What 100 religious leaders told Jonathan about fuel subsidy removal – Archbishop Onaiyekan
It is Christmas again. To some, it means getting more money, more gifts; it means travelling. But truly, what is the significance of Christmas? Simply put, it is the anniversary of the birth our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ in Bethlehem about 2,011 years ago. I say briefly put because each of these can […]
It is Christmas again. To some, it means getting more money, more gifts; it means travelling. But truly, what is the significance of Christmas?
Simply put, it is the anniversary of the birth our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ in Bethlehem about 2,011 years ago. I say briefly put because each of these can be discussed at length. Over the centuries, Christmas has become a big annual celebration. It was not so at the beginning because Christianity was starting; second, because Christians were not in position to make big celebrations, especially in the early days when they were persecuted for being Christians. But as time went on, historically, culturally, various things piled up so that now we have what is called our Christian celebration, which has aspects of different cultures and aspects that were brought in as time went forward.
You will find out, the way we celebrate Christmas in Nigeria is not the same way that you see it when you go to the United States or Japan and places like that. But basically, the bottom-line is that the reason for the celebration of Christmas is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. You can discuss and maybe debate on whether this is historically true, but for us Christians, there is really no doubt about it. Not only because it is clearly stated in the gospels, both of Luke and Matthew, but because we have references to Jesus at his birth in the collaborative evidence from also secular historical sources of that period.
In fact, it has been historically proved that there is no other historical figure of the 2,000 years ago who has as much evidence of his birth as Jesus Christ had. Julius Caesar was around the same time, but he did not have as much news about his birth. The only thing we know is that he was born by the Caesarean [process] because that is where we got the name Caesarean Section. But as for the details of the life of Jesus, these are all clearly attested to in non-biblical sources.
It is one thing to talk of Jesus being born in Bethlehem 2,011 years ago, meaning celebrating the birth of a child—maybe a child that grew up to be a very important person who lived and died a tragic death at the bright age of around 33—that is a point of history. But Christmas is celebrated more than history. It is celebrating the fact that the child was not just a child. He is the Son of God! That is an awful statement to make—that God has a Son and this Son was born of a woman as the scriptures tell us. He grew up and at some point began to do, say certain things, became a famous person, became quite astir that he brought a lot of confusion and even disagreement until the powers that be were so afraid of him that they decided that the only way they could live in peace was to eliminate him – which they did!
Do Nigerians really celebrate Christmas in the proper way?
There are aspects of the celebration of Christmas depending on the different aspects of the meaning of the feast itself. There is nothing wrong with deciding that Christmas will be a time when we will rejoice and share gifts and have parties, especially for children to know that something great is happening. There is nothing wrong at all with that. In fact, it is good. The only problem is if Christmas ends up there because the essence of Christmas is not just the celebration of those things, but the acknowledgment in faith that Jesus has come into this world. And this we celebrate with a heart full of faith in God and trust in him.
Those who look back at 2011 recall that this is year Nigeria had general elections and serious violence followed the elections. What does this mean to you?
This time last year, we were probably saying the same thing; “Oh this year has gone with all its problems.” If we look back at the last 12 months or so and we start cataloguing all the bad things that happened to our country, we obviously will have a gloomy picture. Maybe it is good we do that so that we acknowledge that in certain areas we have not done well for ourselves.
The new wave of bomb blasts, which started from the very beginning of the year and which continued intermittently and up till now, is still a thing of concern. What worries me about 2011 is that the kind of insecurity that we have on ground is new. We are not used to suicide bombers. This is the first time we hear about it and we are praying God that it doesn’t become something that we have to live with, like they do in some parts of the world. We hope that it will be just a passing phase. What is also worrisome is when this kind of thing is given political justification. When you start talking about negotiations, amnesty, it means you are politicising issues of security which have to do with the protection of human life and property. I’m hoping that we will not continue along this line and that when we have a threat on the security of the nation like in Boko Haram, even the Niger Delta militants or the wave of kidnappings, that every political force will join hands to deal with it and not spend the time pointing finger, trading blames—they say this is happening because you didn’t win election properly—because you rigged the election, this is why this is happening. It is sad.
Sometimes, one gets the impression that some of the people who lost out in the political struggles of this year, even if they were not behind this confusion, seem to be standing by and secretly happy—in other words say, “You said you won the election, let’s see how you will rule.” Meanwhile, the country is running down and our reputation abroad is getting more and more tarnished. If we allow that to happen, even if there is another election, when they win, they will still be faced with the problem so they better sort it out now. I don’t have the facts. But we are not getting a coherent, united voice of the political forces and the deeds have proved that I’m not speaking at random.
So you do not support giving amnesty.
It depends!
You supported the one for the Niger Delta?
Well I’m not sure you finished with that one. Only two weeks ago, some of them blocked the Niger bridge. Like I heard people on radio saying, “You told us to put down our arms and you would give us money. We dropped our arms and you have not paid us.” So this is what amnesty means: you tell people who pick up arms, if you drop your arms, we will give you money. The danger with that is that there are arms all over the place, such that anybody who can pick up arms and start terrorising the environment can then come forward and be settled. This is why some of us are a little bit sceptical. And because of that logic, we hear people who present the same logic for the Boko Haram.
Although I don’t know the Boko Haram, who they are, the Niger Delta, some of them are known people. Boko Haram remains faceless. But there are people who are making a case for them, that just as you are ready to spend money to calm Niger Delta militants, you should spend money to calm Boko Haram instead of sending soldiers to go and deal with them. Once you start something that is not based on good principles, you stand to fail.
Many argue that if it were not for the amnesty, the Niger Delta area would have still been hotbed of violence?
Is it a cold bed now? I don’t think the matter is solved already. The issue in the Niger Delta is a more transparent exploitation of our resources, concern for the environment and better use of the oil money which is already happening. When I look at the amount of money the federal government is putting into oil-producing states—where Akwa Ibom is getting N47 billion a month – a state like Kogi with more population than Ikwa Ibom is getting N7 billion. All these billions that government is getting every month are supposed to address the genuine grievances of those who went to the creeks.
The problem with the amnesty situation is that it reaches only the few hot-headed people. It is not only those who carry arms that are aggrieved. For every one of them carrying arms, you be sure there are more than a thousand young people out there who are patiently waiting for justice to be done. We are not talking about them.
During the general elections, you sent out your monitoring team. What report did you get? Were these elections free and fair?
That is very difficult question. We have always said that a free and fair election goes beyond what happens on the morning of the election when people run to go to the ballot places. In most of the cases, the freedom and fairness of the elections were compromised even before the day of the election. As we can see, the processes that lead to identification of candidates—very often, already destroyed my freedom to choose who I want. For as long as the political parties are disorganised the way they are and are not able to bring out the best candidates to be voted for, it could be said that by the time we go for the elections, 80 percent of the choices had already been made for us, completely out of the context of freedom and fairness. It is not free and fair for the rest of us. I don’t know whether it is free and fair within the political parties. That is one case.
The other case, of course all the logistic problems we have had. If it is done purposely, it jeopardises the freeness and fairness of the election. There are very few countries in the world where elections become an affair of national emergency like it is in Nigeria. On Election Day, nobody goes out, no traffic on the road—nothing! It is like a siege. Why?
Other countries hold elections. They don’t close offices. You take permission, go to the nearby polling booth, cast your vote and come back. And why? Because of self-inflicted crisis. Which is why despite all that, you flood the place with police personnel because you have to also monitor the police whom you have sent to monitor the election. Who is going to put order in the workings of the law and order groups?
We have known in the past too that even the question of who is appointed police commissioner in a state is very much important. Some say that in some cases they are appointed specifically to make sure that the activities of the police will go in one particular way. We hear this. I have been in Italy where they hold elections so often but on the Election Day, you don’t see the whole place filled with police and soldiers. No! You don’t need them. What you need are the people who run elections and they are there at their posts. You go, put your ballot paper and go back to your job. When shall we reach that stage?
It is all this that makes it difficult to say it is free and fair. You cannot militarise the whole system. It is no longer free and fair. We know in many cases that even villagers are so scared that they stay at home. Is that free and fair?
But if you go as an observer and sit at a polling booth and you see people going to thumbprint and you say it is Ok, it is only one side of it that is Ok. You have not seen the full thing. And as we have noticed, at the polling station, a lot of things happen there. We were told also that some of those collating officers who came and announced the results of their states with funfare, professors and all that, a lot of them did not announce the right thing. And yet they gave the impression that everything was free and fair. We are told, too, that in some polling stations, the agents of some political parties collected money and signed whatever rubbish was being presented, which means we have not really gone far.
Do you advise Jonathan?
If you go to the Villa, almost an army, there is a whole team of Special Advisors, Senior Special Advisors. The guy has enough advice. Too many advisors [laughter] – unless those people are only bearing the name and are not doing anything. But jokes apart, I have [advised him] emphatically, more than one time. Even before the [general] elections I spoke with him. He received me which was an honour because the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria cannot have time to be listening to everybody. I have also had time to talk to him one-on-one after his election and I gave advice to him. I don’t think it is appropriate for me to repeat now publicly the advice I gave to him one-on-one as my contribution towards him.
So to answer your question, do I advise him? I do, but I will not impose my advice on him. I don’t have institutionalised channel for advising him. Like if there was a system whereby the first Thursday of every month, the president will meet people like us, then I will make myself available. But we don’t have such a thing. He meets his advisors regularly, just like the Federal Executive Council meets regularly.
When former President Olusegun Obasanjo was there, it was known that he never took advice.
Advice, by the very meaning of the word is not a command. Advice means I tell you something and this is what I think you should do but you still have responsibility to do whatever you like. Obasanjo, you are right. It is difficult to advise him. We did it several times. Before you even finish talking, he has prepared his long response and by the time he finishes, he begins to make you feel like you are a small school boy who should know that “I’m in this job for a long time.” Obasanjo has that feeling. And it is true, he has been on the job for a long time. He had been a Head of State, finished and they went and dragged him out of prison and brought him to do this job. There was that feeling which is entirely different from the inner feelings of Jonathan. Jonathan does not feel this arrogance. After eight years, I’m sure Obasanjo now realises that things are not so simple to fix up. There is also the matter of Obasanjo who ruled us as a military president. He could do things faster those days. He didn’t need to go to the National Assembly to approve the budget. So things could move fast. When he became a civilian president, he had difficulty adjusting to this new arrangement.
As for advice we gave him. He might have listened to some advice. He might have changed his mind in few cases but if he did, he would not tell you he did. That is Obasanjo! And in any case, the president is a kind of person who should listen to advice, but make up his mind because on any issue, he is likely get all kinds of advice, many of them contrary to one another. If he is going to wait decide on the basis of the advice, he will remain without taking any decision and then the country will blame him for not taking action. At some point the leader must decide. When he decides, if it is wrong, he takes the consequences; if it is right, he takes the cheers. That is what leadership is all about.
You said Jonathan is different from Obasanjo because he doesn’t have Obasanjo’s arrogance. But do you trust Jonathan?
I have no reason to distrust him because he has not deceived me once. We must distinguish Jonathan, the man who is a nice gentleman, I admire his modesty which is in contrast to his predecessor who we thought was very arrogant. I admire those traits in him maybe because I’m personally a kind of person who likes simple people. He might probably have loved to live simpler than he is doing now, but there seems to be so many protocols and things are imposed on him—a whole lot of machinery here and there, sirens here, convoys there, which are not necessary.
Now, come to trust. I trust Jonathan as a person but the government of Nigeria is not Jonathan. The government in Nigeria is Jonathan with his team, his ministers, his advisors both in government and out of government – all those people who are influencing him. That whole system, I do not trust it because they have not given me cause to trust. It is a distrust that is built upon experience.
So what is your position on the proposed full deregulation of the downstream sector of the petroleum industry?
President Jonathan addressed a hundred religious leaders in Ilorin- 50 Muslims, 50 Christians. I was there! He came with his head of economic unit and Minister of Finance Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. He was there with the Minister of Information; he was there with a certain Minister of State and his whole group. And they produced a beautiful brochure about why it is best for Nigeria to stop this so-called oil subsidy. We did not only get the brochure. The brochure was illustrated and explained in PowerPoint presentation by Okonjo-Iweala. We all sat and looked at it. At the end, there were discussions. At the end of the day, my own opinion boiled down to trust!
I believe that President Jonathan is sincere in his intentions meaning that he believes strongly that removal of subsidy is the best for this country. And he even says he knows that it is an unpopular decision, but he believes it is the job of the leader to do the right thing, whether it is popular or not.
The only problem is that this is democracy. In all major issues, government has a duty to explain to the people. You cannot afford to take a decision and say the people are stupid for not understanding you. They should be able to understand what you are saying. The problem most people have is that of trust for the government. If it was left only to Jonathan to gather this money and he is the one to apply it to education and make the roads and build the railways, like he promises and it is only Jonathan and he alone and maybe other Jonathans like him, maybe we would have said Ok, we give you the benefit of the doubt.
But we all know Nigeria, as it is right now it is difficult to trust politicians. Even they mentioned that they are going to create a special team that will monitor the disbursement of the funds; that they are going to receive from oil and these people are going to make sure that this money is well spent. The first question that comes to mind is where are these special people going to come from? From Mars?
If you ask me, why is there no trust? It is simply what we see on ground, not just the fuel subsidy, which amounts to about four percent of our Gross National Product. We see the whole of the Nigeria and we cannot see it being used properly. The roads are still bad; the educational system is still in tatters; hospitals are still where they were; we have been talking railways and nothing has improved. What is the magic in oil subsidy that four percent will achieve which 96 percent has not done? Nigerians will trust the story if they trusted the government and the performance of our budgets. Which is why when the president says we should prepare for immediate pains because things will get better later, you are asking us to make an act of faith in God that has not delivered. That is not easy!
As a religious leader, I spend most of my time trying to get my people to make acts of faith in God, but I must tell them that this God delivers. If this god does not deliver; if he is god that betrays you; if he is god that makes promises that he doesn’t fulfil, I have no business telling anybody to make act of faith in him. That is the problem we have with oil subsidy [removal].
And I think what Jonathan can do is to appreciate this fact that he has inherited a very bad situation. He inherited a situation where government is not trusted. One of the religious leaders, a Muslim leader told Jonathan, he said, “Listen, it seems you have called us together hoping that we will use the little bit of credibility that we still have to help you sell this idea of fuel subsidy. Otherwise, why call a hundred of us and pay hotel bills for us? Well, if that is what you are trying to do, we have a problem there. Nigerians don’t trust what government has said. Are we going to stake our own credibility on the promises of government which we ourselves are not sure of?” And he said if at the end of the day, the thing does not work, the little credibility we have will be lost and where else will the poor people go. They cannot run to their religious leaders to hear the truth [laughter].
This is what happened at that meeting. And the beautiful thing at that meeting was that we, hundred Christians and Muslims sat together. There was no saying, Muslims here, Christians here. And discussions were simply about Nigeria. You couldn’t gauge from the way people were speaking, whether they were Christians or Muslims, which means things are really improving, Christians/Muslims, we are not divided. Everybody was talking about credibility, about sincerity, about corruption.
One even asked: why do we have to be importing our fuel, because we subsidise imported fuel? Why should we be importing with the length of time we have got our oil industry in Nigeria? Countries that have not got oil have their own refineries and are refining the oil they are using in their own countries. By now we should be building more refineries, producing fuel and selling to other people, let them do subsidy for their own citizens. And if it is true that the refineries are run down because of corruption, then we have not started. We could have avoided this whole problem.
So if you ask me now, where are we with regards to oil subsidy? I will say I don’t know why government made a big case out of this. Maybe badly advised. Government could have actually removed the subsidy without talking about it and all we could hear is that price of petrol has gone up. Right now, diesel has reached the level they are talking about. People are buying without talking about it.
Now people are warning, “If you decide that is what you want to do, go ahead and do it, but just get ready for the backlash.” There will be major upheavals. Labour says they will go out on strike. It will make life extremely uncomfortable for many people. Whether it will be enough to make government to change its mind on the matter, we don’t know.
We are not sure when this gets to the National Assembly—we hear the National Assembly is generally not in favour. What does it mean? Can the National Assembly force government to change? We shall see, 2012 will be an interesting year.
There are those who advise, do it slowly so we will not feel the pains too much. He said that will defeat the purpose. I don’t know how. Some say if you must do it, you have homework to do. It is clear in your mind but it is not clear in the minds of most Nigerians. You really need to educate Nigerians until they begin to agree with you that this thing is best for them.
Unfortunately, they make few points, which spoil their case. They said subsidy goes to a small group of Nigerians, not to the rest of us. So we ask, who are they? Who are these Nigerians who collect my money regularly, smiling? How come you don’t know those to whom you pay the money? If you know them, stop it. Government ought to know the exact cost of fuel and if you have got contractors to bring it to us, you should know how much margin of profit you give them. Don’t come to tell us that a cabal is profiting mostly from this fuel subsidy.
Why do we even need middlemen to import refined fuel? We have a government agency for petroleum. Why should this not be within the portfolio of NNPC? Just as NNPC is in charge of exporting our crude oil, it should be able to bring in whatever refined oil we need without going through middlemen. We hear that this is an area where some Nigerians are making big profit and it is also part of the way government is probably settling political clients, which means we are not serious.
Maybe Jonathan doesn’t think he has enough powers to deal with them, but he should try knowing that in this case, we are all behind him. If he does that kind of thing and then turns around and says “I will remove the subsidy,” people will say, “we have seen what you are doing now.” If we see serious efforts on our refineries and we are getting figures of how much: that means we are going to be importing less. If we import less refined fuel, we spend less on subsidy.
If you are dealing with middlemen who are making all the money, remove them. If he deals with that seriously and stops covering people up under the name of cabal as if they are faceless, we’ll support him. Name them and shame them! Not only telling them to stop, but calculate how much they have stolen in the past years and insist that it should be refunded. Generally, those people can refund because they have put the money in other assets which can be captured.
What is your view on the N921 billion proposed for security in the 2012 appropriation bill?
We cannot isolate a particular item on the budget. We have to look at it in relation to the rest of the budget. And that is where I’m even more worried. It seems that because Nigerians are shouting security, security, government thinks that the best way to deal with insecurity is to spend plenty of money on it, which probably, eventually will boil down to equipping the soldiers and the police. But there is more to security than that. Maybe if we took those steps, we may not need all that money. And the worse part of it is we may spend all this money and still…maybe create more problems.
In all our budgets, we have always complained that there is too much that has been attached to defence, for example. And sometimes it is said that government, especially now that we are in civilian rule, wants to make the soldiers happy. So they budget a lot of money for the soldiers although at the end of the day, much of the money does not go to the poor soldiers. It goes to the big officers and civilians who are close to the Minister of Defence. So if the purpose of this is to indicate how serious government is with security, then first thing, it is important to explain more to the people.
What is your advice on Boko Haram?
It is very difficult to give advice on Boko Haram because we don’t know what it is. My suspicion is that all kinds of things, people and movements are going under this blanket name Boko Haram, which probably explains why they are faceless. It means anybody who is disgruntled will call himself Boko Haram. Wherever there is bomb, we call Boko; wherever police stations are attacked, we say Boko Haram. The police station in my village, Kabba [Kogi State] was ransacked two weeks ago; nobody spoke of Boko Haram there because they are not around there. But if it had happened in Maiduguri [Borno State], it is Boko Haram.
My own idea is that anybody who carries arms and plants bombs and kills innocent people, no government should tolerate it. You have to do something to stop them. It is not a matter of negotiation, especially as in the case of Boko Haram. Up till now, no one has come up to say “I am the one” with whom you can discuss. It is not a matter of secret discussion. This concerns all of us. Government should not be negotiating on my behalf with people I don’t know. Let us know who they are first so that we know with whom we are negotiating, otherwise it will never end.
The other thing I want to say about Boko Haram is that there is a dangerous wave in the world, especially in the Islamic world, which is giving a lot of problem to the Islamic nations themselves – forget about Nigeria.