From DESMOND MGBOH
Retired Commissioner of Police, Abubakar Tsav, is not impressed with the performance of the Dr. Goodluck Jonathan administration, particularly its handling of the security challenges facing the country. In this interview with Daily Sun, Tsav dismisses the call for Jonathan’s resignation from office, coming from certain quarters, but warns that he should not seek for a fresh mandate in 2015 to avoid embarrassment.Excerpts:
Well, to me, he should not resign. I don’t think that it is the solution to the problem. Rather than resign, when the time for the next elections comes, he should quietly allow a more suitable and a more capable hand to take over the affairs of the country.’’ As a very informed security voice, we’ll like your appraisal of the security situation in the light of the various killings and bomb blasts across the country, largely perpetrated by the Boko Haram Sect? The situation is very scary, the killings and blasts are continuing. Sometimes, just when we think the killings are beginning to be controlled, that it is subsiding, you wake up to realise that the situation is getting worse and worse.
However, I think honestly that it should be the responsibility of every Nigerian to think of a way out: let us not start blaming ourselves. Let us not start blaming Northern leaders. Rather, let us come together and forge a way forward and make sure we sustain peace in this country. The other day I read in the papers where this man, Chief Edwin Clark was blaming the former President, General Ibrahim Banbangida and I felt very bad because a person who truly wants peace should not say a thing like that.
He should rather be thinking of finding ways to ending the problem. And they (people who talk like Clark) are making a mistake. The current security problem is not a Northern problem. It is a national problem. It rubs on everybody and every part of the country. Even if there is no bomb blasts in the South, that does not mean the challenge does not affect the South.
What is happening here in the North, ideally, should affect every part of the country. I also heard this Asari Dokubo threatening that there will be war. I, for one, I am very disappointed to hear that from a person like that. This is because this issue, tragically, affects everybody in the country and not a case of one man or a group against the other. Nobody is safe. People no longer go to Churches; people no longer go to Mosque.
They are all afraid. Everybody is afraid to go to public places. Must we continue like this? How are we going to sustain our economy if we continued like this? So, I want to appeal to all Nigerians, regardless of political, ethnic and religious affiliation to come together for us to find solutions to this problem. These people, who are causing these problems, they are Nigerians: They live with us, they dine with us and they are within the society and therefore, let us come out together and find a way out. During the administration of the former president, late Alhaji Umaru Yar ‘Adua, he brokered peace with the militants from Nigeria Delta, and the peace is working today. Some of them have been trained at home and abroad.
The Asari Dokubo that is talking is a beneficiary of that peace arrangement because he was remanded in prison custody over acts of terrorism and through that peace, they got him out of the prison and unfortunately today, he is threatening war in this country. Why can’t we extend the same thing to this Boko Haram people if that would end the violence? But I must add that when situation like this presents itself, there are a lot of people who are benefiting from it, including the uniformed services because when there is insecurity, they get allowances and some of them want to keep on getting these allowances. They want the problem to continue so that their allowances would continue. I think we should all come together and solve this problem regardless of our affiliations.
The government must do more to end the spate of killings. Jonathan must remember that when he took his oath of office, he promised that he was going to ensure the wellbeing and security of Nigerians! Taking it from here, there have been growing concerns that President Jonathan should resign if he could no longer guarantee the security of Nigerians. Do you share the same view? Well to me, he should not resign. I don’t think that it is the solution to the problem.
Rather than resign, when the time for the next elections comes, he should quietly allow a more suitable and a more capable hand to take over the affairs of the country. This is because if he resigns now, somebody else is going to take over and maybe, such a person may not be any better …. But I do believe that Jonathan is being controlled, he is like a puppet. Someone else is running the government for him. He allows people like Chief Edwin Clark may be one of those running the government for him.
I must add that the whole security problem in Nigeria is not being helped by the level of corruption and injustice in the land. Corruption is what is causing insecurity in this country. The President keeps saying that he is going to fight corruption, he going to fight corruption, but if you look very deeply as to what is happening in that Aso Rock, it all amounts to corruption. Look at his wife, who was appointed to the rank of a permanent secretary! She has not worked for a very long time, yet she was appointed a permanent secretary.
She has not worked as a civil servant for a very long time, but they selected and promoted her above other people and made her a permanent secretary. It amounts to corruption! But the President has taken steps to tackle the security challenges. He has sacked many heads of security agencies, including his NSA, Minister of Defence and his Inspector General of Police. Are these not sufficient policy actions? You see there are many issues.
What is causing the problem in this country is corruption. Why can’t they do anything about corruption? There are, as you know, a lot of people who have charges of corruption on them and they are roaming the streets unchecked. Why can’t the government do anything about these corruption cases? We are not hearing anything about it: the police pension scam, corruption in the National Assembly and so on. The moment they start sentencing highly placed people, everything will go on well again. Secondly, the police and the security agencies in the country are under staffed.
There are several youth roaming about and the question is, why can’t this government recruit and train them? I think that the removal of the heads of the security agencies-police and NSA that you just mentioned is scratching the surface. There are basic things that have not been done and which ought to have been done. The issue of the oil subsidy threw up very many negative things about the Minister of Petroleum. The Minister was indicted. Did Jonathan replace her? No! She is still there. The Aviation issue came up and the Minister of Aviation was indicted. Did he change her? No! she is still there.
If he is sincere, why must he allow his wife to take a rank of a permanent secretary when she is not qualified to be so appointed? Still on security, has the appointment of the new National Security Adviser, Alhaji Sambo Dasuki resulted in any significant improvement in tackling the security challenge? Of course, the bombings and the killings of Nigerians have not stopped, but the new Security Adviser has been taking positive steps to change the situation. This is because he has been able to visit Yobe, Maiduguri, Kano States and I think a number of states in the North and has been able to talk to some of the leaders in these states. This is a good step in the right direction.
He has seen them, he has spoken to them-he happens to come from this area- they have listened to him and I think the next step would be to talk to the Boko Haram people involved directly. But the former National Security Adviser did not visit all these places. He sat there and was just talking. He made a statement which was very bad when he went and started blaming the government, and started blaming the Peoples Democratic Party’s political system.
A National Security Officer should not have said such a thing in public. This is because a security officer who knows his job should be felt and not heard. He was supposed to have reduced everything in writing and communicated same to the President and if the President refused to act on it, he can now say okay, I resign. But to go for a meeting of the South-South to say something like that is unfortunate.
To go the South South-people who are very troublesome, people who are fighting for their right over their oil…. You are indirectly trying to incite them. And we, if we have the crop of soldiers that we had previously, maybe that would have led to a coup. It was a very careless statement. Recently, the leadership of MOSOP in Ogoni land declared their autonomy and nothing has happened. People said that government should have reacted. What is your take on this? That is what the security system should have done.
They should have cautioned them immediately. Going to declare this thing autonomy, they are trying to incite another round of insurrection in that area. Our security system should have foiled that statement, invite them and deal with them. But to allow them to do what they did and nobody was arrested and nobody was cautioned is very bad.
So, if tomorrow comes and another group decides to join them and declare their own self- autonomy, then we are already gradually breaking this country into pieces. It is unfortunate. Let me come back to the issue of Dokubo…… Dokubo threatened in the papers that there would be war. I expected the SSS to invite him and interrogate him because the statement is very inflammatory. If they had invited him over his comment, maybe that would send the signal to others not to make such statement.
But nobody called him. Several groups and individuals in different parts of the country are making the same statements or are acting out the fact that they are tired of the Nigeria state as it is presently composed. Where would all these lead us to? It would lead to greater problems for all of us and if care is not taken it would dismember us. The thing is that everybody is crying of injustice and corruption.
Let there be justice in the country. Let there be less corruption in the country and let the security agencies put a stop to all these people who are making all these negative noises, otherwise every section of these country would start agitating for its own autonomy and one day, we would wake up and find that we have several countries in one country. Some critics have blamed the judiciary for the failure to punish corrupt persons arguing that their pace and alleged lack of honesty are not favorable to the dispensation of justice in the land.
What is your take on this ? As a matter of fact, the Nigeria judiciary has not done well at all. But I will want you take note that the new Chief Justice of the Federation has promised to deal with corrupt judges. So, we are now waiting to see what she can do. But having said this, I agree that the judiciary has contributed to our problems in fighting corruption in the society. If they are honest and they handled their cases the way they are supposed to handle them, in line with their oath of office, things would have been very well.
That is why the people keep crying of injustice and corruption. But how do think that the judiciary has failed Nigerians? Is it the speed in which they dispatch the cases or is it that the rulings of the courts are not just or is it in terms of the fact that the highly rich fellows are never convicted? How? The way I look at it is that if we are blaming the judiciary about the speed, we should also blame the lawyers.
It is the lawyers that prolong justice in court because they come with arguments. They try to find ways of frustrating the cases. All they want is for their clients to be free and therefore, employ all means to delay the trials. Sometimes, they file a motion, motions that would take years to be argued in court. So, if we are blaming the judiciary for this challenge, we must also blame the lawyers and we must also blame the police, because all of them contribute to delaying the dispensation of justice in this country! What about these other institutions that are mandated to get corrupt people and interests to court- EFCC, ICPC and so on.
Have they performed well? No! I wouldn’t say that they have discharged their own parts creditably well and the reason is that right from inception of the EFCC, we were told, for instance, that all the state governors then had pending criminal cases of corruption. But up till this time, most of these governors have not been taken to court. The only one of them who was charged and convicted was the case of the former Edo governor, Mr. Lucky Igbinedion. But that was a deceit, the plea bargain thing.
There are many of these former governors that they told us had committed offences that are working as free men on the streets. Recently, there are some of those who were indicted on account of the power probe, nothing has happened. You see, it is the failure of these anti corruption agencies that have made the country to go on the way it is going. If the EFCC and the ICPC were doing their jobs very well, I am very sure that everybody will take a cue from them. So, it appears that the laws of this country are in favour of the rich.
The rich person never gets convicted, but the poor does. The ordinary person who steals gets his hand cut or you send him to prison for a year or so, but people who steal huge sums of money are roaming the streets. In the last few days, a number of names that were dragged to courts for their involvement in the fuel subsidy scam are being dropped. What is your take? That is what I am saying. There is discrimination in the handling of cases in this country. Somebody who is highly placed and somebody who is rich enough to buy justice would always escape justice.
That is what is happening. If today I, Abubakar Tsav, should commit an offence, I know nobody will spare me. They would remand me in custody perhaps until I die there. But people who are rich, you will never see anything happening to them when they commit an offence. The wife of the former president, Hajia Turai Yar Adua and the wife of the president, Patience Jonathan, are fighting dirty over land allocation.
How do you see the whole drama? It is very sad! It is tragic!! It is very sad because during the reign of Turai Yar Adua , Mrs. Patience Jonathan was her right hand person . She was loyal to her. She showed every loyalty to her. And this land in question was acquired during that period. And now that God Almighty has taken away the husband of Turai and Patience’s husband is now the president, she has gone on to take over this land. This is not good at all.
We had expected that she should have encouraged and supported Mrs.Yar’ Adua to complete her project, so that we would have continuity in this project. She has started her own project and maybe by the time she leaves office, her own project would become moribund. It is, indeed, a shameful thing for them to start quarreling over land. But I also blame the Minister of the Federal Capital. If Mrs. Yar ‘Adua had acquired this land and you issued a C of O to her and she made payments and she is not owing anything…. Then suddenly because a new president has come, and the new president has made you a minister, and you want to curry favour from him, then you went to revoke the land.
That is not good enough. That is why we don’t have leaders in the North. We have office seekers in the North! A person who has conscience would not have done a thing like that. He would have given her another land, elsewhere. Or if it was very important to use the same land, you should meet with the two ladies and told them the situation. This is because the projects they want to do are important. That of Yar Adua is important, the one Patience wanted to set up is maybe it is a money spinning venture, I don’t know yet!
The Sun.
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