The Oasis Reporters

March 6, 2022

 

By Abiodun Nejo



‘I am very sorry’ – Segun Oni

What is your opinion on the agitation for Southern Presidency in 2023?

As far as I am concerned, the agitation that I am praying for is that there would be a President to serve Nigeria well and serve Nigeria right. If the person is a southerner, fine, that is very good. If the person is a northerner, why not? The reason we are reducing this to South/North is because we have not seen in the past nearly eight years, anything that anybody will not have been able to predict.



I am very sorry that I was one of those people who traversed the nooks and cranny of this country campaigning for President Muhammadu Buhari. When we were doing it, we saw three critical needs; the need to repair the battered economy, to put a check on excessive corruption, and for security – internal security.



The insecurity issue was not as pronounced then as it is all over the country now. It was just the North-East, but we knew that whatever was happening in the North-East was happening to Nigeria, and it put us all on our toes. Today, it is not the North-East alone that is now under the weight of insecurity.



The economy that we believed was battered then was still healthy enough to be exchanging N160 or do to the dollar. Today, it is N560 to a dollar, which means if it was battered then, it is completely washed away now.



We thought of corruption and we hoped to be able to, at least, create a situation where we could put a stop to excessive greed and corruption. I am sure you know now that people are joining the government and becoming rich overnight. Nothing is putting them in check. People consider you to be mad if you do same. Some of us holding on and standing by our principles are becoming scandalized, but we had made up our minds that what is right will be right and will always be right and what is wrong or despicable will always be despicable.

But why do you think Buhari has not been able to achieve any of the three?

 

If you ask me, I will say people have taken advantage of him because there are not enough controls. He is a good man and good people are always easy to misunderstand. He does not want to hurt people. So, there is a difference between the toughness that we imagined and the simplicity we encountered.

 

My conclusion is that if you are president of Nigeria, don’t aspire to be a good man. Remember there is a principled man who will not allow anybody to cross any line that should not be crossed and will not allow anybody to get away with it no matter who is involved.

 

Some people said education has a role to play in this regard, are we getting it right in the education sector with these incessant strikes and the present curriculum?

I don’t think strikes have much to do with the kind of leaders that Nigeria will produce. It will have something to do with the overall standard of education and the worth of, for example, a typical university degree. But overall, it is not everybody who will be a good manager of men and resources. It is not everybody in the United Kingdom that can manage well or manage better than people in Nigeria. The difference between us and the UK is that their best people are more at the top than our best people here. Our best people here are way below the ladder either because they do not have enough money to have access to politics, or because their kiths and kins would not even believe in them. Nigeria must get it right.

For me, this is now a total embarrassment. It happened around the same place where a serving commissioner and so many other people were kidnapped, so why has nothing been done about it? I was talking to an official of a security outfit in Abuja, I asked them to do a project around that area to ascertain the reason why it has been impossible for the people around there to find a way. I remember there was a time when armed robberies were very rampant on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the police killed a couple of armed robbers around that route and robbery stopped. If they had been kidnapping people around the same area in Ekiti for years now, not even months and we haven’t heard that there is a serious project done, either sponsored by the state government or the security agencies all this while. I think it is an embarrassment.



Some people say poverty is multiplying in Nigeria and life is hard generally owing to the high cost of food and other necessities such as cooking gas, electricity charges, etc. Looking at the government’s economic policies, do you see any hope for Nigerians?



I will say simply and frankly that there is no hope. If there is hope, we would have seen it. This government has been there for six years and things are still going down. What Nigerians should do is to search for an alternative. It is too late for us to hope. There is no hope, we should stop deceiving ourselves. What democracy has allowed is for us to retool our thinking and see what will happen in the 2023 general election.



Do you see PDP or the possibility of a third force as the way out as far as 2023 is concerned?

Third force, yes, but PDP is far from it and there is no hope in APC. On whether we should be getting prepared for PDP, what I will tell you is that in a party that allows people to vote in a secret ballot and show somebody, and get away with it, that party is not the one that is coming. If you allow people with any primitive sentiment to get away with glitches like that, then the system will not be run right, that is why I believe in the idea of a third force. It is not as if we have seen anybody, it is not as if we are sure, but I think we should put effort around the third force to see whether a leader will emerge that will be able to put Nigeria right.

 

 

For further reading:

https://www.starnews.com.ng/how-operation-see-and-buy-denied-me-pdp-gov-ticket-oni-ex-ekiti-gov/

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