Confab report is for the archives, Buhari says

As part of activities to mark the 2016 Democracy Day celebrations in Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari hosted a group of editors, in an interview session where he enumerated his experiences as President in the last one year, the difficulties of governing Nigeria, and where his administration hopes to take Nigeria.

Among other issues, the president stated that left to him, the National Conference report from the Goodluck Joanathan administration would be left in the archives, as it was a misplacement of priorities.

Read below excerpts from the interview:

You were a military Head of State; you contested elections several times, and became president last year. What are your thoughts on your administration in the last one year?

We came into power at a very difficult time. We discovered too late that we had put ourselves as a nation in a mono-economy, depending only on petroleum. From 1999 to 2013, the average cost of Nigeria’s crude oil per barrel was $100. Unfortunately, when we came in it had reduced to an average of about only $30. We suddenly discovered that we are depending on petroleum; we import virtually everything, including food. On the issue of insecurity, it was there during our campaign and we knew about it; we knew about the saboteurs in the South-South, and then the unemployment. We have a huge number of unemployed persons.

I’m told the population of the unemployed youths is about 65 per cent. And for a country of our size, this is something for which we must be concerned. We campaigned on insecurity, unemployment, bribery and corruption, which have done much damage to this economy.

Nigeria is said to be difficult to govern. Did you find it to be so?

There are a lot of problems in the country. You have insurgency in the North-East. But how did Boko Haram start? If you could recall, it was like a group of political thugs, and along the line a young charismatic leader called Mohammed Yusuf emerged. That young man assumed that reputation in the North-East because of the way he preached.

 

One afternoon, the group wanted to go and bury one of their own. Most of them were on motorcycles; some wore helmets and some did not. Then, there were the military patrol vehicles.

 

The normal thing was for them to wear helmets, but the group had a way of wearing their headgears, which made it difficult to wear helmets. Instead of arresting them and taking them to court to pay a fine of some N250, the patrol team just shot six of them. Hell was let loose.

The situation went out of control for the police, and the military took over. Mohammed Yusuf went into hiding; the military looked for him, arrested and handed him over to the police, and he was murdered. That’s why we now have Boko Haram.

 

I know all these because I was once a governor of a North-East state and I follow the political developments there closely.

For unemployment, things became clearer and compounded when we became a mono-economy. We abandoned agriculture, left solid minerals, and everybody rushed to the town to get oil money. Now, we’ve found out that that oil money is not available.

Then, corruption is what we are going through now. How can you take $2.1 billion meant to fight insurgency and share among yourselves, and think that nothing should happen? Not to talk of when political money is being raised for elections and the Central Bank, the NNPC, Customs funds are where the funds were collected from.

 

We’ve made some progress in recovering this money, which I promised I would tell the nation in the next two or three days, just to show Nigerians that we haven’t given up and have no intention of giving up. We’re giving the people the opportunity of fair trial.

They took the money and paid into some persons’ accounts, and there are signatures of some persons who admitted that they had taken the money. Somebody comes and calls another, saying, ‘You’re a member of this party?’ The other person responds by saying ‘yes.’ Then, he’s told, ‘take a N100 million to go and keep,’ and the other person doesn’t ask any questions. You take a N100 million and disappear, and subsequently you complain that you have received money for doing nothing?

The biggest shock was when oil price went down to less than $40 per barrel. I asked the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria to go and bring to me what we had been doing with the foreign exchange we had earned. He came back, and we discovered it’s all food items. Grains, tomatoes, rice… That was unbelievable! All those billions of dollars went into the purchase of food? I believe 60 per cent of Nigerians eat garri, yam, grains that they grow.

So, what was happening was this: those who had a lot of naira on their hands changed it into dollars and kept. I had this experience in the 1980s when we were told that Nigeria consumed more sugar than all Africa in the south of the Sahara, except South Africa.

 

Even now, when we conducted an investigation into marketers who claimed to import fuel into Nigeria, we discovered that one-third of what they claimed was not true. Some people were just taking the money out. Thirty years down the line, we still discover that the Nigerian elite do not care about the country.

Considering the hike in the price of fuel and the devaluation of the Nigeria, which have led to hardship, what would you tell Nigerians to give them the hope that things will be better?

In 1984, we were advised to devalue the naira and withdraw subsidy; whatever their perception of subsidy was in Nigeria. We even had subsidy on flour. The IMF and World Bank talked about subsidy removal.

 

My argument has been that those who devalue their currencies have developed economies, where there is local production and they export the excess. They have good infrastructure. So they devalue their currencies to sell their products outside their shores, and employ their people.

 

We claim to import food, but this is a lie. People just take the money out of the country. How many factories have we built? So I refused to devalue the naira.

 

They talk about petroleum subsidy. I ask: what do they mean by subsidy? They say Nigeria’s petroleum is so cheap that it encourages smuggling into neighbouring countries: Cameroon, Chad, Niger.

 

But I know the four refineries we built could produce 450,000 barrels, we have 20 depots … we didn’t borrow a kobo. So even if we put something on top and pay the cost of refining and travels to filling stations and small overhead, we’ll still be selling at a good price. But they say there’s a lot of smuggling.

 

I said these countries to where they claim petrol is being smuggled to can’t consume more than what one city in Nigeria consumes. I was asked how I knew, and I said, for three and a half years I was Commissioner for Petroleum under Obasanjo. At the time I was removed, naira exchanged for $3. Now you need N350 to get a dollar.

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I challenged Nigerian economists to tell me what benefits Nigerians have earned from the devaluation so far. How many factories have we built by killing the naira? I have to reluctantly give up because the so-called Nigerian economists come and talk things to me, and when I raise issues, they talk over my head instead of inside my head. For us to lose over N300 (every year we’re losing the value of the currency by N100), what for? Let them tell me how many factories they’ve built.

I find myself in a very difficult state because the economists cannot tell me why we should continue to devalue our naira. People say import, and we find out that we are just importing food. We’re now planning to stop the importation of rice, wheat, maize in three years’ time.

On the value of the naira, I’m still agonising over it, that the naira should be reduced to such a disgraceful level over the last 30 years. I need to be educated on this. But I’m not ruling this country alone. I’m under pressure and we’ll see how we can accommodate the economists.

What are you thinking about the privatisation of refineries?

I believe in privatisation, but I believe before you do it, you have to look at your state of development as a nation. The first refinery in Port Harcourt was built to refine 60,000 barrels per day. It was upgraded to refine 100,000 barrels per day. Another one was in Port Harcourt to refine 150,000 barrels per day.

 

So Port Harcourt alone has the capacity to refine 250,000 per day of the Nigerian crude. So you’re not importing anything. As Commissioner for Petroleum, I signed the contract for Warri to refine 100,000 barrels per day; Kaduna, 100,000 barrels per day. We laid pipelines up to Maiduguri, Gusau, all over the country. We took tankers off the roads, and then some greedy people in this country took over and now all the refineries are not working. Nigeria has gone cap in hand, like a non-oil producing country and buys fuel and brings into Nigeria.

With this background in mind, do you want us to privatise our infrastructure as scrap? So, we’re just starting to get them repaired. We want to make them work so that we don’t sell them as scrap. We can’t spend so much money to put up the refineries, just to sell them as scrap. I think that will be a disservice to the country. Let’s repair them and negotiate with them to sell them at good prices. We don’t want them to dictate how much we sell fuel in this country after we’ve sold the refineries to private investors.

There are many initiatives to rebuild the North-East. Why can’t we have one cohesive approach in this regard?

If you could recall, during the week I was sworn in, I was invited to the G7 meeting in Germany. I was impressed, but I was surprised that I was the first item on the agenda. I was told to brief them on the security situation in Nigeria and on the North-East. I spoke, and all of them promised to help Nigeria.

When I returned, I told the governors of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states to make a survey of the entire infrastructure destroyed by Boko Haram – schools, local government headquarters, health centres and broken bridges. They did and put costs to them. I sent it to the headquarters of G7. Then I learnt of the T.Y Danjuma Committee.

He contributed $10 million and Aliko Dangote contributed something substantial. So we reinforced the committee and Danjuma is in charge of it. We persuaded him to stay. We drafted the legal instrument that would give them the legal powers to spend that money.

I sent the request to the AGF. He sent me a draft and I gave it to Danjuma. Instead, it went into some hands and what I got when it returned was virtually another government, with many governors and important people involved. So, I feared that all that money would finish on overheads. I returned to the original draft from the Ministry of Justice to see if we could put few people from Yobe, Borno, Adamawa, Gombe, Bauchi and Taraba to handle the rebuilding of the North-East.

Each of the governors should send directors or some officials from ministries of works, health, education, governors’ offices, and form committees. So whoever comes to help from Nigeria or outside would work with these people under the control of the Danjuma committee. If anybody wants to help he would be taken to locations and he would decide what to do.

If the United Nations identifies a project they will go there and do it. We have plenty of retired but not tired people who could manage things like that. It will take another two weeks or more before the committee members will be announced. But I don’t want a big organisation that will just consume the resources but not produce anything.

Are you satisfied with the performance of your team, and do we expect changes?

I expect to hear from you. But look at what has been happening: after the election, I went to thank Jonathan for what he did – conceding defeat. A former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd), told me he had experience in handover and asked if he should advise me.

I said, yes. He said committees in the ministries met and wrote handover notes and Obasanjo set up transition committees to work with each ministry and at the end Obasanjo took whatever he wanted from the reports. I agreed. Jonathan agreed. When I came to sit down, Jonathan’s ministers complained, saying ‘why would Jonathan allow Buhari to take over government before he is sworn in.’

They refused to cooperate. So I took over without knowing what Jonathan’s government contained. After we were sworn in, I began to debrief the permanent secretaries, taking two ministries per day, to just try and find out what they had. They had 42 ministers; the economy had collapsed.

We reduced 42 ministries to 24 and we had to ask some permanent secretaries to go on several grounds. After taking over we had a strange encounter on the budget, which was called ‘padding.’ I was in government since 1975 in one form or another, but I had never heard of the word, padding, until this time around. I pity the Minister of National Planning. All the ministers made presentations to him, he compiled them and took them to the council of ministers.

It was corrected by the council how they could and I was allowed to go and bow and deliver to the National Assembly. I didn’t know I delivered a sham! Some [civil servants] removed what the ministers put and put what they wanted. How did I know about it? I was sitting, watching the television and I saw the Minister of Health appearing before a committee to defend the budget.

They gave him the document and he said there was nothing to defend. ‘How can I defend what I haven’t presented,’ he argued. I was shocked. He was not the only one. Many of the ministers spent months, hardly eating, and some [civil servants] removed what the ministers put there and put what they wanted. I called the Minister of National Planning, and said I thank you for your hard work, but I can’t assent to this.

I don’t normally sign what I don’t understand. He begged me to sign, but I said because I trust you I will sign, but I will put you in front of me. Wherever there is trouble I will put you in front. Not up to 24 hours after, he began to look for me desperately. I said, ‘what is it, Honourable Minister.’ He said, ‘please don’t sign,’ because he sat down to look at it and discovered what damage those terrible Nigerians had done to us. It took about six weeks to correct it before I agreed to sign it.

Your party did not support the idea of a national conference, but one year after, it appears the clamour is rising again, would you have a rethink and take a look at that report?

No, I don’t want to tell different stories. I advised against the National Conference. You would recall that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was on strike for almost nine months, yet that government had about N9 billion to organise that meeting. I never liked the priority of that government on that particular issue because it meant that the discussions were more important than keeping our children in schools. That is why I haven’t even bothered to read it or ask for a briefing on it. I want it to go into the so-called archives.

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The progress so far made in the fight against Boko Haram is widely acknowledged, not only in Nigeria but outside the country. But there are other security challenges such as the clashes between herdsmen and farmers, kidnapping, activities of the Niger Delta Avengers and Biafra agitations; how prepared is Nigeria to tackle these challenges? 

I think the law enforcement agencies are working very hard to identify the killer-herdsmen. About the militants in the South-South, when we came in, I asked one of the senior officers in the army, a major-general to revisit the agreement the late President Umaru Yar’Adua signed with them. I said he should get a copy of the gazette so that we could see the agreement to know what stage we were in. I haven’t received a comprehensive report on that yet, but I believe the officer is working hard. I saw him responding to some of your colleagues (journalists) a couple of days ago in the papers. Meanwhile, I have told the military and law enforcement agencies that the promise this government took was that this country has to be secured before it can be effectively managed. So we can’t wait for that report before the military re-organises itself and secures the Niger Delta area. So I think that very soon they would do some serious operations there.

Those looking for Biafra have a tough job. A lot of them that participated in the demonstrations recently were not born and didn’t know what people like us went through while fighting against Biafra. So I think they have a problem.

Kidnapping is a very serious thing. I was going round the world telling people that we would secure Nigeria, and by our performance in the North-East, they believe us and people are prepared to come and invest in Nigeria. But nobody would invest in an insecure environment. So it is a top priority for this government to address. Once we settle down to deal with militants, we will deal with kidnappers also.

The 2016 budget has just been signed, given the current economic situation in the country, how do you hope to implement it for the benefit of the masses?

That is a major challenge for us. It is not going to be easy to complement the revenue as we promised in the budget. I mentioned initially that the market plummeted from an average of $100 per barrel for crude oil from 1999 to 2014, and suddenly went down to $30 per barrel, and now it is between $40 and $50 per barrel. I was constrained to approach the governor of the Central Bank to find out how we spend our foreign exchange.

It is surprising that in the budget, agriculture, which is the new hope of this country, has only N75 billion, both in recurrent and capital expenditure; solid minerals is even less. How do we hope to get it right?

Well, you are absolutely right. But don’t worry, even the Central Bank has assisted by giving more than N200 billion to agriculture.

Are we really close to an economic recession? In what ways can your foreign trips help in repositioning the country?  What would you do with the recovered root?

With what has happened to us so far and what I mentioned earlier, I won’t doubt a recession. When the oil price plummeted, we looked left, right and centre, and no arrangement was made to support the economy if such a thing happened. That was why I called to know what we were spending our foreign exchange on, and it was on food items. However, low-income earners cannot afford imported food, people that are not working who are the majority, live on what the farmers produce. So it is really frightening. I believe the leadership of this country should bear the consequence of not meeting up. I blame the elite for not alerting the other government sufficiently to realise that if anything happened to oil, we would be in trouble. What is my solution? It is to advise the Nigerian elite to be patriotic. Let them work very hard to support this country. Leadership at every level should take responsibility to make sure that the economy of this country is resuscitated.

On the anti-corruption fight, your critics are accusing you of probing the campaign funds of the PDP while leaving out your party; how would you explain this?

If anybody received $100 million to give to a political party, I think he should be asked to tell us where he got the money from. I know those we would eventually successfully prosecute.

 

 

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