The Minister of Information, Labaran Maku in a session in
Lagos spoke on the insecurity challenge
the nation is facing as a whole . He said that the Nigeria Army has all
it takes to annihilate the Boko Haram from the country.
Read the Excerpts below:
May 29 was the third anniversary of the Jonathan administration. It
seems there is not so much to talk about in view of the security situation in
the country. What can you say has been
achieved in spite of Chibok?
There is a correlation between the exposure of the
development efforts received in the media and insecurity in the northern part
of the country.
What has happened in the
last three years particularly is that terrorism has taken the front pages and
the prime time news from development and social issues in the country and that
is why, most of the time, I have continued to insist that the media should have
a change of strategy.
I would not say change of attitude because, with
terrorism, once it takes hold, it takes quite a while for it to be dealt with
and, because terrorists themselves are looking for opportunities to sell their
ideology, to use the media to frighten society, to give themselves some
invincible image, they keep doing those strikes mainly because they want
headlines to be celebrated, they want society to be afraid, they want to divide
society across public opinions.
The day we allow
development to lose out in favour of terrorism, they have laid the foundation
to defeat the democratic enterprise.
They want to show that our democracy cannot endure so we must make sure
we focus attention on development while reporting incidents of terror. Even in
reporting, it is my belief that we give it too much exposure, too much
outlandish headlines. Yes, if there is a
strike and people are dead, you would not say the media should not report it,
but when you look at some of the situations that we have had in recent times on
weekly basis, the front page, the headlines, the lead stories are often all
about terror.
In fact, after the last
blast in Abuja, I made the allusion to the fact that it appears that whenever
there is any landmark achieved by this government, bombs must follow and I have
been trying to make the connection. I give you an example, immediately we
rebased our economy and it was told that Nigeria now has the largest economy in
Africa, there were bomb blasts at Chibok.
Immediately they learned that we were going to host the World Economic
Forum, there were blasts in Abuja and environs to make sure that Nigeria did
not get the economic benefit of hosting the Forum, and to discourage the world
from coming here and make the attacks
the centre point of international and local media so that the exposure the Forum
was supposed to give to the Nigerian economy and investment opportunities would
be lost.
You will also notice that immediately after the Ekiti election
(adjudged free and fair and won by the ruling PDP), bombs started raining
again. So I can tell you that almost
every milestone that has been recorded by this government is accompanied by
bomb blasts, by terror attacks. So why is this correlation between the attacks
and development efforts?
The idea is to make sure that there is no development,
the idea is to present government as doing nothing, the idea is to take away
attention from the things that will develop the country to work, and to destroy
the democratic process.
Just imagine
after 911, if Osama bin Laden did not get the exposure he got, most people in
Asia and Africa may not have gotten to know much about him, but every time
anything happened after 911, Osama bin Laden was always on the front page or on
prime time international networks.
If you look at the way Shekau and co dress
today, they mimic what they see on CNN, BBC, SkyNews and Aljazeera. Everybody mimics bin Laden because, to them,
he was an international icon, a role model for terrorists and all that was sold
to the world by the media in the West.
I
think we must come together to agree on freedom of expression, freedom to media
exposure. Are we under obligation, even though our profession said that
everybody must be given the opportunity to express himself; does that
opportunity include those who want to destroy society, who want to sell very dangerous ideas for the
destruction of society?
The point of my intervention is that the distraction of
terrorism aside, our democracy, in the last 15 years, has recorded landmarks,
which I believe this country should begin to focus on and deepen and develop.
This is the first time in our history that we have been able to run a
democratic government for up to 15 years.
The First Republic lasted for seven
years, from 1960 to 1966; the Second Republic lasted four years, three months.
The Third Republic was stillborn. This
is the first time Nigeria has been able to run a democratic government for this
period of time. What have we learnt from
this experience? What we have learnt from it is that power has been
demystified.
If before those in power thought it was going to be permanent,
today, after 15 years, you are seeing former governors on the street, you are
seeing your former president who was so powerful on the street. Today he goes
without siren, with one or two people escorting him, so he looks normal.
Now,
that demystification of power is making every Nigerian citizen to know that
power is temporary. You may be elected
today or appointed, what is now clear is that if you don’t do well; tomorrow,
you are going to join the people. The idea that power is temporary has sunk in
our public imagination. That’s a very
big plus. Secondly, there has been stability in governance.
People go in, you know the entry point and
you know the exit. If you look at
development programmes from 1999 to now, take say Universal Basic Education
across the country, because government has endured for this period of time, if
you look at the reforms in public primary schools, under the military, for
example, almost every year, you had interminable teachers’ strikes because
nobody was paying them.
I was caught up
when I was a teacher in the Second Republic, six months no salaries. From 1999 to now, there have been lots of
reforms in primary education. Competition between states Assuming democracy
continues like this, let’s say for another 15 years, the implication is that
our schools will return to what they were in the 60s and 70s.
The quality will improve because a lot of
money is also going to teacher training and then there will be competition
between states, normalcy will return to primary education and secondary
education. Once we get that done, the
quality of tertiary education will improve. The problem we have had in tertiary
education is because of the raw materials that come from primary and secondary
schools. Every nation knows that once
you get primary and secondary education right, tertiary education is
cheap.
We had a lot of changes in our
system mostly brought about by military rule.
Now the stability we have seen in the educational system, even this
year, if you look at WAEC and NECO performances, they have been improving
significantly across the country. We
used to have less than 30%, today, we have something in the region of almost
60% in terms of those who get five credits at a sitting in WAEC and NECO.
That is a huge improvement. If you look at
tertiary education, go to any university today, what the Tertiary Education
Trust Fund is doing in terms of provision of infrastructure is huge. I am just
taking education as an example of where a lot of achievements have been made.
If you look at our roads today, we still have a lot of gaps in the sector. The
{Lagos} International Airport Road has been given out. So the potholes will not endure for
long. But if you look at the roads
overall, let’s say the Benin-Ore Road that was almost abandoned, if you go
there today, you will see a road you will be proud of. If you take Lagos-Ibadan
Expressway, we are doing it now, all the funding is done for the three
sections, with different reputable contractors.
May be, in another two or three
years, you are going to see a different road.
In 2012, we delivered 32 roads in the country. The greatest story in the
works and transport sector has been the revival of the railway. When President
Jonathan came to power, no train was moving in Nigeria.
The most important
story here is that most of the cement and heavy duty equipment being
transported between the South-West, North-Central and North-West is done now by
the rail; even, sometimes, when you have problems with our refineries, crude
will go by rail.
We have dredged the River Niger from Warri through Onitsha,
through Lokoja up to Baro. In addition to roads and railway, we are introducing
inland river transportation in Nigeria for the first time and all these put
together in the last four years are huge investment in the future of our
country.
In the power sector where I think in terms of the quantum of
intervention, much more work has been done than may be most sectors of the
economy. 10 power plants 10 power plants built in four years is a record. What
we are doing now is to connect them with gas and then hand over to the private
sector to manage. If the next government does another 10 and other government
does another 10 and we continue like that; the problem with power is the lack
of stability in government because so long as governments are unstable, without
predictable tenure, without long plan, you cannot develop a society and that’s
the difference between the democracies of the West and us.
They have long
stretch of political stability, democratic processes and institutions stretched
over a hundreds of years that’s why they are ahead of us. When you hear Innoson
manufacturing new vehicles, those vehicles are manufactured with government
support.
The Bank of Industry is the one
supporting Innoson Vehicle Manufacturing at Nnewi, it is supporting Innoson
Technical in Enugu where plastics of all dimensions and standards and qualities
are manufactured for export and for the domestic market. The new Auto Policy is making it compulsory
for big car manufacturing giants to set up plants in Nigeria. If they don’t,
they are going to lose the market in the next couple of years.
Today Nigeria
has moved from the backwaters into the number one economy, receiving the
highest level of investments. If we put
all these together and you add to the telecom revolution in the last 12 years,
then you see that Nigeria has made a lot of progress under our democracy and we
are proud to say that, yes, we are not even where we should be, yet we could do
more and we would do more but in terms of development, I think it is important
that the media must help this nation to know that a lot of work is going on.
I
have not mentioned agriculture, health, aviation. Even if you are blind, you visit Nigerian
airports today, you will know that work has been done in the last four years,
you will be proud. I have not spoken about the comprehensive management of the
economy.
You would notice that when the
banks collapsed, the mortgage crisis took place in the United States and the
banks and economies of several countries collapsed, Nigeria attained stability.
Our Stock Market crashed in 2008, today it has been completely revived.
The micro-economic management of the economy
has improved and, today, there is a lot of confidence in the Nigerian economy in
spite of the violence in the North-East. When you talk about the issue of media
reporting and seemingly celebrating violence occasioned by the activities of
insurgents, the question to ask is, what is the counter narrative to ensure
that this terrorism is put on the back burner?
Secondly, I am sure you agree about the perception that the Presidency
is lethargic. How do you respond to that
view because it’s very critical and, like you observed, people seem to even
want to insult the Presidency and the President more than even the entire
Federal Government of Nigeria.
How do
you think the media can handle that and, coming from your perspective, what
issues do you need to relate to, to dampen that type of perception? First of
all, I have been at the Ministry of Information and Ministry of Defence
temporarily; so I am in a position to know, to speak with some level of
understanding about the nature of terrorism.
I have, through the instrumentality of the Ministry of Information,
tried to present terrorism, first of all, as a global phenomenon that has
reached our borders and that it has exploited certain weaknesses within our
polity-the weaknesses of political violence sometimes at the local level-where
sometimes politicians think the best way to defeat their opponents is to
establish youth groups, arm them and use them against their opponents. Some of
them outgrow their sponsors and become a societal problem.
Every problem that you see that has developed
at the national level started at the local level, it was not tackled by those
responsible at that level until it becomes a national headache.
I have also tried to explain to the media
consistently that with terror, it’s not about the supposed threat, firepower of
the military because terror is different from conventional war; terror is
different from the wars that soldiers were trained to fight and, all over the
world, the armies of every country are beginning to see that these guys are
small in number but they are difficult to fish out because they are employing
the tactics of urban and rural guerrilla warfare and ,whenever you have a
guerrilla war, it is no longer the issue of the strength of the army.
The army
capacity I know that our army has the capacity to destroy Boko Haram in 30
minutes, if they are to come out. Whether we are in the media or politics and
so on, we will come to a common understanding. For some time, that hasn’t
happened, and that is why we saw a state governor making a proclamation that
government is committing genocide in the North.
When that kind of thing
happens, what does he do? He divides public opinion and makes the terrorists
look as if they have a legitimate cause to defend the North against the South.
For a state governor to say that, normally it is impossible for anybody to say
that when you are facing a collective war. Why did I say this? The Minister of
Defence is from the North, the National Security Adviser is from the North, the
Inspector General of Police is from the North.
It took us a long time to
intervene in the North-East because people said it was not a military thing. At
a point, they said the President should withdraw the troops. He said what is
the alternative? There was no alternative. It is the partisan angle to this
matter that has further created the opportunity for recruitment and the
opportunity for local sympathy. However, there are still politicians that do
support them.
I am not in the position to know whether they are helping them
with resources or weapons but their comments give a lot of encouragement to
them and I think that psychological encouragement to terror is as harmful as
funding them. It gives them the
confidence to endure.
At a point, even in the military, there was confusion. Some will think that the terror will be away
in the next one month. It gave the wrong
impression. You cannot give a deadline
to terror because you don’t know where they are.
There is this perception,
people just look at the President and say he is weak, he is not doing
anything. It’s a perception issue. You are the person in charge of managing
information, how do you feel when people say such things? The President is not
a weak leader but he is a democratic leader and he is the first democratic
leader that we have had in my own sincere opinion since Shehu Shagari; the only
one that came in between was Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua.
He lived too short for us to know what
character his regime would have assumed. Democratic via voting or personality?
Democratic in terms of orientation, in terms of perception, in terms of
principle, in terms of due process, in terms of allowing national institutions
to work rather than personalities to run across the table and beat their
chest.
We have been so much used to
military rule that the psyche of the Nigerian is that a leader must be on a
horse back with a horse whip and, if possible, he steps down and whip people
into line or get the WAI Brigade to line up people on the street and say this
is what must be done.
But this President is a civilian, he is a scholar, he is
a calm person, he is deliberate. To me,
no leader is perfect, every leader has weak points but what I see in this
leader, in the personality and character of President Goodluck Jonathan is that
of a man who is deliberate and knows what he is doing.
He has his focus on changing the Nigerian
economic story. Secondly, he knows that change will not come overnight, many
people will not get used to it. He has
the patience to suffer the attacks without ruffling feathers and that has
helped him to remain focused while his opponents think he is weak. He is not weak; Jonathan is very strong and
tough.
Look at his democratic reforms, elections are getting better. Nigerians
are coming to accept the principle of free election. The other point that makes
the President to look weak in quote is that he is the first President to allow
national institutions to work.
Today, the National Assembly is far freer than
it used to be. The Judiciary has also come of age. The President often jokes that if he were to
exercise 60% of his powers as written in the Constitution, he would be far more
dictatorial than any military ruler that has ruled this nation before, but that
as a leader, his duty is to allow institutions to flourish after decades of
destruction.
When you say a man is weak, look at the way he has run his
diplomacy. If you look at the Nigerian
diplomacy in the last four years, for the first time you will see that wherever
Nigerians are under threat, they are taken home. When you say leader is weak,
maybe you believe he runs away from problems. He sets up too many committees.
Every government sets up committees to shed more light on problems, but,
definitely, this President, from all the records, from what is going on, from
what is falling in, is a strong but democratic leader. To tackle terrorism, you
must tackle the source of funding and we see this in other countries.
Let’s take US as example. After 911, the Patriot Act came and they have
used that Act to sanction banks, companies, shipping lines, and individuals
that have connections with terrorist organisations. In Nigeria, we have been battling Boko Haram
insurgency for the past couple of years and we have not heard of any major
sponsor of these groups being arrested, we have not heard of any big name.
We have only been seeing foot soldiers. Is it
that our intelligence gathering is poor? Is it that government does not have
the will to go after the sponsors? Shekau is there, but somebody is providing
the funds for all the arms and all that.
Why is it that it has been difficult for government to actually go after
the big fish? The second one is Chibok.
It’s about 100 days now since these girls were kidnapped; we have been
hearing comments from government that they know the location where these girls
are kept. The latest one was that they are getting nearer to rescuing
them. When are we going to get these
girls back? Sponsors of terrorism-unless
you put your finger right on it -if you just make a wild allegation, it can
generate a lot of problems in the polity.
We suspected there might be some big
time support, but investigations continue until we put our finger and hold some
people that we are sure of otherwise it can do a lot of damage to the system.
But if you look at the funding process, Boko Haram used to organise robberies
and they took a lot of money from the banks. Initially people did not know the
connection between those bank robberies and Boko Haram.
Today, they take cattle
from poor grazers, sell them and use them to buy weapons. What government would not want to do is to
say, for political reasons, because you go and announce that A,B,C,D and, in
the end, if you do not have watertight evidence, it is better not to accuse
people. But is government getting closer to that?
I don’t want to make a
statement that gives the impression of that because what you want hear is,
‘government is getting closer to the funders of Boko Haram’. What we are saying
is that investigations are going on. Sometimes you just stumble on a fact that
you didn’t even prepare for it and it becomes an issue. But there is nothing hidden under the
sun. People can use all forms of alibi
and channels but they will be exposed.
We need patience so that we do not rush and make conclusions that will
create problem for the system because it’s terrible to accuse somebody on a
weighty problem like this if you do not have 100% assurance that your evidence
is true. On Chibok, there is nothing as so difficult for us as a government, as
parents, as public officers. It’s one of
the most traumatic experiences that we have had in this government.
I can tell
you that a lot of contacts are made every day but we believe that those girls
are not being kept in one place, we are sure they have separated into small
groups and taken to unsuspecting areas.
That is why when people talk about Sambisa, they may not even be
there.
We are doing everything in terms
of surveillance. The second point is that because we are dealing with a wild,
murderous group, you don’t want to put the lives of the girls at risk by just
doing braggadocios. The most horrendous
thing will be that these girls are killed.
It will be so difficult to accept and explain to the public. We need to be extremely careful even when we
have a lead to make sure that it leads to the girls’ safe rescue and not to
their death after the trauma of several months. One of the star projects of
Jonathan is the National Conference. There are issues.
The delegates have come
to a consensus on a number of issues
but, out there, people think the conference is a jamboree because it was not
meant to impact the polity. What exactly would the conference have achieved by
the time it winds up and a report is submitted. What does the Federal
Government do with the outcome of the conference?
If you heard the President
speak at the inauguration of the conference, the goals and objectives were
clearly stated. The conference is aimed
at discussing those fundamental issues in the polity and proffering solutions,
which most likely will end up in constitutional reforms. Let’s be patient and see. We are all patient.
I am asking because the undercurrent is that the conference is standing on
nothing. It is standing on the authority of the President who, as the elected
leader of Nigeria, has one of the singular duties of setting agenda for the
nation, initiating reforms.
So the conference is standing on solid
constitutional pedestal. In addition, after the conference is completed, it is
expected that the report will go to the National Assembly for constitutional
reforms to give Nigeria a more stable democratic enterprise. There are
controversial issues such as will not be avoided in a conference of that nature
but I think putting the controversy side-by-side with the positive things that
have happened there, you will agree that it is well grounded.
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