Charles Cobb Jr. and Akwe Amosu
14 February 2003
(Page 3 of 4)
The parallel is just a legalistic, administrative one. I am saying that what is happening is good because we may succeed in conducting a civilian election.
Now this business about the 'man on the street'. I don't want to say too much about it, but the man in the street does not really feature too much in these things, I am very sorry to say. This has to wait until after three or four or five elections. When the man on the street becomes the centre then democracy will be assured. Right now, what seems to happen is that so long as the big political barons and baronesses can agree at the top, that's it. This is what matters.
You find that primaries are not held very much. Only the local government ones are held and even then people try all they can - governors and others - to impose candidates. For example, there's one place where the issue is still not settled because the man who won was not acceptable to the state chairman of the party and he is saying "No! he's not going to win!"
This [pattern of the] elite fighting it out among themselves is what you will find in PDP. You will find it in ANPP. And you will find it in all these other parties. The man on the street has not started to matter all that much. It's going to come.
Maybe the present political parties will reform; but maybe they will be gradually replaced, supplanted by ideologically-oriented parties. Right now the latter parties are really nowhere because these huge parties dominated by the elite barons are the ones [on top].
But okay, they are still managing to hold the country together and if we continue like this, it may not be in our lifetime, but slowly, slowly these parties will either reform or be replaced by other ideologically-oriented parties or by a coalition of these parties. It will come but I think it would be too much for you and me to expect that to feature at this time.
You are going back to engage in politics. You're running for office. Why? To do what?
To be a senator!
It seems an odd leap to go from being Ambassador to campaigning for political office, especially given what you've just said.
I want to go and help this transformation. The word "senator" is derived from the word for old people in the days of Rome so that's where I should be.
Somebody asked me the same thing: "How can you go? You're an ambassador in the most powerful nation in the world. You don't have any problems. Now you're leaving to go back into politics. Are you out of your mind?" I don't look at it like that. I entered politics to serve the people and to serve my party, now the PDP. And whether I'm here as ambassador, whether I am a Senator, whether I am asked to take party office, whatever it is, to me it is the same: serving the party and serving the country.
I do not adopt a new accent and new postures and new lifestyles because of where I am. Since I decided to take part in politics, my stay here was a political appointment and the Senate is political.
I also have another feeling: that the constitution must be helped. We must all help the constitution. In what way can we help the constitution? By making people accept that these power centers,these arms of government, are there as a right. We have had a lot of dogfights for the past four years between the executive and the legislature. To me that is very unfortunate but very understandable. It will be less now.
Some of us think that we might help to reduce this kind of tension because that's the most dangerous for the country. People should understand that in my country the two symbols of democracy are the political parties and the legislatures. The military governments all had presidents; they had ministers; they had governors, the judiciary. They had all of these things. The two things they did not have were the political parties and the legislatures. So, the people in the executive grew to look at the legislature as some kind of unnecessary nuisance. It is not.
Maybe the legislators in many respects - also understandably - have overreached themselves. That is a very dangerous area between the executive and the legislature. We have also had weird things happen, like the executive sending in the police to surround the house of the president of the Senate or people trying to impeach the president. All these type of things were used in what I call this long dogfight and maybe as many people as can should go and try to help.
I believe I am on very good terms with people in the executive. And I've been on very good terms with people in the legislature and I see myself as going to try and find other people to work with, to appeal to people to close their hand so that we can, in fact, entrench the constitution.
Constitutions have suffered in Nigeria because of military regimes. The first thing any soldier who comes into power does is to dissolve the constitution or suspend it and dissolve the political parties - dissolve all the structures and we have to start anew. I don't think we can continue to do this and achieve the kind of progress we want.
Are you with those people who feel that the constitution is actually under threat, partly because of the Sharia issue? Many people are arguing - we heard this at various sessions during the recent African Studies Association meeting - that there needs to be a national conference.
That is nonsense! It's all nonsense! When Nigerians want something they use the most absurd arguments to try to advance it. Over the years because of our history, "national unity", "shaking the very fabric of society", "basis for living together" - all of these phrases have been rather carelessly used. Nobody in America says "let's meet and discuss our basis for living together".
We are being ridiculous. Anybody who talks about "let's sit down and have a national conference; let's sit under a tree with the village elders, smoking pipes and all that... and let's decide how we're going to live together... It's nonsense! This is the kind of thing that politicians do when they cannot have their way.
But do you see any problem there to be addressed?
The Sharia issue? I can tell you, that President Obasanjo has the best approach to it. Sharia has to do with religious sentiment and is not something that you can change. You have to allow the thing to exhaust its own momentum. And the more you try and stand in their way the greater the momentum you give them.
We are not the greatest Muslims in the world. there are many Muslim states and some of them, like Iran, even run Islamic governments; and there is Saudi Arabia, Sudan - countries where people are trying run things in the way of Islam and they don't do all of these things.
There is a verse in the Koran that says that under God, there is endless treasure with limitless blessing but he sends it down in 'Quanta' (measured installments); he doesn't send it down at once. If you regard Sharia as a blessing to Muslim society, then you should be prepared to send it down in quanta and not to try to introduce the whole thing at the same time. In fact, you tend to make fun of it because you cannot really enforce it. If you start some laws that you cannot enforce you are actually ridiculing that law.
So Sharia will kind of 'blow over' in these places if the matter is left to take its course?
No, it's not going to blow over; it will gradually find its position and it will go back to virtually what we had before. The [Nigerian] penal code was based on Sharia. The constitution of Nigeria limits Sharia to personal law - marriage, adoption, inheritance, things like that. And these people said no, we're going to expand it.
I can tell you that the whole Sharia thing was nothing but a reaction to the way the Christians in the country have positioned themselves with Islam, like blocking any mention of Sharia in the constitution, blocking Nigeria from entering the Organization of Islamic States - things like that. How people dress in schools; blocking small things that could have been easily tolerated and accepted.
The Christians have a very powerful national organization known as CAN (Christian Association of Nigeria). You can imagine what would happen if, for example, the Muslims in Nigeria were to form a Muslim Association of Nigeria. This is, as far as I am concerned, the whole basis of this Sharia thing. And after they have made their point that nobody is going to constrain them and they find that they cannot contain anybody else, they will see that we really have to live together and it is silly to keep fighting one another and breaking each other's limbs because of something which we cannot change. I think it's going to settle down. It may take some time.
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