worried about Nigeria, and I can testify to that, because of the small working group that we have, which is all about how do we lift Nigeria out of the present situation. And if all of us can resolve to do that, we’ll have a better country going forward.”
In his remarks, the Dien of Agbor, Keagborekuzi I, called for peaceful co-existence.
He said the idea of secession should be jettisoned
Traditional ruler said: “Nigeria is going through it, yes, I know. But if we stay united as a people, we will get there eventually. So please, all of you, especially the Igbos that are here today, look at the array of different people that have come here today.
“It’s very, very important that we stay united as a people and as a country.
We have the ability to do it. We have the strength to do it as a country. I want to see us do better as Nigerians, and I do believe that we will be able to do so.”
Former Governor Kayode Fayemi, one of the four panelist who looked at how the country could be lifted said we nedd to have a nation first before we talk about institution.
“On the systemic issues we have to confront, beyond going into the nature of the system we are operating, liberal democracy, parliamentary or presidential system, who cuts the substance of the question you ask? For me, the excuses are always going to be legit, why we are not operating right as a country. Is it the system, the institutions, or the leadership, or in actual fact, some would even say colonialism, because we must provide our own foundation. That’s why we have found ourselves in that situation.
“And as Claude Akin, the late Claude Akin, used to remind us in his book, The Visibility of Democracy, you can’t put something on nothing.
“We’re talking about development, but do we have the nation first? If you don’t have what you’re developing, how do you develop it? And I think the first issue to deal with, and many of us have had it all the time, is what is this space called Nigeria? What is this geographic space as if I were to describe it? And what do we need to do to build a national consensus? Because what Nigeria means to me is not necessarily what Nigeria means to my most distinguished citizen. We have been fighting to forge what in political science we call elite consensus, but we need to go beyond elite consensus to national consensus in order to, and how do we get to national consensus without asking the national question, which is, who are we? What do we want for ourselves? Where do we want the country to be in 10 years, or 20 years, or 50 years? Every country that wants to really develop starts with a national vision and mission.”
He also added that “the requirement for peace and justice is equity and inclusion. And those are the issues that are fundamentally lacking in our environment that we must address. So we can continue to talk about fixing Nigeria.
“Fixing Nigeria is not going to be revolutionary. Anybody who has been part of government, or anybody who has been part of any administration anywhere in the world will tell you that change is often incremental, not revolutionary. However, if the trajectory is progressing, you begin to see the impact of that incremental change, rather than this stopgap measure that we have consistently had.
“And that’s why some of us continue to believe that this nation, the solution is not unmaking Nigeria. It’s not secession. It is remaking Nigeria.
“And how do we remake Nigeria if we don’t have all of those elements in the institution? That’s why restructuring the Nigerian state cannot be a wrong thing. It is actually the path to go. And when we talk restructuring, we could give all sorts of names and definitions to it.
“It’s about reorganizing the society in order for it to serve all of its citizens. Right now, Nigeria is not serving all its people. Nigeria is serving a tiny minority that is close to power.
“And the majority of Nigerians are non-beneficiaries of being Nigerian. So, we have to find a system that responds to the yarning of the majority. And that majority, the bulk of them are under 30.
“70% of our population is under 30. The median age in this country is 18. So, many of them are not as resistant to change as we are.
“We are very wary of change, like the older generation. But the younger people, this is not what they want fixed. And that is why you see them resort to all manner of approaches to fix it.
“Japa is one of them. The other is resistance to status quo. We’ve seen it in #Endsars#le.
He warned that the country run at a risk should it fail to respond to the yearning of the youth in the country.
He said, ” It’s a system where we have come from. And that is why we run a risk if we don’t respond to what we’re being told by younger people. And frankly, what they’re not even telling us, which is going to be more dangerous for us. And there will be no innocent bystander amongst us. It wouldn’t be a case of, oh, I’m not part of the government, I’m not in government, so I’m not involved.
“No. They will look at you. You are in the well-dressed, and you will answer for the irresponsibility of your generation.
On Chris Anyanwu, Fayemi said She used the vehicle that she was most familiar with, the media.
He stressed that “How can we talk about democracy? How can we talk about administrative development when the women that really would be much more fundamentally transformational of the system we’re talking about are not involved, are not included? And I’m not talking totalistic inclusion. We just do not have them there.
“So that system has to be shaken up, has to be restructured. But that restructuring, for me, does not include demolishing the structure or leaving it in the hands of the current architects.”
On her part, Nkior Briggs, an environmentalist supported the idea of restructuring, saying the country will not get it right until it restructured.
She said: “There is something that has to change, something very drastic has to change from whatever it is to something new, completely new. For the past nearly 30 years that I have been doing what I have been doing, restructuring has been a key factor, a key cause. I believe as a Nigerian, I believe as a Nigerian person, I believe as someone from the oil and gas producing section of Nigeria, that if we don’t restructure Nigeria, we continue to have 36 states where four major producers of oil are carrying the rest of the country.
“We have a particular region that is carrying the other five regions. I’m not saying that others don’t have what they need to bring to the table. A restructuring should mean that gold, diamond, silk, whatever else is in any other part of Nigeria should also come to the table. That’s part of restructuring.”
Briggs also advocated for the restructuring of the political system.
She said: “We need to restructure our political system. We need to restructure the people we put in politics to represent us.
“And we have a problem with that. The problem originates from the Independent National Election Commission, the INEC. INEC has let Nigerians down.
“I’m one of those Nigerians that INEC has let down. When you have a voted card and you cannot vote, it means that you’re not choosing the people who are representing you. Therefore, they owe you nothing.”
She stressed, “We are at the very worst stage that we can be as a nation. Patriotism is not the national anthem. A lot of people can’t even sing all the verses of either of the national anthems.
“So patriotism is about what you do for your country, but specifically what it is that your country is also doing for you because you are. We’re all Nigerians. We’re not Ghanaians. We’re not British. We’re Nigerians. So a country is to give and the citizens are also to give.”
She also described as a great error that activists and those who fought for democracy left the politicians to run the show.
She said: “That was a great error and I want us to correct that error. We will correct that error by restructuring. Restructuring does not only mean resource ownership, management and control, which I fully support, but if I support resource ownership and management, it means the people of Zanfara that have gold also get to own and manage their resources and any other resources.
“So in trying to, when I hear fix Nigeria, the first thing that comes to my mind, bearing in mind that I can recall pre-independence, bearing in mind that I grew up in a family that is very exposed and highly politicized in the sense that in every time that politics comes up, somebody, an uncle of mine is always one way or the other in politics.
“So if we are to succeed, then we must, as a people, as the electorate, make the decision as to who are these people that we are going to put in position of our power that we are investing in them to hold for us in trust, to make the right decisions and make the right policies for Nigerians. I have just one example which will tell us where we need to go.”
Senator Eyinanya Abaribe stressed the need to have the right people in the right place.
He also decried the weak institution citing a case where a public officer who was prosecuted for embezzlement only received a slap in the wrest.
He said: “Last week, the former head of the police pension fund embezzled, according to the court, N23.2 billion Naira. He was tried by the court and the court fined him N323 million and then imposed a two-year sentence on him for which he also gave, at the same time that they imposed that two-year sentence, a fine of N250,000 so that he can go free. So someone embezzles N23 billion, then he wakes up and pays back N315 million and he works free to now take N22 billion and walk away.
“Now we are talking about an illegal institution versus the person who was imposing that sentence. So as far as I’m concerned, if we don’t have the right people, we will never get an institution right. And that is the only way we can go forward.”
On his part, Dr. Aminu Gamana said the country needs value reorientation.
He said, “We need societal reorientation in order to get things right. Otherwise, you will conduct elections every four years, people will come out and collect indomie or spaghetti and gods for someone who does not care about them.”
He stressed that the country needed good leaders to have good institutions.
He also decried the level of moral decadence in the country, saying “And how do we get these good leaders that we are talking about? My own take on this is that we are not lacking good leaders. The challenge is our understanding of leadership is where we get it wrong. We tend to confuse electoral positions or appointments as leadership.
“But if you truly look at our society today, our religious leaders are here with us. Every Sunday or every Friday, we all assemble voluntarily before them. We listen to them for an hour or more.
So my thinking is we have many Harvard graduates, Oxford graduates, many professionals who have performed very well in other institutions outside the country.But immediately you bring them back into Nigeria, they will hardly survive. I think it has to do with the system and I think that individuals in terms of recruitment is also one area that we get things wrong. So to add on to what has been mentioned regarding the importance of institutions, it is the individuals that create the institutions.
“And it is the institutions also that ensures that those individuals do not have overriding power in such a way that they destroy institutions and bring them to power or leadership positions.
” So I would like to conclude with one point which is the value system, our own value system. How do we define or celebrate people who have accomplished something in society or in the country? When we were young, I think there were people that we celebrated even though they didn’t have money.
“So it is not just about the leaders who are elected, the followers in their own way are leaders themselves. So we need to ensure that leadership is not just about holding titles but about ability to influence what happens in your community and in your society.”
