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YAR'ADUA, A DISASTER WAITING TO HAPPEN - OLU FALAE |
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Posted to the Web: Monday, March 26 , 2007
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Yar’ Adua, a disaster waiting to happen —Olu Falae
Sunday, March 25, 2007
A former Secretary to the Federal Government , Chief Olu Falae, has done an appraisal of the past and the present regimes of President Olusegun Obasanjo and declared that they were not in the best interest of the country.
•Falae
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Falae, also a one-time Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, spoke in Lagos exclusively with with Sunday Sun. He said President Obasanjo’s first coming as military head of state in the seventies laid foundation for the economic crisis which the succeeding civilian administration of Alhaji Shehu Shagari “merely built upon.”
Chief Falae who was Obasanjo’s main opponent in the 1999 presidential elections also regretted the current state of decay of infrastructure in the country despite the soaring income Nigeria generates from the sale of crude oil. According to him, the failure by the Obasanjo’s regime to satisfy the yearnings of the electorate accounts for the current manipulations of the transition program so that the ruling Peoples Democratic Party could hang on to power.
Falae, currently the National Chairman of the Democratic Peoples Party[ DPP], also spoke on the flagbeare of Peoples Democratic Party [PDP], Umaru Yar’Adua among other issues.
Excerpts:
You ran against President Obasanjo in 1999 . Would you say Nigerians made a mistake electing him and later giving him a second term ?
Nigerians didn’t vote for him in 1999. He knows it and I am sure you know it, I know it. In the South- West where we both come from, I took about 80 percent of the vote. And elsewhere in Nigeria, people did not vote for him, but it was the power that were that decided that one of them, a fellow military person must take over from them. That was what happened. In 2003, General Muhammadu Buhari, his main opponent went to court , you remember the verdict. Even in Ogun State where he comes from, the court said it was a sham election and elsewhere. So, if he found it necessary to rig election in his home state in 2003, it meant he knew he would not have won without rigging. So he never won an election. He has never had an undisputed mandate either in 1999 or 20003.
President Obasanjo has endorsed Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua, two-term governor of Katsina State as his successor. How much of him do you know?
I don’t know him. Honestly, I don’t know him at all. I knew his elder brother, General Musa Yar’ Adua of blessed memory. He and I contested on the platform of the Social Democratic Party for nomination . Him I knew, him I respected . The respect was mutual .But his younger brother who has been dragged into the presidential race, I don’t know him at all. So I have no opinion about him.
But how would you describe the process through which he was drafted into the presidential race as the candidate of the PDP?
He was dragged into it like Alhaji Shehu Shagari before him and each time a man is forced to assume a public office, it is almost invariably a disaster because the man is not prepared for the assignment. If you were never prepared for an assignment and somebody just came to you and dragged you into it, it is going to take you several months before you get your bearing, before you begin to know what to do and in what sequence. The poor chap in my view is totally unprepared for what he has been saddled with. Moreover, people said his health is not sound, but they said oh, he has recovered, he could almost run the Olympics, but before they stopped talking he collapsed.
That single event debunked two lies. The first lie was that he was well. We all know now that he was not well. And the they told us that they had established centres for medical excellence in Lagos, Ibadan, Zaria , Enugu and indeed all over Nigeria, second to none in the world. But when Yar’Adua collapsed, they couldn’t take him to any of those centres o excellence. They had to fly him abroad. Another lie exposed. So, his collapse debunked two lies at the same time.
So, all in all, since Yar’Adua was not prepared, not exposed and is not of good health, in my view, he is totally unqualified to assume the post of president. If the Shagari experience of an unprepared president is anything to go by, I would not expect much from Yar’Adua if he becomes the president.
You remember it was Shagari who plunged us into this monumental import credit debt that triggered our economic crisis. We were importing much more than we could pay for under his presidency to the point that the corresponding banks stopped confirming credits for Nigerians until the General Ibrahim Babangida’s government renegotiated, cancelled some of the debts and rescheduled the balance.
It was Shagari’s unpreparedness that plunged us into that economic crisis. Of course the foundation of the crisis was laid by the Obasanjo military regime in the third quarter of 1978 when Nigeria for the first time took a jumbo loan of One billion dollars. It was like an overdraft from the commercial banks at commercial rates of interest. That laid the foundation for the crisis that the Shagari administration built upon. So, I have my fears about a Yar’Adua presidency. I feel it would lead to similar difficulties in future.
You just talked of administrations plunging us into economic difficulties but left out that of General Ibrahim Babangida under which you served at different times as Secretary to the Federal Government and Minister of Finance. You don’t agree with those who say that regime also mismanaged the economy?
On the contrary, it was the crisis the previous regimes created that we came to solve.
So did you succeed?
When the Babangida regime came, Nigeria was owing about 25 billion dollars , thanks to Obasanjo and Shagari. And it was Babangida’s government that got Chase Manhattan to look into the debt and find out which one was genuine and which ones were bogus. About eight billion dollars was found to be fictitious and was rejected by the Babangida government. The rest was then rescheduled for the re-payment over a long period. So, the government that did that did not create the problem. It tried to solve the problem. But before they could agree that we should spread the debt, because we could not pay immediately,they said we must have a structural adjustment programme . That was how SAP came about. They made it a condition for solving the problem created by Obasanjo and Shagari. That is the truth of the matter. And if people would be honest, they would say the situation under that regime is far better than what we have today. At that time ,we had about six thousand megawatts of electricity. Today, we have one thousand. At that time ,we had the National Directorate of Employment [ NDE] creating jobs or graduates, today, unemployment is the order of the day. At that time ,all the major roads were well maintained. Today, they are almost impassable. And the price of crude oil at a point that time was around ten dollars. Today, it is fifty dollars and yet are not seeing the benefits. Any unbiased commentator would agree that despite the hues and cries about SAP, it was a much better time than we have now. And in any case, the exchange rate by the time I left that government in August 1990 was 7.5 Naira to the US dollars. Not N 75 mind you. And we were screaming it was too high. Today what is it, 130 Naira to one US dollar. So, which one is better?
Still, it is generally believed that the Babangida’s regime institutionalized corruption in Nigerian. While that government was in power, Obasanjo indeed referred to it as a fraud
I don’t agree with that. And as for Obasanjo, how does he and his vice- president refer to their own government? Obasanjo has described his vice- president as fraudulent. The vice- president has accused him of embezzlement of public funds. I have to believe the two of them.And so the summary is that the president and the vice- president have described their regime as fraudulent. Not Olu Falae saying that, but they themselves and it is documented before the National Assembly. I have nothing more to add.
We are at a very critical stage of the transition programme. How hopeful are you of a hitch-free transition of power from president Olusegun Obasanjo to a new president?
I am indeed very worried about what is going on. The omens are not good. First of all, the ongoing crisis between the vice-president and the president and the role of the Independent National Electoral Commission[ INEC] give one a lot of concerns. It is also not clear whether INEC is prepared and to what extent it is prepared for the election. And three, it appears that the confidence of the people in INEC is eroding every day. So, all in all, it is a worrisome situation.
Do you have the feelings as some people do that Obasanjo might be trying to stalemate the transition process going by the current confusion on the political scene so that he could stay on ?
That is a possibility. It is also possible that he lost the plot. That he was trying to manipulate the process and then lost control.
Those are the two possibilities. Either he just lost the plot and doesn’t know what to do again or he is deliberately trying to stage- manage a crisis.
The way things are, we are unlikely to have a free, fair, transparent and credible election.
So what happens in that event?
I don’t know. I just don’t know. If elections are not free and fair, there will be protest, Nigerians will not accept it. So, it is better for the president, the government and INEC to get their acts together and do whatever it is in the next three weeks to make sure elections are free and fair.
The major factor in the election not being free and fair is the political intervention in the transition process by the Peoples Democratic Party [ PDP] led government. They know that they have lost the support of the people, which they never had anyway in many parts of the country. They know that they will be defeated in a free and fair election. They know they will be massacred politically and they cannot contemplate losing the election. That is why we are having all these manipulations. They must have a change of attitude and face the electorate and accept in all humility the verdict of the people. It is just for four years. They can come back again if the people so decide. But they know they have lost the next election.
Mr President has declared the next election a do- or – die affair. Is your party ready also for a do-or-die-election?
We will do and live. We will not die. We shall win, we shall not die. We shall defend our votes in every legitimate way possible. We will not lie down to be walked over by the PDP, anywhere in Nigeria. Some of us are veterans of many struggles .Some of us have gone to detention .We did not commit any criminal offence, it was for standing for our principles that we were locked up in the past.
We shall stand for our principles again without violence, without breaking the law. Some of us have sacrificed to have democracy in Nigeria. If we did not put up the NADECO fight, there would have been no pressure on the international community to get rid of [ late General Sani] Abacha. But the international community realized that the crisis would linger on and on if they don’t do something and that was beginning to hurt their economic interest and then they had to do something. If we had caved in like the rest of Nigerians, Abacha would still have been here today. So, having suffered to get democracy back, we cannot fold our arms and allow people destroy it.
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