Natives of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have been complaining of marginalisation, despite their contribution to national development. In this interview with CATHERINE AGBO, senior special assistant to the FCT minister on political matters, Jibrin Wowo, says the imbalance can only be addressed by constitution amendment
As senior special assistant to the minister on political matters, what have been your efforts towards ensuring the political stability of the FCT?
Shortly after I was appointed, I drew out a lot of programmes which I passed on to the minister. My position as senior special assistant on political matters requires me to liaise with all the political parties and create understanding between them and the administration and that is what I have been doing. If you cast your mind back, you will discover that the problems that came up in other states as reaction to the immediate past election did not happen here in the FCT. It was because of the minister’s initiative at ensuring that peaceful measures were explored soon after the April elections. Elections are activities that must have winners and losers, if you are a loser today certainly tomorrow you may be a winner. Therefore, people should regard the past election as such.
The FCT has been a hot bed of political activities of recent and the development has pitched the earlier settlers and other Nigerians who live in the city against themselves. What is your take on this and what should be done to address the issue?
So far in the whole country, elections in the FCT have been adjudged as the best. As a player in the game, I make bold to say that most of the political problems that come up in the FCT are as a result of the influx of Nigerians from other states into the FCT and good enough, we are trying to address it because it is an area where we have little problems so far. We are all Nigerians but we must bear in mind that there are those people that were here before other Nigerians came to join them. Also, for somebody that has been here for about 15 years; you cannot continue to see such as person as a visitor, he has become a part of you. Therefore when you are creating or enunciating political activities or programmes, they should be part of it. That is what we are trying to resolve now in the FCT.
How do you plan to achieve this?
Political parties should begin to give every Nigerian the opportunity to participate within the context of their political activities in the FCT. Everybody should be given free opportunity to express his desire to contest any position. That you have expressed a desire to contest for a political office does not mean that that is all. You either lose or you win, but a situation where you want to cordon off or deliberately prevent some people from participating in the process is where the problem lies presently. I can assure you that this is an area I am looking at with the minister to improve upon. The minister is already working on creating a level playing ground for all Nigerians to express their feelings politically or otherwise in the FCT.
How about allotting a percentage to early settlers in future elections, just like the 35 per cent championed by women in the country?
I am not even thinking of any sort of allocation arrangement for any particular settler or people to get any percentage or slots per say. I am talking about creation of a level playing ground to enable everybody participate in the process. Let everybody be given a level playing ground to participate in the political activities of the FCT. That is the focus for us. If you feel that you are endeared to the people and that whatever position you want to contest in an election, you have the confidence that the people can vote you in; you should be allowed to express that feeling. To me, the issue of canvassing for some people to be given certain percentage or slots for political appointment or election in the FCT should not even come up.
It was alleged that the FCT could not produce a minister in the present cabinet because it did not present educationally qualified persons as nominees. How true is this assertion?
That takes me back to some few weeks ago, when I saw a report in one of the dailies alleging that the FCT could not make the ministerial list because the people nominated fell short of the requisite educational qualification and I said that was nonsense, absolute rubbish. I was one of those who drew the list and I also made the list. I also know that there were about five graduates, some of them with Masters Degree on that list. No one could have seen my name on that list for instance and say I am educationally deficient. As I speak to you, I hold a Masters Degree in International Relations. You have Hassan Okodobo who has a Masters Degree in Business Administration and Esther Audu who is also a graduate. In fact, there were about seven or eight of us on the list who have gone beyond first degree, while the rest were HND and NCE holders. So how could anyone say that we couldn’t make the list because of educational deficiency?
So why did the FCT not make the list?
I think what happened essentially was a constitutional matter. If you look at it from the onset, there has never been any person appointed as a minister from the FCT. This is because we have this constitutional restriction as it were and until and unless that constitutional problem is addressed, we will continue to have this limitation.
Section 299 of the constitution says that the FCT should be treated as if it were a state. And so far, we have not been able to get a federal administration that has the political will to address that section of the constitution. Therefore, until there is an administration that has the political will to look at that section and say that if that is what the section says, then these people deserve to be part of the federal executive, nothing can really change. But if the political will is not there, then we may remain in this quagmire for long because there is nothing any of us can do about it. It has created a situation where every administration comes and plays around with that section of the constitution. The section did not actually say that Abuja is a state, it says treat it as if it were a state. You see the dilemma? So, you can neither go here nor there.
So what is the way forward?
I have observed this lacuna in the present 1999 Constitution. this imbalance can only be addressed by constitutional amendment. We made frantic efforts to make sure that the administration looks at us and sees the contribution of the FCT to national development, to make the government see that the time has come for the administration to begin to look at the FCT as one of the states of the federation. Nobody becomes president of this country unless he wins 2/3 of 25 states in the federation, in other words if you have 25 per cent of other states and Abuja is not inclusive, it means there will be a re-run. It then means you cannot be the president. And if that is the case the constitution realises the importance of the FCT.
In view of this, we think the time has come for the FCT to be given its rightful place by recognising it as a state. Even if it would not be called a state per say, all the paraphernalia that goes with a state should be extended to the FCT. If you look at the size of the FCT, it is two times the size of some states yet the states have three senators and numerous members in the Federal House of Representatives. This is not so for the FCT, look at its size and the population. These are the issues we have been addressing, but like I said earlier, it all comes to the political will of the contemporary government.
In spite of promises by the administration that the city will be secured for the safety of lives and property, the issue of bomb blasts still rages. As an administration, what are you doing to check this budding crime?
I want you to realise that the issue of bombing is not peculiar to the FCT but a national issue. To my perception, it is something that arose from the last elections. Before the elections, there was not so much report about bombings here and there but soon after the elections, it became almost a daily occurrence. There were actually a few cases of bombing before the election but soon after the election it was like the bombers grew in number and I think the security agencies need to go back to the drawing board and look at the situation critically with a view to coming up with new ideas to tackle the rather new security situation in the country. As a security agent, you cannot continue to work and dwell on one formula, as the security situation changes you are expected to change your formula.
On the political aspect, and as a special assistant to the FCT minister, we are making effort to ensure that the necessary synergy and cooperation among the political parties in the FCT is in place. Take for instance the last bomb incident at the UN house, there is nothing to suggest that it was linked to the political activities in the FCT. This is because I have been in discussion with the political parties in the FCT and to the best of my knowledge, there is no political party working against the collective interest of the residents, whose favour they need to curry for the next election year.
There is a nagging issue of waste management in the FCT, especially in the area councils. As someone who has been there before, what can be done to ensure proper waste management in the councils?
When I was there, I had a special programme for waste management. What I did was to employ a consultant whose responsibility was to ensure the cleanliness and waste management of the area council and we also collaborated with the FCT administration in doing this. On a monthly basis, a certain amount of money was deducted from our allocation and paid directly to the consultant whose responsibility was to keep Kuje area council clean. Then, if you went through the area councils, you could see that the councils were not only managing waste but were also ensuring that everywhere in Kuje area council was clean.
Health they say is wealth and if you do not give attention to waste management and ensure cleanliness of an area, you are likely to create more social and health problems and when that happens, it means that there will be so many issues for you to grapple with health wise.
Presently, there is this programme on waste management the minister is studying for consideration and that is one of the reasons that prompted his trip to Lagos to also borrow from the ideas on how the Lagos State government manages its waste. I think that trip has paid off in the sense that some of the ideas acquired in Lagos are already been gradually implemented. That was what informed the setting up of the committee on greater Abuja cleanliness and by the time the other ones come on board, the issue of waste management in the city would have been adequately sorted out.
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