Second Republic Minister, Dr. Paul Unongo, has said that contrary to views held in other parts of the country that the North was afraid of restructuring, the region is ready for a sovereign national conference.
Dr. Unongo, who is the deputy leader of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), in an interview with VINCENT KALU, advised those agitating for a state of Biafra to bury such ambition, as that will never happen. He also stressed that the North cannot allow the county to breakup.
What is your view on the state of the nation?
We must know what Nigeria was yesterday to know the state it is today. Yesterday, things were more certain. People were certain about their being received. People accepted Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, as the father of the nation; people accepted Chief Obafemi Awolowo, as the leader of the Yoruba and a progressive mind, who brought federalism to the forefront. People accepted him as the Premier of the Western Region, and people also knew Sir Ahmadu Bello, a prince from Sokoto Caliphate, as the prime person and they expected him to protect the people of the North, because he was always thinking about, “ my people are not ready yet; my people are not developed, give us time”.
So, people anticipated their leaders, and they knew their leaders.
Use that and come to our days today, we don’t know what is happening except that the patriotism we noticed from these old leaders, and the decision and extreme interest in developing their country to a modern nation state, as Awolowo thought about seems to be absent today, whether in the legislative or the executive arm of government.
Majority of the people who are brought in to be agents and pushers of development look at their personal interest first, the interest of people who are their friends, business or political associates come second, and then the nation comes a distant third.
The consequence of this type of behavior, is that the younger generation has not seen any need for serious patriotism because it is, everybody to himself; everybody struggling to develop himself.
There has been explosion in the population. During our time, Nigeria has about 30 million people, but the country is getting up to 200 million people, and so the competition has become fierce and everybody is to himself and that is not good for this country.
Not only have we lost the sense of mission that we had, when we were going to school in those days and graduated, we were so excited to join the rank of Azikiwe and other progressives, like Awolowo, who appeared very concerned about his tribal people; he was the father of federalism, and insisted on federalism as the form of government for the Nigerian nation state. He believed firmly that a nation with such ethnic groups should be federalism. So, he had a goal.
We were fighting for something then, but today, we don’t know what we are fighting for.
Since Buhari came and articulated his own fight, the rudderlessness which resulted in Nigeria having a ragtag army of bandits laying claims to Nigerian territory, as Boko Haram did, and taking hold of a large chunk of our territory, and there was no response from the government has stopped.
Buhari came and said what I would do, I would fight corruption and take action to retrieve some of the monies that people have stolen, and secondly, I would uproot these bandits who have taken a chunk of the nation’s territory, and at the same time, develop the economy of the nation.
With the coming of Buhari, at least we had an agenda, which was being pursued, and from the mid term score, there has been improvement on the three- point area that he said he would concentrate. Nationalism has lost. There is no leader in Nigeria today who is talking about the patriotism that Azikiwe or Awolowo used to talk about. Today, everybody is talking about his tribe, his little place.
All the problems of Nigeria can be summarized to this deceit of the leadership, that you can have a nation state and still pursue the little goals of ‘my people’, my tribe.
We should be educating our people that we are not the first people that came from a primordial background of tribe, that leadership emerges, and people should stop talking about their tribes and talk about common interests and common good for the greatest number of people within the amalgam that the British put together, called Nigeria.
I’m depressed. I pray that God will help the younger generation to know that nations are built by deliberate action of people and not by God, and we have great men in this country.
After the Kaduna declaration, where some youth organisations from the North gave Igbo living in the region quit notice, and you dismissed them, but, the spokesman of Northern Elders Forum, Prof Ango Abdullahi came out to support those youths. Is it that NEF is polarised?
Prof Ango Abdullahi is not the leader of NEF. Ambassador Maitama Sule leads it, while I’m the deputy leader.
Northern Elders Forum never sat down, and took a decision, and I do know actually that we will never sit down having gone through Nigeria, having watched Nigeria, having participated in building Nigeria, having benefited tremendously from Nigeria, we will not even dream that we are going to push our people back to the days of jokers, thinking that we don’t have a constitution.
We are trying to create a constitutional government and we have so created it with our blood; we shed our blood in a civil war that was fought with ferocity that we cannot even daydream of fighting a war again. This Nigeria of today is not Awolowo’s Nigeria that he said was mere geographic expression. This is Nigeria that has passed through the crucible of warfare, where we killed about three million people on both sides of the divide and nobody is going to fool us again.
Nobody can stand up and say that, “I, Paul Unongo, cannot go to Anambra and ask the government for a piece of land to farm or create a ranch. If I don’t go to Anambra to ask for it, but some people from Anambra come to me in Benue, Northern Nigeria, and say they want a piece of land to build a hotel, and then some nuts wake up one day and ask them to pack and go because he is called a northerner, it is not possible, it can never happen because the Constitution of Nigeria is sacrosanct and firm. We passed through warfare and we gave ourselves the constitution through the military. It gives everybody the right to settle anywhere. If I’m not able to settle in the East, that is my business, if I’m not able to settle in Yoruba land, that is my business. If a Yoruba man decides to settle in Tiv land, Nupe land, etc, he is so welcomed and is allowed by the constitution, and is no less a citizen than a child who biologically is born in that place.
We are a constitutional government. It the weaknesses of our governments that these types of statements that are likely to cause a lot of dissension, anxiety in the minds of our people are continually being made.
I understand what the children from the North are doing. I understand that they are responding to what Nnamdi Kanu is doing in the East, calling for the balkanization of Nigeria.
I do know that we cannot have another Biafra war. We fought a war for three years about Biafra and we slaughtered about three million people and ended the war, with the federalist winning. We cannot sit in an air conditioned house taking a look at the three million people that were sacrificed and then begin to share Nigeria and say – lets go back to Biafra. That can never happen. I’m not a child; I’m not a joker. I participated in that war. I know actually that these people are touting, doing politics, whether it is the young men in the East who are shouting about Biafra or the ones in the North.
They are talking and I have always supported that the Federal Government should give an opportunity to people who feel that our elders didn’t do it right, lets have a dialogue. The dialogue must be within the Federal Republic of Nigeria; it must be within the constitutional framework of the Constitution of Nigeria, because we bought this for too high a price to joke with it. I know war; I saw war. These people didn’t see war. Anybody who is about 50 didn’t see war. The ones making noise in Nigeria are between 30 and 40 years old. The war started in 1967.
I know that Kanu is not going to get people who are responsible, who saw the war like, Ebitu Ukiwe, Dr. Alex Ekwueme. Why would they want war? They saw it.
We saw Ojukwu, who said he would overrun Nigeria, and what happened to him at the height of the federal troops, and we saw when the time came that he left the country.
Nobody should look for war.
These children must be told firmly that we the elders -there are people like Ekwueme, Ben Nwabueze and others who saw the war, they should tell these young men making noise about war. They never saw it and they didn’t know what happened. There are people in the North like me, who also need to tell our boys.
I was performing my function as an elder who saw it all. No country can go through two civil wars. We will sit down here and talk. People make caricature that the North is afraid of restructuring, let us define what we mean by restructuring. Lets hold a national conference. Even if it is a sovereign national conference, the North will go there, but if it is a conference to dissolve Nigeria, we will never allow that to take place, and there are many Igbo, many Yoruba and Hausa, who like me, a Tiv will say they can never allow these young men to breakup this country that we sacrificed three million men to keep together.
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