Have you ever failed in your life before sir?
There is no human being on earth, no matter how long your string of success may be, who will not have certain areas where he or she must have thought he or she has not done well as expected. I contested for Secretary General of the United Nations and did not win. I don’t know what then failure is if not such. Then my international friends thought that if you wanted to change the world, the UN must be one of the instruments to bring about a new international order. I was with them in a group that we call interaction council of former heads of government, and one day they just said to me, look, we are here discussing annually about what we can do to change the world, shouldn’t we get one of us to take on this assignment of Secretary General of the United Nations? And they said to me, ‘we consider you appropriate for the position.’
Initially, I refused, but they insisted and went further to write to people including my own head of government then. The long and short of it was that the attempt was made, but I did not succeed.
Before the voting, one of the veto powers in the UN saw the Nigerian permanent representative and said: “Oh, you Nigerians are funny a lot, isn’t you?”
The Nigerian permanent representative asked him what he meant? He said it was in respect to the Secretary General of the UN. The Nigerian permanent secretary replied that we were serious about it. The man told us that although the office is the office of a Secretary General, they wanted the Secretary not the General (laughter). It was then I knew what my fate would be. I got two veto votes even when one was enough. So, that made me a distinguished failure.
When you were the President, you took the bull by the horn and most people yelled due to the pain. Did you feel any element of fear then?
Well, it depends on what you mean by elements of fear. Any human beings who does not fear God…
Apart from God, sir…
The fear of God must be in any human being and I have the fear of God and respect for human beings too. I worship my God and I fear God. Having said that, I believe no matter the high position you are holding, whether public or private, diplomatic or whatever, that you must be guided by certain principles. After all, when you are managing human affairs, you will want to do the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people even when you cannot please every single person.
I know that if you try to please everybody, then you will not please yourself. You will not please anybody and you will, in fact, not please God. But what are the things that are really important that you want to do? Already, you have identified those things, but you consult and consult. Should you study the situation? You do. Should you push? You push. Do you appeal? You appeal. Just do all that you believe should be done to achieve what you want to achieve.
You mentioned some of the things, but let me take one or two. Take the Land Use Act. The amount of problems we have before Act about land for development and the case of same piece of land being sold to three of four people by the same person. That cannot help development. That is number one.
Number two: if you look at history where revolutions have taken place in the world, land has always been one of the triggers. Again, we have different land tenure systems. How can you have one country with different land tenure systems? Then we were one country with different land tenure systems and it doesn’t look right.
For these three reasons among others, I believed that we needed a Land Use Act to make it easier for land to be made available for development, which will also harmonise the land tenure system of policy in the country and possibly get us away from possible revolution which cause could be land. We saw it as something that needed to be done and we went ahead and did it.
Two people or two groups of people who felt that they had been badly hit by it, the lawyers and the traditional rulers, started a fight. Today, for the fact that that Act has been in our statute for more than 30 years now is an indication that it is for the good of the nation.
That was something that needed to be done, but maybe people lacked the courage, understanding or the ability to do it. We did it and it has been in use till now. Though there is no law that should be cast in concrete, well if there is need for minor adjustments to make it serve better than when it was put in place over 30 years ago, that will be good.
Many believe that agriculture is key to our advancement, how would you react to that?
Do not forget that before the advent of colonialism, what we had was agriculture and trading. They looked at certain aspects of our agricultural products like groundnut, palm oil, rubber, cocoa and others. They made us grow them to sufficient quantity to feed their metropolitan industry at home and they called it cash crops.
Now as if producing maize and cassava cannot fetch you catch, they put research in these areas. The colonial masters groomed us on how to grow our agriculture to commercial quantity- cash crops as they call it. But after the Second World War, and shortly after our independence, oil became a significant factor in our economy and then we all developed an oil mentality. That there is nothing important in our lives, business or economy other than oil. We think and act oil. And in the process, we forgot agriculture.
I must say that even when I was a military head of state, you will remember what we call OFN (Operation Feed the Nation). Then, we looked at what we can do at the governmental level. We had something that they call ADP (Agricultural Development Programme), which was supported by the World Bank. By the time I left government in 1979, we were very self-sufficient in poultry, rice and others, but the government that succeeded us decided that things must be made easier. So, how do you make things easier? You import rice. And if you remember, the government that succeeded us actually established a presidential task force for the importation of rice, not for the production of rice, which I believe is nonsensical, just to put it mildly. Then they came with the importation of poultry, which destroyed our poultry industry.
For food security, we need three things: availability (production), distribution and affordability. I think that rather than abolish subsistence farming, it should be allowed to remain, while we encourage commercial farming until the small-scale farmers find an alternative means of livelihood. We should move the small scale farmers who are up now down and move the commercial farmers who are below upward, and not to eliminate the small scale farmers like that.
What do make of the National security situation and the way to restore a lasting peace in the country?
When you talk of lasting peace, I take it that you are talking of relative peace in the sense that you don’t have car bomb blasts and all that. For me, I don’t want the peace of the graveyard, which is not good enough. Wherever you have human interaction, there should be a little bit of friction.
Is that a soldier’s perspective?
No, it is the principles of human interactions…
I agree with you, because even in the family there are traces of friction.
Wherever you have relationship, there must be such. I grew up in a family house where we were about 14 eating from the same plate. If you were lucky to get your hand four times into the Eba plate before it finishes, you must count yourself very lucky. But then, some will say why do you step on my toes, why do you cross your legs and it touched me and so on. It is the same, and I think that is good for communal life.
People tend to see religion as a cause of conflict, but I do not. I was happy that when our religious leaders- Christian and Muslim- looked at the Jos issue, they came categorically to say that it is not caused by religion. Now what do you find? You will find both social and economic issues.
Where you have a group that are called settlers and then one that you can call natives, if the settlers tend to step on the economy of the natives, something will spark off that can either be traced to religion or politics.
Now the nomadic farmer carry their cattle’s all around the place, while the crop farmers are static, watching over their crop and when the nomadic farmers come they trample on everything and when that happens the crop farmer doesn’t fold his hands; so conflict ensue. The nomadic farmers by virtue of tribe and tradition are mainly Muslims, while the crop farmer by virtue of tradition and history are mainly Christians, but those who want to give us bad names will call them enemies.
What then is the solution?
I believe that we must hasting development.
In other words, poverty has a hand in it?
Well, the sole part of it, I think is due to our underdevelopment, because if the nomadic farmers have a settled place where they will have grass lands and water for their cattle, they won’t be roaming about. What can we do to make that happen? We must do something to make that happen.
Then who is a settler, and who is a native? Now it depends on how far back you want to go. We can all be settlers in Nigeria, or we can all be natives
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