We don’t need rogues and vagabonds in government anymore —Prof. Wande Abimbola

A traditionalist and former Vice-Chancellor of University of Ife, Ile-Ife, Osun State (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Prof. Wande Abimbola, speaks on problems of leadership, followership, education, religion, security and how they affect our value system as a nation in this interview by AKINWALE ABOLUWADE , excerpts:

 

Many people attribute the problem in the country to leadership, do you agree with the notion?

I don’t agree at all. The problems that we have are problems that cannot be solved unless the vast majority of our people also know what problems we have, what solutions there are and their own contributions to solve those problems. If you talk about leadership, what about followership? All these problems deal with all of us, not just the leaders. Awolowo was a visionary and wonderful leader. He couldn’t do much, he tried his best. It was when he died that people started crying and sending praises. I was at Liberty Stadium, Ibadan the day they carried his dead body there after taking it all over Yoruba land. I was invited to deliver the oration for his funeral. All the governors of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) lined up and I chanted funerary dirges for about an hour. But before I entered the stadium, it was a tug of war because the stadium was filled with thousands of people that were lamenting and eulogising him. Why didn’t they do that while he was alive? He was a good example of the kind of leader that we all want. No country succeeds only because they have good leaders. It is like the case of a wonderful jokey – somebody who is the best for riding prize horses for victory but also needs a horse that is equally wonderful. A jokey cannot ride to success on the back of a mule. We have many problems and to solve those problems, all of us have to be involved.

 

Where exactly do you think we got it wrong?

There are so many reasons why we got it wrong. One, we have so many centuries of enslavement of our people. The bulk of the people taken away from West Africa during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade came from Nigeria especially among the Yoruba. The Yoruba were probably the most enslaved people in the world and we haven’t recovered from that. Slave trade came to an end after Abraham Lincoln abolished the slave trade in the United States around 1865,. Exactly 25 years later, the European powers assembled in Berlin to divide Africa yielding the map that we have today of Africa. And exactly 35 years later, they came and declared Nigeria the possession of the British. The European powers that got the bulk of the land divided up were the France, which got more than everybody else, followed by the British. Belgium, a tiny country which is probably the size of Ogun State or less, was allocated the whole of the Congo. Portugal which is about the size of Lagos State had four countries. Germany also got. When they saw that their own people no longer wanted them to bring Africans to them in bondage anymore, they abandoned the idea and assembled in Germany and then divided up Africa. We haven’t recovered from that, we are an enslaved people, we have been badly dealt with and traumatized. That is one basic thing that we often forget. With colonialism, they brought their own religion, their way of life and education mainly by missionaries after being badly dealt with-. Our languages were never used in the education process. Can you imagine a people whose children go to school and they are not taught in their mother tongue but in a foreign language? Nobody should be surprised that Nigeria or any other African country turns out to be what it is. We need to address those issues. They tried to erase our belief system in addition to more than three centuries of slavery.

 

You mentioned our belief system as a people, do you support traditional oath taking to curb impunity and corruption in government?

Just taking oath doesn’t mean much as important as that may be in our belief system. It is much more than that. It has to do with our values, what we rever as a people and what we condemn. We have dilluted, if not completely erased, our value system. Today,  the two religions tried to erase our traditional belief system, especially Christianity. Their main interest is financial breakthrough. Go and fast for days at a secluded place to sing and dance for financial breakthrough. Which country or people yearn only for financial breakthrough as a value?  So we have to find a way to repair ourselves not just our leaders. We are a damaged people, we need to repair our souls. That is the basic problem.

 

You are well travelled, what do you think is the perception of the international community about Nigeria?

How do we look at a country where nothing works; where there are no roads, electricity? In Oyo town, there is no water to drink,  no security. If (as a foreigner) my son gets a job in such a country, will I allow him to go, will I not be afraid? That is the trouble, the country is in shambles.

 

Some put the blame on the protracted military administration?

During the oil boom, government was spending as if the money would never finish. I don’t salute the military, I don’t know what good they did but the civilians have even done worse.

 

What must be done to right the past mistakes?

I don’t have all the answers. Probably we can do a big conference and invite all the thinkers and intelligentsia in all works of life in Nigeria to contribute ideas but what I know is that the interests of the intelligentsia of Nigeria today in every sphere nobody is interested in our beliefs and values anymore except the few of us that still preserve our tradition. I was born here and I never practised any other religion. But the problem is that do people actually know that something is wrong? I don’t think so. Everybody blames somebody else (saying) oh, it is the senators because they earn N37m a month even some people blame those practising our religions saying that they are witches while some say perhaps until we have many educated people. We need to do something for ourselves and our children. What we are doing now will not take us anywhere. What everybody is looking for is money as if material things are so intrinsic. People think you must have a car or two or three. As if one house is not enough, that is the problem. You will know that these people are sick when you see that they are not satisfied with one house but the one they are living in is filthy.

 

What you are saying in essence is that corruption, in all sense, is sickness?

Well, at the risk of trying not to appear immodest, we can say something like that. Probably we can be on the road to some kind of recovery or good health if we first of all start using our language. It is only on the African continent that a child would go to school without using his mother tongue in learning. The second thing is give everybody the freedom to practise their own beliefs. Everyday, people who practice their own religion are abused. When the Muslims start praying from morning to night they curse saying if you are practising Ifa, Sango or Osun you are going to hell.   Even the Christians will say if you are practising other religion you will go to hell. They will be raining curses. We have people killing in most heinous ways, slaughtering. The violence that Africans have suffered since 500 to 600 years is unimaginable.

 

Security is a major challenge, what do you think is the solution, state police?

We tried state police police before, it didn’t work. When we had three regions, each region had its state police but it was abused by some local authorities especially here in the West. Sometimes, the federal police which we used to call Olopa Eko  would have to come to your rescue if the local authorities tried to oppress you with the local constabulary. By then, Nigeria had too many authorities. In Yoruba land of today, you have to do census to know how many kings we have. In some towns, you have like 40 kings and each of them can do whatever he wants in his locality. Few years ago, one king went to the  temple of Sango and said they should pull down the orisha. I won’t tell you his name. The king said people don’t worship Sango anymore. Nigeria is over-governed by innumerable authorities. Nigeria is about the size of Texas. When you add the small state of Oklahoma to it, it will be slightly more than the size of Nigeria. Nigeria is the size of one and half states in the US and we have 36 states and one Federal Government plus the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, that makes it 38 governments, innumerable kings and thousands of chiefs. If somebody calls me Chief Abimbola, I won’t answer, it is an abuse, the British brought the word. Have you ever seen a British called chief? One day, I was invited to Benin Republic by a friend and he conferred on me the Elemoso of Ketu. When I came back home, one of my cousins welcomed us the second day and he started calling me “thief” instead of chief. Since then  I didn’t want it but many want to be called chief. I live more in America, I don’t see anybody going about calling himself chief, chief of what?

 

Is there a spiritual solution to Nigeria’s problems?

I don’t participate in the madness of financial breakthrough, I am not praying for it. I’m praying that I am a person of good character. We all can live like our forefathers and mothers. I was brought up in a village. In the village, at that time, some people may not see one penny of British money in three months and they still managed to survive. There were strings of five villages where I was raised. The only thing that they craved was to find a way to borrow money to buy salt. What they were using as salt before was ashes of some trees. If you had a farm with vegetables, you will not need money. We sew our dress with thread and needles. We planted cottons and people turned it to clothes. We may not be able to live like that today but we can take a cue from that so that we can de-empathize the need to make money.

 

Casting your divination (Ifa), what does the future portend for Nigeria?

I don’t think we are hopeless even though we have many problems which have not been attended to. We don’t even need a diviner. The only thing that worries me is that we have not even started to try to solve those problems. On the steps to be taken, let the state governments like Lagos State agree to use the learners’ mother tongues to teach in schools. Take a primary six student and ask him to recite a story in English what he would say is unintelligible.Someone from Europe or America would not understand what the student is saying. Another one, you will never hear in my mouth that one religion is not good. If Christianity is not good why is Europe good and if you say Islam is not good why is Saudi Arabia wonderful? But that is not our indigenous value system. What happened to our own belief system? Christianity and Islam should not be practised in a way which you will wipe the agenda of our own ancestors. If we can find a way that is less violent and less abusive of whatever is indigenous to us maybe we would begin to repair our souls little by little. What good can come to someone who abuses his grandfather or grandmother? Let us do away with violence whether by herdsmen or Boko Haram. How about the violence in churches and mosques against the traditionalists? You can ask Ifa any question but the problem is I can’t ask Ifa anything about Nigeria if I was not asked to do so.

 

Nigeria is multilingual in nature, won’t it be a problem deciding languages to use as medium of instruction in schools?

That is a fallacy. It is what they told me in school which is not true. If you count all the languages in Europe they may be 150 or 200. Do you know that in Spain there are more languages that we don’t hear of? It is not only Nigeria that has many languages. That is an excuse. The good thing is that where you have many languages, minority peoples are always multilingual and talented. By the time you put down the three major languages in Nigeria – Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, you now have like 10 percent of Nigerians who don’t speak any of them. People have always found a way to deal with that. We are not casting away the smaller groups but the languages that are ready – those who have alphabets already can be adaptable. Any of the others who also want to use their language should put up alphabets and develop a set of conventions of the users of the language and employ linguists to fashion the significant sounds of their own language. China has 56 languages, they use all of them and some of the languages are used by less than one million out of population of 1.4billion people. That is not an impediment. It is even wealth. We were on the way to that. I don’t know why we didn’t focus on it.

How do you feel about the recent ratings of Nigerian universities which put University of Ibadan, which is adjudged the first in the country, at number 1,032nd position in the world?

I’m not comfortable with the rating but that is the truth. I tried to do something about it as Vice Chancellor at University of Ife, Ile Ife. Yesterday, a Vice Chancellor of a university visited me and we talked for about one hour. It was one of the issues we discussed. A university is not a good one if it does not have linkages. If you enter an African university and there is nobody from Kenya, Senegal, South or North America, nobody from Europe as students or teachers that is very local, it doesn’t help anybody. When I was Vice Chancellor, we had 23 linkages around the world. I travelled  to Brazil, we had four linkages. There was a time when our Dentistry Faculty was not accredited because we didn’t have dental chairs which is a valuable tool in dentistry. But we couldn’t afford it because each chair at the time cost about $30,000. I travelled to a dental university in the south of Brazil, they also manufacture dental chairs in the university. We signed linkage agreement with them and they sent us dental chairs at a cost lesser than a tenth. They came here to train our technicians how to use those chairs. It saddens me to read in the newspaper yesterday that Dentistry in OAU, Ile-Ife has not been accredited once again. I don’t know why that is so. But with good linkages, that will not be so. Another problem that must have compounded the difficulties we have is devaluation of the naira. When a people’s currency is devalued, it is not just the currency but the people also are devalued. Before the naira was devalued, if you went to the British High Commission or American Embassy as a journalist and say I want to travel to your country for a conference and request one week or one month visa they will be saying let’s give you a multiple visa to enable you travel again and again because they knew that our naira at that time exchanged for a few dollars and after changing your money, you had plenty of money to spend and you won’t be a problem there. If you fell sick, you had the money to spend. But today, they are so stingy because our money has no value. That is why they no longer want to give visas to Nigerians because they don’t want our people to become beggars when they get to their country.

 

Way forward sir?

Abraham Lincoln says he prayed and wished that the government for the people by the people and for the people may never perish from the earth. The good thing about democracy is that people elect their own representatives to discuss their problems and find ways to solve them. How can we make our democracy better is one major problem. Number one, go and restructure Nigeria into six zones as the conference ordered by former President Goodluck Jonathan recommended. If Jonathan had good sense to have implemented those recommendations, maybe he wouldn’t have been ousted in the election that followed. Let’s start from there. We don’t need 36 states in a country about the size of Texas. Nobody does that, what kind of foolishness is that? We don’t need 38 governments in a country that cannot provide water, good road for its own people. It cannot provide security, cannot pay the teachers and you still want to continue with this pattern of government. There is no place in history not to talk of modern times where people do that. If you restructure Nigeria, it will now be the problem of the West to find way forward for the zone and no longer the business of President Muhammadu Buhari.  At that, we can’t blame the Federal Government anymore but put things that connect all of us at the center like the army, security, foreign affairs. Whoever is heading the zones are no longer waiting for allocation from the center anymore. Government will no longer be far away from the people. It will now be our own business. Number two, stop this wicked evangelism, abusing each other everyday using amplifiers. These are your own brothers and sisters, you are not better than them because you are a Christian. Some people in this country will say my son or daughter will never marry a Christian or Muslim. There are good people among the Christians and Muslims and there are good people among the atheists. The Christians and Muslims say that their holy books licensed them to abuse people of other faith. If that is the case, I don’t see people doing that anywhere in the world. In which country do people abuse one another everyday? In which country do people break into farmlands and kill fellowmen and nothing happens and the killings continue. Those are the questions we should ask those that are aspiring to lead us. What are you going to do about those who are slaughtering people all over the place, this is  the question that we should ask.

 

Governance is presently riddled by crisis, the National Assembly is enmeshed in conflict, why?

What is Nigeria doing with presidential system? What is the purpose of doing that? What was wrong with the parliamentary system that we had? Go back to the system where we elected people into parliament doing it part-time. I led a senate where people were not paid a dime for one year. They didn’t pay the senators that I led for one year one dime. The N5, 000 a month that senators received was for them to travel from Abuja to Lagos. At that time, from Abuja to Lagos one way was N2,500 and back was N2, 500. They lodged everybody in Hilton Hotel, Abuja. You would eat freely and sign. What are our legislators doing with N37m a month. In today’s Nigeria, we are seeing things we had never seen, hardship. There are many people who didn’t have anything to eat yesterday, they don’t even know what they will eat today  and somebody is pocketing N37m. Why can’t we stop that? The people earning that should be ashamed of themselves. Shame on them.

 

That must be the reason why they are desperate to return to that position?

Yes, and people should no longer vote for them. When they come home, when they go to market place cry “ole, ole” (call them  thieves). We don’t need those rogues and vagabonds anymore. They have failed us.