‘Corruption Is Not Nigeria’s Only Problem’–El-Rufai via ekekeee - June 18, 2013 In this exclusive interview, former minister of the Federal Capital Territory and member of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), Mallam Nasir El-Rufai sheds some more light on his views on Federalism, Nigeria’s corruption malaise, the country’s bicameral legislature and His Personal Political Ideology. Excerpts…. What is your political ideology – are you a Marxist or a socialist? Neither. I have a pragmatic approach to political ideologies. I don’t believe that there is one solution or one path to fixing societal problems. I believe that in the situation that we are in as a country and at our stage of development we should search for solutions from the left and the right. I think there are situations in our circumstances that require the government to intervene and do something and there are situations that don’t make sense for the government to be involved. I don’t say I am a Marxist and that everything must be controlled by the state. I also don’t believe that I am a market fundamentalist and that everything must be left to the dictates of market forces. I think in real life you need a mixture of both depending on the circumstance. So I like to call my ideology ‘pragmatism’. When you pick a solution and it doesn’t work, don’t stick to it, don’t insist on it, try another one. The idea for me is to solve problems and not stick to an ideology. That may sound a bit confusing for some people but from my own experience that’s the only way to make progress in Nigeria. As Deng Xiaoping who is my role model said, “It does not matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice”. That is the philosophy that he used to blend a capitalist economy with a communist political structure. In China, they still say they are communists but there is nothing that they do that looks communist in the economy. So for me if that kind of pragmatism would give you a 10% annual growth rate for forty years then it’s worth it. Deng went against the traditional political ideologies to rescue China from the brink. Thinking out of the box and pragmatically is the way for us to go in Nigeria. When you reach a certain level of development when all the basic bread and butter issues have been resolved, then you can afford to be ‘ideological’ and say things like “Market only”. The republican thinks of low taxes and minimal government spending and interventions while the democratic side is saying “No! we need government, only government can be fair.” These two paths are luxurious. America can afford that because people are not complaining about roads, electricity, telephone services and so on an so forth. Until we solve these I don’t think we should stick to any Ideology, we should just be pragmatic. Do you think that by solving the corruption problem Nigeria will be okay? I think we have a corruption problem, no doubt about it. I think we have even gone beyond corruption to entrench a culture of impunity. It is something that needs to be addressed but I do not believe that even if you remove corruption in Nigeria, Nigeria would make progress unless we get certain things right. I believe that corruption is a problem in every country and depending on the level of corruption it can affect the development of the country. But corruption alone does not prevent development. Indonesia was a very corrupt country. It had a lot of corruption fuelled by oil and military rule but it developed. So there must be something else other than corruption that is responsible for lack of development. I do not believe that corruption is in fact the most important issue we need to face in Nigeria. I think what is most important is to have rules that are applied. You can be as corrupt as you want but once you are caught you should go to jail. There is a lot of corruption in China but once you are caught no one can save you and saying that other people are corrupt doesn’t save you, you go to jail. I think the biggest problem with our corruption situation is the fact that people know that they can ethicize or spiritualize it. If you are caught, you say, “It is because I am a Yoruba man” or “It is because I am a Christian”. People can steal money and go to give their clerics and you hear their clerics fighting for them. This is the problem we have in Nigeria – it’s not the corruption itself. It is the impunity associated with corruption – the knowledge that people can get away with it. If we can change that, corruption would go down and it would not retard and prevent development. I give Indonesia as an example but has to wonder that if we are able to reduce corruption can we develop the way we are? What are your views on federalism? I don’t believe Nigeria is a federation; it’s only a federation in name and I have written about it. Everything about us has the resemblance of a centralized state: we have one central police, we have electricity only controlled by the federal government, we have postal services controlled by only the federal government. That’s not a federation. There are certain things that are best done locally and policing is one of them. Left to me, we should have police at state level. We should even have local government police because 90% of crimes are done at local levels. I believe in true federalism. I have written and advocated for it. We need to decentralize many of our functions. I even believe that just as land is under the control of state governments, let’s allow the minerals under the land to go to the control of the state governments as well. Right now if you take the case of a state like Zamfara which has a lot of gold, the land that contains the gold is controlled by the state government but the mining license to mine the gold is given in Abuja. When the mining company gets the license in Abuja, it has to return to Zamfara to try to get land to get access. It is just confusing. If the governor of Zamfara is given the control of the minerals and the land he could go to Australia and get a company he could give concession to mine gold in his state and Zamfara would get the benefits. The Nigerian government can tax it and get its own share for the federation account. It can be the same case with oil. Let all oil under the ground belong to the states. Offshore should be federation property. No state can control oil that is in the continental shelve or the extended economic zone, but the ones under the soil should belong to the states. Let them be the ones to negotiate with SHELL and co and let the federal government just tax it. This is the way to go. It is this kind of decentralization and competitive development that would bring progress. This is how the first republic made a remarkable progress in a few years. So do you like the idea of a regional government system for Nigeria? I am a realist. You can dream as much as you want but we have 36 states. We will never go back to any regional government system, so I don’t like wasting my time on what is impossible. The genie is out of the bottle, you have a state called Ekiti state with a capital called Ado-Ekiti. You can’t merge it back to make Ondo state or the Western Region, they will not agree. There are legislators, there are commissioners, there are governors who will never agree. In my opinion it is unrealistic, it is utopian speculation. Just forget it. We have a 36 state structure, let us see how we can make it work and in my opinion making the FG devolve some powers and responsibilities to the states and making the FG smaller and less attractive is what would work. There is no state in this country that cannot be viable if they know that they would live or die on what efforts they make to raise their own revenue. This federation account sharing every month is like a drug – it is addictive and it has made many states lazy but if they know that there is no federation account or that the federation is very small then they have to work hard, mine the mineral in their states or produce agricultural products to export or sell to make their money. They would all wake up and the country would be the better for it overall. Everyone has some areas that it can focus on and it can produce to world standard but with this monthly allocation nobody would bother. Do you agree that we don’t need two arms in the national assembly? I don’t agree. I think we do. I think we need a senate and we need a House of Rep. You see, the two houses were designed for two different purposes, the house is supposed to be a representative of the population while the senate is supposed to be a forum where all states are equal so that smaller states do not feel short changed by the larger states. Lagos with 15 million people has 3 senators and Bayelsa with 1.2 million people has 3 senators. So Bayelsa is equal to Lagos in the senate but in the house, Bayelsa may have 1 or 2 or 3 reps while Lagos has 35 or something because of the population. That is how it should be. The purpose of having these two houses is for the senate to act as a more mature chamber that would rise above politics and look at the overall interest of the country. Now the fact that some of the people you have there do not fit that description does not mean that we don’t need the chamber. The fact that it cost so much to run the two houses is a failure of the executive branch. Under Obasanjo the combine budget of the national assembly was never more than 30 billion naira. Now it is about 150 billion naira. Since Yar’ adua came it has been about 150 billion naira with the same population of representatives. So it can be made much cheaper than what we are currently paying. But I think we need the two houses because they serve two different purposes and they serve to check one another. Whenever the senate says something, sometimes the house takes a different view and they have to sit and reconcile to be able to legislate and I think it is healthy for them to do so but we can bring down the cost of running two houses if we have a will to do so. This interview was conducted by Olakunle Kasumu (@Olakunlekas)
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 08:17:13 +0000
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