Daily Independent Online.
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004.
I’m tired of being armchair critic—Agbakoba
In the first part of this interview published yesterday,
Chief Olisa Agbakoba (SAN) spoke on the need for total re-engineering of
governance in the country through constitutional reforms and the need for a visionary leader to
steer the reforms to a safe berth. In the concluding part of the interview,
Agbakoba speaks on how the former Organisation of African Unity Secretary
General, Dr Salim Ahmed Salim and
President Thabo Mbeki persuaded the human rights groups to participate in the
1999 transition elections and the tactical error the human rights groups made
by not participating. He also speaks on the plan to participate in future
elections and the need for human rights groups to be flexible in their approach
to the political process without necessarily compromising on fundamental
principles. Excerpts:
You in the civil
society were active in the struggle that brought about democracy. If you know
how to do it so well why did you shy away from taking power when it was thrown
open in 1999?
It was a tactical
error. Why we failed to play a very prominent role (that’s my personal
opinion, most of my colleagues would not agree) stems from the fact that we
came from a highly moralistic and puritanical platform. The engagement with the
military made us almost like holy priests of the crusade. At that time, just a
thought of any of us having access to the government was viewed as
contamination. Part of the reason that the Campaign for Democracy broke up was
because people felt that it was wrong for Dr Beko Ransome Kuti to have a conversation
with Ernest Shonekan at Aguda House: that they were contaminated. And I totally disagreed. How can you
not come out and have a conversation, even just to say hello? I gave you this
story to show how we in the civil society viewed contamination. So with that
principle, we strategised on how we would engage the coming democratic
experiment. Some said June 12 will have to crystalise. Then Abiola (Moshood)
died. With his death, the symbol disappeared. So what do we do next? Some of us
said: well, government of national unity, there must be a transition
government. Now on hindsight, I feel this was very utopian. Very nice, but not
achievable. As we were discussing all of this, don’t forget, the new
political associations were being formed. And a very strong arm of our
movement, NADECO (National Democratic Coalition) had accepted to take part
because the pro-democracy movement can be categorised into two: The political
arm, represented by NADECO and the civil rights movement, represented first by
Campaign for Democracy then later by the United Action for Democracy (UAD). At
the UAD we were younger, less experienced than our NADECO branch. The NADECO
branch saw the opportunity and they engaged in the process. That led to the
Alliance for Democracy. Since the human rights brother organisation abdicated,
it was left out. Easily, Femi Falana would have been the governor of Ekiti
State in 1999. While that was a mistake, most of us now wanted to get involved
in 2003 with a disastrous consequence. The gate had closed. If Femi had come
out in 1999, he would have won. But I think the lesson is: Always be pragmatic.
Always be flexible. Don’t compromise your fundamental principles. And on
hindsight, I don’t think we would have compromised our basic position, if
we had decided to get a political party going.
This brings me to
two famous encounters that I like to recall. So much was Abubakar interested in
getting us in the process that he asked Salim Ahmed Salim (then Secretary
General of the Organisation of African Unity-OAU) to speak to us. And Salim
Salim said: “Take part in this process.” That meeting occurred in
Sheraton. But we would not take part because we felt we would be contaminated.
The other more dramatic one was Thabo Mbeki (South African President). He invited
us to Abuja to discuss how we could play a role. We told him that he was
joking; that after our struggle and after his own experience, having been the
ANC (African National Congress) representative in Nigeria for many years, that
we were disappointed that he would even suggest to us the need to be part of
this all-inclusive political process. We did not go. As a compromise, he now
said: “All right, I will divert my plane from Abuja to Lagos but we shall
now meet at the airport.” When we got the letter, we resolved that we
could not snub him. We went and as we discussed he said: “Take part in
this process. We in South Africa had had this experience. We understand your
viewpoints. But it is important that the Nigerian political situation be resolved
at once. We disagreed. That is how the final opportunity to be part of the
process was (in my view today), unfortunately, lost. If we took part in the
process, I am not sure of the difference it would have made but it would have
enabled us as you said to go and show that thing we said we could do. That is
what is driving me now. I am tired of being an armchair critic. We talk and
talk and we publish reports. We criticise. So, I am now at a point that I would
have been in 1999. So, the whole idea that is driving me now is to show that it
is not too difficult to get Nigeria working. It is just to understand what the
problems are; put them on a large political canvass and begin to tackle them.
So, I hope that we’ll be able to energise ourselves to push forward because
the civil society is really required to take up the challenge.
But we observed
the way you are advocating is not the way the civil society is taking up the
challenge. We can’t see any form of agreement between it and government,
even though some members of the groups that waged the anti-military struggle
are now in government. They work more in alignment with labour, for instance.
How do you see this in the context of your new advocacy?
I think on this
point, it is important that I be correctly quoted because of what occurred when
I expressed a view in relation to the protest march being organised by the
Coalition of Nigerian Political Parties (CNNP), which the United Action for
Democracy (UAD) was a part of. My successor as the UAD convener, Bamidele, in
response to my views against the protest, described me as a renegade because of
what I had said but was misquoted.
I said we needed to review and see whether the old method can work today. The
old method was this: The people were crushed and are afraid. But there are a
handful of us who felt that we could bring about a change. We did not depend on
numbers to do what we did. So we went to Yaba. Five were enough to deliver the
message that Abacha could not silence Nigeria and emerge the lone presidential
candidate. We showed that that was impossible. That was what gave us our
stature. We did not need a crowd of 100,000 people to march. Those methods were
appropriate and important at that stage. Whatever you did, so long as you
showed the moral courage, it would reverberate. Now in democracy, when you talk
about protest, you have to have the numbers. You have to absolutely have the
numbers. With the military government, you did not need the numbers: Courage;
that’s all. So today, I would not take part in a protest until I was
absolutely sure that we had the numbers because not to have the numbers shows
that what you are doing is unpopular. It may not necessarily be so but the
perception will be that it is unpopular. But under a military rule, we had
courage to say what we couldn’t ordinarily say. Nobody would come out to
face the bullets. But in a civil democracy of any type, people expect that you
say what you are saying on fuel prices or on unemployment without hindrance.
Now, we say we are
going to have a rally at the Eagle Square in Abuja. And the ruling party will
have another rally down the road. And they show 200,000 people. And you show
5,000. You’ve lost. That is democracy. It doesn’t matter whether the ruling party has rented a
crowd or not. You have to be very careful the kind of tools you use today. That
is why I said, beyond the old tools, we must invent new ones. And one of the
new ones is precisely what I have been saying: developmental approach. We need
to reconstruct laws. We need to make an impact. We need to actually join in the
government.
You spoke about
the courage you had to face the military as a group. And I remember some
sections of the civil society joined in the formation of political parties
then. Now is it not that the courage failed you and you refused to participate?
Something like the fear of failing since it is cosier to confront and advance
and be applauded?
No, no, no.
That’s not right. You need to ask first: What are the challenges of the
pro-democracy group back then? I, as a key leader of the human rights group and
founder of one of the key platforms, never expected that my role was to take
over power. I was motivated by people like Clement Nwankwo back in the 1970s.
They started the Civil Liberties Organisation to deal with basic human rights
problems arising from the failure of the government to address critical social
conditions: keeping people in prisons or using detention decrees to keep
people. These were our challenges. It was only in the context of the way military
government was going that we stumbled across the wall. So we kept aside human
rights work and wore the toga of pro-democracy activists: two different roles.
The pro-democracy movement and the human right movements are cousins. And
because we had human right minds, we were not politicians. If NADECO had formed
CLO, they would have brought a political mind to bear on it and their agenda
would have been power. So we were not interested in, at the end of the day,
taking power. That was why. It is only now that the vision is becoming clearer:
That you cannot continue to be just an activist; that there is another ladder
to climb. Few of us have now moved to that platform. But don’t forget,
the human rights movement remains intact. That we were called upon to do what
we did under the military rule does not mean that that was our role. Our
business was not political. But today, there are many political parties. The
role of human rights groups has returned to its original state. Which country
of the world are human rights people political stars? None, except the chance
came like between 1987 to 1999. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It may
not come again. The human rights community has returned to its original
mandate: The enforcement of Chapter 2 of the Constitution; Chapter 4 of the
Constitution and some African protocols and international conventions. There
are diverse kinds of people in the civil society movement. There are human
rights persons and there are some kind of politicians like we have in NADECO
who have a political cause. And you could find pro-democracy activists. There
is a blurred distinction.
