President Muhammadu Buhari, late last month, assented to the North East Development Commission (NEDC) Bill, a piece of legislation conceived, drafted and sponsored by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Yakubu Dogara. In this interview, the Speaker commends the President and cautions elite from the region on mismanaging the Commission. Excerpts presented by JOSHUA EGBODO.
Mr Speaker, you sponsored the North East Development Commission Bill which has been signed into law by the President. Is this a dream come true for you?
I commend His Excellency, Mr. President, for signing the Bill into law. As I said before, this shows the level of the President’s sensitivity to the plight of the highly traumatised people of the North East. For us who are sons of the North-East, we know our history very well, so we appreciate this gesture and we will not take it lightly.
What informed your decision to push for the creation of the NEDC?
From day one when we started meeting, our thinking was how to ensure that whatever policies developed by government aimed at tackling the challenges facing us as a zone are policies that will survive whoever is formulating them. So it became clear to us that if we leave everything at the level of policies, granted that today we have a President that supports, loves and likes our people, chances are that he will not continue to be there forever. Not even chances that is the reality.
Will you say that this is the end of the insurgency and the beginning of a new era?
As a matter of fact, the heat was becoming very close to our section of the North-East, were it not for the timely intervention that was brought; the change of government in this country, and then they were able to put these insurgents on their backtrack.
With this progress made, some have said Boko Haram has been degraded, decapitated, or even been defeated. Whatever the situation is, the most important thing is for our people to go back to where they belong. And then, for them to get hope in the environment that God has given them, they can continue to contend with destiny of life. That is what is important.
The debate shouldn’t be about the degrading and decapitating of the Boko Haram, but about the survivors, the IDPs and the rebuilding communities, hopes that were shattered on account of terrorism.
Some have argued that the Boko Haram insurgency was caused by prolonged years of neglect and marginalization of the North East. Like Senator Bukar Abba Ibrahim who once said that Marginalization of the region began since the 1960s, do you agree with this assertion?
As a matter of fact, these signs were there, it’s just that we didn’t notice them on time. It is true that for years in this country, the North-East has always come last in terms of budgetary allocation. This is in spite of the fact that we face more challenges than others and when it comes to development indices, we are the last in the country. But we didn’t pay attention. When the population curve was going up sharply and opportunity costs were nose-diving, we didn’t pay attention.
Will you say that poverty and deprivation caused the insurgency?
I don’t know the correlation between violence and poverty, but I’ve seen that in societies where hope is lacking, there always seems to be tendencies of violence. Or where you find extreme poverty the likelihood of violence is always there. I guess that was where we missed it. So as true believers and representatives of the zone, our focus has always been what we can do to build on the successes that this government is gaining in its fight against terrorism.
And ultimately, to ensure that we do not have a relapse to this kind of situation in which we find ourselves in the zone. Even those zero statistics of human development indices have been destroyed. Businesses and factories, I think as we speak, the only productive enterprise in the Northeast may be Ashaka Cement. I don’t know if we have any other factory employing people in the Northeast. Infrastructure is zero.
In the new law, we saw that major source of funding will cease after ten (10) years. Is 10 years enough to rebuild the region?
The truth is that the level of devastation as a result of this insurgency is one that is going to take us decades to recover from. If you were to quantify the infrastructure, wealth and everything that we have lost, you’d be talking about trillions, then you can imagine in the national budget, where are we going to get allocation of trillions to the North-East? Is it within the next ten or twenty years? So even to recover the things that we have lost, as we are saying will take us decades, not even a few years. So that was why as skilful legislators, we decided that we will go for the North East Development Commission.
Some people believe that the commission was not necessary and that it may end up being like the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), which many believe has failed to deliver on its mandate…
Yes, a lot of people thought it was not necessary, some even thought, well, we want to create a system that will be like a pool of prosperity in the desert so that a few privileged sons and daughters of the region will just mismanage the resources. And I know that even the President was watching us before signing this bill into law. But I guess that he saw the plight of the people and that he’s been told of the level of devastation in that region. And since current efforts are not enough, and may never be enough to address the challenges, if these interventions are left at the level of policies, any subsequent government that comes and doesn’t love our people that much, will just with a stroke of a pen, strike the policy out, and that is the end.
So the thinking was that if we could elevate this to the level of a law, then any future government that seeks to reverse it will have to face the members of the National Assembly in order to repeal that law. And because we have a voice, we will continue to have a voice in the National Assembly; it is going to be exceptionally difficult for that to be achieved. So we were making provisions for the long run, not for the short term.
In some places where I have had to advocate for this commission, I have said the freedom for us to plan for ourselves, to manage the resources accruing to the zone, is something, and we should be given that freedom. I should never be understood to be canvassing that we will mismanage resources given to us, but I said even if we do it, and we fail, a free man when he falls blames no one. We will accept the blame that we have been given the liberty and resources, but we mismanaged it, and then we bear carry the shame for the rest of our lives. It is better than to leave this at the level that one day it may just be thrown to the dogs.
