The Chairman, House Committee on Information, Hon. Zakari Mohammed, in this interview with ABDULLAHI OLESIN, speaks on sundry national issues, including the vexed issues of subsidy removal and the ongoing constitution amendment process. He declares that the nation needs stringent laws to curb corruption in the oil and gas sector.
What is the stand of the House of Representatives on the issue of fuel subsidy removal?
For us in the House of Representatives, these issues are ones that are very sensitive to us because, basically the country relies on oil.
We run a monolithic economy and when we get back to the House obviously, maybe as the week runs out, we will take a position on this matter. But, what I can say is what we have said in the past, and that is, we will be like recalling all that we had said about fuel subsidy. We believe that, even in the beginning, if the malpractices, if the sharp practices, if the under-table dealings are taken away from the oil industry, of course, we know that even the subsidy issue is sustainable. But of course these issues are history now.
We just know that corruption is quite, quite neck-deep in the oil and gas industry, and for us in the House, that is one of the reasons why, when the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) was brought to us we had to study it carefully. We have ended the debate and committed it to the relevant committees of the House. In fact, we have put up a Committee of the House, encompassing the chairmen and deputies of the committees on oil and gas, petroleum, upstream and downstream, finance, and several other colleagues of ours, to work on the PIB Committee.
Very soon, a public hearing will be called and these issues will be thrashed out. Part of what we want to discuss, or embed, in the PIB law is to be able to put up those stringent laws to check corruption in the oil and gas industry. For the removal of fuel subsidy totally by Mr. President, the House would take decision when we get back to the plenary but I am sure that any matter that borders on the lives of our people, who happen to be our employers, we would definitely take them up.
What is the position of the House on the issue of plea bargaining?
You see, let me tell you one thing which I have have said several times: clearly and unfortunately, Mr Reuben Abati who is supposed to be the spokesperson of Mr. President is very unfortunate. I read about his write-up and I quite got very disappointed that rather than even address the issues, Abati was particular about Zakari Mohammed as a person.
Then, he alluded to the fact that I was absent-minded. And what was my crime? It was because I said that the government of President Jonathan, from all that we had seen, does not display strength, and, of course, the will to tackle corruption head-on.
And, of course, that is the truth and I stand by that. I will keep repeating it. But I just want to tell Abati something: that there was somebody who occupied the office of the special adviser or spokesman of Mr. President very a while ago. That gentleman is Mr. Segun Adeniyi.
That man is still alive. My advice to Abati? is that he should go and take lessons from Segun Adeniyi on how he handled the affairs of late President Musa Yar’Adua, when issues of this country, issues of policy direction, where at some point we didn’t know the right direction we were going to. But he handled it as professionally as possible, and a lot of us were proud of him.
Having said that, the issue on ground is the fact that the oil and gas industry, because we have done a mistake as a country, and we have relied so heavily on the oil, everybody that is somebody in Nigeria wants to have something to do with oil.? And unless we begin to divest and we begin to redirect our too much focus on oil the corruption will continue to be there in the oil industry.
Well, if I say anything about the government of the day, they would say they met the problem that way. But I want to say that leadership is not by shifting blames; leadership is about responsibility. The day? you make up your mind to serve, you must be culpable for everything that goes wrong while you are there. So, I want to say that, for us as a House, I believe, and until we are proved wrong, the will to tackle the corruption in the oil and gas industry looks selective, and unless we go for it totally, we go for it head-on, we might not be able to get to where we are going.
Already, people are being taken on. For us, concerning the plea bargain, we just feel that justice should not be a short-circuited way; that is, there shouldn’t be shortcut to justice. Let the rule of law prevail. And that is what we keep preaching at the National Assembly. For us, we would keep asking and demanding that the right thing be done even if we are blackmailed in the process.
But we know that the way we are, the way things stand now, unless there is a change of attitude, we might not be able to tackle that problem head-on. And that is the issue of corruption in the oil and gas industry.
We would pass the PIB with our observations entrenched, and we will give it quick passage, taking note that it is not just a garbage in, garbage out issue, but taking note of the key issues. And we have already made our observations on these issues very clear. We will come out with the law that is sustainable, a law that will empower the institutions to function rather than empowering the actors in the institutions.
So, we don’t intend to pass a PIB that would put the country at the mercy of an individual. That, of course, we would not accept. But all the key issues that border on making the oil and gas industry open to investments will be made so that employment would be generated and revenue would be created. We would work towards that so that we will be on the same page with Nigerians.
What is your take on the clamour for National Sovereign Conference by some Nigerians?
We, the elite, are the Nigeria’s major problem of Nigeria, and unless and until we become sincere with our utterances, we will definitely be running into all these kinds of problems. We, as a House, said that there are issues, and if you look at the 43 amendments that we sought: for instance, independence of the legislators at the state level, independence of the local government (financial autonomy), state creation, revenue allocation formula, presidency rotation, etc, all these issues have been in the public domain over time.
And by the virtue of Section 9 of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, we are given the power to amend the constitution. How we go about it is immaterial. But what do we intend to achieve by that? Some people have said that we should call a (national) conference, that we should call for a referendum. Of late, we have come out with a position and we said that anything that is not in the Constitution, we can never be a party to the execution of such. Referendum is not in the Nigerian constitution; it is alien to our constitution, and I am sure that the lawyers, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), should know better.
For us, as a House, there is no perfect constitution in any part of the world. You keep upholding it and tinkering with it all times as you carry on. The constitution of a country is scripted according to the country’s history.? Some people welcome, at a point in time, that maybe their?? grandchildren, their great grandchildren can come and bring up certain ideas and begin to put it up and embed it in the constitution. But to continue to say that the entire constitution is faulty, I beg to disagree with that.
And, unfortunately, it comes from such quarters that you believe the people should be enlightened enough to know that if they say we should throw out the entire constitution, all the institutions that are products of that constitution become illegal. If you throw them out, where do you start from? Who conducts the conference? Where do you get the funding? Who moderates it? What modus operandi are we going to operate with?
We are leaders in our right, and we believe that rather than throw out the constitution and throw the country into confusion, we should look for a leeway out. Every responsible government, every responsible people will look for a leeway in every situation. That is what leadership is all about. It is about proffering solutions at every point in time. You navigate when it is stormy and take a right course. That is exactly what we believe, in the seventh National Assembly, that we are doing.
These issues have been brought to the public domain; we had interacted and I know that, in my constituency, it was democratic. Every issue was considered according to its merit. The people had a very robust debate, and at the end of the day we came up with common stand on each of these issues. The aggregate views of the people will be collated and, of course, that will form the stand of the Nigerian people as far as we are concerned.
Some people have lost elections. Some people have lost relevance. They believe that the best way to come back is to begin to ask for a conference. If you want to stand in an election, go and follow the due process as enshrined in the constitution: pick up the party nomination form; sell yourself to the people;? be accepted and come out, rather than doing it in your own way.
You cannot get into the House through the back door. Getting through the window is illegal. So, that is exactly what I want us to put in its right perspective, and actually the elite class is the problem with us. And unless we get these things right, we will keep missing the point. We are empowered by the constitution to tinker with the constitution, and we said the amendment is within the purview of our powers.
There is nothing that we are doing in excess. But the people that are asking for referendum, for confab, for these sorts of things, I think if we search their views, it might not be in the best interest of Nigeria.
We are at such a critical moment of our history that if things are not done right, we might be putting this country on the slaughter slab and we would begin to tear it to pieces. And, God forbid, we don’t want to preside over the dividing up of Nigeria.
Nigeria, either by mistake, commission or omission over time since 1914, we have learnt how to stay with each other. Some of us have made life partners across the divide.
Some people are big business partners across the Niger. Their best friends and associates are across the Niger. How do you reconcile that?
These are the issues some of these people believe that can be taken for granted. What I know and what we believe, in the seventh Assembly, is that the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable. Not at any cost. On some other issues, we will keep discussing, and of course, the aggregate views of Nigerians are what we are presenting, such as: Do we need state police?
What about the issue of indigeneship – if you stay in a place after a period of years, can you be voted for? All of these are the issues that have been embedded and are in the public domain. And those are the issues that we put forth. We didn’t just wake up and say this must be in it.
We people did public session. A lot of Nigerians have amended it. And the participation has shown that Nigerians have decided to take their destinies in their hands. That is exactly what we have done with the peoples’ sessions and public hearing, and I am sure by the end of the day, by next year, hopefully, we would come out with the clear constitution.
We have made the best decisions according to what we came with. All of us have submitted our reports now. The reports will now be treated at the committee levels and, of course, public hearings would be done. Some other views will be embedded in it. And we would have aggregate views of where Nigerians stand on each of these contending issues.
From the readings of the public hearings, it appears that one issue that is uppermost in the minds of Nigerians is whether there is going to be creation of states or whether it is going to be creation of local government councils only. Yet between the Senate and the House of Representatives, there seems to be some communication gaps as to what really is the purpose of these arguments with regard to creation of additional local governments and creation of states.
What is the position of the National assembly on the creation of more states in the country?
On state creation, for now I cannot tell you the stand of the House or the National Assembly because all of us have different views on the issue from what we brought back. For instance, in my constituency we are not particular about state creation; rather, we prefer that our local government councils be split into many more because they? are the closest to the people and, that, of course, is a bit sustainable.
In my own opinion (I am not speaking about the resolution of the House) as far as state creation is concerned, it is just to create chiefdoms for certain people to begin to flex their own political power. For us,? it is not about the number of states, but how effective and how efficient are these states?
But of course when the aggregate of our opinions comes out, I know that with the interactions I have had with a number of my colleagues, they are not particular about state creation. Rather, they are looking at how best the system will work for the local governments to get very, very effective.
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