Why I’m still close to Obasanjo-Bishop Kukah

Written by Rakiya A.Muhammad and Abdulfatai Abdulsalami, Sokoto. 

Foremost nationalist and Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Dr Matthew Hassan Kukah, speaking in this interview on why and how those in government should earn the trust of the people, also dwells on why he remains a close friend of former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, among other issues. Excerpts:

It’s four months now since you became Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese. How is the challenge of being Bishop different from that of being Father?

Sokoto is very quiet, very peaceful and very warm; warm in terms of the way one has been received. It has been extremely encouraging. I have also been amazed at different delegations, people taking the trouble to personally come and pay respects.

But how is the experience of being a bishop different from a Reverend father.

It’s just like you are a member of a football team and may be suddenly you become the captain. You have to try and develop a vision, but I am not unaware that despite being the bishop, I am still the newest person. Everybody else knows Sokoto better than me.  My main interest now is first of all to explore what the challenges are together with my priests and sisters. I have had series of meetings with the various groups within the Catholic Church. I have also had meetings with members of the Christian community. Frankly, I find it not so much of a challenge; it’s been a very good experience to me.

What efforts have you made to cement the relationship between Christians and Muslims in the North-West?

I really don’t like using the words Christians and Muslims. I came to do a job, principally to be a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I happen to be in a place called Sokoto and I consider myself a witness to these people irrespective of what their beliefs may be. The reception I have received has been extra-ordinarily warm. I have covered the four states that make up this diocese: Kebbi, Zamfara, Katsina and Sokoto. Each of these states that I visited, I met the state governors. Where they weren’t available I met with the deputy governors. The reception, as I said, was extraordinarily warm.

Why is the condition of Nigeria getting worse in spite of our prayers? Asian countries that don’t engage in so much religious activities have better economies. How do you explain this?

That question should be the subject of a book, seriously. The reason why we are praying so much is not because we love God. The reason is that there is nobody, nothing else to cover our nakedness and our want. It is like living in an orphanage and, for me, to locate the superfluous expression of Christianity   by our people, you have to connect it to the total failure of government to deal with very basic issues, which we are now conscripting God to do on our behalf and on behalf of government.  As I often say rather jokingly, if you set out from one end of Nigeria to another, you don’t know whether you will have a safe journey. You are afraid of armed robbers, you are afraid of checkpoints, you are afraid of bad roads, the cloud of fear that drives you is what produces that obsession with relying on God for you to arrive safely. So when you get from one point to another the first thing you say is thank God I have arrived safely. You cannot say this is how to get a job in Nigeria.  You cannot say this is how to pass examination in Nigeria. You enter into the university now and you cannot rely on your intellectual capacity to graduate.  The lawlessness in our society is what produces so much prayer. But true service to God enables you to be honest, to be sincere, to be transparent.   But we have a society that is obsessed with theft; stealing is a god that is prevalent in the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are praying that they would be posted to a place they will steal money very quickly. You are now listening to politicians crediting their electoral success to a particular spiritual man of God. We don’t know whether politicians win elections because INEC has done a good job; we don’t know whether politicians win elections because we have voted for them or maybe some witchdoctor or some spiritual man has already announced that they are going to win election. The man who is stealing election is trusting God that he would steal the election successfully; the man who has lost election is trusting God to restore his mandate. This is a society that is bereft of any intellectual input in policy. That is why criminality, armed robbery, banditry, and theft are sitting side by side with churches and mosques. Being a Muslim is not just about going to the mosque, being a Christian is not just about going to church and this is why I continue to worry that we are one of the most corrupt countries, yet one of the most church-going and mosque-going communities.

Are you saying the situation is helpless or how do we get out of it?

It is not a helpless situation but time is not on our side. People are getting increasingly very angry and feeling very frustrated. Government doesn’t command the kind of loyalty and respect that it ought to command. Ordinary citizens don’t trust government. I think government should win the trust and confidence of ordinary people.

After the elections in April, Southern Kaduna became engulfed in violence. What are your thoughts on this matter?

Violence in Nigeria is like a sick man. One moment, there is a boil in your ear, another day there is a boil in your mouth, there is a boil in your armpit, on your toe. Violence defies geography and this is why it is so worrying. Otherwise very peaceful communities are now exploding left, right and centre. There are clouds of grievances hovering around the entire country. These grievances are based on different perceived notions. The grievances have got a lot to do with historical perception of relationship even with communities and that is why I always worry that we continue to frame this thing as if we have problems between Muslims and Christians. A lot of the problems you  have in  many parts of southern  Kaduna are purely and simply  the questions  of law and order.  It is about regulating the behavior of particular institutions. For example, a very critical question arises: how are we going to deal with the problem of pastoralists and the relationship between them and farmers? It has always been a cat and mouse relationship. When I was growing up in my little village, I knew my father had a reputation with a lot of these Fulani people because every farmer would rejoice at the thought of Fulani people passing with their cattle and deciding to settle on their farm. I mean this is what I grew up with. If you don’t have a country in which the rule of law is the driving force, people are going to do as they like.  Let me go back to where I am most familiar with. My younger one is the chief in my village. I wasn’t at home, but I read in the New Nigerian of an initiative which I thought was wonderful. In our locality, we have four different ethnic groups: Hausa, Fulani, Baju and Kulu, but we have had a problem with the Baju people, which goes back to the last six or seven years. The young man had the diligence to approach the Baju people, although we are no longer fighting. It was something that happened many years ago, but he still felt it was necessary to deal with the issues of trust. There were series of meetings they had with the community, with their chief and so on. Then subsequently they now had a meeting with the Hausa, then had a meeting with the Fulani, and then finally they decided to bring all the different groups together on the 10th of December. They brought everybody together made up of all these ethnic groups. People sat together; let’s put this behind us.  My argument is that the government will try its best, but reconciliation would never come as an external agency. People have to sit down and heal issues. With government, committees are set up, commissions are set up, nobody knows what government is going to do because government occasionally gets stuck. Those of us from outside always say we want the government to release the report or to act on it. But sometimes, it may not be politically convenient. In my view, government should support local initiatives that communities embark on.

Government must quickly get its hands around the problem before violence becomes an industry because once it becomes an industry and people invest in it you are going to have a problem but the irony will be that the more it festers, the more people who are benefitting from it directly or indirectly take advantage of the situation and then you just find the system spiraling and spiraling and spiraling. I  mean people who produce arms would have nothing to do with their arms  if there are no wars that are fought. It is not about how much money you want to spend buying equipment, it’s about how much gari we are going to put in the stomachs of our people because that is the greatest shield against violence. If you are not able to feed your people, you are not able to accommodate the people and guarantee them the basic things of life, you are going to continue to have a system of violence.

You worked closely with President Olusegun Obasanjo. Why do you think Obasanjo didn’t totally remove fuel subsidy?

I didn’t work with Obasanjo. I have never worked for anybody, any government. I have had specific assignments. I have had relationship with everybody but in the case of Obasanjo I had a relationship with him during my work with Oputa Panel and Ogoni. Also, I worked with late President Umaru Yar’Adua because I served at the Electoral Reform Committee. I have worked with President Goodluck Jonathan because we continued the work with Ogonis  up till when we  handed in our report. To come back to your question, the fuel subsidy issue is a conversation that went wrong. It is not about economics in my view, it is again about trust. Let me answer your question very briefly and tell you what I have always thought. If I were the president of Nigeria and I see that there is great potential of taking money from this area, the first thing is to appreciate that ordinary citizens everywhere in the world don’t trust politicians, don’t like politicians; they consider politicians an evil that they have to deal with. This is the truth and they should therefore appreciate that politics is to face being misunderstood. Therefore the least a politician can do is to try and earn the trust of his people. Now, given the way this election went and given the issues that are still on, given that ordinary citizens know that this process just like other processes have been driven by corruption, why do you think that you can convince a Nigerian that you take a few hundred billion naira or dollars and place here and turn your back and imagine that you will come back and find your yams there? We are used to the fact that whatever a Nigerian politician finds, he would consume. That is the psychological feeling that ordinary Nigerians have. Therefore it is wrong to assume that you will simply tell Nigerians that we are going to save this money for you and that we would take care of you. No, because we are used to not being taken care of. I would have said for example when Obasanjo left we were told that the issue of the railway for example, we were supposed to have a railway line running from Lagos to kano in 50 months, which means that by 2010 we ought to have been running it but just like everything else, when Obasanjo left, the crooks in the system who had lost out in the contract started blackmailing everybody. Then poor YarAdua cancelled the contract. It took us more than one year and then these guys re-organized themselves and came back and said okay the contract has been divided into I think three or four, in keeping with where the teeming elite are located and they now called it stand alone project from Lagos to Ibadan to Jebba and Minna and Kano has been divided and distributed but we do not know when the railways will be completed. If I were the president of Nigeria, I would have called a meeting of the people dealing with the railways, and say to them: how long do we still have to complete the rails from Lagos to Kano? If they give me six months I will tell them please can we make it two months? What do we require to complete this job? If they told me what is required to complete the job, I will be more than happy to give them the job. Meanwhile I keep mum. The first textrunning of that train, I will be on that train  from Lagos to Kano and as soon as we arrive Kano, I will stand up and address Nigerians and say to them, do you know what, you see this train, this is just the beginning of great things, because if we can find the money, you will go from Kano to Maiduguri, from Maiduguri to Yola, from Yola to Uyo, from Uyo to Port Harcourt. We will criss-cross this country with railway lines but I need the money. Nigerians would say please tell us, what do you want us to do? Ordinary Nigerians would have forgotten completely about all the stealing and looting and we could now say that President Jonathan we are sure that we can trust you, take everything that you require to do the job; but for now we have seen nothing. We are supposed to hold on to the straws that are flying in the wind and just hope that when this money is saved it is going to be judiciously used for our good.  Nigerians are saying we didn’t trust you yesterday, we are not about to trust you today, till you earn our trust.

So, you don’t know why Obasanjo didn’t totally remove the subsidy?

I think Obasanjo was probably not unaware of the social consequences of the decision when a lot of other things were not yet in place and like I said it is only right because where we are now, the government has put the cart before the horse.  It is now struggling to say this is what we meant to do and like I said to a senior government official you should learn a lesson from Lamido Sanusi and Islamic banking debate. I didn’t know that Islamic banking was what ordinary Nigerians thought it to be. I thought that non-interest banking was actually something that we needed to explore but unfortunately that project was shut down not because of anything but because there is also something to be said for timing. I am convinced that president Goodluck Jonathan has all the best of intentions, I think he genuinely means well but as this problem stands now, it is definitely not the way to go.

You said recently that removing fuel subsidy is worse than the effects of Boko Haram violence. Can you explain this comparison clearly, sir?

Frankly, I was talking of it from the point of view of the instability it will trigger. We are now at a point in which you need all the support that we can get. What we are looking for  is how to build trust and I have always argued that Boko Haram is just an aggregate of all levels of frustrations by ordinary Nigerians. It is just that in their own case, they are bold enough to kill themselves, maybe there are a lot of other people who feel resentful about a lot of things and my argument is that I think the government should not offer these people such a wonderful opportunity to create the kind of instability that we do not need. On this issue the timing is wrong, it is not that people don’t know what the issues are. People don’t need to be persuaded, we should be asking ourselves how did we get to this point in which our people don’t trust us? If the last time someone went to the hospital something happened, they left scissors in somebody‘s stomach, they now decided as a result I am not going to the hospital; showing up and promising this person that things would change is not good enough. Maybe Nigerians are wrong but this is the perception and our perception has empirical justification. We are used to our common will being squandered. You are reading the papers about how much Nigerians are buying up Dubai, how much Nigerians are buying up the beach heads of Ghana, about how much Nigerians are investing in Gambia, about what Nigerians are spending in South Africa. Does it make sense for goodness sake that here in Nigeria, we don’t have a record of a public officer being yanked off from the line and facing trial. We don’t have a record of a public officer who is serving a prison term because of what he/she has stolen. Look at what has happened in Uganda, look at what has happened in America. Every day when you open a newspaper from China to Japan to America to everywhere, look at the case of a young man who lost his job in Britain just the other day. What was the reason? He organized a party and people were dressed somehow. Everywhere in the world, public officers have a minimum code of conduct of what is acceptable or not acceptable.  It is only in Nigeria that we don’t have a single code of conduct.

You have actively participated in major government conferences on the review of Nigeria’s constitution. What is your take on the 7-year single tenure dream of President Jonathan?

The president was just expressing a point of view. If a president wants new term of office, he would draft a bill and send it to the National Assembly. I have spoken with some of the president’s handlers that I know and they said there isn’t a bill. I have asked journalists whether anybody has seen a bill; they say they haven’t seen a bill. So, what are we talking about? It is a question whether the president has right as an individual  to express a point of view but of course it probably means if you are a president you probably do not have a point of view because you may be misconstrued but again like every other thing in Nigeria, I don’t think it’s about tenure, it is not about how long one wants to stay in power, for there are a lot of very fundamental questions relating to how people enter and get out of power and how we can make politics less of a criminal enterprise and more of an institution that people can come in and come out and how we can build a political system that really goes back to some of the principles of  building a good society. I feel like saying perhaps we should bring our politicians back to the classroom  just to let them understand that the essence of politics is how you build a good society. That is why I am saying trust is very important. You can be the most generous person in the world, you can be the most committed patriot in the world but if people don’t trust you, if your own children don’t trust you, I think it is not how much you are paying their school fees, if your children don’t trust you and you still insist in sending them to the best schools something will give somewhere.  If  I were the president of Nigeria one of the things I would try and say is okay since I am getting into this problem that I know we are never trusted how are we going to do? Let me give you an example: I was telling my priest yesterday. I said look, as a priest, I was one of you just up till four months ago and I know that as a priest we always assume that the bishop has all the money in the world, all the money in the  diocese so I want a new car. If bishop doesn’t buy it, it’s because he just doesn’t want to. This is how I used to feel. Now I am a bishop only for three, four months, I now have to ask myself, how am I going to earn your trust? So, I said okay, what we are going to do is when next we have a meeting, I will pull out all the records, everything that we have. Let everybody see. Once you have seen everything that we have, then we can start. Maybe we have more money than you ever dreamt of, maybe we don’t have as much as you dreamt of. Perception is very important. If you become a local government chairman in Nigeria today, you will know yourself that people are saying we local government chairmen are only just distributing money.

How can this perception change?

That’s what I am saying; if I become a local government chairman today or a governor or a president, one of the questions I would ask is how do I earn the trust of my people? Frankly, a president doesn’t even have to have the capacity to answer that question but this is what advisers, people who have been there before will tell you about what to do and how to do it. Earning trust doesn’t necessarily mean people like you, no. That is not the point. In fact, sometimes  the most hated public officer with time turns out to be the people that have done the best for their country. It’s like a child growing up especially now that the whether is very cold. Very few children love their mothers to be woken up at 5.30 in the morning and told to have a bath to start getting ready to go to school. Children cry their way to school. It’s going to take them another 20 years before they look back with gratitude. In the same way, I am convinced that earning trust is not the same as being liked. No sensible leader would want people to just love them. The less you perform perhaps the more likely people are going to love you. If you are going around distributing public funds to people, they may actually like you but it also means that you are writing your signature on water. Because no sooner do you stop distributing the money than your memory goes. That is why the key word is trust.

Is Nigeria’s problem spiritual or manmade?

Nigeria’s problems are not spiritual. What is spiritual about pressing a switch and seeing light? It’s science. What is spiritual about entering a train and going from point A to point B? It’s science. Our problem is incompetence and the only way we can look at the future is to look back to science. I mean religion would remain very important in our lives but that is not where we should be looking at in terms of solution to many of our problems.

You’re a great friend of Obasanjo. What is behind this relationship, because he’s one man Nigerians take pleasure in vilifying?

Obasanjo is a good friend. He came for my installation and I really appreciate that but frankly let me tell you I have been to school, I consider myself an educated Nigerian and I try to deal with human beings as I see them and the best answer I can give you is what late Stella Obasanjo said when she was asked about her husband. Stella said, do you want to rate him as a president, or as a husband? They said okay rate him as a president. She said as the president of Nigeria, I would score him about 80% because whatever he is doing I know how much sacrifice he is making to raise this country. As a father I would score him, I think she said about 40 or 50%, as a husband I think she scored him 25%, so really if you ask my relationship with Obasanjo actually; I tell the story in my book, perhaps one of the things that has brought us together is  our own passion for this country and I believe that whatever it is you may say about him, one thing you can’t take away from him is his deep love for this country. He made mistakes like everybody else but those who are fighting Obasanjo are fighting him for their own reason. Those reasons relate to business, they relate to ambition, they relate to power, they relate to contracts, they relate to all kinds of things. When I spoke at the American University, I said to Atiku, he is my friend and Obasanjo is also my friend but as a priest I believe that it  is actually the best that I can do. I cannot refuse to talk to you because somebody had told me that you are a thief. I am in the business of reconciliation and the good thing about my relationship with Obasanjo is nothing has connected me with him relating to  contract, privilege, opportunities  because these are the things that spoil relationships and many people who wanted contract or wanted different things and had problems with Obasanjo expect me to inherit that problem. I have no problem with the man. As I said we have a perception about where this country ought to be. But I would mention it to you, there are one or two things that Obasanjo  did for which I would not forget him in a hurry. I come from Kaduna State. Before Obasanjo became president, from when Kaduna state was created not a single person, not one from Southern Kaduna had ever been appointed an ambassador, a federal permanent secretary, or a minister to represent Kaduna State; not one. It was when Obasanjo became president that Senator Isaiah Balat became the first person from Southern Kaduna to be appointed a minister. He is not the first person to be a graduate. By the time Obasanjo left, about four or so different people have been appointed ministers, including Mrs Nenadi Usman. By the time Obasanjo left Martin Agwai was the chief of Army staff, he then became Chief of General staff, followed by General Lukah. When we had reception for Agwai, I was there. Obasanjo was there. I got there after he had left but I called him later on because he went from there to go and greet my late friend’s widow in her village and I called to thank him but  he said nobody should thank me because the people I appointed were the best that were available  at the time.