WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-07-31 Time: 05:00:01 Posted By: News Poster
Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, General IBM Haruna (rtd), rose from a meeting of the forum which he chaired in Kaduna last Wednesday, dissatisfied that the issue of zoning was not critically tackled to the expectations of Nigerians by the umbrella body of the North. GEORGE AGBA confronted him for more clarification on the issue of zoning.
You just clocked 70 recently and you must certainly be owing someone for this lease of long life
I feel I owe God first. Allah is the creator; he is the sustainer; he is the provider. I thank him for giving me the lease of life this long. I also thank all those who along the way I have met. Who have been friends and who are part and parcel of my family and above all, owe my 70 years to the Nigerian nation because I have lived most of the time as what they call ‘government pikin’. We were nurtured and brought up on the poor people’s wealth. From the time I joined the military school in 1954 to when I retired in 1977, no one other than government’s budget had made provision for me. So I see myself as one who enjoyed from the people who make up Nigeria and I owe them my debt of gratitude.
You must be one of those lucky persons unlike your contemporaries who died as victims of the civil war and gruesome murder like the late head of state, Murtala Mohammed. How do you feel being alive today to count your blessings?
I owe it to the realization that life is a journey of body and spirit. It is like when you take a flight; you have a journey with people you have not met before and by the grace of God, you hope to get to your destination. Along the way, I have met a lot of my friends and contemporaries. Some have reached their destination, and as God has prolonged my own life to this time, I am yet to get to my destination. It is never over until it is over. I feel fulfilled personally. I have been married and I have children. I am now an orphan. I buried my parents, they didn’t bury me. My children are all graduates. Personally, I feel I have gotten to where I never dreamt of. It is not all the citizens of a country that would have the opportunity to realize this kind of fulfillment. I feel I am in the minority of people we can say they went to secondary school, tertiary institution, fought a civil war and joined in the rebuilding of the country. In the course of all these, you lose friends, you lose contemporaries and you are still soldering on; and you ask yourself what is it all about if I am contented and happy with my family. You also ask yourself what is it like if it was not so and you find out that there are many who are going through the experience of the lack of opportunity and support to actualize or get to where they feel they have reached the peak of opportunity that came along their way which they took. But they have cause to say I did my best, even where it was not the best, it was best enough within my talent and I am happy for the part I played. I hope that Nigeria will become fulfilled. So that many Nigerians would be contented to be Nigerians and feel fulfilled. So the struggle continues. It is never ending, but the struggle can be made less painful and more cheering like sports. You don’t always win; you will play hard; you have injuries but at the end, you feel that the game has been worth it and the cheering crowd had been entertained and those who had invested in you or in the game or in the nation feel satisfied that even if they don’t get tangible returns, the dividends in other ways either visible or invisible are satisfying because they know that succeeding generations will find things better. They will have different challenges and a better foundation from which to face their own contemporary challenges. And one can say well, there is still hope, there is still some inspiration and there is still some motivation to continue to work hard and hope for the best.
At 70, you will soon witness your country mark its 50th anniversary. Would you say the country at this age is fulfilled in terms of its politics, polity and the things one might consider in determining a great nation?
Nigeria is yet, in reality- concrete reality- to be a nation. It has to get there first as a nation state before it thinks of fulfillment. We had nationalists for decolonization and independence; then we have not been sure of what to call a succeeding breed of political leaders. There are some committed nationalists and then some that would even wish that Nigeria be returned to colonial rule. There are those who by their calling have had to make sacrifices for the Nigerian state. We have earned the respect for the preservation of the Nigerian sovereignty. Many of my contemporaries have passed on in the course of national building: Nwategwu, Uforo, Murtala Mohammed, Okpor, Bisalla and many others. But also there are some of us who are still alive. These are military men who were committed to the Nigerian civil war to preserve the Nigerian entity under the leadership of General Gowon. We almost went apart. We almost could have had several nations either in confederation or as independent countries. That notion of separation has not totally disappeared because of the ambivalent commitment to one nation, one Nigeria. It is that ambivalence that has given room to different commitments to the building of the Nigerian nation where the heroes past and their endeavours would not be in vain. So, we are still building the Nigerian nation and its progress will depend on leadership in the new era. The military did their best for too long and, therefore, missed the opportunity to build successive governments that will be committed to building the Nigerian nation on the basis of freedom, liberty, rule of law, human rights, due process and all those notions of a civilized modern nation. In those era gone by, they had monarchy, military dictators and the autobismacs. We are in that kind of stage now, but we have a different world parameter to work with. In those days, they can work on the basis of getting empires as colonial and getting slaves to enhance their capital. So those days are gone. We can’t decide we are still in that embryo of nation building where tribes and ethnic nationalities feel they are not yet on board and those in that past had greater territory and preponderance of culture. So we have domestic atmosphere that requires a new form of relationship other than that engendered by the colonial era. That had led us to the civil war and after the civil war there was no victor no vanquished, and we are still tinkering with the constitutional which is the fundamental law that we can all regard as the contract of relationship as different ethnic nationalities making up a multi cultural, multi religious and diverse people working as one in a kind of unity. It is by defining our unity that we will all accept and respect as the basis for our peace and progress. It is a hard work for the leadership who must show vision, commitment, transparency, honesty and morality in doing the public business.
Never has the North been so divided as in the present time when the issue of zoning is heating the polity. Your organization, the Arewa Consultative Forum which is the umbrella body of the north met on Wednesday. What is your general position on this issue?
First of all, let us accept zoning within its own context. When one says the North is heating the polity on account of zoning, and that the North has not taken a decision on zoning, the context which this zoning is debated must be clearly understood and stated. Zoning is not our national policy as a federation. If we are in a confederation, we can talk about each state having the opportunity through whatever means of electoral college or system, to produce a president. So in our context, we will say the zoning will go round a circle of 36 states and FCT. So when you provide a president from your state within that confederal set up, it is like a chairman from the reigning governors. We are not in that situation; it is not our constitution. There is no zoning or rotation thereafter in respect of finding the president or the chairman of rulers.
So how did zoning get into our political lexicon?
Zoning came about because after the successful so called best election was conducted by the military regime and was scrapped. And because we are so ethnocentric as a nation, one particular ethnic zone or region- the South-west felt short changed. They were aggrieved. Notwithstanding all the hullabaloo, the threats of separation and splitting the country that took place immediately after that episode. The politicians, the leading politicians who had their debacle with the military to bring about a democratic atmosphere felt that in a democracy, there must be a level playing ground. But it was not possible following a successful democratic election to hold sway and open the gate to the democratization of political process in Nigeria. This search for justice and equity in the political environment brought about the adoption by the foremost political party leading the democratization process, to accept that zone (the South-west) to be fully incorporated and for them to feel that they are part and parcel of the Nigerian project and that they are not being discriminated in the leadership apex of the Nigerian nation, thought that they should put up one of their own as their candidate for the presidency.
What happened was that the political negotiators of the PDP asked Dr. Ekwueme who was in the fore front of the political founders of succeeding democratic party from the military, to allow the South-West to be given the slot in the forefront of the PDP in order to assuage their pains from the step-aside act of Babangida and the following development between shonekan and Abacha.
But then, that slot got personalized in the person of General Obasanjo. Obasanjo has been Head of State before. He had been guilty of treason. But how they descended on him to come and take the democratic leadership in my view, had become the misfortune of the country because the Afenifere and the South-West political groups were in the PDP and if they had stayed there probably they would have influenced who in the South-West would have taken the mantle of candidacy or slot of presidency.
But that didn’t happen. They defected and went to one party or the other, ending up with an AD candidate from the South-West to pitch in their camp against the PDP. It then appeared that the South-West would not support and did not support Obasanjo and PDP. But PDP was bent on bringing into the forefront of political movement, the South-West.
Anyhow, they knocked out their agreement to assuage the pains of the South-west ethnic group. Having done that, their plan was to ensure that the democratic space was brought into the fold of their national growth on justice and equity.
The attempt to make peace with the South-West would be for one term, “we had crossed the first hurdle which is bring back into the main team, the South-West. Then the second hurdle was that after Obasanjo’s first term, they re-arranged their team. They jettisoned their fundamental basics of building an equitable democratic party by allowing him a second term. That compounded the problem because their notion of zoning and appeasing South-West had been jettisoned.
And then the third complication was brought about by what I may now call the abuse of opportunity because the moment Obasanjo got the second term, he now decided not to promote democracy, not to promote the practice of the rule of law and constitutionalism in accordance with the constitution that brought him in, he decided on the path that was definitely going to dismember the constitution with his ambition and create a general national state of anarchy or lawlessness in which he can be rallied around as the pillar or the father of the nation. So that put us in a very difficult part of democratic development. Why it had put us there mostly was because immediately after the military era, the PDP had to be strong to succeed. But then, there was no equal development of an opposition party culture. And the reason for that was simple; the general public had not been enlightened as to the possibility that the democratic space and development will be viable and that it will succeed. Again, the legislative arm of the federating units and the federation had not been strengthened because there was lack of experience due to military intervention. Secondly, there was the fear that democracy will not grow because it had not been properly nurtured. Then, the third issue was the total pollution of the democratic process; the growth of militancy, thuggery, rigging and total stealing of the mandate because people were not at the centre of the development of democracy, neither were they really at the centre of the purposes for which democracy was being groomed. That was the third term debacle with Obasanjo. The sum total is that the country depended on the PDP to find the growth of democratic culture; but the PDP failed. They failed the moment they could not restrain him; it had to take the whole country to battle. Obasanjo’s regime orchestrated the change by several conferences like the Enugu constitutional conference and generally engendered corruption in high places to make democracy untenable. Now all this was happening under the PDP umbrella. At the constitutional conference which Obasanjo himself convened, the issue of zoning was debated and jettisoned. So if zoning has come to the fore front now, it is not because of the North and it is not a Nigerian problem. It is really a political party’s entanglement with their own policy, and they were supposed to be the pillars of developing democracy as I earlier said. They are the ones who have the strength. Unlike the other parties that were in opposition, they need not have the fear that the other parties had because they were supposed to be the controller of the executive arm – the presidency.
Again, it was the PDP system that admitted the late president’s candidacy. It was the same PDP who could not reason to believe that that presidency was going to be weak because of the ailing condition of the late president.
Now, the late president had three years of his term. He did not complete four and naturally he is not alive to complete a second term. So the problem of his successor is squarely the problem of the PDP. The zoning that is now being debated is to do with the successor to the late president. And I suppose that if they lack the will to discuss and agree on amendment to what they call an agreement as they failed in 2003 for Obasanjo’s second term, we should rarely be looking at the party. The party is the one who has built up the notion of zoning and successor to their presidential slot. In this case, if they agreed and the agreement is enforceable, then one expects them to honour their agreement. So there would be no problem, it is not a national problem and it will not be an Arewa problem.
Sir, I still insist that the issue has gone beyond the PDP, it is a national problem and….
(cuts in) I have not finished; let me land. That is the position so far. It is because the PDP and their agreement is lacking the force of enforcement. Making it a Northern problem presupposes that everybody in the north belong to this agreement and to the PDP, and that is false. It presupposes that the North is admitting that any president who is not a northerner will prejudice the development of the area. Again that is false, because we have had presidents from the North who had not rationally discriminated against others in order to promote development there. So again, it is not really a northern problem. But the northern political elders of PDP didn’t announce themselves as northern political leaders of PDP. They have met and have taken a decision outside the party agreement.
If you look at the list of most of those who went to the meeting of the northern political leaders, they are from that party. We should not make the domestic problem of a party a national problem and begin to talk as if the North is party to the PDP agreement or the North is insisting on presidency.
They cannot wear the cloak of the North and say they are talking for the North when there is no northern political party. The ACF is not a political party. It is a consulting group with membership spread among all the parties; all the religions and all the ethnic groups. Having made it a non PDP affair, they are hoping we should adopt it and make it a national affair. That is going to heat the polity. The context in which zoning is being used to heat up the country is being perpetuated by a deliberate ambivalence being put on it.
Original date published: 30 July 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201007300373.html?viewall=1