Dr. Fredrick Fasehun is the founder of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) and interim National Chairman, Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). In this interview, Faseun speaks on the opposition by some northern political leaders to the bid by President Goodluck Jonathan to contest the 2015 elections, ongoing National Conference and the Boko Haram insurgency. Excerpts:
You are championing the revitalization of the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) founded by the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, what new thing is the party bringing to the polity that the existing parties have failed to offer?
The UPN is purely an ideological party; the people first. The people first means that UPN will be a welfarist party. In our recent political history, sinners suddenly became angels and sinners mingle with angels. We don’t know what ideological manifestation they will offer to the country. When you mix hot water with cold water, you’ll neither get hot nor cold water but lukewarm water, which cannot make tea, and that is what we have in our polity now. The sinners of yesterday have become angels of today and sinners and angels have mixed together; what are they going to offer us?
Nigeria, the biggest black nation should be a leader in world affairs and leadership involves a lot; you must be able to meet and overcome challenges. That is what leadership is. A leader should leave the stage as an icon and let the people feel nostalgic that he is leaving the stage. We have been unable to overcome our internal challenges; Boko Haram has become a nail in our soul for some years and it seems that the country has no answer to what is going on. If Nigeria does not know that after killing more than a thousand of her citizens, she is at war, then she will never know anything.
Over a thousand citizens of our nation have been killed, and if it is a fact that government is in place for the comfort and welfare of the governed, where is our comfort in the midst of this insecurity. Where is the convenience of the governed in this country? That is why UPN has come to introduce discipline into our national polity and to remove impunity which gives rise to corruption. There is so much impunity in this country and that is why we have not been able to fight corruption. UPN won’t stop people from becoming multi-billionaires, but they must pay their taxes; they must obey the rules.
We reviewed all the other political parties and what we saw was indiscipline, corruption, anti people-policies.
We have seen some people claim in the past that they were Awoist, but immediately they got into power, they abandoned the ideologies of late Chief Awolowo. How will the new UPN guard against this?
I have told you that leadership is about challenges; we will confront the challenges headlong and proffer a change. It would be like the second day after creation because all the good things that Nigerians have been yearning for would be made available. We will not allow any Nigerian to starve even if he or she wishes because our common wealth would be made common. When you see some civil servants smiling to their banks because of the looting of our treasury, you will realise that some people are taking more than their normal share. A civil servant was found to be having N27 billion in his bank account, and I ask: What for? Will that not pay what we in the UPN call social benefit to unemployed graduates for three to four years? It can be done, just put UPN in government and you will see that every Nigerian can feed from our natural resources.
How will your party handle the challenge posed by the All Progressives Congress (APC), which is already on ground in your supposed base–the South-West?
We will not acknowledge threat from anywhere because ours will be politics without bitterness; service to people and let the people decide. If they choose to go with sinners mingled with angels, we won’t mind, but we will offer service to the people and allow the people to decide the way they want to go.
Will the UPN contest the 2015 elections, particularly that for the presidency?
I don’t think we will contest the presidency, but we will contest all other positions.
Why is the UPN opting out of the presidency? President Jonathan wants to go back to the Villa and he has been campaigning for five years now, do you want a UPN candidate to just wake up and challenge him in 10 months?
Does that mean that your party will adopt him in 2015?
If they want to discuss with us; we will table our terms and if there is a consensus, why not. But nobody should attempt to water down our ideological commitment.
Do you think the President should go for a second term, given the belief in some quarters that he has not performed to the expectations of Nigerians who gave him massive support in 2011?
Let Jonathan contest for a second term; that is what the constitution says. The moment you say he cannot contest, you are denying him of his constitutional rights, and should he turn round that you must vote for him, that would be unconstitutional. So, what I stand for is: let him enjoy his constitutional right, but let Nigerians also enjoy their own right. Nigerians have the constitutional right to vote or not to vote for Jonathan, but he has the constitutional right to contest the election.
There is the perception that win or lose; Nigeria will boil if Jonathan contests the election. What is your take on that?
There are only two ways; you contest to win or lose. Why is it that some people want him to lose; is it because he has not performed well. Do you say that he has not done well and he is putting up lasting infrastructure; building rail from the South to the North; constructing the East-West road. I don’t want to believe that Nigerians have short memory because successive administrations bastardized the economy before Jonathan came to power. He came in not as a magician but as a political president and he has been fixing what has been damaged. He has been able to fix in four, five years what it took previous administrations decades to destroy.
You are advocating the use of force against Boko Haram, but some northern elders have insisted on dialogue, how do you reconcile these two positions?
About three years ago, I was one of those who said we should dialogue with the insurgents, but the more we preach dialogue, the more we lose our children and women to the insurgents. So, for how long should we keep losing innocent Nigerians? The future of any country is a function of its youths and we are folding our hands, looking at our children being slaughtered every day. We are compromising our future. Nigeria needs to take care of her future.
The planned National Conference has finally taken off, what do you make of the exercise?
I was one of those who started the agitation for a national conference in this country, but see what is happening now. Even before the National Conference started, people, including Lagosians were already agitating their exclusion. To be honest, I think that we should have had a pre-conference orientation before we slammed the National Conference on the people. How many of the delegates know what a confab is or have they just gone there for the money? The orientation should have been more superior to the confab, so that when the delegates get there, they will know what it takes to strengthen the unity of Nigeria. In the South-West, we have been agitating for a parliamentary system; in the South-East, there is the agitation for complete autonomy; in the South-South, there is the agitation for resource control and in the North, some people believe that power must stay in the region indefinitely.
How do we reconcile these conflicting interests?
Through the re-orientation that I just talked about. I have attended the meetings of the Southern Leaders Assembly and I know what we discussed. Such meetings should have gone on for some time, prescribed by the Federal Government and not just waking up to go to the confab. There are contentious issues and we know them, so let us be seen to be making efforts to douse these contentious issues before bringing people together for a conference. I chose to opt out of the conference because I feel that the present confab may not solve our problems.
When I saw the list of those who are at the confab, I felt that the conference should have been a thing of the youths. Those of us going into our 80s have no business being at the conference. What recommendations are they going to come out with that would be acceptable to the present generation? Is it the Land Use Act; if you are from the South-South, are you going to accept 13 per cent from your resources? I come from the South-West; am I going to accept the presidential system as expensive and corruption prone as it is?
The confab is on the heels of the 2015 general elections. Don’t you envisage a situation where it could have some spill-over effects on the polls?
We are building our nation and not political parties. Nothing prevents us going on with confab and when the elections come, we stop it may be for 30 days to have the elections and after that go back to the confab. This will throw up Nigeria as a serious country willing to build a united nation. As one of the agitators for national conference, I admire President Jonathan for giving us the opportunity to sit down together and fashion out how to build the Nigerian nation, but it cannot be done in three months.
What is your take on the CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi’s suspension?
Sanusi deserves what he got.
He built a wall around himself and had no respect for anybody. This man has no respect for the office of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and carried on as if he was a law unto himself. The fact that he is a Prince does not confer a special status on him; he is not above the president and even a monarch is still under the head of state.
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