As a result of the increasing terror campaign constantly unleashed on innocent Nigerians every week, two security chiefs fell victim last week as President Goodluck Jonathan wielded the big stick and relieved the National Security Adviser (NSA), Owoeye Azazi and the Minister of Defence, Haliru Bello, of their jobs. The general consensus is that the unchecked activities of the group are seriously threatening the unity of the country and has renewed the agitation for a national dialogue and political restructuring. In this interview with JOSEPH ONYEKWERE, a senior lawyer and former member of the National Assembly, Mr. Onyeabo Obi, who is also a member of People's Democratic Party (PDP) Board of Trustees says the alarming level of insecurity in the country has made restructuring imperative. He also spoke on the need for national dialogue, legislative probes and corruption among others. Excerpts:WHAT do you think is the way out of the alarming rate of insecurity in the country'To be honest, I don't know. But then, if we talk about kidnapping, this is the only country where people are allowed to pay ransom. When ransom is paid, kidnapping becomes a profitable business. You know that they don't snatch cars again' You kidnap somebody, put him in a toilet or somewhere and N10 million comes out, N5 million comes out and because you paid and the man goes away, they look out for the next person. So somebody can be making up to N5 to 10 million every month for doing nothing.But the family members of the kidnapped person are afraid of the life of their benefactor as the case may be.In one case in my town, sadly in the last one month, N30 million was paid and the man still died. But if they didn't pay, the next person wouldn't be kidnapped. So it is a vicious circle. The more we pay, the more those boys who have no other jobs, who are not doing anything, would say, 'let us stop at the next junction and take another person even if he is a poor man. His family can cough out N100,000.'Advanced society's refuse to encourage people to pay, they would say don't pay but report to the police. And if people stop paying, perhaps, a few people would be killed and after that, it would stop. Those kidnappers are not there to kill people but to make money. So, if they see that there is no more money to be made, after a while, they will stop kidnapping. But if they will get the money easily, they will continue. Sometimes, it is even the children who will tell their friends to kidnap him that money would come out. They will do so and share the money. So, it is the love of money. If there is no money to be paid, I bet you, that it would stop.What about the issue of Boko Haram'I am not an expert on that. How I wish I knew enough about their history or background. What I know, first of all, is that hardship or unemployment, disparity of income and levels of life have weighed a lot of discontent among various youths. And if they are so discontented, there are easily to be persuaded to go one way or the other. The only difference is that the Northerners can be religiously indoctrinated enough to believe that they can kill themselves in the process and go to heaven on a good cause.In the South, nobody wants to die because there are no such things. There, they kill themselves and kill others. They believe that they are doing a good thing ' that these terrible people, let us destroy them. So the society has itself to blame for lack of opportunities. All the international reports such as the World Bank index on poverty shows that the North West and the North East particularly, are the most deprived, in terms of employment opportunities and living below the poverty line. And if you see a man from your town riding on a private jet, driving Limousines, owning buildings and all that, you would not be happy. And I think, the sooner we start addressing these lacks of opportunities, the better. There is no reason the North West and the North East should be that underdeveloped because they ruled the country for so long. In fact, we shot ourselves in the foot.The former National Security Adviser recently said it was your party that contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram. Do you agree with that'Yes, I agree. Even the way we run election and choose candidates is faulty. The whole society is involved. The church is celebrating corrupt people and breeding criminals. Political parties use the method of extortion.The former military head of state, Muhammadu Buhari recently made statements considered inciting by the Presidency. Do you think he should be tried for sedition'The difference between a military rule and democracy is that there is the latitude of freedom of expression. The polity is heated up enough that once you try to pick him up, you over heat it and it becomes counter-productive. So let arguments engage themselves. The public is knowledgeable enough to assess people for whom they are. It was not during our time that six suitcases were smuggled into the Nigerian customs. Buhari was still the head of state at that time. Charles Taylor addressed the International Court on Sierra Lone. He said that to say that he was responsible for what happened in Sierra lone because he was the head of state of Liberia put all heads of states in trouble because everything that happened in Nigeria was all Jonathan's fault. But the challenge is that you have to do your best.One of the things that Buhari said was that the 2011 elections were rigged and that if such was repeated in 2015, there might be a conflagration. Do you agree'No! I don't agree. I am a member of the PDP, but I am a critical member. I don't accept that. I know we have a lot of shortcomings and accesses. But what I saw at the convention, which nominated Jonathan where delegates from even Adamawa nominated him, and the overwhelming votes from delegates all across the country, I had no doubt that Jonathan would win the election. Secondly, Buhari is a good candidate. But he is hated and feared by Northerners who don't like his style of discipline. Thirdly, he wanted to rule Nigeria. He did not campaign in the South. You cannot win presidential election without the principle of spread apart from the majority of votes. And that spread means you have to win the two-thirds of the states. You cannot get that by sitting at your home! So as a revolutionary getting popular vote, he has to be realistic. I don't accept that 2011 election was rigged. There might have been pockets of injustices here and there, but I think that there was general popular acceptance of Jonathan.Do you agree with the call for national conference'Yes, we must talk. But I don't have any sentimental attachment to the word sovereign. What is sovereign' If we all agree, it would be implementable. If we don't agree, nothing can be implemented. So what I am saying is that we should concentrate on the need to gather and talk and forget what the name given to it. So dialogue is very important. Let us renegotiate out terms of existence. Nigeria should sit down and reflect if we have got it right. In few years time we would be 100 years of the amalgamation. I think we entered into the presidential system of government too early without knowing what it takes. One of the things we could do is to go back to the parliamentary system. You start from the root, become a member of the House and your colleagues there would determine whether you are good enough to become a minister, or commissioner or not. But here, somebody comes all the way and declare, 'I want to be the governor of the state'. No track record and all that and when he finishes, he has nowhere to go. That is the problem. So, I think we should reverse to the parliamentary system. The 36 states of the federation are too unwieldy. We have to revert to the six geopolitical zones and let them be the federating units. We should then reduce the things that the Federal Government has to do so that not everybody would want to go there. I don't see why the Federal Government should be bothered about agriculture and education in my state! I also think that the zoning thing should be included in the constitution since zoning is always causing problem because if CPC doesn't zone and win, it has made nonsense of the PDP zoning arrangement. So we can adopt it as a national policy. Switzerland has done it; Lebanon has done it. When it comes into the constitution, the condition is that all political parties must nominate candidate from that zone. The PDP is always causing a problem because people are defying it. We are only talking about the centre, in the states, it doesn't work. Some zones have never produced a governor and they are not happy. So there are a lot of things that ought to be renegotiated and re-examined.What is your opinion about those who wear the wig and gown and are not lawyers such as members of the National Assembly and others'As I said, these are all colonial relics. In England, it is not the mayor who wears the wig and gown, it is clerk of the council. The registrars in England also wears the wig and gowns but here everything is abused. Everybody is right Honourable here. If you become a counsellor, you become a right Honourable and if you become, a governor, you become His Excellency. It is all a contradiction, a tautology if I must say. So, I think they should all be abolished. Even the amount of money spent on buying those things count. When a Speaker is impeached, what happens to his wig and gown' The next one orders a new one and outside the seat, he cannot use it when his tenure expires unless he is a lawyer. Nigeria is wasting millions in ordering these relics of a colonial rule, which doesn't improve on anything. The one on the political class should be abolished first completely.As a former member of national assembly, what do you say about the series of probes, which Nigerians hear nothing more after the reports'It is good for the misbehavior in the political, judicial and executive class to be exposed. The eleventh commandment is 'thou should not be found out' because exposing, abusing or disgracing a 'big man' is worst punishment than killing him. Even that exposure is salutory.In England, if you convict an important person, instead of sending him to jail, you send him to do community service. He has already been disgraced enough but unfortunately here, we have become so immune to shame. You can imagine that in my political party, my national chairman who is a great reformer by reputation and doctrine had constituted an advisory committee and one member of his advisory committee is a convicted person. So you see that there is no shame in Nigeria. A convicted person will parade himself as if nothing happened. It was even said that when one of them came out of prison and was celebrating, that former president Olusegun Obasanjo called him to order publicly and said: 'don't you have any shame'. But Nigerians have no shame because people went to dance in London. When Ibori was convicted in London, Nigerians went there to dance and to support him. And you can be sure that the day Ibori sets his foot in Nigeria here, there will be a lot of people who will be dancing and celebrating him. We have lost our sense of shame and value. So, what I am saying is exposure is an important thing. But you know that the National Assembly is neither an executive organ nor a judicial organ. They cannot send somebody from there to jail except for contempt. So the judicial process has to take over from there. The investigative process has to take over. And that is yet to happen.Where does your own role in the probes end'It ends in legislation. You cannot even legislate somebody guilty because there is due process in the constitution. There are procedures for trial. There must be fair hearing. And those inquiries are not supposed to be trial; they are supposed to be fact-finding. It is not today that those things started. You cannot convict somebody based on the evidence given at those probes. You have to fashion out evidences, which can withstand the test of the law court.Are members not worried that after the highly celebrated inquiries and exposures, nothing comes out of it in terms of prosecution and punishment'I have given you a case where someone was convicted and he is in a panel now set up by the party. We have lost our sense of shame. I am worried about the National Assembly over these things because I know the limitations of their power. But then, are they free themselves' How many of them are clean' You see what happened in the last aborted Capital Market probe where an investigator became a defendant' And the situation here is that once you touch someone, his people will come out and say he is our man, is he the only one and so on. So, it is not easy to change things in this country. It needs the political will of the executive. The House has shown its political will in the Fuel subsidy probe. The House has done its own bit. It is not for the judiciary to prosecute. It is not even for them to enforce their orders because they don't have the legislative powers to do so. Once they expose it, the heat should be on the executive. From there, the heat should be on the judiciary. If they don't play their parts, the whole system is condemned and the repercussion will tell on the whole system.As a former member, how do you react to the allegation that the parliament is gulping a high chunk of our resources'It is a major problem. But you have to ask yourself, how much do those people spend to get in' The question of fixing your salary is a tough one. It is an impossible task to ask any person to fix his own salary. You know about the scandal that arose in the British House of Commons about allowances, false claims, shows you that politicians generally would cut corners. Our society is skewed in so many ways and it is not only in the National Assembly. Those members before they enter, they have to bribe the party people to give them nomination forms. They have to even bribe the electoral officers to do their works. They have to bribe the judges to even get the judges nullify or get their opponent's election nullified. So the system is corrupt. But the worst thing is that Nigeria is not investigating and punishing those who commit offences. What makes people behave very well is the fear of being caught and punished. If there is no punishment and there is no finding out, everybody will keep doing what they like and that is what is happening.Apart from the case of Bode George, I don't know of any politician who has gone to jail. A banker spent all her sentence in the luxury of a hospital. What are we talking about'What is your view about the controversy surrounding the rank of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) since you didn't get one'I applied several times, several times I was shortlisted and was always told it would happen next time. But I realized that I would not do the Nigerian thing to be favoured. Somebody would ask me: 'have you gone there to see this man or that man' And I would ask: 'why do I need to see somebody' I always say that my records are there to speak for me. Besides, the form says, canvassing will disqualify you. So, why would I want to disqualify myself' But that is what they do. But I never did that.Secondly, members of the Privileges Committee used to go there and say 'I support this candidate or the other. I never got anybody to adopt me. In fact on one occasion, the chairman of my local branch came to tell me that the Chief Justice said 'you are going to be conferred with the SAN today.' I said okay, we will see! I wasn't concerned. The following day, nothing happened and he rushed to me to say 'sorry, it appears as if I told a lie, it was not a lie. I called the Chief Justice to ask him what was going on.' He said at the point when they were to take my name, one person just got up and say: 'last year, we promised somebody from the South East. So we cannot leave him and take Onyeabo Obi'. So, they said, again, next year. I laughed because that was ridiculous. But frankly, they have been unfair to me. I wrote protest letters. But then, my consolation is that you don't always get what you deserve. Somebody said, it is better not to get what you deserve, than not to deserve what you get. So since I am recognized in the profession, I let it be.Will you join the call for the scrapping of the title of SAN'I have been asked to do that, but you cannot burn the house because of a rat. You know that Nigeria first had Queen's Counsel (QC's,) but because of abuses, that rank was abolished and they started SAN and the abuses has become more manifest. There are even allegations of bribery, forgery, procurement and so on. The annoying thing is the artificial thing they do regarding how many cases you have handled. Many of the cases don't belong to the lawyers; it is like buying it or hiring it. And if you go to Supreme Court cases, very few senior lawyers or those who have got the SAN go there to argues cases and file it out to people who will use it as one of their numbers for SAN. So the quality of arguments in the Supreme Court has gone down. So I call for it to be revised completely. England has revised its rule too. In England now, lawyers go for an interview. Though Nigeria also do that but one of the wrong thing is that judges of the Supreme Court are choosing candidates. All these I think are not good for the profession. The rank, indeed, does not hold respect as it should. I will not call for it to be abolished; rather I will call for its abolition on another ground.In America, you don't have to hold a title to be a good lawyer. The question of rank is colonial and archaic, which I agree should be abolished. I agree that we should abolish the wig and the gown. The judges of the Supreme Court can wear the gown. After all, the magistrates that are dispensing justice don't wear the gown or wigs. And many countries don't, so let's abolish the colonial relic. We don't need the wigs because our country is in fact too hot for the wigs. So I am in opposition in that respect. If I say abolish the rank of the SAN, not because of the abuses, but because I want a more egalitarian approach to law ' you make your mark and the clients will judge you by hiring you. Not using a title to do a lot of things. There are SAN's who are contractors, there are SAN's who are hoteliers and so on. It doesn't give honour to the rank.
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