After a glittering military
career spanning over 30 years, Gen. John Shagaya (rtd) made his foray
into politics as a senator representing Plateau Central Senatorial
District of Plateau State from 2007 to 2011. A one-time ECOMOG
Commander, and variously head of peace keeping operations in troubled
parts of Africa and Asia, Gen. Shagaya ensured that peace was restored
in war-torn Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, among others. An emblematic
trouble-shooter that he was in his days as a soldier, his home state of
Plateau is encased in intractable crises of bleeding proportion with
none able to guarantee peace. Senator Shagaya speaks about the trouble
in Plateau, the collapse of the ‘monolithic North, his botched attempt
to return to the Senate, among other issues, in an interview with the
Assistant Editor, LINUS OBOGO. Excerpts:
One would have expected that you would have made it back to the Senate, but that was not to be. What would you say went wrong?
What I believe went wrong as at the time
was the forcible nomination of a candidate by the governor of Plateau
State under whose rule the state lost more lives and property since its
creation in 1967. Some of us at that time thought that the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) would have allowed all the candidates of the
party to emerge and go through the primaries for the people to choose
whom they wanted to represent them. I lost hope in the democratic
practice where someone else will be selected over the choice of the
people, so I quit PDP and decided to just stay quiet.
The convener of the North East Forum for
Unity and Development (NEFUD), Alhaji Bello Kirfi, was reported to have
called for the secession of the North from Nigeria, although some
others elders disagreed with him. What do you make of this call,
especially when considered against the background of the reported
American Central Intelligence Agency´s (CIA’s) report predicting that
there might be no country called Nigeria by 2015?
Let me say that you have raised two
issues and that is the so-called prediction by an American Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and secondly, the content of the outcome of
the North East geo-political zone of the Northern Elders summit in
Bauchi. For the latter issue, I want to say that I was not part of that
meeting and I have not read the content or communiqué from the meeting
and so, I cannot hold brief for the conveners of the conference. But
suffice it to say that some youths of the Southern part of Nigeria have
irresponsibly raised the issue of the Delta region seceding from the
rest of Nigeria. So, if there is any truth in the report of the Northern
Elders summit, it might be in response to the reckless comment of the
Niger Delta youths. And I believe that it is as a result of that
reckless comment that must have given vent to whatever might be coming
from the North.
The President has consistently in the
last nine months, in every address of his, maintained that nothing will
cause Nigeria to break up. And if nothing else, he cannot be the
variable at this point in the country’s history to be used to cause the
break up of Nigeria. There have been those comments all over the place
and anybody is free to want to make his comment heard.
With regards to comments from America, I
addressed a conference of the armed forces about two years ago on the
issue. It was just about the time President Olusegun Obasanjo was
leaving office and the late President Umaru Yar’Adua was involved in his
electioneering, when suddenly, there was an outburst of a prediction
allegedly by the CIA that Nigeria would break up in 2015. Following the
frenzy, I went to America to do an investigation and it has since
revealed that there was no such prediction by the CIA. What emanated
from the so-called CIA prediction could have been a sponsored research.
There was a young man, an American student, who was working on his PhD
programme. The research had to do with global peace, global economy,
crises, diseases and global everything. In his research paper, a copy of
which I obtained from the university and which I have in my library, he
touched on America and a host of countries and continents.
What did he say about America? He said
America would soon be destroyed by cancer because of the concentration
of chemicals in their diets. Most of what the Americans eat
synthetic-based food like vegetables, meats and other dairy products.
For instance, it is no longer a thing of surprise to find that a
two-month-old broiler being consumed. Eggs are no longer naturally laid
by chickens but genetically modified. So, that was that young man’s
research on America. When it was the turn of Africa, the young man
decided to narrow his research down to Nigeria and Kenya, but with
emphasis more on Nigeria. What he set out to say is almost coming to
pass with regards to the US and China. China today may be pretending to
be feeding themselves, but in actual sense, they cannot feed themselves.
They are all over the continent of Africa today looking for farmlands
to farm and ship back to their people. And that was exactly what the
young PhD student was saying in his thesis.
In the case of Nigeria, all he was
saying was that the country was a very powerful sub-regional country in
west of Africa. He said Nigeria has managed to take up the
responsibility of the security of the sub-region in the ECOWAS and the
ECOMOG. And next to Nigeria would have been Egypt, but it has been
bastardised because of its involvement in the Middle East crises. Next
to Nigeria also, as an emerging power is South Africa.
On Nigeria, he tried to publish from the
result of the World Health Organisation research on HIV/AIDS epidemic
and concluded that if we did not do anything about it to control the
scourge and its spread, the country will lose so much of its population.
And if Nigeria loses so much of its population, then the Nigerian armed
forces would also be depleted and so, by a certain period, if the
situation is not properly handled, the country will not be able to
perform the sub-regional watch-dog it is known for today. He also dealt
with corruption and so many things that had to do with Nigeria.
But some mischievous Nigerians just took
one line from the thesis and went to town with it. It is akin to those
who never read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, only to be the first
to go to the streets in protest against the book. I have read the book
three times and I can tell you that unless you studied English or
literature, you cannot understand what the author is talking about. Yet
people who never went to school started carrying placards on the
streets. Unfortunately, our politicians decided to just pick up one line
from the thesis and went to town that the CIA predicted that there will
be no country called Nigeria by 2015. It was purely an outcome of a
research work by a university student. The CIA never predicted anything
of that kind.
What will make Nigeria to be no more is
the inability of our leaders to handle some of the security issues and
other challenges confronting us as a nation and blaming them on others.
That is why when a man has a problem in Kano, he blames it on the
President. When there is a problem in Jos, he blames it on religion and
when there is a problem in the Delta region, it is blamed on Abuja.
There is a growing tendency that when something happens in your state,
you look for a scapegoat somewhere to hang it on.
With due respect to the Yoruba, they
have the most learned Islamic clerics in West Africa today. Do you find
any religious crisis in the region? My answer is no! The reason why
there is no religious tension in the South West is because of the high
degree of literacy. The Yoruba respect each other’s right to religion.
That explains why they inter-marry and still practise their different
religions. While the Yoruba can fight and set themselves ablaze if it
has to do politics, they will definitely not disagree and go to war on
the basis of religion. That says a lot about their level of
sophistication. The North is not more Islamic than the Yoruba. Whenever
there are Christian festivities like Christmas or Easter, you will find
their Moslem brothers and sisters celebrating with them and vice versa.
Why is this not obtained in the North? The reason is simple, illiteracy.
The crisis in the Northern Nigeria today
is illiteracy. This has fuelled much of the trouble plaguing the
region. As we speak, I am yet to find a professor of Islamic Religion
from the North. There is none. Knowledge is grossly lacking and
illiteracy stalks the region like an incubus.
There is one Bishop Josiah Fairon of the
Anglican Communion, Lokoja, an ex-military school boy. He was my junior
in the military school. He holds PhDs in different areas of studies
including Islamic religion. Yet he is a Christian cleric. He can discuss
the Koran with the Sultan of Sokoto on an equal footing and knowledge.
The Catholics also have a man who is well learned in Islamic knowledge
in the person of Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, the Bishop of Sokoto. He is
a Master’s degree holder in Islamic Religion. This is an addition to
the PhD he holds. The truth is that once Nigerians realise that there is
value in education and pursue it vigorously, we will understand
ourselves better.
The North is today believed to be at
cross purposes with one another or a region of a babel of voices,
leading to the argument whether there still exists what was once a
monolithic North. Was there ever such a bloc and if so, what may have
gone wrong?
I am now 70 years old. And I am old
enough to be able to understand and to have seen the politics of
Nigeria, the politics of the North and other parts of the country. By
1960, I was already a young man standing on a parade ground to be part
of the Nigerian armed forces that ushered in Nigerian independence on
October 1, 1960. So, one has seen and heard a little bit of what it used
to be.
There is one question we need to ask
ourselves and that is, why is it that from 1953 till date, the Middle
Belt decided to have a voting relationship, a political relationship
with the South West? There was the United Middle Belt Congress/Action
Group, a relationship which started in 1953, yet there was Northern
Nigeria. The situation will be likened to what I described earlier in
the Delta region, the Isaac Boro uprising of 1964. The youths of the
Middle Belt of the early 40s and 50s believed that they were not being
adequately carried along in terms of involvement in the administration.
So, they discovered that in the South West, there was value, knowledge
and understanding. But in the late 50s and early 60s, when Sarduana
discovered the move by that geo-political zone, what he did was to get
closer to the Middle Belt and he found out what was likely to be a
revolution that would take part of the North to align with either the
South West or the South East. When he discovered what the problem was,
he drew the leadership of the Middle Belt in people like the late Joseph
Tarkar, Paul Unongo, the late Sunday Awoniyi, Abdulraman Okene, among
others, closer to him.
Having brought them closer to himself,
he decided to send them to universities outside Nigeria to acquire more
education and come back to form a very good link between their
communities and the administration of Northern Nigeria. That was how he
handled the issue and that was why a lot of the Middle Belters respected
the late Sarduana. Even though he was a Moslem, he was the leader of
the North who respected everybody and treated everyone equally until the
coup of 1966 consumed him. His most trusted person was his principal
private secretary, the late Sunday Awoniyi, a Christian. Each time the
late Sarduana travelled to Israel, he would buy the latest version of
the Bible for Awoniyi. He would tell Awoniyi: ‘Your God is a good God.
Stay close to Him’. There was nothing people didn’t do for Sarduana to
sack Awoniyi because he was not following him to the mosque on Fridays.
But the Sarduana said no, because he felt there was one God and there is
still one God and there shall be one God. So, when I hear people speak
about monolithic North, I come to the conclusion that it is used for
cheap acceptability.
Since 1967, when Gowon decided to break
northern Nigeria into six states with six more from the South, bringing
it to 12 states and subsequent state creation, each state has been
ruling itself. So, the so-called monolithic North will not arise again.
Only leaders who lack the initiative will want to go on hanging onto
something which no longer exists. Even though others may think
differently, that is what I think. I was a Minister for Internal Affairs
for five years and I was the first Christian to be in that ministry for
five years. The point I am making is that for those five years, I was
the chairman of the inter-religious committee and I made sure that
through dialogue and understanding, the North and the South West
observed Sallah on the same day. Until 1985, the North would not accept
the sighting of the moon of the South West. So, there were two Sallahs
and different Sallah holidays. It took a lot of understanding to manage
the situation. We need that kind of understanding today.
When Izalla Moslem sect wanted to create
problems in 1982/83/84, no one knew who they were and the only way we
could destroy the Maitasine sect was to acknowledge that there was a
sect called Izalla. We recognised Izalla and we gave them a certificate
and told them that they could practise but they should make sure that
JNI and CAN knew who they were. When we did that, Maitasine disappeared.
The Izalla was fighting for recognition and as soon as they did that,
they sheathed their sword. They have their headquarters in Jos which is a
Christian state. So there is value in respecting people and knowing
their worth. Again when in 1987, there was this big religious crisis in
Northern Nigeria and I was made the chairman of Organisation of Islamic
Conference (OIC), I had the responsibility to handle the issue and I
worked with people from other religions.
I remember then that we were desirous to
be in the OIC, but the timing was wrong. We said since we were still
suspicious of one another, it was better we pulled out and return to the
status quo as an observer country. That was the decision at the time.
But the question is, who launched Nigeria into an observer status of the
OIC? It was General Yakubu Gowon (rtd), who was a Christian head of
state and I saw nothing wrong with it because as human beings, we must
recognise the existence of each other.
If OIC was handled the way you explained
it, why was it alleged to have caused the resignation of the former
Chief of General Staff, Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe (rtd), from the IBB-led
military junta?
What happened then was high level
politics which I am incompetent to speak on. That was not the reason.
Unfortunately, Gen. Sani Abacha is now late, but if he were still alive,
then he could contradict me. What happened was that there was conflict
as to who truly should be number two and it had nothing to do with the
OIC. Ukiwe, as the Chief of General Staff, was the number two, that is
second in command to Babangida, but Sani Abacha would never recognise
him as number two. He believed that as the Chief of Defence Staff, he
should have been number two. So that was the high level politics that
was going on then. Ukiwe lost out because something happened, and it is
that something that you should investigate.
Was that what obtained in previous military regimes before your time, lack of respect for hierarchy?
The answer is no, which was why I said
that at that time, there was crisis of leadership. You can go as far
back to Gowon’s regime. He had just spent a few hundred days then and
there was confusion as to whether his regime would survive or not,
because of the killings in the North and part of the West, so there was
that lack of confidence. When Gen. Gowon was in the saddle, the number
two man would have been Brig. Ogundipe. But he gave an order to a
corporal to do something and the corporal told him that he could not
take orders from him. Immediately he told Gowon that he could not be his
number two, since an ordinary corporal could tell him that he could not
take orders from him. So Gowon sent him as High Commissioner to London.
Again, when the cloud surrounding that administration settled, Gowon
then took the next most senior military officer, Admiral Akinwale Wei.
So, there was respect for hierarchy. When the late Gen. Murtala Muhammed
took over as head of state, he took the most senior military officer as
his deputy, that was Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo. When Murtala was
assassinated and Obasanjo took over, the next most senior was not Shehu
Musa Yar’Adua. It was Theophilus Danjuma. But Theophilus said since
Murtala was assassinated, it would be better to give the position of
number two to someone from the region where Murtala came from to assure
them that the administration meant no harm. That was why I said that
Abacha and Ukiwe’s situation was peculiar. Ukiwe is alive, so he can
speak for himself. The highest sense of discipline was observed
throughout the military administration and especially under IBB. If
there was none, there would have been no way that IBB would have
dismissed a colonel for refusing to account for N300,000 travelling
allowance that he collected.
The North appears to be opposed to the
inclusion of the six geo-political zonal structure in the constitution.
Is there anything the region is afraid of?
Unfortunately for the North, the six
geo-political zonal structure is in the military decree. It will be
interesting to know the particular individuals that are sharing these
extremist views. You can’t say that all the 19 Northern governors will
be speaking with one voice. It is not true. Plateau State may not share
in that. If the Delta region fought for self-governance to the extent
that they carried arms in 1964 and today they have three states, Delta,
Bayelsa and Rivers, why should someone wake up and say that they must go
back to former Eastern Nigeria? Is it possible? If the Middle Belt, the
United Middle Belt Front and the Borno Youth Movement which did not
also want to believe that they belonged to the Hausa/Fulani groups,
because the Borno Empire believes that they are more Muslims to the core
than the Hausa/Fulani who were conquered by Usman Dan Fodio. That
problem still exists; hence the Shehu of Borno would not accept 100 per
cent the authority of the Sultan over him. Is the person advocating for a
return to the old regional structure speaking the minds of everyone?
These are conflicting issues. That is why we have to understand the
standpoint of whoever is commenting on an issue.
As former ECOWAS Commander, you put your
life on the line to bring about peace in the West Africa sub-region-
Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and other troubled spots in Africa.
How does it make you feel to be described as a commander who ensured
peace for others but has no peace in his own homestead?
Well, I have always admitted before the
media that I share in the shame of Plateau for three reasons: having
served my country and other parts of Africa all my live, ensuring that
there was peace in Liberia, Rwanda, Angola, there is no peace in my own
home, which is Plateau State. It is quite a shame. The second reason is
that the man who administers the state today, Governor Jonah Jang is a
retired colleague of mine in the armed forces where you would think the
highest discipline and respect for human lives should be sacred and
therefore would have been called to order by his GOC or the president,
were he still in the armed forces, yet he appears clueless and helpless
and cannot be called to order. It is a thing of shame.
The third reason is, as a Christian who
is God-fearing and who believes in the faith I uphold, that human live
is sacred, and yet I see lives and property being destroyed and I cannot
do anything about it, all in the name of democracy. So I also share in
the shame.
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