Senator Magnus Abe, representing Rivers South-East, is Chairman, Senate Committee on Petroleum (Downstream). He was at the Nigerian Tribune House, Ibadan, Oyo State, on Thursday where he spoke on burning national issues. Assistant Editor, Dapo Falade, brings excerpts:WHAT do you think accounts for the apparent backwardness in the country' First and foremost, let me say this; the reason why I decided that if I'm in Ibadan, I will come to Tribune House is that, to me and to a lot of people in this country, Tribune is more than a publishing house. It is a birthplace of many of the ideas about the kind of Nigeria that a lot of people will want to see. For me, being in Ibadan is therefore in a sense a sort of spiritual journey because about the ideals that build and sustain Tribune that a lot of Nigerians had learnt more now than probably they would have at the time that Chief Obafemi Awolowo of blessed memory was saying some of those things. In many ways, the ideas and philosophy of the Tribune was ahead of its time and I think that a lot of the things he warned against; a lot of the things he foresaw and a lot of the things he was worried about are today some of the challenges that Nigeria is still grappling with, many years later. So, I'm just happy and excited to come here to express my friendship and also celebrate my own personal relationship with Tribune that has lasted so many years.Part of what a lot of us have been talking about is that the challenges of Nigeria have reached as situation whereby some of the ideas that we are talking about today, some people would not have been willing to listen to them 10 or 15 years ago. Every junction in the life of a people creates new opportunities; new challenges that give room for changes that are caused by the very dynamics of growth itself. All the while that we pursue a conversation in this country, it has been about what we shared and what we get and a lot of people who think about the problems of Nigeria think only in term of the fact that the feel that corrupt leaders are stealing money and that is why the country is poor. But the truth of the matter is that Nigeria is poor, not just because we have leaders who may not as be honest as we expected them, but Nigeria is poor because we are not a productive society; Nigeria is not adding value; Nigeria is not driven by efficiency. So in that kind of atmosphere, corruption would thrive because we have capital that is lying around doing nothing. But where a society is focused on production and on value addition, you will very rarely have money that is lying around doing nothing for people to come and carry. We are running a system that is not driven by efficiency; that is not production-based; you have a bloated Federal Government that dabbles into everything, including what it has competency for and what it doesn't have competency for. You have 36 state governments that are repeating themselves in various ways, even doing the same thing that the Federal Government is always trying to do-duplicating offices and functions. You have 774 local governments and all these whole structures of recurrent expenditure are based on just one and only one item namely, oil. I don't care what kind of angel that you will bring to superintend over Nigeria, as long as all these drain pipes are keyed into one single source of value production, there will never be enough for the things that actually matter to the Nigerian people.In some other parts of the world, the society is propelled by some individuals who are in leadership positions. In the case of Nigeria, in as much as it can be taken that the problem is a collective thing, what do you think about the role of the leadership' Well, the leaders of Nigeria are, to a very large extent, a reflection of the attitudes, beliefs and the very nature of the people that they lead. The people who are leading Nigerians are not people from Uganda or South Africa; we all Nigerian and the nature of the conversation that propels us is what drives the very essence of what we do as leaders. The beauty of being in the Senate and being where we are today is that today there are a lot more Nigerians who are ready to listen; who are ready to contemplate more ideas and who are ready to fight for change in this country. We have reached a point where people are ready to consider things they were not ready to consider before. What Nigeria needs, more than anything at this point, are leaders that would understand that to achieve the kind of change that we desired, you must be ready to talk across country and package ideas in such a way that people from every parts of the country can to relate to such ideas and can see values and benefits for themselves and for the people they care about. So any conversation that is designed as sectional or designed in the midst of suspicions to benefit one section against the other, will find wide acceptance and will not be able to add value to the country.Invariably, you are saying you are not in support of the call for the convocation a national conference by whatever name it is called' I don't like to waste my time. If you have a national conference, who will convene it' Who will declare it open' Where will the report be submitted at the end of the conference and what will be done with it and how will that report become law in such a way that it will actually impact on what the people do legally and what they do not do' We have a constitution which is basis for everything that we are doing. Now, for you to bring about the kind of changes that this country needs, you need to amend those laws that govern how we have relate with one another; how we have relate with our resources and how the very structures and branches of government are run. All these things are set out in a legal document; if you go and convene a talk shop that has no legal validity; that has no statutory or constitutional role to change anything, what is the essence of that' It is just an academic exercise and a waste of everybody's time.In any case, people keep saying that the National Assembly is not representative enough of the Nigerian people, but who will you bring to represent the people enough more than those who are there now and how will you choose those people so that who voted for them will be satisfied that this other people represent them enough more the other ones' I think that if we are serious about bringing about changes, let us use the tools that are available to us and those tools, by the very nature of how the constitution is written, there is no way any idea would sail through about constitutional amendment except such an idea is able to galvanised nationwide support.There is this nationwide discontent in the country as exemplified the Boko Haram insurgency and other problems. Don't you think this is probably because those elected into public offices are not doing the right thing' Let me tell you something about government; what I know is that there is no democracy anywhere in the world where the people trust the politicians or where they think politicians are doing the right thing. That is the very nature of democratic government; where the people have the right to air their views, they are going to be critical of those who have power and authority. It is not a Nigerian thing; it doesn't necessarily means that Nigerian leaders are worse than leaders in other countries. People don't trust politicians and rightly so because a lot of the things that people want, the reasons why you may not have them are diverse and you may not have the reasons why A may not work or B may not work. Everybody is just looking at the man who is making decisions. If somebody has the power to do what everybody wants-water, light, job, education-what will stop any politician, however bad he may be, from wanting people to have those things' They are simply realities that leaders have to confront with that make some of these things difficult to achieve. And part of what a leader does is to call attention to some of those things that make things difficult to achieve; and that is what we are doing. The way our country is structured makes it difficult for us to achieve those things that the Nigerian people want. It is not necessarily because Magnus or Jonathan is bad and that is why you don't have all those things. The structure of the country itself; the way we do things make it difficult for us to get the best out of ourselves.Would that your explanation make up for the apparent failure of you and your colleagues to bring to public knowledge the outcome of probes being carried out in the National Assembly' The National Assembly has really done a lot, trying to draw attentions to some of the challenges facing our public sector system. Whether you see the outcome or you don't see it, these probes bring change; it changes the way public officials behave, it changes how they relate to issues, it changes even what they do. So, it is working in a way that may not be immediately visible to you. Part of the responsibilities of the National Assembly is to draw the attention of the citizens to what is going wrong so that people are compelled to change their behaviour because they know that everybody is seeing what you are doing. In that respect, I will score the National Assembly very high and again, contrary to the assumption that people have, in a lot of places and sectors in this country, the government is doing its best; a lot of the state governors are working very hard and a lot of public servants are actually making sacrifices. An example is the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Immigration Services (NIS); that is one woman I admire very much because of what I see as her dedication to duty; her commitment to trying to improve the service. But that doesn't make NIS perfect; I have a litany of complaints, just as I'm sure a lot of other people do. They are challenges in the very nature of how we do something and I think how we can change is to change the way we do things and how we relate to resourcesWhat is your take on state police'Talking about security, there is no federation I know in the world where only one government pays for security; you can't afford it. The resources that you need to police a country of 160 million people, the Federal Government of Nigeria doesn't have that money and if it brings out the money for it, it will not be able to do any other thing. The way security is being handled is that every government contributes by carrying some parts of the burden.But the presidency, as symbolized by the president, is against the idea of state police, including some prominent Nigerians such as former Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Gambo'The issue of the retired IGP, I didn't take it serious because these are people who obviously are protecting their turf because these are people who have vested interests. But what we are saying is that if your own brother or sister or son or daughter has lost his/her life or suffered insecurity that has hit you directly as a person, or you have suffered kidnapping due to the failure of the security system, you are not going to listen to whatever any retired IGP is telling you; it is irrelevant. Why people are talking about state police or state judicial systems is because they are not secured; there is no security for business or for life; people are afraid. If you want them to stop talking about state police, it is a simple thing; provide the security and where you cannot provide it, then you must allow people to make suggestions as to what we need to do to help the situation.But Mr President also said the country is not ripe for state police'Mr President is entitled to his view as the leader of our country and I'm of the people who always respect and support the president to air his views because there a lot of people in this country who believe that everybody can talk but Jonathan cannot talk. I'm not one of them but I don't have to agree with everything the president says. On this matter of state police, I'm not with him; I don't agree with him. If he says the country is not ripe with state police, then let him bring out money and fund the police in such a way that the people will feel secured. That money is not there and so how will he solve the problem when you don't have the resources and you don't want other people to contribute to solve the problem' In any case, this is a federation and if the president has a view, that is the view of the Federal Government; other federating units have their own needs that are different from the needs of the Federal Government.Is it not also ironic that while some state governors are in support of state police, some others are against it' That is why in a proper federation, one government should be doing A while another government does B. The tragedy of our own federation is that we must all do something together; that is not federation but a unitary government. In a proper federation, if Anambra State feels it is bothered about security and it wants to do something about it, it should have the power to do so. If Niger State doesn't need it, it should have the freedom to refuse to do. But for Niger to say 'I don't want it and you cannot have it', that is not a true federation. Every state should be free to determine their own priorities and set their own cause. No federation succeeds without the success of the federating units; if the states are not successful, we wasting our time in Nigeria. What can we do to make the states successful' For us to sit here and continually begin to worry that governors will use state police to harass and arrest opponents, that is a silly idea. Today, how many people are fighting their governors and living in their state' All the people fighting their governors are living in Abuja, so does the governor needs the state police for them to run to Abuja' The power or will of the governor already exists what we should be worrying about is how to make our federation work for the common man; not only about how do we win elections and remove people from offices. That is not what democracy is all about; democracy is first and foremost about the safety and security of lives and property. So, if the ordinary citizen can have security at a price and the governor feels that his own to use the state police to chase his opponents, one day he too will be an opponent to somebody else. Why should be worried about that'How will you debunk the insinuation that in the National Assembly, members of the House of Representatives are more vibrant than the senators who are said to be in the pocket of the executive'First, I have not heard anybody say that. Secondly, the National Assembly is one and it is not correct to make insinuation that the National Assembly has different images that we want to present to the public. There are things that the Senate has done and done very well. When you have the last Labour strike, it was the Senate intervention that saved the day for the country. There are certain things that the Senate is better positioned to do by virtue of the maturity and its age; the Senate has its own tradition and the House of Representatives have its own tradition. How the Lower House would approach a given problem would reflect its own tradition and way the House does things; the Senate would have approach an issue with a reflection of its own decorum. This doesn't in any way subtract from the effectiveness of what we do. So, in this country, there are several instances where the Senate has intervened decisively, even the Doctrine of Necessity at a time that Nigeria needed to be saved was done by the Senate and it was done without a lot of rancour. So, we should be able to make fair judgment based on results and I think both houses of the National Assembly are doing their best to serve the Nigerian people. I don't see them as being in competition. I know that in the Senate, we have a way of doing our own things and those who watch out for results recognised this. The House of Representatives also has its own culture and style of going about its businesses.What is your sincere assessment of the PDP-led government since more than 13 years in the saddle'PDP has contributed a lot to the Federal Government of Nigeria. It is the only party that has been able to sustain our democracy for as long as we have; this is the first time our country has run a democracy where we had a transition of government from one civilian to the other without bloodshed and turning the country upside down. This is the one time that we have been able to have a government that has been able to carry every section of the country along. This is the one time that we have had a government that promised transparency as part of its own cardinal commitment to Nigeria and has delivered on it in the last elections. This is the one time that we have had a government that is bringing change in so many different ways; we are dealing with the issue of power and the old debt relief. All those were programmes and actions of the PDP-led government. Today, there is a revolution going on in agriculture; there is a revolution going on in the power sector; all these are initiatives of the PDP. The truth of the matter is that when government achieved something, nobody bothers to look at what you have done; they will concentrate on what you have not done.
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