A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress and member of the sixth National Assembly, Senator Ayo Arise, in this interview with Gbenga Sodeinde, speaks on salient national issues including the need for the President Bola Tinubu-led administration to make restructuring of the nation top priority.
Revered legal giant, Afe Babalola, recently celebrated 60 years at the Bar where former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, described as neither moral and constitutional the huge salary package of the National Assembly members, What is your reaction to this vis-a-vis the fact that this so-called jumbo pay was approved and even promoted during his tenure?
Let me congratulate Afe Babalola for his vision and his sense of industry for Ekiti and Nigerian people. He has created educational opportunities for our younger ones. The legal profession has witnessed tremendous boost, elite patronage and the medical school has become another Mecca for the salvation of the health sector in our country. He has been a wonderful person for our country and Ekiti State in particular.
Let me also use this opportunity to congratulate your Publisher, the Publisher of the THISDAY Newspapers, Mr. Nduka Obaigbena, on his 64th birthday for his invaluable contributions to the development of the country, and society, through the entrenchment of democracy in Nigeria through his media outlets.
Mr Obaigbena has paid his dues as a patriotic Nigerian, and a media mogul, I pray God to give him long life and make him to continue to prosper so that he can continue to contribute more meaningfully to the development of the country and society at large. I congratulate him.
Now, back to the real question you asked me, I do not know who started the jumbo pay in the National Assembly. I was in the 6th Senate and most of what we describe as a jumbo pay lies in the allowances vis a vis traveling back and forth from your constituency to the headquarters. It covers the cost of opening and running of offices at different local government offices within respective Senatorial districts.
There is a difference between policy and implementation in Nigeria. If some people decide not to do the needful that such monies are provided for, then that is a different kettle of fish.
In terms of morality, some people can begin to ask questions, and hardly would anybody agree that he is getting too much in terms of remunerations in the National Assembly as accessibility of grassroot people is definitely higher for a Senator as against a governor.
On the constitutionality, I want to say that most of these things are done and are ratified through the Appropriation Act thereby making such actions covered under the constitution of the Federal Republic.
I know it is not only Baba Obasanjo, but many Nigerians feel somehow that all the Senators are actually benefiting far more than the services they render to Nigerians.
This is quite debatable depending on who you are talking to and depends on what each and everyone can say he has done in terms of their constituency support and value added to the people they represent.
Those are issues we need to continue to work on and I want to assure you under the present circumstances, many of them would be able to justify the pay. This is not about the pay; criticism should be more on the effectiveness of the oversight functions.
If we do proper oversight and we call a spade a spade, I think Nigeria would be better for it. We cannot discountenance the statements of our elders who could be seeing things from a different perspective. For me, I think we should continue to raise the issue of the jumbo pay, we should be very objective to look at other sectors. We all need to stand up against wasteful allocations, wasteful spending in our public sector. Every waste has an impact on our ability to fund our power sector, our road infrastructure, and provisions of other basic amenities that can improve the quality of life of our people.
I hope the National Assembly will continue to focus on the direction of carrying out oversight functions to ensure that the executive, particularly civil servants are not wasting too much time and putting so many clogs in the wheel of progress of executive actions during implementation.
This new government should beam searchlight and ensure that policy and timely implementation is raised to a reasonable level.
Nigerians are groaning under the hike in price of petroleum, what is your reaction?
The hardship being experienced by Nigeria as a result of the hike in petroleum prices is not unexpected, but the scale far outweighs the intention of the Federal Government.
The palliatives being discussed by the government is expected to ameliorate some of the consequences of the price hike.
I am one of those who believe in the action of Mr. President. Nevertheless, I also believe that the palliatives must reach the intended recipients in the shortest possible time frame.
The subsidy regime remains the highest source of leakage in our economy. Trillions are paid out to vendors, many of the vendors turn around to sell the subsidized products to neighboring West African countries for incredible profit. Many of the vendors merely put documents together and collect subsidies on products that never made it to Nigeria. Nigeria in many cases was subsidizing fraud and the poor Nigerians suffer the consequences.
Your advice to Federal Government on policy and implementation.?
This government must ensure that corruption is looked at, very seriously because it’s getting to a level that every public official must become accountable in terms of implementation of policies of government. That change in thinking is what we need and that is what we are praying that the President should give to Nigerians.
The solid mineral policy must be totally overhauled. There are resources in the solid mineral space that could dwarf what we have from oil in terms of revenue to the Federal Government. The focus of the government is largely on the oil sector. This situation should be reversed urgently as part of the revenue generation diversification of this government.
This government has said students will have access to loans for education in our tertiary institutions. There is a huge gap between the pronouncement and implementation. Relative to implementation, things happen faster than the pronouncement.
Some tertiary institutions have now jacked up their school fees, how do you respond to that?
The Federal government must immediately set up a school’s loan board to come up with implementation guidelines.There must be a maximum amount of money a student can take based on the type of institution the students are attending and the course of study.
The loans board would merely be a coordinating board. The actual loans must be processed by the retail banks. Guarantee should be provided by the Federal government. The banks would be able to collect their loans from beneficiaries within 10 years of disbursement.
The government of President Tinubu should urgently set up state, regional and credit Bureaus that would link with the Federal Credit bBureau. The credit bureaus would have access to verification portal of the National Identity Management Commission for identity verification.
NIMC is developing a robust database that could become the basis or foundation for our economic development and the precursor to any credit scheme run by the government. Everyone that has a national identity number shall be entitled to any government support available to citizens.
The moment the President started mentioning a credit system, I know he was on the right track of prosperity for Nigeria.
It goes beyond just credit; it is the harbinger of our economic revolution. The provision of mortgage loans for housing for Nigerians, the housing revolution would certainly pick up. Doors of opportunity would open to every Nigerian in different housing categories.
The auto industry would certainly require more manufacturing or assembly lines to fulfill the aspiration of Nigerians for car ownership that the availability of a robust credit system that would open the vista of opportunity to visit a car lot and drive out in a new car with little or no down payment.
The President has a manifesto and that cannot be fulfilled in two years. He has a mandate of four years and hopefully he might be there for eight years. This era would invariably be the golden era of our national life. The credit system must be implemented to succeed by ensuring that corruption or nepotism or any form of favoritism is removed by putting down best practices governance in the implementation of the credit system.
Nigerians are blaming President Tinubu for current fuel price hike, and the hardship in view of the current economic situation in the county, some said the president ought not to have made the pronouncement on the fuel subsidy, saying there wouldn’t have been the hike in fuel price and its negative multiplayer effects on the people now?
The issue of fuel subsidy removal has existed in Nigeria for decades and it has become a political and economic problem that has defiled solution. There can never be a correct time to remove subsidy because it has been weaponised against the government by the labour unions and the vampires sucking the blood of Nigerians on the other hand. We really do not know the most potent of the two as the weapons of mass destruction targeted at our population.
The labour unions on the one hand understands that subsidy has become the parasite eating deep into the fabric of our economic development by depriving Nigerians the money required to fund our education sector, stalling our industrial growth for diverting the needed funds to jumpstart our industrial revolution.
Yet they negotiate with government a form of increment of petrol prices for Nigerians that keeps us on the path of economic kwashiorkor. They increase prices at a rate that never provides answers to a trend that sees us selling our crude oil to countries where they would be refined and sold back to us at a rate that ensures that we can never generate any meaningful profit.
The cost of crude keeps fluctuating in the international market. Now we are selling at $80.00 per barrel, the refineries must buy crude at $80.00 per barrel, they must refine with consideration for the cost of crude and sell to us at a rate that ensures they cover their cost and sell back to us.
Nigerians refuse to understand the simple law of demand and supply. We want to keep the cost of PMS constant despite all the variables of economic indexes. The labour unions pretend to be helping the workers by pursuing objectives that would further sink us into economic failure. Nigeria was pursuing bankruptcy through fuel subsidy.
Every well-meaning Nigerian understands that subsidy must go but no leader had the courage to say when until President Tinubu. There would never be a correct time to remove subsidy, we are witnessing the hardship which is inevitable if we would ever eradicate the monster called fuel subsidy. The President has reacted swiftly to alleviate the hardship people are experiencing through several steps to provide succor to Nigerians.
There is no doubt that the poverty alleviation problems would touch every household in Nigeria, we just need to be a bit patient.
Work is going on to update our National Social Register of poor people across the nation. The National identity database would now be handy to identify the truly eligible population of beneficiaries of the social safety net.
The employment to be generated because of the policy of this government in the housing sector credit, the automobile sector credit, the education sector credit, and the overall improvement of the quality of life of our people would certainly in due course move Nigeria in the direction of economic prosperity.
What are the things you can suggest to President Tinubu in turning around economic situation of the country?
One must give kudos to the President towards ameliorating the suffering of Nigerians. He should continue to invest in mechanised agriculture and continue to encourage people to go into large scale farming so that production will be coming even before the end of his palliatives.
There is nothing hidden that he did not touch on solutions to this hardship. Even the state government are genuinely interested too.
And it should not be based on any party affiliation. I think it is a question of patience to implement some of these policies. Nothing is rocket science anymore, but it is now a question of implementation.
We need to bear a little more and the President is appealing to Nigerians and engaging them.
What advice do you have for the president in the area of security challenges facing the country, unemployment, and others?
I believe with the restructuring of the security apparatus of Nigeria, things should get better. One of the few things I expect the President to do now is to decentralise policing. The way he took the courage to end subsidy, he should take that same courage to create state and local police.
Good enough our President is American trained. In the United States where we copied our constitution, police is localised.
They have State, County, City, and Campus police. At the federal level, they have the FBI, which is the equivalent of the federal police. Once the Federal Police comes to a State on any federal crime, the state or county or city police surrender authority to the federal police. This has worked for centuries.
The President has seen a society where it works. The same courage that he used to remove fuel subsidy, let him use the same courage to call on the National Assembly to quickly work with the Executive arm of government to create and pass the law that decentralizes our policing structure. The importance of a local police in detecting strange faces in their communities would certainly reduce crime particularly in our local and rural areas.
Once the police are decentralized, the issue of unemployment would reduce. Even at the very minimum, we can posit that at an average of 10,000 policemen per state, no fewer than 360,000 able bodied men and women, would be removed from the unemployment market.
Some people out of fear of the unknown say that the governors will use the state police to harass opponents. As we continue to work towards removing immunity of the governors while serving, any governor that uses the state police in manners detrimental to the constitution as regards freedom of speech etc., shall face his /her charges after they leave office. There should be no statue of limitation on crimes and felonies. The system would certainly correct itself down the road in the future.
The society belongs to all of us. We are all stakeholders. We must ensure that we move in the direction of integrity, fair treatment to our citizens and when these things are established, they will be resolved.
I believe the state police must be the President’s priority. He has always been for it, and I know he would take that courage to work with the National Assembly now that APC is in power and let us find a good solution to the security architecture of Nigeria.
If we have local police, they would be able to single out Boko Haram members and other criminals in the society because the police are local persons. They would be able to know when strangers or would be criminals enter their domain and use intelligence gathering to nip potential crimes in the bud, thereby reducing crime in our society.
I know the President is serious about correcting insecurity problems. But its beyond this over-centralised police that we have. We must do what is right for the people and the country. Once the President moves in that direction, most of these problems, he will use that to conquer unemployment and curb insecurity in the land. He will be winning on two fronts.
Some of us will continue to say what we know or think is right. We too need to pay our dues and allow things to work in our country. There is nothing that does not and have a solution. Tinubu cannot establish state police in two months of stay in power. The implementation maximum of one year every state should have its own police.
Luckily, this is an interactive President who is a micro manager. In the area of revenue drive, we now have TSA and the Remita checking money which is boosting the revenue of the country. The President understands what it means to aggregate all the resources and have access to it and be accountable to it.
We must ensure that we move in the direction of integrity, fair treatment of our citizens and when these policies are established, they will be resolved.
On corruption, let the president take his stand, stand firm, and make firm decisions that will move the country forward.
He needs to make hard decisions, stand by it and where corrections are to be made, he should focus on it and make corrections and don’t roll back where some individuals have held back this country in the past, that is my take.
