Chairman of the Senate Committee on Power and former Benue State governor, Gabriel Suswam, in this interview, speaks on issue of constitution and electoral act amendment, open grazing, and other national issues.
The trending issue in the legislative arm of government right now is the PIB. What is in it for the Benue people you represent?
It is the issue of money for frontier exploration, which is not new. NNPC has always had it, just that the money meant for frontier exploration has been a little money, those are monies warehoused in the account of the NNPC for exploration where they suspect that they can find oil. What has happened with the PIB is that some people are saying we need more money for frontier exploration and there are a lot of areas. For instance, what is in it for us in Benue is that the Benue trough has been said to be an area that has a large deposit of oil and other minerals so if we have more money under the frontier exploration, Benue probably could benefit, relevant agencies would go there and do properexploration for oil and they may find it in commercial quantity. That is one. Now,other senators are saying the percentage for frontier is too high. The issue of five or three per cent for the host communities is another one. Though some are arguing that if you give the host communities 5 per cent, it is too much money that has been given, to that area because we have the Ministry of Niger Delta, NDDC and 13 per cent derivation. Those are all monies that were intended to address the issue of devastation of the environment and although those monies to an extent have been mismanaged and people are saying why do you give them so much money again, the south-south people are arguing that this is the first time that there is a direct law that will impact the host communities.
On the issue of Electoral Act amendment, there is the issue of electronic voting and transmission of votes. What is your view on this?
The report of the committee has not been presented on the floor of the senate yet, all that has been happening is in the realm of speculation. When the committee presents the report, we will now know whether that provision for electronic transmission of results was removed or tampered with but as it stands now, all of us are speculating. I’m not a member of the committee and but once it is presented, probably next week, we will know where we stand and then be able to comment competently.
Two state constituencies were recently created in Benue State through your efforts. Can you speak more about that?
The Ushongo State Constituency has been an issue in court since 2005 and the court gave judgment in favour of that constituency. The procedure is that after the court judgment, the two chambers of the National Assembly ought to approve before INEC will go and do demarcation and then conduct elections. Then there is Gumawhich is not as late as 2005 but the judgment was given some years back. It’s something I was involved in, especially the Ushongo, when I was governor, I tried desperately to get that constituency and unfortunately, we couldn’t because the National Assembly was unable to give approval for INEC to go there but luckily, I became senator representing that area so I took it upon myself and was able to lobby my colleagues and while I was doing that, I mentioned it to the governor who reminded me of the Guma Constituency the court had given judgment for which was outstanding. I, therefore, took the two constituency issues to the Senate and lobbied my colleagues who graciously approved it and then we sent it to the House of Representatives for concurrence and that was done and INEC has been informed and as we speak, the process is ongoing and in a few weeks, they will be ready for elections.
There have been agitations by the people of the North Central for a development commission like the North-East and Niger Delta Development Commissions. As a senator from the zone, are you pushing for this?
The development commission is for what? You cannot just have a development commission; it has to be properly defined. We’ve just passed the HYPADDEC commission bill which is for areas affected by the activities of hydroelectric power generation. The North-East commission is to help rebuild the zone devastated by activities of bandits and insurgents. The way people go about agitations is not proper, you cannot just pass a bill for a commission. HYPADDEC is for the North-Central and it has taken off, appointees have started work and we are doing the budget. If people want something like a commission, they should be able to define it properly and then we see how we can go about it.
A lot of bills have been passed for the establishment of institutions, schools, hospitals and the like. Will all these institutions take off?
Let me not be conclusive on that but if you’ve been following since 1999, I don’t know how many of those institutions have been assented to by the presidents. No president or executive arm of government will assent to institution bills passed by the National Assembly just like that. When the executive wants to establish institutions, they do like former President Jonathan did when universities were created and given to the zones. The manner people bring those bills is more political than realistic. No president will sign those bills otherwise, every village will have a university or one institution or the other. To a large extent, some of us are playing politics with those institutions because as far as I know, I don’t know any that has been signed by any president. When you finish from the Senate, you need the concurrence of the House of Representatives and most times, you cannot get that concurrence and that is the same issue with the Adikpo Polytechnic in my constituency. It was a bill that was brought to the Senate but there was no concurrence by the House of Representatives so it never existed, it didn’t even get to the stage of being transmitted to the president for assent, so that is what is happening. For most of them, once the bill is passed, that is where it ends.
Do you subscribe to calls for removal of immunity clause from the constitution and for a unicameral legislature?
On the issue of immunity clause in the constitution, it was intended to protect those who occupy those positions from serious distractions because if you don’t have any form of protection in a society such as ours, from any form of prosecution while in office, no person will work. I think that clause can be modified and I don’t know how, but I don’t subscribe to calls that immunity should be removed from the constitution for the office of president and governor. If you do that, all of them will be in court every day because the decisions they take as chief executives affect people positively or negatively and those who suffer negative impact will take them to court and so I think it should remain. About calls for making the legislature unicameral, we were practicingthat and I don’t know what was in the minds of the opponents of the 1979 constitution but apparently, because of our size and diversity, they felt that if we have a unicameral legislature, many communities will be under represented and so we adopted the presidential system. With this, if we don’t have enough representation in the Senate, we can in the House of Representatives and that is why there is equality of representation in the Senate otherwise, there is no basis for a state like Bayelsa or Nasarawa to have the same number of Senator as Lagos but that is equality of representation. Now, you go to the House of Representatives and say how do I balance things up, so Lagos and Kano for instance, have more representatives than Benue. I think it’s just to balance the diversity and peculiarity of Nigeria that the presidential system was adopted. If you scrap it, you go back to be confronted by the people crying of marginalisation and underrepresentation. If we have a unicameral legislature, you are going to have a lot of problems of representation. How many people will you select for a state, is it one per local government? When people say such things for political expediency and are not prescribing how they can be done, it doesn’t make sense to me. It will only make sense of you properly define how it will be carried out and how there will be representation of all groups. The current system, though expensive, is intended to solve this problem of marginalisation and diversity that we have in the country.
There are a lot of separatist agitations going on in the country. How can these be resolved?
Once you have bad governance, you have people agitating for all kinds of things but if you have good governance, all that won’t be happening. For instance, for a Tiv man in my village, it does not matter to him who is the president if he is getting what is due to him; good roads, good electricity hospitals etc. He will not even agitate for local government but because people are not getting that, they feel that if we stand on our own, we can do better. It may not necessarily be so but that is the feeling for me. It is bad governance that has brought about this level of agitation. People do not feel protected and rightly so. Killings have become common place, if you wake up in a day and do not hear of killings, it is an abnormality in this country today but it used to be the other way round. And so when people have this level of lack of protection, they feel it is because their own person is not in position and they are at the receiving end. So you don’t blame them. The only way to stop the agitations is to provide good governance. Let the people feel protected. We have been classified already as a failed state, the reason being that all the indices of a failed state are present in our current situation. How do 100 children get kidnapped and no one is saying or doing anything, nobody is arrested? Under such circumstances, people will continue to agitate to have their own countries.
What have you been doing for your constituency?
What you call constituency projects are projects that you facilitate in the national budget. That is the only way you can impact your constituency meaningfully as a National Assembly member. And so, for me, as the chairman of power committee, most of the projects that I have done are in the area of rural electrification where we have done mini grids and also construction of classrooms. The one I’ve done which is personal, using my money, is the distribution of tricycles to empower people in my constituency. There are quite a lot of projects I have facilitated through the budget including boreholes. A lot of these will be commissioned when we go on recess. Even though I’ve done projects in all 7 local governments in my constituency, the biggest I would say are the mini grids in Anwase which will supply power to close to 300 households and we have already done the networking. A similar project has been done in Atekumbur in Ushongo where there was no power but they now have 24 hours power for over 300 households as well. These are impactful because they are places where there would have been no power even in the next 20 years but now, as long as there is sunlight, they will continue to have electricity.
You are the chairman senate committee on power and Nigerians have been paying through their nose for darkness. Why is this so?
There are a lot of issues around the power sector. When the power sector was unbundled, the essence was for efficiency, that if you put it in private hands, it will be run as a business and be more efficient so people will pay and have light. Unfortunately, the unbundling was done inhaste so there were a lot of challenges that the unbundling was confronted with that you can now see. Generation and distribution are in the hands of private entities while transmission is in the hands of government. Now, they all need to synchronise their operations for efficiency. If we generate 5,000mw, transmission should be able to carry it and distribution should be able to distribute it but that is not the case and there are reasons for it. The distribution companies said they inherited dilapidated infrastructure; the transmission company said the infrastructure for transmission is long overdue so there are technical losses as they wheel power. In generation, most of the thermal power plants have gas issues, there is lack of gas infrastructure and for the hydro ones, once it is dry season and water level drops, they have to close down some of the turbines. It is a mixture of a whole lot and what they need to do is to sit down, do proper planning and synchronise generation to transmission. That was what the Siemens contract was intended for but where the contract is right now is also a question for another day. As we speak, generation has dropped drastically and so they have to shed light here and there. It is a very complex thing and except the government decides to face the power issue with all seriousness, we will continue to spend and not get power.
South-West governors met and came up with a position that the presidency should be rotated to the zone and also about making laws against open grazing in the zone. What are your thoughts on this?
I will answer that question by referring you to what the Greeks say. The Greeks classify human beings into three categories, the idiots, tribesmen and citizens. The agitation of southern governors is because we fall into the categories of idiots and tribesmen, we don’t have citizens. An idiot does not tell the truth, if you put him in an office, he must steal money, if you give him an exam, he must cheat. A tribesman sees everything from the prism of his tribe and they classify tribe as not just tribe but religion. If you put him in a position and you do not come from his tribe or religion, you will not get anything meaningful from him. A citizen is a person who drives to a place by 2am and the traffic light is on danger and he stops till it turns green before he continues. We are tribesmen and idiots so we continue to agitate for positions of authority to come to us because that is the only time we feel that we belong and we can patronise our own people. If we are citizens, it won’t matter where a president comes. And the Greeks who made this categorisation said that 90 per cent of Africans are idiots and tribesmen and it’s true. If you have a president who will not appoint me minister because I am not his relation but that I have the competence required for the job, that is a citizen. They are agitating for power to shift to their zone because that is the only way they will also feel that something has been done for them. This puts us squarely in the category of idiots and tribesmen. However, they said an idiot can become a citizen by training and a tribesman can become a citizen by orientation so let us train ourselves so that we can move out of those categories. The president can come from anywhere provided you have someone who is a citizen, who will provide for all Nigerians not on the basis of tribe and religion.
On the issue of grazing laws, when I was governor, I chaired a committee set up by the National Economic Council (NEC) to look at the issue of conflicts between herdsmen and farmers and when Governor Murtala Nyako who was vice chairman was removed as governor unceremoniously, I became the sole chairman and I travelled to many countries including in Africa to be able to put a report together and it will interest you that I went to a country as small as Namibia and found out that 40 per cent of beef consumed in Europe comes from Namibia and they ranch their cattle, they don’t roam all over the place. Therefore, I don’t see why ranching should not be the way forward. When we came back, I presented a beautiful report and it was unanimously accepted by all the governors and the entire economic council. In that report, we recommended that the CBN should put down N100 billion seed money that states interested in ranching can draw from and develop. We recommended a model which will include schools, dams, and also land to grow grass within the ranch for the cattle. When we lost election, that report was jettisoned but it’s still there and any person can dust it and work on it. If you’re a movie watcher, when you see the western movies, it reflects the stories of what used to happen when herders, called cowboys, were moving cattle across America. There were a lot of conflicts, it didn’t start here. America overcame it because they decided to ranch. It was the same problem all over Europe and they decided to ranch. So we are at that stage they were, of conflicts between herders and farmers, so we must adopt the world best practice which is to ranch cattle and reduce the friction that comes with their movement. Ranching is the only thing and I think every person agrees with that. Former Governor Nyako who has a big farm with a lot of cattle is a strong advocate that cattle must be kept in one place. I went to his farm in Adamawa and I saw very big cattle. Ranching is the way to go and there’s no question about it. No matter how much we delay it, that is the only way we will go that this problem will be solved and I think that this one is something we should not play politics with because it affects everyone.
