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Yinka Odumakin is one of Nigeria’s leading political activists who has built up a very respectable personality for himself over the years. Although he is young, he has built an impeccable reputation for himself and has been highly principled. He has a clear picture of what he wants from life and he has been quite dogged in pursuit of his ideals. And like most activists, he has paid dearly for it. He is one of the delegates at the ongoing National Conference in Abuja. He is one of the delegates who will readily tell you that he was shocked by some of the realities he found out interacting with fellow delegates from other parts of the country, especially from the North.
Odumakin is a critical voice in the Nigerian political space known for his fearless disposition on national issues. He came into national consciousness as an undergraduate at the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) where he was suspended in 1986 after Ife Students chased Admiral Patrick Koshoni out of the University Convocation arena. Koshoni had come to represent Military ruler, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.Odumakin’s “connection” with the incident was the authorities vendetta over his role as the Editor of the most fearless magazine on the campus called PETALS magazine.
He and his colleagues challenged the suspension in court while being represented by Femi Falana who got the order quashed but the ban on PETALS was not lifted. It was while the case was on that he became the Public Relations Officer of the Students Union living on injunction from the court.It was the executive he served in that conferred the Senior Advocate of the Masses on radical Lawyer, Gani Fawwehinmi. Upon graduation from Ife,he served at Ogun State College of Education in Ijebu-Ode where he was offered automatic employment which he turned down. He joined the PUNCH Newspapers in 1990 as a Staff Writer and later moved to The Guardian Newspapers in 1992.
He was an active participant on the front line in the pro-democracy movement that followed the annulment of June 12 elections for five years, suffering incarcerations at different times in the hands of military junta.In the post-annulment period, he became actively involved in the national front as an active player in the Pan-Yoruba Socio-political organization ,Afenifere which he has served as Publicity Secretary for many years now.He was among the founders of Save Nigeria Group(SNG) formed to break the logjam of power hijack when former President Yaradua became ill. He was the Spokesman of the organisation.He has for decades been at the forefront of the campaign to re-structure Nigeria which has culminated in his being a delegate to the on-going National Conference. Yinka Odumakin who holds strong views about the way Nigeria is being run, expresses his views in an interview with an online magazine.
What has been your experience at the Confab so far?
It’s a mixed bag. For some of us who have been at the forefront of agitation for a National Conference to address the future of this country, it was a moment of reality for us and a dream come true, to discuss the way forward for this country. It is a mixed bag in the sense that the conference has shown clearly that there is a dual ideology in this nation.This was clearly shown at the conference where you had the pro-federal delegates and the pro-feudal delegates. The pro-federal delegates want Nigeria restructured along federal lines, so that we can truly answer the name Federal Republic of Nigeria. But the pro-feudal delegates came to sustain the status quo. It is so interesting that when it comes to even the question of Federalism, we don’t have the same understanding of it or the same conception of it. Whereas to the pro-federal delegates, Federalism is a system of government where the same space is governed by different levels of governments that are co-ordinates. But to them what Federalism simply means yes, we have tiers of government, but one is superior and the others are like fiefdoms who report to the centre and who we control the centre like school kids.
It’s a mixed bag. For some of us who have been at the forefront of agitation for a National Conference to address the future of this country, it was a moment of reality for us and a dream come true, to discuss the way forward for this country. It is a mixed bag in the sense that the conference has shown clearly that there is a dual ideology in this nation.This was clearly shown at the conference where you had the pro-federal delegates and the pro-feudal delegates. The pro-federal delegates want Nigeria restructured along federal lines, so that we can truly answer the name Federal Republic of Nigeria. But the pro-feudal delegates came to sustain the status quo. It is so interesting that when it comes to even the question of Federalism, we don’t have the same understanding of it or the same conception of it. Whereas to the pro-federal delegates, Federalism is a system of government where the same space is governed by different levels of governments that are co-ordinates. But to them what Federalism simply means yes, we have tiers of government, but one is superior and the others are like fiefdoms who report to the centre and who we control the centre like school kids.
And that came up in every issue we had to discuss. When we first got there, the 1st challenge we had was the question of the voting pattern because the government said that decision should be by consensus where consensus is not possible then you have to go buy 75% which was opposed by many of us that everywhere in the world, including the UN, it is either you have 2/3s, simple majority, or 2/3s, that this is an abnormally. Infact that issue was going to break up the Conference.Until we had a committee of 50, that went then, did their arithmetic, between 75 and 2/3s, 66 they said 70. We came back we started the Conference. We had a lot of challenges over the question of Rules and Procedures for the Conference. We spent quite a lot of time on that.\Then we broke up into many committees and there are many of us who said look, many of these committees are policy issues. They deal with Transportation, Education. They are things that form the manifesto of the President.
The core issues are the structure of this country. All those policy issues are like software. If you spend all your money buying software and there are no hardware, there will be no where to put them. We felt we needed to sort all these issues first, but by the time we finished committee reports and the committees came back, the conference leadership in their wisdom put all those policy issues first.So things were going smoothly until we got to those major issues like political restructuring, to devolution of powers derivation and the rest. Infact if they had put devolution first, the conference will have ended at that point.It was difficult coming to an agreement on Derivation, because of the fiscal way wardness in this country where we have imbibed what Mahatma Ghandi called one of the 7 deadly Social Sins Wealth Without Work.
For instance, I laid before the conference some figures that should shock any nation that is serious into reality. The figures showed that in the year 2012, of all the 36 states in Nigeria, only Lagos State could afford to pay the salaries of its workers, if per adventure Oil is not selling. Because in 2012, Lagos generated N219 billion as IGR and its wage bill was N75 billion a year, it means Lagos State could afford to pay salaries 3 times over. But the remaining 35 states could not impact; a state like Yobe, throughout 2012, it generated N1.45 billion and its wage bill was N22 billion (on salaries alone). I than said if for one reason or the other Oil does not sell today, all these Governors flying jets all over the country today will look for Okada to ride one.
This is at the heart of why we could not agree on Derivation. At first when everybody was putting food on the table, derivation was 50%. Nobody complained. Infact there was healthy competition. But now that everybody is depending on this Oil, to share this Oil became an issue. There was another set of figures that showed what we shared at the centre between 2009 and 2012, that is 4 years, only 3 zones contributed South-South with Oil gave us 68% average in those 4 years, South-West gave 23% and South-East 8%, North-West 0% in 4 years and North-East 0% in 4 years, North-Central 0% in 4 years.
It was against that backdrop that you can see all the fights over derivation, call to retain the status quo. In 2005, Conference Derivation was already 17%, Mantu Committee that reviewed the report further increased it to 18%. But this 13% came from Abacha Conference in 1994. This issue of Derivation has rocked every Conference in Nigeria since 1988. Infact in 1988, they could not agree on it. 1994-1995 was Abacha’s Conference. Derivation was going to smash the conference, until they set up a 9 man committee to go and look at the matter. That committee too could not agree, until the late Gen. Yar Adua said ok lets do it this way. There are 9 of us. Let each of us write on a sheet of paper what should be the derivation formular. And they all wrote what it should be and Yar Adua added everything up and divided it by 9. And he came up with 122/3.3 That is how they came up with 13% at that conference.
But in 2005, even over 17%, South-South delegates walked out at the Obasanjo Conference. When we now said ok let’s more on with the 18% that Mantu recommended in 2007 and then lets now devote 5% to begin to explore mineral resources in every other part of Nigeria, because if you look at the Geological map of Nigeria there is no state in Nigeria that is not blessed with mineral resources in large quantity. We said lets put 5% on that. The North then said they will only agree to 5% increase for Derivation if only they can get 5% for Terrorism and Insurgency a permanent feature of our lives or are you saying you want to turn terrorism to a derivative item? If you do that, then you are telling other sections too that go and start your own. So, it was when we could not agree, despite committees upon committees that we said well let’s throw the matter back to the President. We now set up a committee to work out what this should be. It was clear that some of our friends from the far North, now wanted to use that derivation issue to scuttle that conference, so that the conference will not agree on anything, so that it can reverse all the gains we have made. Before then, that conference had passed over 600 resolutions and we had taken fundamental decisions that can restructure this country 70%.
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