Tinubu is my friend but I don’t like the direction he’s taking Nigeria –Donald Duke

• Joins subsidy debate, says petrol can sell at N200

• Insists ‘Lagos-Calabar Highway is fancy road, we don’t need it now’

By Soni Daniel, Northern Region Editor

“President Tinubu is my friend. But I disagree with the direction he’s taking Nigeria. Even within a family, we all don’t have to think and act the same way”. With these words, Mr. Donald Duke, a former governor of Cross River State (1999 – 2027, same time Tinubu was governor of Lagos State), explains, in this interview, why he is challenging Tinubu in the 2027 elections. Duke is vying in the election on the platform of the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). He also speaks on the very contentious issue of the removal of petrol subsidy and the position of former VP Atiku Abubakar to restore the subsidy if elected president in 2027 among other issues in the polity. Excerpts:

ADC presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, said if elected, he would return fuel subsidy to reduce the burden on Nigerians. What would you do in this regard if you become president?

I don’t believe there should be subsidy and I have spoken on this in several forums. If, for instance, you buy water at N10 and Nigerians cannot afford to pay N10 for it, and you decide that you’re going to give them at N5, then you’re subsidizing the water. That’s the ordinary meaning of subsidy. If you have a borehole in your compound and you’re producing 200,000 litres of water for sale and you decide to keep maybe 20,000 for your farm use and then sell the balance, you cannot come back and say you are doing subsidy. This is how people look at the subsidy. But I don’t believe in subsidy. This oil is our own, right? It belongs to all of us. It’s our common wealth. Don’t look at the price of the oil in the international market. We need about 300,000 barrels a day. We produce about 1.7m barrels, okay? We sell about 1.4 barrels commercially. The 300,000, look at the cost of production, not the international price. While we sell crude oil at today $70 or $80 a barrel, the cost of production may not exceed $40 a barrel, okay?

A barrel of crude in Nigeria has about seven byproducts. Of those seven byproducts, the key ones to us are probably diesel and PMS, petrol. The others are aviation fuel, kerosene. Diesel and petrol are the key ones, let government give them to us at the cost of production, not at the market price but take into cognizance the cost of distribution and put 5% or 10% above, right? Sell the five other byproducts from a barrel of crude at commercial rates. If this is done, you would find that you can easily amortize this petrol, and give it to your people at N200 or N300 per litre. Why is it important?

That’s what drives your economy. That’s what drives the country, right? You’ve got to use what you’ve got to get what you want. China did so in its early days. Southeast Asia and Japan used cheap labor when they were developing. Cambodia and many other countries use cheap labour to make clothes for export and they are doing well. They’re using what they’ve got. China today is not cheap labor anymore because they’ve developed, right? In Nigeria’s case, oil is what gives us an edge over others. Our economic advantage is our energy. But we are flaring gas. There was a time Nigeria was flaring 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas daily. You can’t imagine it. That’s the equivalent of 25 million litres of diesel. Can you imagine what 25 million litres of diesel is? They just burn it. And we did it for many decades.

But it has been significantly reduced

But the reduction is that they’ve ingested it into the ground, not that they’re using it for anything. So why don’t you spend the money, clean the gas, and make sure that there’s a gas point in every senatorial district? Nigeria should not sell its gas for local consumption at international price. It’s your own. Just sell it at a point where you know that you can keep production going. That’s why I said when you calculate everything, add maybe 10%. I’m not saying sell it as a loss that you can say you’re subsidizing. Sell it at the cost of production because it’s yours. Don’t come and tell me that gas in Nigeria is cheaper than America or cheaper than England. You’re not where they are. Those are not your mates.

How can you say, for instance, that this is the price of a product that keeps your economy going, but most people cannot afford it, and you own it? It’s not that you’re getting it from another country. It’s your own. It doesn’t make sense. Then they turn around and say, “oh, if it’s so cheap, it will find its way across the borders”. So, are you going to punish your people because you can’t police your borders? And why don’t you think of a solution to that? Okay, you can dye your oil and petrol. You can say petrol from Nigeria is purple, blue, yellow, red, whatever. It’s a dye. It doesn’t affect the car, the engine, you know. So, if you find that color petrol in Chad or Niger, you know it came from Nigeria and the security agencies can track and arrest those taking the fuel across the borders. They should go and find out how Nigeria’s petrol got to such places and deal with those responsible for the theft. That’s how it works. But you can’t punish your people because the essence of governance is to ensure that the people are productive. That’s why we go to school. That’s why we have hospitals. If you’re sick, you’re not productive.

But the Bretton Woods people are subsidising food.

Yeah, nobody’s talking about that. You’ve got to keep your people productive. If there’s no food, right, they cannot survive. So, they make it available. That is why I am saying that whatever keeps your people alive and you have in abundance, use it. I don’t know why it’s so difficult. I’ve sat down with three or four finance ministers. They don’t get it. They all want to please the World Bank and IMF, but the people in the World Bank and IMF are just like us. Small, small boys that go to Harvard and all these schools, you know. Some are there telling Nigeria what to do. When I was in school, these people were not born. But today they’re advising Nigeria how to run the economy. You’ve got to be productive. The essence of government, like I said, is to ensure that all of us are productive. If all of us are productive, the environment is safe and there’s order. What more does government do? That’s all the government is. You know, my definition is, the reason why we need government is for the utmost productivity of our citizens within a safe and orderly environment. That’s why you need security. That’s why you have the judiciary. You want to make the environment orderly and safe. That’s it. If Nigeria was safe and orderly and people are productive, who cares whether you’re from Sokoto or from this, you know. Nobody cares. Because we’re all doing one thing or the other. But where inadequacy persists because we’re not productive, we begin to use tribal sentiments or want to take advantage of it to achieve what we want to achieve. So, if I’m a Calabar man and I find that the man in this office who can give me what I need is a Calabar man in the military, I start speaking Efik to him because I want to appeal to that sentiment.

Or if I’m a Christian, right, I start saying Jesus saves, or Muslim I try to appeal to that sentiment to get what I want. I don’t believe that we’re tribalistic or we’re ethnic. We just use things because it is advantageous to us. So, we want a president or a governor from our locality because we think it will give you added advantage, right? But if you’re getting everything without that added advantage, who cares where the governor comes from? You’re not looking at merit. After all, when you go to hospital, you don’t ask for the doctor who is from your village. You ask for the doctor who can cure you. So, I don’t believe there’s ethnicity. It’s because of inadequacy that we try and use what we’ve got to get what we want.

Why is the cost of living in Nigeria so high? What went wrong and how did we get here?

I think we got it wrong right from independence and as the years go by, the effects become starker. We have not addressed the issue of productivity. I use an example which is like a broken record, but I’ll say it here. Between 1979 and 1983, Shehu Shagari was president. His average budget for those four years was $25 billion.

Our population in the mid-70s was about 76 million people. Today, our population, they say, is about 230 million people. We’re still spending the same $25 billion that Shagari spent 46 years ago. All the trillions, by the time you divide it, you come down to the same thing. So, in essence, the economy has not grown. In fact, it has shrunk because $25 billion in 1979 or 1980 is not the same as today. So, the economy has shrunk, and people just need to survive. So, they’re going to banditry and kidnapping to make a living. The Boko Haram crisis is caused by poverty. And once they taste that kind of money, it’s very difficult to wean them off it. So, a kidnapper kidnaps someone and gets 20 million Naira. You tell him to go and do a steady job, they’ll give him N250,000 Naira. It can’t work because the villain has already tasted blood. When I was in university, we had Maitatsine crisis, which came before Boko Haram and all that. And it was always from that Maiduguri area, in the northeastern part, which is the poorest part of the North. So, you find that those things are exacerbated from those parts.

Now, it’s creeping all over the North and coming down South. That’s on one hand. On the other hand is the clear fact that we have not really updated our security architecture since the end of the Civil War in 1970. It’s only recently that they created more Divisions, right? But you notice something. In the United States, they have what they call the National Guard, which is military and is in every state. Yes. The National Guard is really like having a Division of the military in every state. So, they’ve really decentralized security. And I’ll say something here for free. Anything that is essential must be local. So, you have to localize the security to take care of everything everywhere in the country. Due to the fact that 80% of security is intelligence, nobody should stay in Sokoto and want to know what it is. I think if you have the local intelligence in Calabar, you need the local people there to gather that intelligence for you to use and enforce. Don’t forget that only 20% of policing is enforcement, while 80% is intelligence gathering. So, we need to start thinking differently. That’s why at the introduction, I said we must have a collective vision. Where are we taking this country to? We don’t have a vision. We just wake up and do whatever is important. We woke up one morning and said we want to build a road from Lagos to Calabar.

Nobody thought about the economics? Nobody thought about how many communities we would need to go through**.** If a road just goes straight from Lagos to Calabar with nothing in-between, of what value is that? I would be the happiest person because I live in Lagos and Calabar. So, I would be going back and forth. But a road is a commuting infrastructure between communities. There are existing roads. You and I know that if, I don’t believe they’ll get to Calabar, but let’s assume they get to Calabar. What happens to the other roads? What happens to the East-west highway that we’ve been talking about? You know that nobody will pay attention to them. Even if it were the best road to be a sea view, you want to be looking at the sea as you’re going to Calabar, fine. What is the economics of it? What is the opportunity cost? Maybe you can say “we’ll do it in 10 years when we can afford it”. But we can’t afford it now. There are higher priorities. Children are out of school. We have the largest number of out-of-school children in the world. We have the largest number of poor people in the world. And you’re building a fancy road from Victoria Island to Calabar? It doesn’t work like that. So, all I’m asking for is let’s be honest with our people. Somalia is a country that has no ethnic group. They are all one ethnic group and one religion. It’s mono-ethnic, mono-religion and they are fighting. Why are they fighting? Poverty is the cause of the fighting! The people are simply poor. This is a mono-ethnic and mono-religious society. One of the few in all of Africa where all of them come from the same ethnic group, they are Somalis. That’s their ethnic group.

But how would you tackle rising insecurity in the land?

We will have to deliberately decentralise policing. The idea of state police, even local government police, is right. Have it. Have the guidelines, but you must strengthen the judiciary. This is because there must be someone that everyone reports to if things go wrong. But the idea of having it is not bad. After all, the national police system is also abused by the president. You know? Yes. It’s not the governors only. Set it up. Put stringent guidelines. Right? Their main preoccupation should be intelligence gathering. It’s a shame that after almost 20 years of Boko Haram, we don’t have any intelligence on them. We have not infiltrated their ranks. We ought to have infiltrated their ranks by now to know what they will do next.

Why did you choose PRP given that it is not a popular vehicle?

Tell me a better vehicle. Huh? Tell me a better vehicle. If you go to Kano, you hear of PRP. That’s not the point. I told you my aim is very difficult to say a PRP will win the national elections. But I told you I want to be in the field of discussion. Right? I want to change the trajectory of our discussion. A lot of younger people are losing hope because nobody is discussing what gives them hope for tomorrow. Nobody. So, I want to be there. But let me tell you something directly about your question. Where was NDC six months ago? Where was ADC six months ago? There are new contraptions. But I believe that regardless of all these contraptions, for presidential democracy to work now, we all have to come together.

Why are you not joining the 1999-2007 set of governors to support the incumbent president?

We all don’t have to be. President Tinubu is my friend. But I disagree with the direction he’s taking Nigeria. Even within a family, we all don’t have to think and act the same way. Even in Atiku’s family, I hear one of his sons is an APC (member). We don’t have to be in one party. And that’s the beauty of democracy. We express ourselves.

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