Col. Tony Nyiam hit the limelight as a leader of the botched 1990 coup that attempted to re­move the military government of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida. In this interview on Rockcity FM, Abeokuta, monitored by TOSIN AKINOLA, he urged Nigerian leaders currently locked in bat­tles for political offices to put na­tional interest above their selfish ambitions. Excerpts:
As a commissioned Army officer, how do you feel about the situation in the North- East where Nigerian soldiers appeared to have been ridi­culed by the Boko Haram sect?
I feel very sad about the percep­tion we now have about the Nige­rian military, but it’s not surprising because it is a system thing. We have, for a long time, had a dysfunc­tional system where we had leaders after leaders who did not want a strong military because of the fear of a coup and over the years, the mili­tary were not properly equipped nor armed and on top of this, Nigeria is one of the places under-policed. If you take the indices, anybody who is a researcher should go and check Chad, Niger, Cameroon, Burki­na-Faso and even Benin Republic, they spend much more percentage of their GDP on defence. Not only that, in terms of people in uniform and the population, we do so badly, the whole Nigerian armed forces are not up to 200,000, that is the Army, Navy, Air force.
You said some of the aims of that 1990 coup was to re­move un-elected leaders, did you have a plan to immedi­ately hand over or organise an election?
First of all, at that time we had a plan of 18 months and the 18 months was for us to address the issues Nigerians have been dodg­ing and these are the issues that we have to address. Elections go, elections come, most politicians are concerned about the next election but there are hardly statesmen that are concerned about the next gener­ation, concerned about the future of the youths, people are always think­ing about their children. Obama for example, in the last election, they talked about this oil and gas, how over dependent they were on out­siders, Obama brought in, a system whereby America would free her­self from over-dependence on the middle east, today we have seen the truth, Obama’s plan was to fend for his generation to come.
In our own case, our politicians think only of the next election and their ambition, what we sat out to do and what is still a pre requisite for us to begin a proper transition and democracy are three things in my mind, once we set out, the first thing we would have done was to have a sovereign national conference. Two, we were to correct the lies we have altered by history, the lying of census. It’s only in Nigeria that those who are in the coast are less in population than people who live in the semi desert region, if you check, nowhere in the world do you have such. So, this census matters which you also see now even with the distribution of the PVCs is so stressed that we are saying we should rush an elec­tion where the amount of PVCs that was sent to the northern parts of Nigeria were almost as much as the one distributed to the whole South, the whole southern region is about 16 million that have been dis­tributed, the North-West is over 13 million, that lie has to be corrected, we need to have a genuine census to know how many we are and we had a plan that, that census will be conducted by the international body like the UN agency for a change, we will really know ourselves.
Right from the days of the British, the British taught some people how to fortify census figure to give them some political advantage, we want to correct that and this is still imper­ative, people forget that this election coming, of the things apart from the oil well, people are afraid that Jon­athan is going to do a proper census which will come up next year and this is why when I say some of our elite, the intellectual who should be thinking beyond election, should be looking at the strategic picture, strategic interest, for example, of the South-West, South- east, South- South, they should be thinking if we juggle this election, the candidate we are going to have, will he give us, will he allow us to conduct cen­sus and correct this abnormally in census? Census is very important, to do the census, it’s after you have done the conference, there is a dis­proportionate sharing of the revenue to the point that those who don’t have number gets more than those who have number.
To do census the third thing is to put the system in place, know the number of Ni­gerians, different parts of Nigeria, different nations within Nigeria, how many they are? That’s how you can really meaningfully do what is called election. In the U.K where some of us have lived, in America, census and election go hand in hand, in fact it’s the same board because if you start an election whereby there is an imbalance in the census figure, you have already rigged the election before you even start, so it is all these contradictions, all these dysfunctional aspects of our politics that we are to correct and this is why this election is at stake, I appeal to every Nigerian, opinion moulders that they must realise that this elec­tion so much is at stake. The choice is between electing somebody who is ready to restructure the country, so that there is balance.
For the complete interview and source, visit:
http://sunnewsonline.com/new/?p=107972

Tell that to the PDP

So many politicians in the APC forgo thier personal ambitions to rescue this country from the hands of GEJ and is croonies

A wise man