Post-election violence can’t vindicate Campbell’s instability theory on Nigeria, says Ajumogobia
We’ve just conducted the 2011 elections. There were commendations and then came the violence. How have the elections affected the country’s image in the international community? I think the 2011 elections are very important for Nigeria. We in Nigeria recognize that and the international community was anxious to see how we will fare. We did […]
We’ve just conducted the 2011 elections. There were commendations and then came the violence. How have the elections affected the country’s image in the international community?
I think the 2011 elections are very important for Nigeria. We in Nigeria recognize that and the international community was anxious to see how we will fare. We did very well and it is unfortunate that the aftermath of the election, the violence that came after the presidential election, is being used in some quarters to try and overshadow the obvious, extraordinary success of the elections.
Apart from the comments that international observers have made, which we have published, are there some comments by the international community that you find interesting?
I find the statement of some members of the international media particularly interesting because in one breath, they commended the election process as having been acclaimed by observers as free and fair and in another breath, they seemed to question the outcome. Now, no election is perfect anywhere in the world. So statements that this election was ‘far from perfect’ don’t say very much. Saying that it was an improvement on the 2007 elections is a gross understatement. It is interesting to juxtapose these mixed statements with those of all observers who were on the ground: the International Monitoring Group (IMG). European Union, African Union, the Commonwealth observer group, Economic Community of West African States and other pre-eminent election monitoring groups, who all said it was a free and credible election. I find it difficult to explain mixed statements in view of the reports of experienced election observers. If the post –election violence is the reason, it would be unfortunate because those statements should have applauded the election and deplored the violence.
US Secretary of State issued a mixed statement on behalf of President Obama. Have you drawn her attention to the fact that observers acclaimed the election as free and fair?
The result of the Presidential elections only came out last week. I travelled out of the country immediately after. I visited the French Foreign Minister. He commended the elections. Mrs Clinton did also-she commended our efforts and congratulated the president, commended Prof. Jega and INEC and said INEC should investigate some of the complaints. I do think that the statements of the international and local observers carry much weight. No country is obliged to have observers. We scheduled an election. We could have decided that we didn’t want to have observers. For example, in Egypt, former President Hosni Mubarak, said he didn’t want to have observers to elections there. We decided to have observers and gave them freedom to move around the country and they came out and said it was a credible election. Interestingly; the candidates all said it was good, before the results came out. I don’t know how you can applaud a process and say the outcome was rigged.
There is this viewpoint that the international community commended the elections because, if they didn’t, their economic interest in Nigeria will be threatened. Talk about their oil companies operating in the Niger Delta, etc. Do you see it from that perspective?
I find that perspective very interesting because the presidential candidates themselves commended the elections: Malam Ibrahim Shekarau, Dele Momodu, Nuhu Ribadu, General Buhari, all of them commended the election. Everyone spoke from the perspective of their own experience, and without exception, everyone commended INEC. I think the international community commended the elections because their representatives on the ground acclaimed the elections as being fair and transparent.
Earlier in the year, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, wrote a piece on Nigeria in which he predicted that there might be violence after the 2011 elections because the country will be polarized. Do you see the violence as a prediction coming to pass?
John Campbell’s thesis is based on the supposition that the country is made up of a Christian south and a Muslim north; therefore, there will be conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian south. That is not the case. The violence that we’ve seen after the 2011 election has been targeted violence, targeted based on political lines. We all know in Nigeria that the political parties in Nigeria are not religious-based. There’s no party that is made up of just northerners or southerners. That underlining premise is faulty. You can’t build facts on a faulty premise. John Campbell was writing a book: Nigeria: Dancing on a Brink. His thesis is as contrived as the images that you see on international television of burnt cars and houses, rather than the impressive queues of people lining up to vote. If you are objective, you should show the election and also the reaction to the election. I refuse to allow anyone to diminish for me the extraordinary effort and success of the 2011 elections by emphasizing the clearly orchestrated violence.
As foreign minister, when you read such thesis, you should have alerted the government by saying this is the thought coming from some quarters. The piece attempted to say if Jonathan contested against a northern Muslim, the country will be polarized, essentially because the zoning principle of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was violated to give Jonathan the presidential ticket?
The fact is that Nigeria can have only one president, who is likely to be a Christian or a Muslim. If you accept John Campbell’s thesis that if it is a Muslim, Christians wouldn’t accept it, and if it’s a Christian, Muslims would protest, then we can’t have a president. I had once responded to Ambassador John Campbell and I am not inclined to respond to him again. I’m only answering your question. He wrote a book in which he advanced a clearly faulty thesis and I suppose he has to be consistent. His readers will expect no less.
Niger Republic and Ghana had elections and there was no conflict. Are you worried that Nigeria, the Big Brother, had its own elections and there was violence?
I went to Guinea. They had a very close election. Alpha Conde won the election by a small margin. His opponent, Saidi Diallo, was very upset about the election. He felt he won. He went to court, which decided that Alpha Conde won, and he said he wouldn’t contest it. I think that demonstration of patriotic leadership is what determines the outcome of some of these things. All the candidates, after the votes, said this was a free and fair election. They commended INEC. All of them said they will accept the outcome of the election – on record. Then, the result came out, which were different from what they expected. I think everyone has a duty and regardless of your feeling of how the elections were, we all have the duty to protect lives and property. It’s not just the responsibility of government. If there was a tendency to react violently, all leaders, regardless of their persuasion, have a duty to restrain their followers. In 1968, France had the worst student riots that you can imagine. I was in secondary school. There were also riots in France in 2010 reminiscent of the 1968 riots. Riots don’t make a country unstable. It’s a law and order issue. Law and order has been by themselves necessarily restored in the places where there was violence. There will be law enforcement to ensure law and order is preserved in those areas, and life goes on. If you look at different parts of the world, there are riots in different places at different times. Why is it that when there is riot in Nigeria the entire country is said to be unstable? In 2007/2008 in Rivers State. Jeff Koinage was a CNN correspondent and he was staying in Hotel Presidential. There was nothing going on there, but he was broadcasting from the lobby of Hotel Presidential, wearing a flak-jacket. What was the message – that, Niger Delta militants were on rampage? When the BBC shows images of burnt cars and houses, and not the impressive queues of voters, it’s the same message they are sending out. Viewers will conclude that Nigeria is unstable. This is not true. Nigeria is not unstable. Companies are doing very well. The profits being returned in Nigeria by foreign companies are Nigerian subsidiaries and are often higher than profits returned from other subsidiaries in other parts of the world. Many multinational companies operating in Nigeria know that the profit they make in Nigeria is always a significant part of their profits from around the world. That has not changed and the riots in Kaduna and Bauchi will not change that.
What are the indications that after May 29, foreign investors will come into Nigeria?
Already, I have people showing interest in coming to Nigeria. They’re asking me about oil and gas sector investments; investment in agriculture and in our electricity sector. We’re going to spend $3.5 billion a year for the next ten years to build our power sector. The return from that investment will make the return from the telecoms sector insignificant. In telecoms, for instance, we had 500,000 lines in 1999 when President Obasanjo was elected. Today, we have 75 million subscribers! That’s the telephone which you don’t have to use every day. But you use electricity every day. That’s why the whole world is interested in Nigeria. Otherwise, why should the whole world care about our elections? It’s because they want to come and invest here. Unfortunately, we have an opposition that is vocal and some of who reacted violently to the outcome that was unfavourable. Unfortunately, the foreign media is taking negative images and spreading them across the world as a pointer to instability.
We had this crisis in Ivory Coast. What did you tell the disgraced Laurent Gbagbo and how did he take your counsel?
I never had the dubious honour of meeting him.
Why do you call it a ‘dubious honour’?
Because I think what he did was not what any leader should do. Thousands of people died in his country simply because he lost an election and wouldn’t handover to the newly elected leader. He was ready to bring his country to ruin to ensure he stayed in power. His last five years in power was without an election. He conducted the election; accepted the rules; indeed he as President had to endorse them. He invited the United Nations to monitor the elections; he went through the first round of the election; and the result was endorsed by the UN; he accepted that result; assuming that he will win the second round. But he lost. He brought the country to almost a ruin. Cote d’Ivoire was one of the hubs of development in the West African sub-region. When the results came out, it was crystal clear, even when you discounted the places he was complaining about. Former President Gbagbo lost the election and should have done what was honourable and handed over.
Initially, we thought ECOWAS will use force to push Gbagbo out, but we didn’t. Now, France came and did the job. What does that say of our policy?
That is not quite accurate. ECOWAS passed two resolutions. The second talked about the use of legitimate force. That was deliberate. The expression, ‘legitimate force,’ implies a UN sanctioned action, and that is exactly what happened. Nigeria and France presented a joint resolution at the UN Security Council to secure the use of force under a UN mandate, to protect innocent civilians and that was exactly what happened. The resolution also sanctioned the support of the 900 French forces stationed in Cote d’Ivoire for the UN forces there to protect civilians and destroy heavy weapons of the government. That’s exactly what happened.
Nigerians in Cote d’Ivoire, at a point, came under attack. What’s their condition now?
Peace is being restored. I went to Cote d’Ivoire and met with President Allasane Ouattara, at the head of a delegation sent by President Jonathan four days after former President Gbagbo surrendered. We drove through the town; it was very quiet, like any city that has suffered from civil strife and military occupation. I saw the television station completely destroyed. It was almost like a ghost town, but normalcy is returning. I visited our embassy, because it came under mortar attack at one point. Happily, there was no damage to the building. Life is slowly returning to normal.
Was there any assistance to Nigerian victims?
Yes, there was some. A few people were evacuated. As you’re probably aware, we have more than two million Nigerians in Cote d’Ivoire and maybe another five million other nationals from Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, etc. So for those who advocated evacuation we would have been talking about the evacuation of about seven million people. Therefore, we thought that the United Nations troops there should be given the mandate to protect the people, and that’s the best protection that we could have given our own nationals and others in the circumstances.
In Nigeria, the Chinese are taking over many sectors. In Kano, for instance, the Chinese are involved in retailing textile materials. Then, in the mining sector, they are suspected to be involved in illegal mining across the country. Under what deal are they doing all these in Nigeria?
We’re operating a free market economy and that means we don’t discriminate with regard to who our investment partners are. President Jonathan has just won a brand new mandate. This is his own mandate. He had been exercising a joint mandate with the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua. As part of his new mandate, he’s going to review economic and fiscal policies and those policies that are not going to complement his agenda for transformation will be changed.
As a country, what can we say we have gained from being a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO? I see Nigeria as a dumping ground, but other countries wouldn’t allow our local products into their own markets?
As far as WTO is concerned, we, Nigeria and some other developing countries, have been advocating that the complete removal of barriers to trade are not in the interest of developing countries, like ours. I think that no country is an island, and we can’t act unilaterally. That’s why we are working within international fora to try and change the rules in the market place in such a way that we can compete with the Chinese, for example. We’ll continue to press for changes in the rules with regards to trade under the WTO.
What’s Nigeria’s position of the crisis in Libya today?
Our position on Libya is this: we’ve offered to mediate between the Ghaddafi government and the rebels. If both will accept Nigeria as an honest broker, I think that will be good. I think the Libyan people should have a say on how they are governed. They should choose. I think that, unlike Cote d’Ivoire, where we had an elected president and one who lost an election and refused to stand down, Col. Ghaddafi wasn’t an elected president, neither are the rebels. A negotiated outcome is what I will advocate.
The rebels say they’re not ready to negotiate with Ghaddafi?
It may well be a matter of trust. I went to great lengths to restore diplomatic ties with Libya after Col. Ghaddafi’s inflammatory comments that Nigeria should split along religious lines. I contacted the foreign minister in the former Libyan cabinet and we eventually agreed to restore relations so that Libya would send its ambassador to Nigeria and we’ll send ours back. We signed an agreement – I and Moussa Koussa who has since left the government. We honoured our part, but they haven’t. That’s a little bit disturbing, because if you have an agreement and the other party is not acting in tandem with it, it does not build confidence to enter into other agreements. It’s my judgment that from the images we saw of government using deadly weapons against unarmed civilians, to get some of these formerly unarmed civilians to sit around a table in a neutral place with Col. Ghaddafi’s government, suggests progress in the right direction.
What conditions have the rebels given before they can have a deal with Ghaddafi?
I haven’t actually engaged them yet. But we have made it public that this is Nigeria’s position and in the days and weeks ahead, we’ll try and make contacts with both sides. This is the possibility that we want to explore.
Do you think Africa should remain the “centerpiece” of Nigeria’s foreign policy?
When we say this, we are saying that Nigeria can’t develop if we have conflicts in the countries around us. It’s going to affect our own development agenda if there’s conflict and instability everywhere around us. Therefore, it’s important for us to ensure we don’t have conflicts in our sub-region.
But the attempt to have free trade in West Africa has not worked out?
It’s better now than it used to be. When I was in the university, you needed a visa to go to Ghana. You needed a visa to go to Benin Republic. You don’t anymore. I can just wake up and go to Benin Republic. We’ve made progress. The European Union (EU) started almost 50 years ago. The great vision of the EU was a common market, but it took time to create and there are still problems. The Euro is even more recent. They have a currency that is competing with the dollar today. We aspire to have a West African currency. I think it’s a big vision and the Nigerian market, as big as it is, will be bigger if that vision is realised.
What I’m driving at is this: What have we gained from our role as ‘Big Brother’ in Africa – intervening here and there? We know the Western powers are in Libya because, after the conflict, they’ll profit from its oil wealth. But what has Nigeria gained from interventions in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, etc?
There’s going to be a shift in our foreign policy. People have continued to ask me, ‘what is Nigeria’s foreign policy?’ and I refuse to put a tag to it. Most countries don’t. What is the US foreign policy? Recently, Dr. Henry Kissinger spoke of ‘pragmatic idealism’ in an effort to encapsulate the US policy in Libya and the Middle East. Our foreign policy is defined in our constitution – national interest (incorporating citizenship diplomacy), African integration, our international cooperation and responsibility and promotion of a just world economic order that was implied in your question about WTO. Right now, I think we should concentrate on what will promote our national interest. Someone asked me recently that, ‘we hear you gave power to Chad, you give gas to Ghana. Is that part of our foreign policy?’ My response was that part of our foreign policy is to have friends and if you have friends and they have needs that you can meet, you do your best to meet them, as part of that friendship. The difference now is that we’re going to demand reciprocal treatment.
Finally, what will you be remembered for as foreign minister?
I have only been in this office for a year but I would like to be remembered as a foreign minister who sought to mould consensus rather than just being part of it. In Cote d’Ivoire and Libya, Nigeria took a stand that is not in consonance with our usual passive approach of abstaining when it comes to controversial issues; we tend to be neutral. We took a firm stand in Cote d’Ivoire. We’re one of the few countries that took a stand right through to the end. In Libya, we moved the consensus for the African group to support the No Fly Zone. Some people have questioned that.