Dr Mike Omeri is a past Director General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA). In this interview with 365Daily’s Gabriel Atumeyi, he bared his mind on some of the challenges the country is facing in the spirit of Nigeria’s Democracy Day celebration.
Excerpts:
What is your position on the clamour for restructuring and a new Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria?
Time has come to revisit the 2014 Confab report. It could be by way of getting a few elder statesmen, even if it is by one, one. Let them look at the document. Let the elite look at the document and pick out what is deemed to be very necessary for the country at this point. If the entire document is not sufficient, let us look at the things people are talking about now, put them together and make recommendations to the National Assembly so they look at them and turn the Constitution into a useful facility for Nigerians.
Could you share your thoughts on the call for secession in various segments of the country?
There is no sane Nigerian that will support secession, not because we are from this part of the country or the other. Then, we had an Ojukwu, who declared secession. Now, who from the Southeast is that leader that would declare secession against the Nigerian state? Do we have? No, we don’t have.
Clearly, it is going to be difficult to that. Why don’t we just find ways, find solutions to the issues? The Constitution and the people, colours, languages and so on are not the problems of this country. It is us and the way we have been managing ourselves. The Constitution is a document that if we chose to do the right thing, people will not even refer to it or remember that a document like that exists. But it is because we are not doing the right thing most of the time, so we are now confounded with challenges, with situations that are becoming or gravitating towards chaos.
I remember when as DG of NOA, the agitations reached a crescendo in the Southeast by this same IPOB. I travelled to Enugu, I invited all the known members of IPOB to a meeting and they came. We had a long discussion. They said nobody was talking to them from anywhere, even by way of offering explanations to the challenges and issues in the land.
Don’t forget, some of those people don’t read any paper, they just act on the views of influencers. We later went for a radio programme, I think it is Dream FM, for a thirty minutes programme. We ended up doing a one hour, 30 minutes programme because there were so many callers that the radio station had to increase the programme time. Even some other radio stations were calling to say if we finish from that radio station we should come to their radio station because we were offering explanations to the challenges of the moment. We were telling the people what they wanted to hear in the language they understand. Not the kind of language that is brutal and destructive. They are your citizens.
The President should not talk about meeting people force by force, brutalisation of citizens and so on and so forth. Are you declaring war on them? If they had declared war on the state, they are non – state actors. There are ways of handling them because they are still your citizens. So if you can do that, let us also declare full scale war on every other restive communities or situation, and there are many of them. At the end of the day, we will have only the President alive because we would have killed everybody.
But there are solutions and ways of handling some of these conflicts and I think we should adopt them as the first remedy of remedial action before resorting to military action or force or whatever.
How do you see the Buhari administration vis a vis what June 12 stands for?
For me, I would say there are apparent contradictions, especially at the rate we are going. June 12 stood for freedom and democracy. June 12 stood for a peoples platform because the outcome was gladly the will and strength and determination of the people of Nigeria. So, if we have a democracy under the watch of our current President today and the language we are hearing is not the language of democracy, then it is alarming. And such actions are giving birth to the reaction that we are getting from the citizens. So everywhere is getting militarised because that appears to be the direction of the kind of democracy we want to practice today and I don’t think it is good for Nigeria at this point.