Nigerian born, British citizen, Ms Ayo Obe (née Ogunsola) was unarguably the most outstanding lady in the pack at the advent of the modern day civic society movement, a point that was consolidated by her election as president of the Civil Liberties Organisation in 1995.

Obe, a partner with the Lagos law firm, Ogunsola Shonibare; following her stint as president of the CLO was in 2006 appointed to lead the Elections Programme of the National Democratic Institute in Nigeria.

A trustee of the International Crisis Group, ICG, she is also a member of the board of the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN). She has in the past served on the board of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, OSIWA (2006 – 2010) and was appointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo as a member of the board of the Police Service Commission, from 2001 to 2006.

In an interview with Vanguard, Ms Obe who is a leading advocate for the Bring Back Our Girls, BBOG movement speaks on what she describes as the shame of the continued abduction of the girls, the anti-corruption war of the present administration, sectarian violence in the country among other issues. Excerpts:

By Clifford Ndujihe

You appear to be lying low

I am a legal practitioner I was president of the CLO until 2003, that is 13 years ago. When I was CLO president, I personally didn’t issue press releases. The CLO did. It is not a matter of lying low, if you go to Falomo roundabout, Lagos, any Saturday, you are likely to find me there campaigning for the return of our Chibok girls. Even then, it is not a matter of saying, ‘look at me, I am the person. It is a matter of going there to support a cause.

It is alleged that the Bring Back Our Girls Group, has become soft under President Muhammadu Buhari compared to what it was under President Goodluck Jonathan?

That is a lie that some newspapers have been pressing and falsely pushing.

Rescuing the Chibok girls?

It was two weeks after the Jonathan government did nothing about the Chibok girls’ kidnap that we said let us set up a committee. We asked ourselves why we didn’t do anything to rescue the Chibok girls? That was how 59 school boys were slaughtered at Buni Yadi, Yobe State, we all did nothing and moved on. Then the Chibok girls were kidnapped. We said, ‘are we going to move on again?’ So, since that time, everyday in Abuja, somebody has been sitting out in respect of the Chibok girls, and we gather every Saturday at Falomo.

It did not stop when Jonathan stopped being president. But some people who are Jonathan’s supporters kept pushing the lie: ‘They have stopped, they are no longer pressing.’ To say that the campaign waned after Jonathan lost the election is a complete and utter lie. The people, who insist that the only purpose of the Bring back our girls campaign was to get President Jonathan out need to apologise to the parents of those girls and the bring back our girls campaigners. We have met the parents from time to time. We have met the people of the Chibok community. And we ask the same question: Are you saying that not a single girl has managed to escape in all this time?

Some of the girls escaped …

Ayo Obe

That was during the kidnap. That is why we have 219 still missing. During the kidnap, some of them managed to escape. Then, there was a girl who was supposed to be married to one of the Boko Haram fighters and she said ‘let me go home and tell my parents after all marriage is a family affair.’ So, she went home and did not return. But the Boko Haram insurgents went to the village, raided the place and carried her off again.

As far as we know, the Chibok girls are not being used for suicide bombing. We don’t know what they are being used for. When we hear stories that they have been raped, pregnant, etc; it does a disservice to us as Nigerians.

We must not just bring back our girls physically; we must bring them back socially, mentally, emotionally, culturally and totally rehabilitate them. When Bring Back Our Girls started it was to tell the President, bring back our girls. That was in 2014. We didn’t even know who would be the presidential candidate. The opposition was still forming its coalition. So the only person we had to call on was the president.

By July 2014 when Malala Yousafzai came to Nigeria to spend her 16th birthday with the Chibok girls, I remembered that at that time the president had not reached out to the Chibok parents. I was in Abuja and came out of the hotel to buy newspapers and I saw the picture of the president side by side with Malala grinning.

I said to myself, don’t the people around him understand how bad this looks? And then he now met with the Chibok parents.  Why couldn’t he meet some of these parents before hand and be seen with them so that by the time Malala came it wasn’t that it was this young girl from Pakistan, who lives in Britain, who has reminded our president that he has an obligation to his citizens? I didn’t like it at all. Those were the things that President Jonathan did or people around him did to him and for him. It wasn’t the Bring Back Our Girls campaigners.

The Jonathan administration felt the Bring Back Our Girls campaigners were taking money from the opposition. Even if it were so, it should have been a reason for the government to pre-empt the opposition, go the extra mile and bring back our girls.

Challenge to rise to the occasion

The Jonathan administration did not see it as a challenge to rise to the occasion. The current administration, unlike the previous government, is not pretending that they don’t know it is their job. The President has said, I can’t say I have defeated the insurgency if I don’t bring back our girls.

On fears that the girls may no longer be rescued

We have to account for them. We know the names of these girls, we have their photographs, and we know their number. Since the army started beating back Boko Haram, we discovered that there are thousands of people we didn’t even know were missing. That is a terrible indictment on us as a country.

Anti-corruption crusade

The Buhari administration should not just go after people, who have corruptly taken the nation’s money but should also institute systems that will defeat corruption. I believe that the Buhari administration should have made Nigeria a very attractive destination for investors and all of us.

Now, we have the Treasury Single Account, TSA, and the use of Bank Verification Number, BVN. When a new government comes into power, people sit up because they don’t know the body language of the new ruler. But after some time they go back to the old ways. We need a system that will make it difficult for people to revert to the old ways.

During the time of late General Sani Abacha, the CLO came up with the idea that we need two approaches. One was Freedom of access to Information and the second was Ethics in Government. We started the first but the second never really took off. I remember going to a workshop that was to hold in Abeokuta and learnt that the Abacha government had stopped it.

Freedom of Information

But the Freedom of Information continued, and we eventually established the Media Rights Agenda, MRA, to pursue it, and it became a coalition and eventually it was President Jonathan that signed that legislation into law.

When Obasanjo came to power and was talking about fighting corruption, we said, ‘wonderful, we have a beautiful tool that will help you.’ We had some legislators in the United States, who had enjoyed Freedom of Information and they said we need sometime like that in Nigeria. Obasanjo’s response was you can present it.

We felt if it were presented as an executive bill, it would get speedy passage but Obasanjo was more interested in setting up ICPC and then EFCC. Instead of our having a holistic approach that makes it harder for people to be corrupt in the first place, what we have allows people to be corrupt and we start going to catch them.

Selective anti-corruption battle, resistance of the corrupt

As we have seen at every single stage, every time we have people being arrested or charged with corruption, we hear the expression, ‘yes, what about Mr A or Mr B?’ The whole design is if we cannot do everything at once, we should not do anything at all. People would say they were being prosecuted because of their ethnic group or political party. Some say the fight is selective. What is selective? The people, who were ‘chopping’ were in a party. Again, you are always going to pick the people, but the Federal Government has its books.  You come into office; you inherit the books. You look at the books and say, for instance, this money has been paid for a helicopter, where is the helicopter, etc? You are examining your books. State governments are also coming to examine their books.

By the way, the state government does not need the EFCC because the state laws against corruption are there. If you are saying the Federal Government is using the EFCC, the state government has the attorney general and director of public prosecutions. As a state government, if you examine what your predecessor from another political party did, they will say it is selective.

Personally, I don’t expect it not be selective in that sense. As a general marching into battle, I will, first of all, deal with the enemy in front of me before I start fighting the troops that are supposed to be supporting me. I don’t believe we are running a government of saints. I don’t believe we are running a government that is not composed of hypocrites.

We all have our double standards, and I don’t expect that these people are going to be super-human. That is why I agree with Jonathan that we should make it impossible for our face to be a factor in the fight against corruption and I expect that this will be implemented as we go forward.

What she makes of the crises ravaging the country on account of the Boko Haram insurgency, Fulani herdsmen menace and the IPOB agitation for Biafra Republic

In a way, none of these is new. You didn’t even mention the Shiite Moslems issue. In terms of where the security agencies are at fault, there is nothing new in that. What we expect to see is a government that responds and doesn’t allow issues to be swept under the carpet.

For us to hear that 357 people, Nigerians, were killed and buried after a clash with the military is something that we cannot just brush aside. It is a terrible indictment. I wait for the outcome of the panel of inquiry, but I don’t think that it should end at the panel of inquiry particularly when there are perceptions about the ability of that panel to do its job when it is comfortable not having its demand for El-Zakzaky produced before it met.

On IPOB, you don’t expect me to have a lot sympathy for establishing a separate state of Biafra. It is one thing to say people should not separate but to say that people cannot talk about separating I don’t see how that is compatible with our right to freedom of expression.

What was even worse was this recent statement by the DSS about the killing of people they identified them as Fulani herdsmen. They now said they were killed by IPOB supporters, and yet nobody has been charged to court.

It tells us how bastardised the security services are. What is their business in making such a statement? Is it not a police matter? To just come and make a categorical statement and then there is no arrest, no charge, nothing is not good enough. The outcry against the depredation of the Fulani herdsmen is very large. The concerns of people where herdsmen are bringing their cattle where they never used to bring them, in my capacity as the vice chairman of the International Crisis Group, I wrote an essay on the future of conflict and I identified the situation in Lake Chad as a cause of conflict because what we call Lake Chad in Nigeria, we don’t have any lake again. And the steps we ought to be taking to restore the lake we have not taken them.

Symbol of climate change

It is a symbol of climate change in our backyard. People who should be able to live from Lake Chad, are not able to live. The areas where cattle used to graze are gone. You find that there are pressures, and it has been missed. Why are we having that issue of cattle roaming because always, from Cain and Abel there is always conflict between the farmer who is farming crops and the farmer who is rearing cattle. So the question is how are we going to tackle it in this modern day and age?

There are Fulani, who are not roaming around. There are Fulani, who keep cattle. In fact, if anything, you hear from people in the North, how they suffer from cattle rustlers – people who come to steal their cattle. So what is that we should do? If we are going to have grazing reserves where should the grazing reserves be? I used to think it would be a good solution but now I can see that it would be the cause of the greatest conflict.