How Jonathan revived 54-year-old relationship with the Philippines – Amb Farounbi

Heavily bearded Dr. Yemi Farounbi, Nigeria’s Ambas­sador to the Republic of the Philippines takes an excursion into the Nigeria/Philippines relation­ship that dated back to 1975 and what the two nations stand to benefit. He also comments on the defeat suffered by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the March 28 presidential election and the hopes of Nigerians in the incoming gov­ernment.

Excerpts:
How has Nigeria fared in the last four years on the international scene?
In forms of international relations, Nigeria had, indeed, stabilised her position internationally as a giant of Africa, as the leading nation in the Third World and as a leader of ideas in the Middle East, Africa and what we called the South-south. We have played the leading role as usual within Africa, giving supports to countries that we ought to do. In the course of the four years, we have emerged as the biggest economy and that has added a lot of muscles to our stature in international relations. Because of our emergence as the biggest economy in Africa, we have become the 26th economy in the world.
All of these matter in international relations. In geo-politics, you look at the population; you look at the economy; you look at the domestic politics; all of these project a nation to the national scene. The fact that our economy has stabilized; the fact that our economy has grown, the fact that our politics has also in many ways, matured, has helped the stature of Nigeria on the international scene.
It has meant that in the United Nations, they listened to us. It has meant that sometimes, our move has been very decisive in assisting the United Nations in taking decision. The emergence of Nigeria as a very strong country had been shown really in so much interest everybody had in Nigeria about our elections. We should have asked ourselves; why were they so interested? Why was United Nations, why was U.S, why was European Union, why were all of them interested in Nigeria? It was because of the emergence of Nigeria in the last four years as a big player. And when you become a big player, you attract attention.
But people complained that Nigeria leadership is not so much reckoned with in the international community. The last time American President Obama visited West Africa, he was Ghana. Nigerians believed that visit was a slight on Nigerian leadership.
I think that is our own interpretation. What is important is Obama’s interpretation. If Nigeria was that insignificant, would he have shown the kind of active interest he had shown in the last one year in the evolution of democracy in Nigeria? Don’t forget that the same Obama played host to President Jonathan after the 2011 elections, which most people accepted as a large improvement on past elections, which was in fact the beginning of recognition of Nigeria as a very strong democratic nation. So, I don’t think Obama not coming to Nigeria was because Nigeria was not important.
There are a lot of domestic reasons why the leadership of another country do whatever it is doing. Let me give you an example. The Israeli Prime Minister, before election, went to the U.S, he addressed the Senate. He went on the invitation of the Republican leadership of the Senate. Throughout the period, the American President refused to meet him. In fact, the Secretary of State and the Vice-President were all outside the U.S so that they had no contact with him. That was not because Israel was not important. It was because an election was nearby and Obama was playing safe.
What I am trying to say, therefore, is that the reason for a president of a country doing a lot of things depends on his internal politics, his own internal geopolitics; his own internal hopes and aspirations for developing his economy and so on.
Ghana might have been more important to American interest than Nigeria at that time. But the same Obama now has even promised that in the remaining few weeks that President Jonathan has, they are going to work with him.
What I am trying to say is that because of our own peculiar way of interpreting things, sometimes because of our own way of under-playing our roles in the international scene; sometimes because of our own inadequate appreciation of the stature of Nigeria in international scene, we sometimes tend to interprete things from a negative point of view rather than look at the positive things based on a lot virtues and a lot of attributes that Nigeria has.
You represent Nigeria in the Philippines, what has been the benefit of Nigeria’s relationship with the Filipinos so far?
I have been in the Philippines for almost three years now. Nigeria has had diplomatic relationship with the Philippines for 54 years, but I am not sure many Nigerians know about Philippines just as many Filipinos are ignorant of Nigeria. Let me give you an example: To govern the relationship between the two countries, a joint commission was established. The first session was in Manila in 1975. Since then, until I took over, there was no second session. We succeeded in having a second session on December 6 and 7, 2012 in Abuja. This year, the third session will hold in Manila. This joint commission ought to be every two or three years but for 27 years, there was none.
When you do not have joint commission, then you cannot talk of joint agriculture, joint trade, joint industrial policies and things like that. But we have succeeded in bridging that gap. And the next joint commission, which will hold this year, we’re hoping to look at things like mutual policies on trade, on education, on cultural exchange, joint information development.
We are looking at things on areas of education; we’re looking at things on area of visa relaxation and our joint battle against drug, which has been on for the past six or seven years and we are going to sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) this year. These, we have worked on in the last three years.
Apart from that, there has been an inflow of investment activities into the country. You may probably know that the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company and its Yola counterpart have Filipino company as their technical partners; they have a company called Meralco, which is in charge of power distribution in Philippine as their technical partner. All of that happened in the last three year.
We have at the moment in Ilorin, a Philippine university called Ahmad University International, trying to establish. It is undergoing accreditation with the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) and hopefully this year it will open its gates for admission. There is another proposed Philippine university in Osun State. It has been offered land by the state government in Ibokun. Hopefully, in the next one or two years, that university will also be opened for operation. There is a third one which the Benue State government has given a land in Katsina-Ala to establish a Philippine-financed university.
So, in the last three years, we have succeeded in attracting at least three universities from the Philippines. They have 1,800 universities anyway and their oldest university is 405 years old. Their oldest medical school is 187 years old. So, there are things we can gain from the point of view of education from them. As I speak, there are no fewer than 1,000 Nigerians in Master’s programmes in three Philippine universities, learning marine engineering, marine transportation and riverine protection to ensure that Nigeria can play a dominant role all over the world in the shipping industry.
Philippine contributes 28 per cent of all the workers in the maritime industry all over the world. They have only 100 million people while we have 170 million people; if we succeed in training many more Nigerians in this field, then they don’t have to wait in Nigeria to work. They can work anywhere and in any ship all over the world. This we have been able to do.
We have been able to bring in a few multi-level network companies; Alliance in Motion is here; Unlimited Network opportunity is here; Organocrone is here; they are all from Philippine. They have been able to strengthen the relationship between the two countries.
As a matter of fact, in the next two, three months, a company from Philippine that uses coal to generate what they called clean energy, will be coming to Nigeria to talk to the Nigerian electricity regulatory body to see to the possibility of establishing a power-generating plant, using coal from Kogi State. All of that is being discussed.post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com
There is a Unilab, which is the largest pharmaceutical company in Asia. It has 12 branches in Asia. It is a Filipino company. It is on its way to Nigeria; first, to distribute its products; second, to establish a company that will produce drugs to serve the African market and third, to establish a partnership with domestic investors to build a big hospital.
One of the things, I had worked on in the last three years is to see how Philippines can assist Nigeria in arresting the outward drift in medical tourism. We’re spending about N32 billion every year taking people to Isreal or India. If we are able to establish our own, then we might be able to preserve such money. All of these, we have been handling.
And for the first time in our 54 years of relationship, a Minister of Foreign Affairs from Nigeria came to Philippines. It is considered a landmark achievement. All other countries have been having exchange at the presidential level; we never even had exchange at ministerial level in 54 years.
So, we think we have been able to cement the relationship between Nigeria and Philippines. Today, I can confidently say that Philippines consider Nigeria as its platform for entering and being a player in Africa.
With all these laudable achievements and looking at the impending change of government, do you nurse any fear that all these may soon be truncated or abandoned?
A nation lives in continuity and one of the things that governments are wary about is aborting diplomatic relationships. And that is why even in the very dark days of Nigeria, when a military government takes over, they will tell you that all international agreements, signed by preceding government will be upheld. It is important. If a country cannot be relied on internationally, then it is lost. So, I don’t entertain any fear at all.
You have just reeled out what the President Goodluck Jonathan-led administration was able to achieve in a relationship with one country, looking at the result of presidential election and as an insider, do you think President Jonathan deserved to be voted out or you think Nigerians actually misunderstood his administration?
A nation decides its own leadership in whichever way you look at it. As a diplomat, you know, countries deal with countries. Whoever a country elects, the other country has no other choice than to deal with them. But there are other factors beyond international diplomacy that affect the result of an election. It might be domestic politics; it might be self-inflicted politics; it might be, as you said, non-appreciation of what the government has done and it might be what I call inadequate explanation of the position of the government, of the goals of the government, of the visions of the government and so on. One of these can come into play.
In the last few days, President Jonathan has become a big star in the firmament simply because he made a phone call. But the character of President Jonathan has not changed all the years. It is still an aspect of his character that motivated him to make that phone call. But for whatever reasons, those aspects of his character were not even seen, were not even appreciated, were not even drawn attention to. All of these are the combination of factors that affected his administration.
As a big stakeholder in the party, after the election, what next, looking at several cracks and internal squabbles rocking your party?
Let me illustrate with an American situation. After the Johnson era that started in 1965, for years, the Democrats didn’t come to power. They were always controlling the House of Congress and the Senate but it was the Republican that was winning the Presidency – Reagan, Nixon and so on. Then came a Bill Clinton who rebuilt the Democratic Party, gave it a new look, an urge for power and a hunger for political leadership and that changed the whole situation.
It was the same thing in U.K, for years, from John Major to Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives dominated the political scene. It took a Tony Blair to alter the situation, gave it a new look, made the Labour Party not to look as one socialist, leftist outpost but something that can be accepted. And for eight years, Labour kept on winning elections until they handed over to Godwin Brown, who again brought the Labour Party to opposition.
What I am trying to say, therefore, is that in the life of a nation, you should expect moments where there will be emergence of one party, the re-emergency of another in what Billy Drudge calls the dynamism of continuity and change in development. No matter how good PDP is, it is just possible for people to say, ‘oh, since all these years, let’s have a change,’ not necessarily because the party was not getting it right but because there could become a situation where the people are having boredom for seeing the same people all over and over again.
I expect, therefore, that in keeping with the examples I have given, where parties had won and lost and had not gone into total oblivion, that the PDP will rise again; that the PDP will go back to the drawing board and ask itself what went wrong. Is it that we took the people for granted? Or is it that we didn’t explain enough what we were doing? Is it that we were not inclusive? Is it that we were exclusive? What went wrong? I believe that the PDP has enough intelligent, sufficiently intelligent, sufficiently politically articulate people to look at the situation and say, ‘yes, perhaps we didn’t move fast enough with the expectations of the people’
If you ask many Nigerians, who voted for change, what direction of change do they desire? What is the constituent of change they are expecting? They probably don’t have an answer and these are issues. For those of us who belong to this politics, in 1983, the slogan was ‘changi’. We really didn’t exactly get it. What we got out of that was a military junta. It was also a change.
So, I expect that the PDP will sit down, take a look at what had happened, take a look at contemporary Nigeria. Had there been changes in the expectations of Nigerians? What are the landmark expectations of Nigerians? Something tells me that part of it is restructuring of Nigeria. Maybe, that is something we ought to begin to look at as a party and to see what we have been doing to stop the internal hemorrhage, the type that the party was subjected to in the last two years? There must be a way of blocking hemorrhage and there must be a way of preventing hemorrhage. The PDP will certainly bounce back.
With the benefit of hindsight and looking at the key players of the All Progressives Congress (APC), do you expect any magic?
If you get magic, then that will be strange, because you never can get magic in governance. It is not possible. Governance has to be subjected to reality. Henry Kissinger once said: ‘If you are so much visionary that your head is in the cloud and your feet is not on the ground, you are going to get blown off.’
So, any new government we have must face itself with the reality on the ground. What is the reality on the ground? One of the realities is that there is a drop in the price of crude oil. That is one. There is a reduction in the demand for Nigerian oil. That is two. What does that suggest? It means that there will be shrinking revenue available. That is the realities on the ground. So, the government will now say: ‘what do we do with this? How can we expand?’post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com
Many years ago, the President-elect took a look at that kind of situation in 1983 and said he was going to do counter-trade. But can counter-trade work today? These are all options. They have to look at the reality. So, it will be foolhardy for Nigerians to expect magic because magic is not reality. And I think it is better for Nigerians to accept the reality of our situation; that there are so many areas we have to work on. We have to work and complete projects-independent power project is there; there is modernisation of the railway, which has to be done; there have been positive achievements in the areas of agriculture, particularly by the young man who now is the outgoing Minister of Agriculture. He has done a lot in agriculture. In fact, he has become respected all over the world because of his achievements in the areas of rice production; in the areas of distribution of fertilizer; in the elimination of corruption in the system of fertilizer distribution.
These are some of the realities that in-coming government will look at. Where had been successes? Where had there been failures? And then of course, from the concept of their three agenda viz: one; that they are going to look at the economy. In the next few months, we would like to see how they look at the economy. The area they want to tinker with; the area they want to work upon. There is a gale of corruption, which is their second point and the third, of course, is terrorism that has become a dark cloud in the sky of Nigeria.
So, as a student of contemporary politics, I don’t expect magic from any government because it is not possible. But I expect every government to study the reality on the ground, what Mary Parker Follett calls the Law of Situation. You study the situation on the ground and devise policies to tackle the situation on the ground. That is why you find a political party that campaigned against a policy such as privatization ending up doing privatization. When they got there, they found out that is the reality on the ground and they have to move the nation forward.
Sometimes, you have to abandon some of your policies; you have to shift some of your policies because as somebody campaigning from outside you do not have all the fact. By the time they get all the fact, they will now sit down and ask: ‘In the light of this fact, how do we move Nigeria forward?’ Then, they begin to fashion packages that may not be entirely in toto with what they had promised. But there will be intelligent adaptation, knowledgeable adaptation to the reality on the ground.
What’s your advice to Nigerian business community as regards what they stand to gain in the Philippines?
The interesting thing about the Philippines is that it is a country like ours. Same climate, same weather except the typhoons and they have things that are working. They are on the same level of corruption except that their corrupt people don’t take their money outside the place. As I speak, their last president is in jail; their president of senate of last tenure is in jail; two top officials of that same senate are in jail.
Yes, they try to uphold their law and the present government is trying to fight corruption. But Philippine hasn’t the kind of resources that we have. They are getting resource as Filipinos and there are 13 million Filipinos outside Philippine, contributing about $38 million in terms of foreign exchange earnings to Philippine.
It is something I want Nigeria to look at. How can we coordinate or establish a systematised approach to harnessing the resources of Nigerians in the Diaspora to develop our country? There are so many Nigerians doing so well outside Nigeria and that can bring a little out of the so much wealth that they are having. They can bring it back to Nigeria to help us develop Nigeria.post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com
The second major source of income for Philippines is what they call Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). That is, the call centres. BPOs are aspects of one’s business, which are outsourced outside because it is cheaper to do outside. If you pick up a phone in Nigeria today and you talk to an airline in US or you try to make a booking in a hospital in US or you are trying to make a booking in a restaurant or a film theatre in US, the chances are that the man answering you is based in Philippines. A lot of this has been outsourced to the Philippines because labour is cheap. So, when you call, it is channeled to the Philippines, they answer you, do the charter booking and so and so forth. And in that process, Philippine has become the number one BPO country in the world.
India used to be the number one because Indians spoke English. But Philippines took over because they opened door and it was entirely privatized and they speak an English that has no accent like the Indians. When I talk to the Philippines, they said: ‘Nigeria should be leading there because they speak better English than anybody; a clearer English; not English English, not American English, but a unique English that it should be possible…’ But, of course, for us to do that we need regular electricity because a BPO or a call centre has to work 24 hours every day. That is one area.
Tourism is another source of their revenue. Last year, they had six million tourists from outside Philippine and they have 22 million domestic tourists. They have so many hotels. Hospitality is their trade. Of course, if you meet an average Filipino, he is always all smiling; warm, humble, smiling, resilient, even, in the face of whatever problem. I think we should look into that. We have a lot of tourist possibilities in Nigeria; natural tourism, ecotourism, cultural tourism, historical tourism that we ought to develop. Our Yankari Games Reserve is there, Old Oyo National Park is there and many more like that. All of these, we can partner with outsiders to develop.post by expdonaloaded.blogspot.com
Of course, in terms of investments in Philippine, they have a lot of fruits. If you get to the White House today, if you are served any fruit, I can say that 80 per cent of the chance is that the fruits came from Philippine. They make a lot of money from coconut water. They have coconut butter; they have coconut sugar; they have coconut toothpaste. What they make from coconut is unbelievable.
I tried to link the Lagos State Coconut Production Authority with the Philippine Coconut Production Authority, they are discussing presently so that they can help us to see what we can do with our coconut beyond just eating alone. The sweetner we use in the hotel are made from the hard bark of coconut.
It was in Philippine that I found beautiful red wine made from mangoes. We are trying to see if Oyo State and Benue State that are large producers of mangoes can network with them and jointly come and develop such industry in this country.
I just made an invitation to Dangote to send a team to Philippine to look at what they are doing in their agriculture. He should get a team to understudy them and see if he also can invest in that regard and if he can take their concept to help us here.
It is a beautiful place to visit and as we say in Philippine, ‘it is fun to be in Philippine’ and I also tell them ‘it is better fun to be in Nigeria,’ because at least we are sure that there is no typhoon; we are sure that there is no earthquake.