Going by the myriad of challenges facing Nigeria, a former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Mr Olisa Agbakoba (SAN) in an interview with senior journalists including the Deputy News Editor of the Champion Newspapers, Ibrahim Quadri, the legal luminary gives template in addressing the deep-seated poverty affecting the socio-political fabrics of the Nigerian populace. Excerpts:
What will be your advice for government on a number of challenges facing Nigeria as a country?
But unless we have a leader focused, we’ll be like this. Everybody in this room, I’m sure, pays rent. I believe. If you pay rent, you can pay mortgage. The reason you don’t have a mortgage is, there is no legal infrastructure at all. That is the difference between the rent that you pay and the mortgage that you can get. So why is the government not making it convenient for Nigerians? That’s the thinking I want to see. We did the paper, because we do policy papers from time to time. We did the paper that suggest that Nigeria’s national development GDP budget should be at about 500 trillion naira. A lot of people say it’s not possible. I say it’s possible. It’s possible if a number of things happen. The first thing is that very few Nigerians, even economists, who feel that budgeting and planning is their domain, not knowing that law plays a strong role in it. And law plays a strong role by what we call legal policy. So for instance, it doesn’t matter how nice a house you want to build will look like. If the foundation is weak, the house is not likely to stand. So Nigeria’s number one problem is political governance. The constitution isn’t working. I’m not sure why it has taken 25 years, from 2000 to date. Every national assembly talks about constitutional reform. The last time I had a chance to speak before now, when I spoke on President Tinubu’s birthday, I made the point that Nigeria is not likely to go far unless it addresses its weak constitutional foundation. That’s number one. Flowing from this is the need to have appropriate regional arrangements. I would suggest eight regional arrangements. I would suggest that the states are too fragile to carry the Nigerian national development agenda. I would suggest that the Mid-West needs to be created and out of North-West and North-Central. And this will be constitutionalized and the states will cease to exist. Then these eight constitutional regions will have the ability to be developing the Nigerian agenda. Abuja cannot do it. Flowing from this would be the need to downsize the public service. I don’t know whether you’re aware, three million federal public servants consume 70-80% of our national budget. That is unworkable. The big correction that the President needs to do boldly is by removing fuel subsidies but that should have been channeled in the direction of social infrastructure, roads, education, things like that. It’s going to pay debts, therefore, we are in a rigmarole of debts. So we must do something. We’ve been doing the same thing consistently for the last 25 years and nothing works. Rather we have more poverty, more people going into debt, so something new must happen. And that thing that is new must start from the constitution. It has to start. That is the absolutely first task. We need a new constitution as fast as possible. Having done that, we need to turn to economic governance. So the first is political governance. The second is economic governance. I don’t understand why in Nigeria we allow International Oil Companies to become owners of our oil wells. It’s a big problem. I don’t know whether you understand the damage this does to us. We absolutely abdicate our natural resources to six or seven IOCs who in turn take away all the resources. So we’re always poor. We’re always struggling to meet target. I ask myself, how come we never want to meet the cash flow, but the IOCs meet it and take the money out? So I said at that conference, we need to do what Aramco does in Saudi Arabia, they do not give up the oil wells, they don’t. They own everything. What they do is, they identify you and your skills. You’re a driller. Come and drill. Whatever you can do, they give you a service contract. They do not give you the oil well. I hope you know in Nigeria, the oil well is sold. So we cease to be the owners. We lose control over huge resources. So rather than have the flow of resources from all these OMLs, things go abroad. That’s dangerous! That has drained our pockets and left us in a worse situation. The third one is administrative governance. We need to reduce our ministries. For instance, the Ministry of Information is absolutely irrelevant. The Ministry of Internal Affairs that deals with things like marriage, marriage certificate, issue of driver’s licence, prisons. Right now, the Federal Government has only one prison, only one prison. Yet if you look at the budget, the Federal Government has budgeted between 8-16 billion Naira every year to maintain prisons that they don’t have. So Lagos State potentially has the largest number of people in prisons. But because they don’t feel the pinch, they don’t care. They are kept there forever. But if Lagos State were paying to maintain their prisons, the speed of justice would kick in. So these are the things. The Federal Government has no business in education. It is a regional matter. It’s something for the states or the local governments. So this is not the place to begin to describe what needs to go. But I think that we can reduce the Federal Government’s administrative structures to no more than 10 ministries. That will drop the cost of maintaining the government apparatus by about 80%. And you can divert it elsewhere. So that’s also important. Because if the money is limited and you’re not cutting back on your expenses, you always have struggles. And again, there’s a shifting geopolitical and economic international order which we must have.
Would you say now that the PIB Act is not encompassing enough?
The PIA Act is a dead Act. For instance, just to give you an example, is it not the PIA that says that NNPC is a private company? NNPC is a regulator. The government has to hands off for business. It doesn’t have the skills. If I were a lawyer and I was told by my secretary, look, there are more clients there than I can cope with. I would have to employ more lawyers. So what type of a country would say that its problem is that it has too much money? So the PIA Act is depriving us of revenue. And one thing I need to point out is that the government needs to draw a line between what it can do efficiently. How can one man create a railway system for the whole country? One man, It’s not possible. Then his friend was running around too. Two men, what would require a national infrastructure of private heavy lifters. That’s why we have no roads. Because the government is not ready– but unless we have a leader focused, laser focused on the issues, we’ll be like this. You should be telling the government, we want to hear policy. We don’t want to hear contracts. So FEC became a contract awarding body. Let the government hands off the railways and allow the private sector to drive it.
Let us look at the coastal trade. Would you say that the non-involvement of indigenous shippers or shipping line in our coastal waters also accounts for the reason why multinational oil companies are also freezing us of our resources?
Sure. I wrote that because of the Cabotage law, but unfortunately it’s not going to post. When I wrote it, it was 4,000 or 5,000 oil vessels. Right now there are about 50,000. They come, take our resources and run away. So a country – I don’t want to mention people’s names so that it doesn’t become a political thing, but there’s something he said that always resonates. You must go from consumption to production. The government is not doing this. But I think we need to pay attention to how we can grow an active private sector that is producing. That’s key. If you don’t have factories, if you don’t have industries, you can’t get out of poverty. You will not. So what happens is, the Chinese dump things here, we are one of the world’s worst dumping grounds for everything. So if you keep getting dumped on, how are you going to do? You can see how Dangote has aged. He said, if I had known, I would just have been importing PMS. He thought that when he would do refinery, he would do for Nigerian benefit. But for this very NNPC has been giving him hell. So who would now like to become another Dangote? So government policy must embrace the private sector. You must tell the private sector, we have no hands in business. You guys do it. We create the policy, we create the legal and regulatory environment for you to thrive. Do you know that Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the UK, was concerned about the Chinese withdrawing their interest in UK steel, which was the last steel factory in the UK? At 10 Downing, he announced that Parliament would convene in an emergency session on Saturday. They convened, they debated, and they passed a law. Can you imagine it happening here? There are so many emergencies that we are faced with that I would hope the government can work with greater speed.
What is your comment on Donald Trump’s new policy on tariffs?
When we became decolonized, the Western world had already fixed the rules of the game. So we don’t have a seat in the United Nations. So no African nation has a seat at the Security Council as a permanent carrying member. Because we were not there when they did all this. So when Trump began this thing of trade tariffs, I’m not sure he understood what he was doing. But he has seen that it is failng. So the question is, what plan do African countries have to enter the space? China has a plan. China is doing what is called decoupling. They are decoupling from the influence of the West. They want their currency to be as attractive as the dollar. So they have a plan. What is our plan? I think that is important to look at. The reason why President Trump is so interested in issues in Ukraine is not so much that he likes Ukraine, but the world is shifting from the ordinary minerals to new ones called critical minerals. The North Central states zone of Nigeria is the fourth largest in the world, containing critical minerals that can bring us revenue in the region of about $20 billion. Then you turn to issues concerning generating income. One of the fields that I have speciality in, oil and gas. So Shell comes into Nigeria, it is given an oil well, they produce oil. But there are 34 value chains, but the Nigerian government only looks at one. They look at where is the oil? They say, okay, you take 60, I take this 40, they produce it. They float around to package the oil. They store it and they discharge it to vessels that they name. It’s your oil or the federal government that should be naming the vessels that should take the oil around the world for sale. But it is the oil companies that are doing so. If you do that, how do you grow? Take Aviation, in advising the minister for Aviation, we say we need to have a Fly Nigeria Act because the Americans come from all of them. Fly Nigeria Act creates us as the regional hub, hub onto their aircraft because that’s where you can get American aircraft very easily. That’s what we should call the Fly Nigeria Act. Because we have the population and the resources to grow our airlines. When we say create jobs, we don’t create jobs by just talking. We must look for the opportunities. So the opportunities that Nigeria has to create jobs are there and we need to see the government do so. So that the poverty can reduce. So those are the sorts of things that I hope the government can do. Because rightly pointed out, suffering is great unless we have proactive solutions.
