•Says he is the best hand for the job
•I can secure Benue State within a month if elected
•Says FG lacks political will to fight insecurity, insurgency

Second Republic Senator, Professor Iyorwuese Hagher was Minister of State, Power and Steel; Nigerian Ambassador to Mexico and con-current to Costa Rica, Guatemala and Panama and later, High Commissioner to Canada. A poet and one of Africa’s best playwrights, he is currently the Pro-Chancellor of Afe Babalola University. Last weekend, he declared his intention to contest in the 2019 presidential election. In this interview, he spoke on why he is joining the race. Excerpts:

Hagher

By Peter Duru

Why do you think you can be president of Nigeria next year?

I will be president next year because Nigerians are sick of being tired and the status quo. They want a change. Nigeria has been ruled all these years by pre-modernity. People sit there, they don’t look at the future, they don’t plan on the youths. They do not plan on succession. They do not plan on legacy. They plan on eating, capturing treasury and looting. Nigerians are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the trajectory that our nation has arrived at today. God has not hated Nigeria so much that he will allow Nigeria to degenerate and collapse and totally become a failed country, broken into pieces. We Nigerians are so God-fearing, we pray a lot and some of us believe God has heard our prayers.

Why I think I will win the presidential election is that most of the aspirants on the ground do not share my passion for this country, my love for this country, my zeal for this country. And the places I have served this country, as a university professor who has watched my young people grow up to make something of themselves and still watch young people today grow up, graduate, don’t have jobs. Because they don’t have jobs, they are not married and they are watching the young men who graduate don’t have jobs become a risk to themselves. I am watching these young people flee this country into slavery in Libya and die on the seas. As a university professor and somebody who has all his life mentored, taught and trained youths, it breaks my heart.

So, to me, it is not even about winning because I know I have already won in the hearts of Nigerians. It is the struggle to change the status quo that it will never be like this again. It can be done because the issue with Nigeria is poor leadership, bad leadership, people who are fixed in the ways of yesterday, people who don’t have a clear idea about where Nigeria should go. Nigeria has a critical advantage over other countries because we have the fastest growing population of young people who are intelligent, so our entire lives should be focused on educating these young people on skills and ways that they will become significant. Countries like Germany and Japan have no raw materials, yet, they have developed education, employment and productivity.

This is what this presidency is about. It is to give Nigerians the ability to rise above mediocrity to be giants in the international community because we have more young people than other countries, that is our critical advantage. I am seizing the opportunity to turn this around and it will be done because I have taken too much shame looking at my young graduates without jobs. In my house, there are graduates that I trained that have no jobs, and they cry to me as a senator seeking my endorsement to get a job.

This will not happen, this is the worst form of corruption, bureaucratic corruption, corruption in government, corruption in the university system, corruption everywhere. We have become endemically corrupt and the country is not looking at the fundamentals of fighting corruption. We are dealing with the surface symbolism of corruption and we are pursuing people and raiding people’s homes without dealing with the fundamentals. That is why I am different, I am going to win because Nigerians don’t have a choice because it is me and others.

There is the problem of insecurity in Nigeria. In Benue, your state, herdsmen are killing farmers, in the North-East, Boko Haram insurgents are killing and in the South, militants are there with their problems. How will you solve these multifaceted problems if elected president of the country?

We are in a state of total collapse in this country. There is nowhere in this country, no state where you do not have armed robbery, and kidnapping on the increase. People are killed at will and there is no solution to the murders taking place and nobody is held accountable. Our security agencies are compromised and criminals work in tandem with our security agents. We have reached a state of paralysis.

When I become president, it is not just me, it is a mind revolution. Everybody will be a security officer. That is what is done everywhere in the world. We have the technology today that can effectively map out and secure our areas but nobody is using them. More importantly, the things that are making people criminals are unemployment, lack of education, where people in the 21st Century are animists, who believe that if you kill a young woman and take out her private part or parts of her body, you can make money out of that. Why should such barbarity continue? And we are not unaware of the modern slavery that is taking place where young people are being hunted to harvest their parts for use in other countries for kidney and heart transplants, etc.

So people who are vicious and wicked come to Nigeria and look at you that you are a very strong young man, kill you and end up harvesting your parts for their benefit. With modern technology and everybody getting involved in security, we can solve this problem. Now, nobody really cares if we involve the local communities. I can secure Benue State within a month.

One laptop can capture an entire population in a local government area, and village by village. If everybody is everybody’s security, the day a strange face appears in the local government from bicycle to motorcycle, we can log in that a strange person has come into village A, what is he doing? The following day somebody else reports, we saw strange movement of people. You then monitor it immediately, using information system. You can monitor security, it has reached advanced stage. It is so easy to be done but nobody wants to do it because people are benefiting from the insecurity.

Look at the present insecurity in the country. The President asked for $1billion, why is terrorism not being crushed? It is lasting longer than the Nigerian civil war. Why? It is not a problem to me, I will finish it. All it takes is political will. If they are ready to finish it, they will finish it but because they are benefiting from it, they will not.

The Agric sector is in dire need of intervention, what are your plans for that sector?

Agriculture via education is how I am going to turn this country around. With education, you don’t need oil. With agriculture, you don’t need oil. The monies that we got from oil have been stolen. And the oil is going down. If you live in the first world, you will be surprised how much research is going on. There is a car called Tesller that is already being driven in US and Canada, which does not use fuel at all. They are also experimenting with cars that drive themselves. You sit in the car and sleep, it takes you anywhere you want. Primitive agriculture will not work, educate the people and also improve the agricultural product.

I am going to do one thing that no other president has done in this country. I am going to take education so seriously that every university will be actively involved in research, development and innovation. That is what has not happened in this country. Professors are promoted in our universities, go and ask them what they did before they were promoted, basic research that has no relevance in the environment. We have a university of agriculture, what do we do with it? They should be on the farms teaching new methods, giving us new seeds. Have they ever given us a new species of oranges? No!

Our people are innovative, our people are creative, every year, you see different names of new mangoes that they have on their own experimented. They research on their own, work and had successful products. That is research taking place outside the university system. Now, I am not speaking out of a vacuum. I have built a new University called Afe Babalola University. I have been Pro-Chancellor in charge of the university for eight years. And that is what we have been doing. We have won many international prizes in science and technology.

I am going to replicate that in every university and I am going to establish research centres in every university across the country. Two days ago, I was so angry to see that bitterleaf has been commodified and have been put in capsule form and they are selling it in America as one of the cures for cancer. If that is a fortune, it should have been discovered here in Nigeria, there should have been a centre for it. The intellectual property would have been beneficial to Nigerians and not the international community. And since we are not doing this, our universities are not counted among the best 1000 universities in the world. It is a shame; that is why I am going to be a university president, the education president.

What’s your take on the raging herdsmen/farmers crisis that has brought the country to its knees?

My answer is simple. Buhari has been a very incompetent president and the fact that he has declared that he wants to run again after I, Obasanjo, Babangida and a host of others, including Danjuma had advised him not to contest and leave a legacy. I told him you have to choose between leaving a legacy and a peaceful society or be regarded as somebody who killed democracy and promoted genocide. Apparently, he has chosen the latter.

I consider his declaration to run for a second term as an act of political terrorism. When you have failed all your campaign promises, the first promise was that he will be here for one term, he has failed that by declaring that he will contest for a  second term. He promised that he will eliminate corruption, but the Transparency International told us that Nigeria has never been so corrupt as it is today. How many people have his system jailed? He is fighting corruption in a wrong way. And most pathetically, he does not have the disposition, the willpower, nor the kind of empathy which a president should have. He is behaving as if it does not matter what the people are saying. He is behaving like a civilian dictator. We know that he is still a general in his mind so, maybe he is leading us to full military dictatorship.

We elected him in 2015, if he makes himself elected again, by hook or crook, it is an imposition. Right now, it is an imposition. He went into the NEC meeting of his APC and announced himself that he is running, which is an act of intimidation. It is like, oh whether you like it or not, I am going to run. So I feel deeply concerned that our president is out of touch with the reality in his country.

When I am a Nigerian president, I will make sure that every ethnic group in this country is respected. There will be no favoured ethnic group, no master ethnic group. There will be no slave ethnic group that has to give up everything so that other ethnic groups must live. And you have the Tiv as the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the rest of the country. I say this with very serious concern because each time I see people eat pounded yam in the town and I look back how that pounded yam was produced, and see one poor farmer’s child deprived of school, and see his educated people eating pounded yam, and I see that they are doing it at the back of the young people that have been deprived of education, I cry.

As I drive along the road and see people selling mangoes, fish, even rats and crickets along Abinsi Road, they don’t eat those things, they need that protein but they also need to pay hospital bills. They also need to pay their children’s school fees. So, fundamentally, I am going to restructure Nigeria to work in such a way that people will be happy. I will give the young people the kind of infrastructure they will be happy with. I will set up internet infrastructure in every city. I will give roads that work, it is a shame that no single federal road is working in this country. I am going to make sure that there are roads. I am coming up with a master plan which you will all see. It is doable and I will do it.

I will give Nigerians brand new fantastic infrastructure befitting a 21st-Century country, which by 2050, will be the third largest country on earth. It’s not too far from now, we should start planning for that. We are not, we are having a youth bulge which could lead to a revolution, or it will lead to a war and we are not ready for that. We don’t want a breakdown or a chaotic scenario. We want a determined leadership that will construct, and be involved in nation-building. Our leaders are not engaged in nation- building, that is why they are engaged in ethnicity, nepotism, corruption, preaching primordial mindset of personal aggrandisement and and riding roughshod over the sensibilities of Nigerians. So I will be a different president.

Most of our leaders are known for running overseas for medical attention despite repeated campaign promises to end the practice given its implication on the nation’s resources. Will your presidency be different?

I will go to the Afe Babalola University Teaching Hospital. As an ordinary pro-chancellor in the university, I built the most modern university teaching hospital in this country. If I need a new heart, I can have transplant right in that hospital in Nigeria. And besides, with money, how long would it have taken Buhari to have assembled the best team, pay them whatever money they needed to have him treated here in Nigeria? If it requires time, the three years he has been going abroad for medical treatment would have been enough to build a hospital, even if it is a hospital that was just about his sickness. Just one hospital, bring all the experts, bring all the equipment. Don’t we have the money to pay for that? I think it is medical tourism.