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.
