Former secretary of Transparency international (TI) and retired Director of Training and Doctrine of Nigerian Army, Gen Isola Williams, is as blunt ashe could be. As for him, after practising constitutional democracy for 20 years, he has come to the conclusion that Nigeria’s problem lies among the followership who he said failed to produce good leaders to lead them due to what he described as chop and chop politics and tendency to corrupt leaders elected into office.
He also said, in this exclusive interview with Executive Editor, Tunde Abatan, that the 1999 constitution as it is now cannot lead to the development of the nation arguing that Nigeria should revert to parliamentary system of government.
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Excerpts
What do you think are the main issues affecting Nigeria today?
I will say most of the issues that concerned Nigeria that Nigerians don’t talk about are the choice of leadership. What most Nigerians forget is that political leaders do not fall from heaven it is the followership that create political leaders. Nobody was born a political leader and very few political leaders have their children to take over from them. We have people saying the problem of Nigeria is leadership but I don’t believe that. The problem is from followership because the leaders come from followers.
If the followership is corrupt you cannot expect the leaders to be incorruptible, if the followership are incompetent you cannot expect the leaders to be competent because corrupt people would not choose incorruptible people and incompetent people won’t elect competent people no matter what noise they make. The second interesting thing all over the world which is also in Nigeria is that Nigerians want incorruptible leaders like every part of the world you discover that those being voted for are incorruptible people but you see Nigeria who believe in eat and lets chop, how do we reconcile the two and that is what we need to look into. We all know that reduce corruption to the minimum at all level of the polity whether it’s in the civil service, public service non-governmental sector, churches, everywhere Nigeria will be a paradise for all of us but there is a point which is also a contradiction. Nigerians want a paradise but they are more concerned about what they can get and that is why people who occupy position are being harassed by their families and relatives to keep stealing. So in that case, how do you want to have people in positions who are not corrupt? The second point that should worry Nigerians is the system of government. When you have a situation in which local government and states collect monthly allocation from Abuja every month without accounting for the previous one in terms of performance, value for money and especially the impact on citizens’ lives. So what do you expect?
It is an opportunity being created for people to loot. The condition you have in Nigeria today is that Nigeria has plenty of money whether earned or borrowed. Secondly, people are appointed into public positions instead of being recruited which means the level of patronage is very high and in most cases it is not by merit. Like everybody knows once you are appointed you must look out for yourself that means take as much as you can take and when you are caught depending on your connection, the case would die and that would be the end of the story. We have three conditions for the kind of corrupt system we have to continue to thrive. The three conditions are: plenty of money, lack of accountability and above all, impunity and that was confirmed by Osiomhole who said that come to APC and your sins shall be forgiven. So in that case, what people like us interpret that to mean is that APC is an Alliance of Political Crooks and they can not deny that. Many of them left PDP to join APC so it is an alliance of political crooks. So I call PDP poltikians Deceiving the People.
The two main parties we have in Nigeria; the Alliance of political crooks and politicians deceiving the People they are not our hope at all so we should consider on how we can make a change which are the fundamental issues. So what we need to do is that the constitution is basic and that constitution has to be changed from the presidential system to the parliamentary system. What is surprising me is that the alliance of political crooks said they are going to make a change including constitutional changes and they set up a committee and the committee camp with a report and they did nothing with the report, could you imagine if that constitution has been turned into a constitutional amendment.
To be cpntinued
