Nigeria’s greatest problem is that only few people know the right thing — Uwechue, Ohanaeze boss
By EMERSON GOBERT, JR
Saturday, February 28, 2009


Ambassador Ralph Uwechue
Photo: Sun News Publishing
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President-general of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Ambassador Ralph Uwechue, says that Nigeria has leadership problem because there are few people who know the right thing. He also said that African leaders feel inferior in company of their counterparts outside Africa.

Speaking with senior editors, during a courtesy call on The Sun Publishing Company, the elder statesman said whenever those who know the right thing occupy positions of authority, the country would be better run.

He decried the way the country’s leaders emerge, even from their parties, saying that there should be transparency and due process in picking candidates for elective positions. The former ambassador stressed the need for the creation of an additional state for the Igbo, saying that this would ensure equity and fairness.

He said that the civil war could not have been fought for the break-up of the country but for the safety of the Igbo in Nigeria.

Uwechue spoke on these and other things.

Assignment as ambassador
I left University of Ibadan just before independence and I served in various countries, Cameroon, Pakistan, Switzerland, Mali and I ended up opening the Nigeria embassy in Paris on 10th May 1966. At independence, there was a disagreement over the testing of atomic device in the then Algeria Sahara. Nigeria got annoyed and broke relations with France on that issue and because General De Guile was a very proud person we didn’t have relations for a while. When resumption took place, I was the one sent to open the embassy. I was 33 years old. That was where the difficulties in government came and met me.

The civil war
I represented Nigeria in France, but what happened was that the Biafran quarrel emanated from incident involving successive massacre of Ndigbo in Northern Nigeria the previous year, that is 1966 and the exodus of Igbo from the North. I said to myself, I don’t come from the Biafran sector of Nigeria but justice has to be done and the security of all ethnic units in Nigeria must be guaranteed. If Igbo are hunted down seasonally, like rabbits, there was no need to stay. I quit the federal service by myself. I decided to present the Igbo cause to the French world, but on a condition that I did not believe in secession and I told Ojukwu so. In fact, I met Ojukwu for the first time in my life six years after the civil war at Charles De Guille Airport. Like Chukwuma Nzogwu, who came from Opanam, just the next door to Ogwuashi Ukwu, where I come from, we fought for the security of the Igbo within Nigeria and not for secession.

I didn’t believe secession was the answer. Igbo are planted everywhere. We are all integrated into this country called Nigeria and we tend to remain so, but there has to be guarantee of safety and security for all the units, be it small or big, in this country. It is on that basis that the country will survive. You won’t want to stay in a union where all the time you are squeezed until you are almost extinguished.
Those where the conditions I gave. People like us said “no” that what the Igbo were fighting for was security within Nigeria and not sovereignty. The first Head of State, even though a titular, was Nnamdi Azikiwe.

The first military Head of State of Nigeria, Aguiyi Ironsi, was Igbo; so it couldn’t be sovereignty that the Igbo were talking about. It is security within Nigeria. These terms and condition were guaranteed in the Aburi Accord. We told Ojukwu and supported him when it came to resisting the massacre of Igbo and protecting those who were not killed, but we said it should not be through secession. I fought on the same platform diplomatically to help protect the Igbo but not for secession. Some of you may have heard of the book I wrote on the civil war, entitled Reflections on the Nigeria Civil War: Setting the future. That is where I took a stand that Nigeria would remain one.

This British arranged marriage requires time to settle in. I recommended an elastic federal union of six regions, 25 years before it became popular and now six zones. Three zones are to be controlled by the majority tribes and three controlled by the minority tribes to create a balance. All the names coincided with the present six zones, except what is called South South. I called it South Central. That is all and, of course, the boundaries did not quite coincide, but the concept was the same. I have been a Pan-Nigerian all my life and Pan-Africanist. I started primary school in Sokoto and I went to secondary school in Kaduna, St Gerald’s College, Kaduna. We started it in 1949 and from there I went to University College Ibadan, from there I went to the foreign service. You couldn’t have a more Pan-Nigerian background. We didn’t want Nigeria broken up, but we wanted a Nigeria where everybody was safe, where ethnic groups, big or small, were all safe. It is important that one knows this position.

Leadership of Ohanaeze
I am happy that Ndigbo have asked me to lead Ohanaeze Ndigbo organization. It is a socio-cultural organization aimed at not only preserving but also making sure that Igbo cultural organization is promoted and consolidated. Ohanaeze Ndigbo, beside their culture and civilization, has political and economic interests. Ohanaeze will take interest in the promotion of such legitimate interest within the Nigerian family. We are practising multi-party form of democracy; so Ohanaeze cannot be partisan. Ohanaeze will not be interested in saying what party you must choose or belong to but you must be a good Igbo person.

Obviously, if you are a good Igbo person, you are a good citizen of Nigeria already and you must politically promote an agenda with the focus and interest of Ndigbo within Nigeria. I on two occasions fought to be President of Nigeria. In 1993, under Humphrey Nwosu’s option A4, I emerged as the SDP standard bearer for Delta State with 81 per cent of the votes. Then we zoned the president and deputy to the South West and North East, that was how Abiola and Kingibe emerged. Again in 1999, we tried something. In 2007, through PDP, we tried to try because we didn’t even take off.
With due respect, Obasanjo has been my friend and I respect him for being a thorough Nigerian and a great Pan-Africanist, but the way the presidential nomination was handled in our party was not democratic at all.

He literally beat us to the game. This has nothing to do with whether they are qualified or not; we are talking of the process of the emergence. The same team may have emerged, but they have to follow due process. That didn’t happen, but then it’s history; we just forget about it.
Ndigbo have entrusted me with helping to manage the affairs that involve the interest of Igbo nation within Nigeria and we intend to do our best in that regard in total and harmonious collaboration with other ethnic units in Nigeria.

Ethnicity is natural to any man or woman in any part of the world. You are born into it. You could be a Ghanaian, Senegalese, Tanzanian or British. These are political arrangements in countries we have. Some succeed and continue to be consolidated and others break up. Many of you knew about Yugoslavia. Where is Yugoslavia today? Even Czechoslovakia broke off peacefully along ethnic lines. The ethnic blocks are the building blocks of any modern nation. You don’t choose to be Yoruba or Igbo. When your mother is suckling you she would be singing that language already to you and you grow in it and you didn’t choose. This shows that the health of the body is actually predicated by the health of the little cells that make up the body. If the cells are in order, the entire body is in order. These units, big or small, are the building blocks of the nation and have some time-honoured traditional values.

Ethnicity
In a normal Nigerian community, there is a lot of respect for elders. At the village level whether you have a PhD or the richest person, when you come to what you call in my area Diokpaa, that is your elder, you bow. That is our tradition. It is respect for order, which you then translate to respect for law and order in the larger community. So, the ethnic ethos is quite important.

What is wrong with ethnicity is abuse of ethnicity. When you start using it against other people unfairly, yes, that is wrong. But you recognize that you are a black person; you now discriminate against a white person, that’s wrong. God made you black; you must acknowledge it. But don’t say because you are white, blacks are inferior or because you are black the Chinese are inferior. So, this is how we see it. The ethnic unit is a building block. In fact, in the case of our country, when the British were leaving, they consulted our politicians and statesmen at the time and asked them what they wanted to do as they were going. Through a number of consultative processes, the founding fathers of Nigeria said we would stay together as a nation, as a country, but because of the complexity of the composition of Nigeria – ethnic, religions and otherwise – we would be a federation of states. A federation not just a Nigeria. A federation means that the building blocks form the base of the country and what the Federal Government gets what it is accorded to it. Power comes from the unit to the top; not the other way. That is the concept of federation.

At independence we had agent general offices in London. The West had one, the East one and the North one – commission embassies, more or less, in those days. That was at regional level, but military intervention distorted everything and we got the unitary system we now operate. But we could make progress with it if we have politicians genuinely patriotic and who are nationalists; otherwise it is easy to abuse because you can occupy a central seat and mouth unity and you apply sectional thinking in your actions. These are possibilities. Another way is to dust up the master plan that created Nigeria. You ca not say that Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sardauna of Sokoto and Obafemi Awolowo were great men, icons and you rubbished what the icons sought out and created. We inherited something from them. My feeling is that this is a great country. We must ensure that Nigeria survives as a nation but the easiest way to achieve that survival is to make sure that the unit within it feel comfortably and happy within it. They would not feel dissatisfied like Yugoslavia and say let’s break up. No. The more you make people happy the more you make them feel that it doesn’t matter what their ethnic background is. The Igbo man, Ijaw man, Hasua man, Yoruba man etc, should have equal chances. It is that equality of chances that will keep our country together.

God’s willing, by May I will be 74. A normal table candle is about six inches. People like us have brunt five inches; some of you have burnt only one or two; so you are better investment than me because the future of this country continues through you, through my children and grand children.

The need for unity
So, we have a stake that it doesn’t matter how long we have left, we should invest it in ensuring that those who come after us do not suffer unduly from our avoidable mistakes. It is a continuous thing. Nobody can love Nigeria or Africa more than people like me. My house in the village, Ogwashiku is called Africa House. I built it in 1979. It is right in the middle of Ogwashi Ukwu. The book I am going to sent to you, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Setting the future, is dedicated not to my wife or my mother or Nigerian but to the true and thoughtful African. I wrote it at the age of 34. You cannot be a Pan-Africanist without being a Pan-Nigerian, but you are simultaneously an Igbo man, a Nigerian, an African and a citizen of the world all together. So, I’m at the stage right now helping to manage the affairs of the unit, that is the ethnic unit, which if we all do well; if the Yoruba do it well, we do it well, the Hausa-Fulani do it well and others do it well, Nigeria would be well.

The problem of leadership and what Ohanaeze would do
You see, my colleague and I have just taken over. That is the new executive and we are in the process of putting together the programme of action. We already have a focus. You see the Igbo nation in Nigeria has missed out on a number of occasions on quite important item within the country. I’m talking politically. For example, the concentration of Ndigbo is in the South East. We have six zones. One zone has seven states, four have six, only the Igbo one has five. There is a gap of two between the one that has seven and the other one.

States are created equally from the federal point of view and that already shows that there is something wrong somewhere. Now, how do you rectify this form of imbalance? You need representation in the areas of political activities that matter and you need sincere Igbo men and women who will have an Igbo agenda and present an Igbo agenda as a representative of Igbo people. You talked about mediocrities. The problem is only partially mediocrity. It is more of insincerity. We have clever people who excel in manipulating and maneouvering to power. They push to the limit and ensure that better people don’t even come up. If so, those who don’t want to be messed around unnecessarily say okay, it doesn’t matter, why should I bother, I can feed my wife and children in a more decent manner, why do I take this way. Such people will continue to dominate the political scene, but the rest will now criticise.

Most of us did basic sciences in school. If you want to boil water, you put water either in the pot or kettle and put that over some flame. Immediately the flame touches the bottom of that container, the first molecules of water nearest to the bottom actually boil and go up. If you come a minute or two after you put the thing on fire and put your hand you will notice almost nothing, may be the water will be a little tepid. Come back after 20 minutes, if you put your hands it will burn you. The difference is that enough molecules have taken heat that is why it will burn.

In Nigeria today, those who know the right thing are too few, as we are talking now. But it will not continue forever. Once the heat is on, the molecules will be taking heat more and more in the container. Our job is the educate the population. They are the only guarantee of what we call democracy.
Ohanaeze, as a body, will be interested in educating the masses of Igbo people as to their rights and responsibilities within the Nigerian nation. We are not going to encourage the elitist exclusionist. Not at all. The market woman, the truck pushers should be aware of the fact that he is Igbo and wants his or her rights protected; that he has to play a certain role. When that educational process is consolidated, nobody who doesn’t qualify for a place in position or authority will find himself there. You have seen already what happened in Edo State.

Oshiomhole is not a rich man, but he has beaten those with a lot of money because the population there noticed that this fellow has been talking about what the people need. He has been exposed to their knowledge through his activities as a labour leader. All we need to do is to ensure that the kind of thing is not isolated but the whole of Nigeria is inflamed with what is right and what is wrong and who is cheating and who is not cheating; that is the only answer. There is no second answer. But it takes a little time. Time is a neutral factor; if you don’t use it nothing happens. What we now do is to use the time available to pump in knowledge that democracy is the best forum, but those who represent us must be the best that are capable of delivering the kind of goods we are expecting from them.

Internal squabble in Ohanaeze
We inherited the situation as it is. We are a product of a process of election and we are trying to see what we could do now we have been elected and sworn in. The need for real independence of Ohanaeze has been dramatically highlighted by what happened in Enugu over the post of secretary. Somebody was said to have won, like those of us were said to have won and eventually sworn in; but another group challenged that verdict. As far as Enugu State is concerned, it is to them that we zoned Secretary General position. The group claimed that the governor was behind them; therefore, the government was sponsoring them. That introduced a bit of delay.

Eventually, Saturday before the last I was in Enugu to see the governor. Four of us were involved. You know the organization is called Oha-na-Eze: the ruler and the ruled the two together. That is why we were two Ezes and two Ohas, in equal proportion. The Asagba of Asaba and Igwe Ilomuanya from Imo represented the Ezes and myself and my immediate deputy from Ebonyi represented the Ohas. Four of us were involved in discussing with the governor. We explained to him the urgency of getting the thing resolved quickly, but our preference is a situation where disunity in Enugu does not continue after such a resolution.

If Ohanaeze was not involved with the governors, in terms of funding, what a governor thinks will normally be his personal affairs. If he wants to influence Ohanaeze, he will do it like anybody else by lobbying and explaining. But you know the banal expression that who pays the pipers calls the tune. What is happening is that Ohanaeze needs to have financial independence. It means that those who mange the affairs of the organization will have free hand and will give respect to the governors, as the elected leaders of the states and to tell them that this is Pan-Igbo affair involving the Ohas, in the larger majority and what the Ohas think should carry the way; but we have not reached that stage yet. We have been working on something. Asoluka has been very active in the direction of producing a programme for the financial independence for the Ohanaeze organization.

Obama, who won US election, collected more money from records available than any other previous candidate. This money did not come from the big people. It is the ordinary people who were just giving 10, 15, five dollars but in their masses. If we position ourselves in such a way that the ordinary Igbo market man or woman or anybody feels that this is a body that they have confidence in and can support, it would be better. A multiplicity of widow’s mite can keep Ohanaeze going, small as it might be. And we are targeting that.

However, we have to ensure that there is no psychological divide between the governors and ordinary Ohanaeze people. What we do is to, while seeking total independence financially, explain to them that they are the elected representatives of the people and deserve our respect and they will be consulted very often on issues of importance to Ndigbo because they are elected representatives of Ndigbo. But all the same, whatever they say will only be a constitution of the overall thinking of Ndigbo, not for any one to impose anything because he is an elected governor. This will mean level of diplomatic management skill in dove tailing the two. So, they don’t feel alienated, but they do not be in a position to impose anything on anybody.

Contesting for the presidency at an old age
Do you know the age of Mandela when he became president. First of all, the constitution does not put upper limit. It is only at the point of entry. As we are taking now, some people are talking about getting the judges to move to 80. Frank Roosevelt, one of the most successful American presidents, was on a wheel chair. A president is a symbol and a catalyst, like a General in war. Many Generals are old people who cannot fight because one disease or the other, but they make the plans for the young forces to fight. President of a country, like Nigeria, requires much experience. If you are a young doctor and you made first class, usually the first operation you perform, like a simple appendix, you see him trembling and nurses mopping him and encouraging him. The same young man or woman 20 years later can perform heart surgery whistling. The difference is experience. If the person is alive and can compete in spite of the age and win let him go ahead.

Some people can be gifted and very young and can do a lot of great things, but age in management situation is always an advantage because you are more experienced. The thing that a young man will handle and make mistake an older man would have foreseen it.
I mention that if Obasanjo has had the third term, he would be more than 72. Age is neither here nor there; it has to do with an individual. Some people are old at 50.

Between South East Igbo and Delta Igbo
My being elected to this position, more or less, will put paid to that thinking that you have two classes of Igbo – one core Igbo and one non-core Igbo. If the Igbo nation does not regard those outside, either in Rivers or Delta, why should they ask one of them to come and be the head of the organization? So, we are going to use it to explain to those who are doubting that is unfounded because the proof is there to show that it is not founded. You know some of us are much older; we know what the Igbo were before the civil war came and shattered their confidence. They used to walk very tall in those days. There were heavy competition and many of them excelled and even in Rivers, in those days, many people who were not exactly Igbo claimed Igbo in those days. Now these Igbo add something to their names or drop something from their names. That is to say that what matters is success. If the Igbo nation reorganizes itself and restores confidence in the Igbo nation, many people who are doubting or skeptical or who are embarrassed to be Igbo will quickly lean towards being Igbo and start walking tall.

Need for additional state for the Igbo
Well, it depends on which side you are that influences your thinking. There are those on our side of the river, that is Anioma side, who will want Anioma to be the sixth Igbo state. Kogi State traverses the River Niger, like Benue State. So, the river shouldn’t be a barrier as to where the lines are drawn. They are some who think Anioma could be the sixth Igbo state, others say no let’s get the sixth state from the South East and if Anioma is created they can decide where they lean; that is a point of perception.
As an Anioma person and now we are all involved with Ohanaeze, I will go for creating Anioma State and lumping it with the rest of the Igbo territory. That will be my personal choice, but that need not to be the choice of every person on that side. If it were to happen, the South East boundary will change and the South East would have six states and the South South will still have six. That it just a personal position. I have not consulted any person on the matter.

At 33, you were already representing Nigeria and today it is almost impossible for 33-year-old man to represent Nigeria. The old breeds are still sitting tight. How would the young ones grow when the old breed are not leaving the stage?

I represented Nigeria and most of us did at that time because the country was young. General Gowon, you know his age then. If you look at even the photograph of Zik, Awolowo, Balewa and co they were very young. The nation was young. You go to the secondary school you attended, you wont recognize it. At the beginning, it was small and may be it has broaden. In my case, may be 20 times it was then. As the population grows and the family enlarges, you are bound to have older people in the system. Old people in Nigeria did not begin with Zik, Sardauna or Awolowo. The older people did not belong to the new political setting. They didn’t go to school and so they were kind of cut off, but people like Zik and co, who had proper education, were still in the system. By the time, in 1983, Zik and Awolowo were presenting themselves for the presidency of Nigeria, they were not young people. They were still in the system and had cumulative experience.

I believe that young people have every right to come up, but not at the expense of cutting off the head so that the neck becomes the head. No. They would compete. We have example in Dimeji Bankolo, Speaker, House of Representatives. You saw his score; he almost scored 100 per cent when he was voted into power. So, a good young man, who is a genius can emerge even with old people competing. I feel that age should not be a disadvantage nor should the youth be a disadvantage. Let there be only one thing – fair competition. If a young man is more fitted he will beat the old one and if the old one still has the strength he will out-distanced the young one.

African leaders and self- confidence
[b]It worries my mind to see African leaders fidgeting before other leaders and in fact other people from other parts of the world. I have lived and worked in many countries in Asia, Europe, America and other parts of the world. I have tested the acumen of the people there and those of Africans from my local environment and found that nobody, based on race, is inferior to the other. What retards us is the poor leadership that holds the people down and stops them from realizing their full potentials.
I remember that many Africans and Nigerians study in other countries and have proved themselves great even when instructed in strange languages which they effectively imbibed. And my conclusion is that the engineer from Nigeria, the journalist, the teacher and other professionals are just equals of their contemporaries in any other nation or continent. Any day our leadership rises to the challenge of self-liberation that would embolden it, Africa and Nigeria would be better and prosper like the rest of the world.[/b]