Engineer Patrick Ekpotu was a former Deputy Governor of Akwa Ibom state between 2007 and 2011. A petroleum engineer, who also holds a masters degree in Leading Innovations and Change. Ekpotu is known to be fearless in speaking out on issues of national importance. And in this exclusive interview with Edward Dibiana, he didn’t disappoint. In this first part of the explosive interview, we serve you his views on increases in petrol pump price and electricity tariff, he also didn’t leave out godfatherism, #EndSARS and public perception about the current government, among other topical issues.
The recent increase in petrol pump price and electricity tariff have elicited debate about Nigeria’s inability to manage her critical infrastructure, what are your views on the mismanagement of the power and refining infrastructure 60 years after independence?
Our political system cannot be silent in matters affecting the wellbeing of its citizens. There should be a minimum degree of affordable living that citizens have to be subjected. We cannot keep importing fiscal and monetary policies from the highly developed democracies whose per capital income is outrageously incomparable to ours, while overlooking the basic minimum comfort of citizens. It is bound to inflict pains and burdens.
No government ever thinks of a moderate taxation plan outside wretched, skinflint system of selective welfare and social services. Therefore, we continue to have increased inequality and the highest rate of poverty among nations of our class. I hope our leaders who hire the economists that advise them do find a means of listening to the governed to truly understand.
If they do so, they will understand from their anguish and lamentations that inequality always has a way of tearing at the legitimacy of the political order. And that poverty creates pockets of what often amounts to state collapse in every poor locations. High poverty has been linked with spectacularly increased rates of both committing and being victimized by crimes, being incarcerated and certainly being killed by (the) police in the course of duty.
How do we increase cost of social services and taxes at a time in the world that all countries are reducing same due to the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic? When all nations many of which are poor, in Europe and the Americas, are paying a minimum of €350.00 and $1,200 respectively or its equivalent to each of their citizens who are unemployed and those employed but who earn lower income, to cushion the pandemic effect. Even if it were the correct thing to do, I think the timing is wrong.
On power and refinery infrastructure, I don’t want to run into conclusion yet. I still think the President will live by his words that he will have all the refineries working before leaving office, just as he said of power. With the contract recently signed with Siemens to overhaul our power infrastructure on a short and long term basis, I am hopeful of the significant boost the power sector is going to witness on account of that. So it does appear that some progress is being made. But we would want to see actions on them speak more loudly in years coming.
Many are of the opinion that Nigeria is more divided than ever in recent times. What do you think is responsible for such public perception?
It could be a consequence of holding up high or wrong expectations. Whenever such expectations are held and they end up smashed, they easily inspire reactions that may compel the holders feel like, ‘oh, my God, the sky is falling’. Whereas it is not. Another possibility is when there is cause for a people to feel that they are unjustly treated by their government, that appointments and patronages are not equitably distributed as expected.
And going by the news we read daily, there is no denying that this kind of perception exist today in Nigeria. Same complain is also heard from many nationalities across different states, which further expands that sphere. And many citizens have taken advantage of it to compound the divisiveness by compiling versions of such absurd lists of purported appointments on sectoral basis and circulating them all over the social media.
If they are incorrect, then it is one more example of the atrocious danger and harm of living with the doom that false information and social media could be. And that would invite us more than ever to roll our sleeves and get to work for deep systemic solutions to this divisive doomsday disaster before the challenges of today become the future challenges of our children. That is concrete evidence of seriousness we will like to see speak next.
But should the perception and circulated statistics showing unfairness be correct and real, then it is a non-promising sign for national unity, since it would have trampled on the fundamental principle of federal character meant to inspire confidence across board, drowned the notion and expectations of a nation undivided and could rob citizens of all faith in humanity, idealism, righteousness, and brotherhood. It would mean that we have deliberately let the predicament of dividedness to emerge from our hearts and be given birth to through political actions. And if the action is seen to have taken a toll on our collective spirit, resolving it is all that is required to get things right back. And it’s resolution would also have to be born in the hearts of leaders and the millions of fellow citizens; certainly not from the laboratory.
Give us a sense of what you think are the underlining factors that elicited the nationwide youth restiveness over police brutality.
It is unfortunate that Nigeria’s policing has to evolve in a way that now manifests a new generation of pain before the world. It is police brutality that was held out as a key factor for the restiveness, but it appears that a bizarre chain of events handed the youth the weapons they needed to commence the campaign. The general notion of the nation getting harsher on her youth, which turns their hopes into a permanent traumatic disorder, must have been one that added to the boil over.
Those possibly could have driven the feeling of the burden to advocate for their values as future generation and the burden of enormous urgency to act. Ironically that type of feeling goes with a weight of compulsion to toughen up, either to show they are hard enough to withstand the authorities whose duty it is to turn the situation around or to convey the message that they are tired to bear it. And as they consistently chanted while the protest lasted, they also appear tired of listening to claims by every politician seeking to administer public trust that they do so because of public interest. Whereas, history has proven that such interests can never be best served by following the same known old paths that they often close after getting the peoples’ mandate.
These long-simmering issues would have resonated multiple times over to inform their decision to make the march to their professed ideals to be strongly written. In that case, police brutality would only have been the symbol that chronicled the harshness and arguably requiring their toughness.
Unfortunately, all the factors happen to bother on what our adult society has actively contributed to make by way of lessons they teach, certain behaviours they reinforce, values they inculcate, and the certain forms of softness they disparage. Painfully, so much misery and pain and violence had to stem from how we teach them to understand what it means to be Nigerians. So to me it was a function of a clash between very distinct forms of mental and emotional lives prevailing in the land.
There was the Lekki Toll Gate shooting and accompanying vandalism, looting, stealing, etc as sideways of the protest. Do you see us learning any lessons as a people and as a nation to prevent a repeat?
Quite a lot and in many ways… Happily it is over and leaves everyone, both government and the governed, the opportunity to review its aftermath. Painfully, many have also had to mourn their loved ones lost, property destroyed and wounds sustained. It is strongly hoped that those responsible for the carnage will be held accountable. Sadly, no child born from 1997 has witnessed any meaningful protest in the country; the more reason it was fun to our boys and girls, already tired of Covid-19 lockdown which kept them out of their campuses, especially after watching the latest peaceful protest in the USA.
More so, the protest organisers did not educate them that for many reasons, our circumstances are different from those of the USA. Had that happened, most of the children lost to the protest would have had to choose whether or not they were willing to contribute their voices by shedding their blood to challenge injustice. Because that did not happen, it means that they were lured into the protest while the society watched. And in the process, take away their dreams, expectations and their lives. Notwithstanding the stunning upset by the protest, the signals from it and what the spectre of a repeat would be, are the lessons flowing from it that should rationally deprive every thinking person of sleep at night and jolt the leaders awake.
The activists who drummed out the youth into the streets, despite knowing that they are poorly parented and catered for by the society; who constantly cheered them into sustained action and consistently inflamed their wreck while it lasted are also not left out of the lessons taught. The conjurers of the protest failed to look their mission through to the end, to see that control problem would be an issue; that opportunists, group and ethnic interests, secessionists, hatred, criminal motivations, pro-establishment protest groups, and hoodlums will all weigh in and compete with genuine interests, in readiness to tear the nation apart.
Had they thought through, they would have been confronted with the question of whether or not it is the only option to put out a smoldering fire by dousing it with gasoline. And should they claim they thought through to the end but were not confronted by the question, then serious doubt is raised about what their actual purpose was. This adds to their sudden disappearance from the open scene, when it all went bad, and the resort to tweeting from the comforts of their homes and hideouts in attempt to dial back the aggressiveness of the youth. Whatever appeal their unfiltered thoughts once held has been worn off by this. So unless their mission was to leave the country war torn, the outcome of what they gave birth to serves as a legitimate case for jittery nerves.
What about those in authority, the political leaders… what is there for them to learn?
The uprising itself and the events accompanying it is clear enough message to them. But not only them because also expected to learn from it are all leaderships across levels of society including institutional, educational, religious, traditional, community leaders.
Aside what I have already said, what other evidence are there to suggest that the uprising is the most singular and effective message ever to our political leaders? Plenty: And this is why a better question to ask is whether the politicians will be able to avoid the usual pitfall of interpreting the unfortunate threat in the light of triviality and attributing it to the “handiworks of purveyors of wickedness and bitter political foes”.
I have this message for them: Take advantage of this clear signal, it is an eloquent statement to all who wish to learn that the conventional dynamics of bad politics witnessed in turbulent climes like Ivory Coast, Libya, Yemen, Syria, CAR, Somalia, Sierra Leone and others the world over, can also apply to us. Following similar pattern, all the carnage in those countries were preceded by such massive protest, then riot, security use of live bullets, global outcry against human rights abuses, cautious withdrawal of security forces to protect only their installations following international pressure, mob retaliation, arson targeted at public and leaders’ assets, looting, targeted attacks, fleeing of the targets, separatists, opportunist, free reign for competing interest groups, et cetera.
We cannot afford to take further chances. The balance between being quiet, taking insufficient action and inaction, all of which have been our permanent abode since independence, has now shown to be very delicate. For these 60 long years have we rode our luck and skirted past disaster yet continue in inaction? And living together may be frustrating but offers us opportunities that not doing cannot. We do not have to wait until fate invites us to demand payback.
If this sinks, then our first duty is work to seal all opportunities opened to “purveyors of wickedness” by denying them the satisfaction of drawing us all out any time, and getting some tacit endorsement from their likes, for “their flights of fantasies”. This, we can only do through visionary policies, strong moral leadership devoid of ethnic divisiveness, erosion of norms, institutions and trust in traditional information sources.
Mobilization of pro-establishment anti-protest groups to counter peaceful march may not be of help all the time. It is ill-advised, ill-timed, an alternate use of force and cheap reactionary approach that are not necessary if things proceed normally. It is prone to encouraging a clash. The clash may become a panacea for live bullets to be deployed, which is all that peaceful protests need to transit to riot, the next stage. Caustic words and temper tantrums from political leaders and representatives – more so the clannish ones, ethnic attack dogs, religious, sectional, academic, media, and other leaders, are not needed. They are like live bullets incapable of leading the revolution of the heart required to heal the situation.
Only well-placed words are called for because the force of argument, it is argued, is the best force. Live bullets and alternate force can stop a heart. Well placed words can change numerous hearts, and the many such hearts are what we need to change our situation. To do otherwise is to keep pumping in those ingredients, which taken together will always create a tinderbox that is poised to explode when “purveyors of wickedness” come calling citizens out. Now is therefore the time to outlive the perennial mistake of always recirculating used, old tested and failed methods to solve Nigeria’s 21st-century problems.
The message given also shows that our traditional response mechanism of spewing nonstop torrent of lies to excite our audiences cannot take the place of a sincere and accountable work to expand the base of truth and fairness. It has even taught that society knows its members who are richer by work as opposed to those richer by graft and by pull. It has taught that we have to begin to show practical commitments to unity, justice and equity and that we have to start looking at numbers in a completely different and sincere way. Just as no politician would get on a plane if there is 1-in-50 chance a plane will crash, so must we work to ensure the number is zero before we stop worrying. This approach we must now adopt in nation building.
We should stop stretching our luck and get down immediately at work, make conscious choices, accompany the choices with deliberate policies, and begin to deal with our predicament. We must not forget in the process, the need to renovate our national cultural challenges rooted in how adult society, families, schools and our market places shape the psyche of Nigerian children. Should anyone among us insists as always, that the spectacle is over and so it should be business as usual, he is in urgent need of a licensed medical practitioner and we should not hesitate to prudently assist him, where there is one in the neighbourhood. May the soul of those who have died in the course of the violence find rest in the Lord.
The outcome of the recent Edo state election is said to have sent a strong message against the culture of overbearing godfathers in the political circle. Before the Edo election, your state, Akwa Ibom also voted against the interest of your former boss, Senator Akpabio to return the incumbent governor for a second term of office, is there any similarity of message?
It might appear so, but I think that there is something in the entire notion of godfatherism in politics that has to be understood. A godfather may successfully influence the emergence of a candidate within the small circle of Party nomination by deploying all the atrocious acts used in bending election outcomes in the country. But he cannot, in a rational electoral process, influence the electorates to do his bidding against their will? If he succeeds in having his candidate eventually elected, then it is the will of the people who voted that would have spoken.
The godfather’s ability to ride through faces stiff limitations whenever a fair electoral process in place. Godfathers in our politics only thrive in the jungle or gorilla election type we used to know as “Carry-Go”. And by the way, I hope we don’t have to see such again in 21st century Nigeria. So what was seen as surprising results in the cases of Akwa Ibom and Edo elections appear not to be far from this. “Godfatherism”, being evil itself, can only succeed in an evil election variant. Unfortunately, the actors at the centre of the two cited cases are to my mind, only scape goats, as every governor in Nigeria seems to be guilty of this same thing. They hardly remember that the fire that lights is also the same fire that consumes.
After watching President Buhari’s conduct of elections, it was easy to arrive at the conclusion that the notion of godfather in politics has been spoilt and its viability upturned. His insistence that the votes of the electorates must count was clear message that the days of godfathers influencing elections beyond political parties nomination level was over. I however think that the president should go beyond this and also take a look at sanitizing the political party angle too as well as Local Government Elections. After all, evil anywhere is evil everywhere. Political parties don’t belong to anyone. As long as they are registered and funded in part by our taxes under the law, they must be viewed as national institutions for political development and must therefore do things right.
So all we need do is to strengthen and institutionalize the current free and fair electoral process by making additional laws to back it and be firm to punish defaulters very severely. I think this is what appears lacking in the current framework. That means if this president is out of office, there are chances of hurricane elections returning in the country.
I agree that any system not institutionalized can easily be washed away. What additional measures you suggest be added to what is on ground to strengthen the electoral process?
I think there is need for establishment of an institutional framework for Electoral Laws enforcement. That could monitor and compel strict compliance with all electoral laws and rules guiding our political activities. It should also deal with breaches to political party rules and constitutions, after all, that is where it starts to go wrong when party officers bend rules in favour of anointed aspirants.
We could call it “Electoral Practices Compliance Commission (EPCC)” with responsibility for ensuring that politicians, nonpoliticians, political parties, etc., all play by the rules. The establishing law should prescribe very severe punishments, up to 20 years jail term on first time offenders and 50 years on subsequent time’s defaulters. It is the best approach to preserve the nation, infuse sanity, check abuses and improve on the credibility of our electoral processes.
To my mind, this, in addition to current efforts, will be a milestone in protecting our electoral processes and ending a possible return of era of volcanic and rapturous elections and election victories. By extension, it will also disconnect citizens from the dimension of insecurity which are borne and encouraged by our mode of involvement in politics. And help the nation out in staying ahead of its citizens by being proactive and preemptive and not always often reactionary, reactive, and sensing danger only when things have gone out of hand or when there is bloodletting.