In the concluding part of his wide-ranging interview with GBENRO ADESINA, former Nigerian AMBASSADOR (DR) YEMI FAROUNBI examines Nigeria’s declining influence in the international community, the country’s worsening security and moral challenges, the performance of successive governments since 1999 and the role of the media in holding leaders accountable. Farounbi also reflects on his diplomatic career, offers advice to younger Nigerians and challenges South-West governors and Yoruba leaders to revive the region’s tradition of innovation, education, enterprise and public service. The Excerpt:
Q: You were a broadcaster, a diplomat and a public administrator. Out of all these, which one gives you the greatest sense of fulfilment?
A: Diplomat. I love being able to represent Nigeria and talk about the enormity of its size and opportunities. However, Nigeria doesn’t understand how to use its embassies. So, I don’t like it. For example, when they want to go to New York, they will carry about 100 people. What are the people in the embassy doing? What needs to be done is to send a small team to join the embassy staff and do whatever you want to do there. We have not learnt the concept of the slim embassy. You don’t need an embassy that has 100 staff. You need an ambassador, an economic adviser, and a maximum of 10 staff, which you can properly fund. Most of the embassies are not well funded. They can’t pay rent for offices or for staff accommodation. Sometimes, they don’t pay their electricity bills; they don’t pay for water. In the Philippines, I learnt that the Nigerian embassy got burnt, and it has not been repaired. When you get there and push an idea to the Nigerian government about how to work with the host country, you will not get a response from home. You don’t get an appropriate answer at the appropriate time. It doesn’t make you very useful. So, you find some of those ambassadors enjoying retirement rather than being active and participating in the development of Nigeria, finding direct investment for Nigeria, attracting investors into Nigeria, and opening up their host countries for Nigerians to come and invest. They are unable to do that because they are not getting an appropriate response from home. That is why we have all kinds of people being made ambassadors, including those who don’t even know Nigeria. I like public administration. We are able to bring order into governance. But when it comes to changing society, I like the media. That is the one that makes me happy. I want to be able to change society. Ordinarily, the media should not conflict with the government. The government wants to change society along partisan lines. The media want to change society not along partisan lines, but along public-service lines. So, this will always bring conflict between the government and the media. I like to be able to influence people. I want to say, “This is not the best way to do it. This is not the best way to privatise.” I want to ask: Why can’t we handle electricity differently from the way we are doing it? Why are we not doing power through solar, wind, water, and nuclear energy? What happened to the 19 power plants Obasanjo started? What happened to the equipment? Why do we have the kind of things we have between Gbajabiamila and Adeyemo? Is that an indication of decay in the public service system? For example, for about 15 years under the military, they didn’t recruit new staff into the civil service. We now find that people up there are retiring and, under them, there is a gap. When they go, we will start recruiting people who have no experience to take over from seasoned people. The system will collapse. I want to critique our budget. So, I love the media passionately.
Q: Of the presidents you have known since 1999, who would you score the highest?
A: From 1999 to date, Obasanjo is the only Nigerian president who is truly a Nigerian. He has a lot of shortcomings, but he loves Nigeria. Absolutely, there is no doubt about that. Sometimes, because people underrated him, and he knew they underrated him, he didn’t give people too much of a chance. When you look at his face, he doesn’t look sharp, so they underrated him. Obasanjo has tremendous native intelligence. Because he thinks people underrate him, he doesn’t give them too much room. He is a great man. Yar’Adua was left-of-centre in his thinking. His community tried to possess him. They didn’t allow him to become the person he would have been. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is a nice man. He didn’t prove to me the intellect that I expected from the qualifications that he has. I didn’t exactly see that. He is a good man. He had a template for development, but he wasn’t as hardworking as OBJ. President Muhammadu Buhari — I didn’t expect much from him. A lot of people talked so highly of him because of the former years he had with Idiagbon, but I knew it was Idiagbon who was working. I was in the public service long enough to know that. When Buhari got there and there was no Idiagbon, it showed. His environment ensured that there would be no Idiagbon because Idiagbon made sure it wasn’t Buhari’s government; it was their government. He was pocketed by people around him, and they were even monitoring his offices. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is okay. What he promised me in his inaugural speech, he has not fulfilled a lot of them. Also, there are a lot of sycophants around him. He should stop them. They have named every street, every university, every hostel, and every barracks after him. He doesn’t need all of that. Some of his appointments are not the best, but I think it is an inherited system. Nigeria’s political system doesn’t allow the best to be recruited because we don’t look for the best. There are a lot of things I still expect from him. When we were calling for restructuring, we were there together. When we were asking for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC), we were there together. When we were talking about true federalism, we were there together. A lot of the things I see represent ideological somersaults. Sometimes, I doubt whether he is the one or somebody else is doing it. You can be an “omo ita” and achieve those things that the people, the status quo men in the corridors of power, don’t want. They don’t want change, but he needs change to leave behind a legacy.
Q: What are the biggest challenges Nigeria is confronting, and how can they be resolved?
A: Number one is security. To address it, we need to understand the causes of insecurity. We think that security is just about carrying guns and using drones. No. A lot of the insecurity we have revolves around religion. Those of the Islamic State West Africa Province, those of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, those of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, the people called Lakurawa, people called JF, and Boko Haram are ideologically religious. Their objective is to establish an Islamic state and Islamise Nigeria. How to deal with that is different from the insecurity that comes from people who don’t have jobs. If you give them jobs, they will no longer pose the same kind of security threat. First, you have to create and ensure job security. You have to think about social welfare, social security, and housing security. The man who has no place to sleep and no food to eat can easily be recruited to become an agent of insecurity. We have to look at the totality of our economy. Does our educational system allow people to be trained to become job creators rather than job seekers? The over 37 million housing deficit that we have in Nigeria- how do we solve it? People don’t have to sleep under bridges. A lot of people become criminals because their relatives are sick and they cannot pay the medical bills. So, if somebody tells them, “If you join us to kidnap people, you will get money,” they join them. That kind of kidnapping is not the same as Boko Haram. It is a business to make money instead of armed robbery or 419. They make money from it. That is economic banditry. You can’t solve that unless you create jobs and provide more houses so that people can sleep and sleep in peace. Then, you can have multilayered security: federal police, state police, local government police, and community police. Vigilantes, all of them working together, can provide a security umbrella for the people. That is the most important problem we have. The second problem is morality. Morality in Nigeria has collapsed. In the past, if you were a thief and you went to a party, nobody would sit near you. They would isolate you. They would let you know that you were a social deviant who could not mix with other people. But today, we will hail you. We will give you a chieftaincy title in the town, in the mosque, and in the church. It is about making money, rightly or wrongly. That is why a contractor will reduce the thickness of a road. Doing that is depriving society of its rights. We must revive our morality. The third problem is the economy. So long as people keep stealing, how do we protect our economy? Look at the kind of money they said Malami, the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, has stolen. How do we protect our wealth when those who are supposed to protect it are stealing it? We can’t talk about how much has been stolen because the sins of some people are covered up because of political alignment. How do we develop our economy in that situation? If we want to grow our economy, we must change our moral system.
Q: What is our image in the international community?
A: Our image was completely tarnished, particularly during the Abacha era. Obasanjo did what he could to lift it. International policy is an extension of domestic policy. So, what you are outside is a function of your domestic strength. We don’t have much domestic strength any longer. There was a time when we coughed in ECOWAS, the whole of West Africa would shake. They no longer shake. We have lost the influence and leadership that came from our sheer geographical and economic strength. We stopped being who we were in the African Union (AU). They don’t respect us. We are no longer the strongest economy. We are not the biggest economy. So, we have lost respect. We have a population, but we don’t have the military strength or the economic strength. All of that has been affecting us. That is why they treat our citizens the way they do outside the country. They know Nigeria will do nothing beyond making civilised noises. We made civilised noises in South Africa; nothing happened. They know nothing will happen. They know who we are — that we don’t know how to defend our citizens. When we can’t defend ourselves at home, when we can’t protect ourselves, how would we protect our citizens outside? This is the only country I know where the embassy doesn’t know its citizens in that country. This is because Nigerians will go to a country and will not go to the embassy because they don’t trust the embassy. They can’t go there for help. If they have to be brought back home, the embassy will not be able to do anything. If Air Peace didn’t volunteer, those people would still be in South Africa because the embassy is not adequately equipped for such things. These are things we have to look at so that our image can be restored.
Q: What decision have you taken in the past that you think you shouldn’t have taken, or what should you have done differently?
A: None that I can think of. But there are things I thought I could have done and didn’t do. It has nothing to do with decisions. For some years, I just decided to observe Nigeria. When I got tired, I started writing columns, which I did for years for the Sunday Tribune, Saturday Tribune, and sometimes Sketch. I called them “Better Days.” I believe we have to keep on pushing our people. The Yoruba say, “Wọn kì í yágo fún ẹlẹ́ṣin àná,” meaning, you don’t clear the road for the man who rode a horse yesterday. It is the man riding it that you are using the whip on. You have to continue to whip him, not because you hate him, but because you love Nigeria. This is the only country I know where they will hate you because you criticise a leader. They will think you criticise him because you hate him. They don’t know that you do it because you love him. I spent eight years writing columns criticising OBJ. By his own admission, it cost me appointments two or three times. The day he left office, I wrote a column in the Saturday Tribune titled “The Achievements of OBJ.” He called me and said, “So, I had achievements?” I said, “You did.” But I didn’t see them in your columns, he said. I said, “I can’t be praising you when there are still more things you can do.” I had looked at him as someone who could change the economy of Nigeria and put it on the right footing. Then I saw some drifting, so I hit you so that you could drift back. But that doesn’t mean you have not achieved. He said he didn’t know.
Q: If the younger Yemi Farounbi were sitting before you now, what advice would you give him?
A: The younger Yemi was a rascal. I was the General of rascals. I had them all over. I had nothing to fear. I didn’t care about my children, their school fees, and things like that. I didn’t have those things to bother about. As I try to be that younger person, it is difficult. I wish the younger Yemi had persisted until now. I would tell the younger Yemi: keep on doing what you are doing.
Q: What advice do you have for younger journalists, public servants and leaders in Nigeria?
A: Don’t give up on Nigeria. Do everything you can to add value, no matter how small. See what you can do to make Nigeria a better place. Our private sector is as corrupt as the government sector, but I know Nigeria has too many good people. The corrupt people who create problems for Nigeria are very few. They are not up to one million. It is up to the remaining 36 million Nigerians to decide that we are going to make Nigeria better. Those one million people who create problems will either leave us or join us in making Nigeria better. We seem to have succumbed to those one million.
Q: Say something to your fellow Yoruba people and the South-West governors.
A: The South-West governors should first ask themselves: Have they lived up to the expectations of the Yoruba people? Are they really, indeed and in truth, leaders of the Omoluabi? Are they Omoluabi in their character? Are they showing commitment to the people? Have they demonstrated that, in 1954, we started free education? Have they demonstrated that this place called the South-West started the first housing estate in Africa, the first television station in Africa, an Olympic-standard stadium, and the first commercial broadcasting service in Nigeria? This place started the first industrial estates in Apapa, Yaba, and Ikeja in Nigeria. What are they doing that is first in terms of development? Have they forgotten that this was a place where education was made available to all, irrespective of party affiliation, age, or the financial capacity of the parents? Are they doing the same thing? Have they looked into opportunities in areas such as tourism, culture, and the arts? How are they taking advantage of the restlessness of the intellect of Yoruba youth and making them part of the progressive and developmental movement of the South-West? How are they looking at the political recruitment system? Are their local government chairmen as good as the local government chairmen under Awolowo? Can they compare their cabinets with that of Awolowo in 1957? Do they know that, in spite of so much support Awolowo had, he couldn’t impose Alayande as governor? He couldn’t impose Olawoyin as governor. He couldn’t support Omoboriowo as governor. He had to bow to the wishes of the people. Why are the governors imposing local government chairmen and other people — members of the Houses of Assembly, members of the House of Representatives? Why are the people becoming unimportant in a democratic setting? Why are the people becoming so irrelevant in the South-West? To the kings and traditional rulers, are they like the Ooni Aderemi, the Ewi Aladesanmi, the Deji Adesida, and the Olowo Olateru? I am saying they should bring the values of the past back and integrate them with today. Can they please protect the Yoruba? Can they look at the fact that major streets in our cities have been taken over by non-Yoruba people? Just go to Ado-Ekiti, on the way to Ilawe, where NTA is, and see those who have taken over the place. I’m not talking about Lagos. I’m not talking about the area from the National Theatre to LASU. Who has taken over the place? What has happened that we don’t have the Odutolas any longer? What has happened to us who started WEMA Bank, Agbomagbe Bank, and National Bank? Where are we today in the banking industry? Where are we in the industry? We who communally built secondary schools — why can’t we communally build industries that will create jobs and opportunities for our youth? Where are the small-scale industries again — the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and hairdressers? Now we have to look for other nationals to do these kinds of jobs for us. What happened to our trade centres? At a time, they were talking about a Yoruba nation. Yoruba has always been a nation by every definition. We might not have been a nation-state. For us to move forward, it is not the absence of a nation-state that has prevented us from moving forward. We tend to begin to behave like others. At a time, we abandoned our own agbada for babariga. At another time, we abandoned agbada for the Jos dress because we wanted to be like them. When they want to be like us, we are struggling to be like them. Do we know the kind of lamp that Oduduwa gave us that we are carrying — the heavy lamp of light, of leadership, a beacon of hope and trust? We have now begun to hide that and run after something else. I think we must change. If Yoruba gets it right, Nigeria will get it right. Nigerians like competition, but they want somebody to lead. When we started television in 1959, the East started in 1960, and the North started in 1962. When we started free education in 1954, the East started in 1956. You, who are expected to chart the path, want to be like those who are looking up to you to chart the path. There must be something wrong with us. We are doing well in the churches. We probably have some of the best churches: RCCG, Deeper Life, and Winners. At a time, we dominated the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church, the CAC, and the Apostolic Church. In those days, those churches built schools, hospitals, trade centres, workshops, and industries. The Catholic Church is among the richest in the world. They own gold mines, factories, and hospitality centres. Why were our churches not doing that to create jobs for our people? Take people off the streets. Put them in jobs. The Yoruba must accept responsibility for building this country. Running away from this country when you have succeeded in joining others to bring it down is to say that God will judge you. Let us atone for our sins by doing things differently and by behaving well. Let the churches create jobs, trade centres, ICT hubs, and other things that will make it possible for everybody who comes here to eat out of their labour. We can do it.
