Nigeria might collapse if the elite class fails to halt the drift - Sam Nda-Isaiah

The Chairman of Leadership Newspapers, and an Exco member of Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria, Mr. Sam Nda-Isaiah, clocks 50 on Tuesday. In this interview with CHIAWO NWANKWO and JOHN ALECHENU, he speaks on his media life, the depth of corruption in the country, and concludes that Nigeria might collapse if the elite class fails to halt the drift

Congratulations on your turning 50 on May 1. Has it been golden all through?

It can’t be all golden of course; I thank God very, sincerely. The first thing I will do is to thank God. I say this because I know many close friends, my contemporaries and people in my age group including some very, very close friends that didn’t live to be 50. So, the first thing I will do is to thank God very sincerely. On whether it has been golden, I’m sure the answer is very obvious, it has not been; I also thank God for not just being 50 years, but also for giving me very good parents, who still remain good parents to me up till today; for giving me a very good wife, very good children, good family and great friends.

You trained as a pharmacist, but today you are a publisher of one of the fastest growing newspapers in Nigeria. At what point did you decide to make the transition?

I have always had interest and flair for writing. I’ve always expressed my views very strongly especially when I think those are the right views. I hate injustice, I hate when people want to do the wrong thing for the fun of it and I express them strongly. I have always loved to express myself. In fact, when I was in pharmacy school I was the Editor-In-Chief of “The Student Pharmacist,” the official mouthpiece of student pharmacists all over Nigeria. I went to the University of Ife. While also at the university, I was part of a campus magazine called “The Touch.” In fact, Sam Omatseye of The Nation was part of it at that time. All my life, I’ve been in the media, I was brought up by my father and the only job my father has done in his life is journalism. He was a pioneer member of staff of the New Nigerian, he rose to become a Deputy Editor and went to start The Triumph; he was the pioneer Managing Editor or so. And when we were small, anytime he came back from the office, he would bring all the papers in Nigeria, including foreign papers and hand them over to me. So, right from primary to the secondary school, I’ve always been in this environment.

How do you handle political pressure?

There is a lot of political pressure. I think the best way to handle it is the way I handle it. My views are usually not personal, occasionally they can be. But they are not. If you are my friend you should know that the newspaper can criticize you strongly. In some cases, I might not even know, at times my column will even criticise you. I think my friends already know that and they have accepted it but what I will not accept is for somebody to call me to say, oh, the newspaper lied against him; I will not take that even if you are not my friend. Most of the calls I get are on things that are not true. When you check it (the story), it’s true, in that case, there is nothing you can do. It is either I remain in this business and do it properly or take the money to go and do something else; maybe, to sell pure water and make more profit. But as long as it is this, people will have to do it well. The reading public knows when you are compromised, don’t under-estimate the public, they know.

Some see you as a Muhammadu Buhari apologist, just as you have been accused of having incurable dislike for Obasanjo. How do you react to this?

Well, I am not an apologist of Buhari, I support his aspiration to be president and I want to place it on record now and I still do. Since 2003, he has been the best candidate on the field. I have no problem in saying that. I am not his apologist because Buhari will be first to tell you that I’m one of his greatest critics. I think that there are a fewer people that can meet Buhari and tell him things that I do. I still believe that during the Obasanjo election and that of Yar’Adua, and the last one, he was the best candidate on the field. However, he has his own problems. He probably lacks the wherewithal of a typical Nigerian politician that will make him win, that is a different issue, but in terms of the person that would have held this country, or put it in the right direction; I believe that among those who contested, he was the best. If Buhari had been the president today, there would have been no fuel subsidy issue, corruption would have been addressed. And of course, you know this Boko Haram thing would have been handled differently. When it comes to choosing between right and wrong, I am very firm in taking a position. I’ve found out that it is the easiest way to live because if people don’t like you today, you will understand tomorrow why I took that decision. As for Obasanjo, I don’t dislike him but I dislike his ways. Most of the bad things that we have in the polity today have their roots in Obasanjo’s administration. I was the first to coin the word “third term” and people thought I was an extremist; we saw it and it came to pass. Public funds were used to bribe National Assembly members for the third term; Electoral Act was forged; I think these will be a subject of discussion another time.

Were you surprised recently when he said he never initiated the third term plot?

Of course, he wanted it. He deceived many people. I am not the only one, including people that supported him in 1999; I was not the only one.

So you did?

Oh, yes! About three or four of us thought that when he came out of prison, he was somebody who had the experience to recreate the structure for good governance that had been destroyed at the time. He was not the only one available then, but we just thought that he was the most qualified; he had been president before. Not until when I later heard from Gen. T.Y Danjuma, how he was forced to leave power in 1979, we thought he voluntarily left power then; even if there was corruption then, there was order. We had also thought that after he voluntarily left power and become a world figure, he might have fine-tuned some of his governance ideas. All these we put together and we thought that we should start re-building and the best person to come back to power was Obasanjo. Don’t forget that at that time, people were also talking about power shift. I didn’t support him because of power shift, I had never been a supporter of power shift or rotation, and I still believe that the best person should contest and let election be free and fair. I was one of those who supported him, we had a group called New Millennium Collective. I was one of them, Bashir Yusuf Ibrahim and the late Sali Hidjo Ahmed. There was also Usman Gidado, now deceased. We wrote to him; initially, he even abused us and said we did know some people that were promoting his entry into politics and that he was not available for service. But that was before he changed his mind. The problem with Nigeria is that we accept too many things. A president that will be part of a group called Transcorp that bought NITEL openly? President Nixon of the America only spied on a party, but he was a pariah till he died. I am sure that will not even qualify to be called a crime here. In fact, when he died, I thought they were too mean; they were still talking about it and abusing him in death. Crimes have no consequences here.

How will you describe the Nigerian state today?

The Nigerian state today is in serious crisis. I don’t think anybody should argue about that. There is a serious security crisis, there is a serious crisis of corruption and the kind of corruption we are talking about now, I think we should find another name for it. I think it is corruption mixed with wickedness where people will steal N1trn. Do you know how many zeros are behind one trillion? Where people are stealing pension funds and they are giving them bail; where the judiciary can discharge and acquit Ibori and the same Ibori will go to London and plead guilty to only God knows how many counts of corruption and the judiciary is not even ashamed? Yet, nobody is apologising or embarrassed. Nigeria is in real crisis, Nigeria is going the wrong way; we can’t even conduct a free and fair election.

If you were to be in Jonathan’s shoes how would you address this issue of corruption?

There is a very simple way to handle corruption. If you want to handle corruption, you will handle it. If N1trn can be stolen and the president does not know that one trillion is being stolen, then there is a serious problem. If one trillion naira can be stolen, and the president doesn’t know who did it and when, then there is a major problem. If you are not corrupt, it means you can arrest even your brother. Are you surprised that Power Holding Company of Nigeria is not working; refineries are not working; there is no water; there are no roads? Everywhere, it’s free for all stealing. Nobody is saying that the president is corrupt, but you can’t be sitting down and the whole place is like this and you’ve not declared a kind of emergency in government. Nigeria is the only oil exporter that is broke. In the last few years it used to be that we could not implement the capital budget, now even the recurrent we can’t implement in spite of the fact that the price of oil keeps going up. I think we are now hitting 2.6 million barrels of oil per day apart from the money made from gas. The tax office made N4.6 trn last year, Customs made almost a trillion and yet we can’t pay salaries. Customs made about N700bn and that excludes some paratatals that are money yielding. We’ve not even talked about oil; we cannot continue to run this country like this. The government itself has not made any serious statement, all these statements we hear are either from the House of Representatives or from activists. The government itself has not shown outrage in this pension fund thing. I’ve not seen anger from any direction. Nigeria might collapse and it is in the interest of the elite, their enlightened self-interest to sit down and see that things change. We can’t continue this way. (Source: The Punch)