I would agree for example that a lot of the failures are in terms of managing resources and keeping track of resources and so on. I gave an interview recently, my estimation is that 80 per cent of the failure of socio-economic development in the North can be attributed to the failure of local and state governments. Only 20 per cent could be attributed to failure by the federal government because the division of responsibility is very, very clear. So, you see, this is the totality of the crises we’re having.

When we wrote to the President – the document is still there – we said yes, poverty is one of the elements, but there are also other factors that set people one against the other and so on. It was not Boko Haram that started ethnic religious conflicts. We have been having ethnic religious conflicts for years. Plateau, my state Kaduna and various other places, OPC, MEND and so on, These are ethnic, religious or socio-economic conflicts that have been taking place for years in this country. And in each case you can explain why. If you take the current cry for resource control and so on, it’s very simple – failure of the elites, particularly those of them who are operating in the South-South.

I did an exercise recently to look at the 2014 budgets that have been approved by the various Houses of Assembly throughout the country in the 36 states. If you take the budget in the six states in the South-South together with allocations to the Ministry of the Niger-Delta, allocations for NNDC and Amnesty, the figures came to a frightening disparity. The South-South budgets together with all these allocations stand at N2.6 trillion, against the combined budget of 19 northern states at N2.4 trillion. Do you call this justice in one country?

And yet the politicians in this region get up in their various communities to say, No, your money is in Abuja, it is the northerners that have stolen your money; it is oil money and so on and so forth. If you take this issue of oil money technically, is it idle money? Who produces it? Who works for oil? Who put oil on ground and who is extorting it? We can argue here that the labour of the northern farmers produced the groundnut pyramid. The labour of the cocoa farmers in the West produces cocoa. The labour of the farmers in the eastern part of Nigeria produces palm products. Whose labour is producing oil? Certainly not the people who are sitting on it. It must be somebody coming from outside that told them that there is oil there and then brought the technology to bring it out. And you said it’s your resource. Meaning what?   The companies should be paying taxes.

I saw Dr. [Iyorchia] Ayu’s interview recently and I agreed with it completely. He said this resource issue, you have to look at it very critically. When you say you are producing something it must be by your own sheer ability and labour. But this is idle wealth that you’re not working for and this is why people are even quarreling with you for it and that is why the money has no value now. I would take you to Chapter Two of the Nigerian Constitution. I was privileged to be the chairman in 1994 Constitutional Conference that produced that draft.

Chapter Two – fundamental objectives and directive principle of state policy – that’s where the soul of the Nigerian Constitution should be. If people would work on the provisions of that chapter, this country would have perhaps risen far ahead of where we are now. The soul there is that the Nigerian resources must be harnessed and used for the benefit of Nigerian citizens. [But] the resources of the country have been mortgaged through the pressure of IMF and World Bank. So everything must be private sector-driven, meaning the state has no role in ensuring that the resources of the country are controlled for the benefits of the citizens of this country but rather are controlled by the multinational companies who will bring in dollars against the depreciated naira. Only few years ago, one naira was equivalent to one dollar and forty cents.

By the time you graduate from the polytechnics, federal colleges of education etc, don’t even talk about secondary school students, the economy cannot absorb them; it’s in hands of less than one per cent of the population of this country. So anybody who is dreaming that this country will remain peaceful under this regime is dreaming. I’m not saying particularly Jonathan’s regime; he inherited a lot of these things. It’s a cumulative failure that has taken place and we’re getting to the pinnacle of it. And the pinnacle of it is surely dangerous; very, very dangerous. The signs are not good.

How do you see the economic reality of the North now? Is it buoyant or not? 

No! The North has always been self-sufficient. I was telling you that the resources of this country, particularly the oil resource that we’re fighting over, are being cornered by less than 100,000 people out of 170 million.

So, out of that number of 100,000, I don’t think the North has more than 100 or 150 people that can be considered to be elites and rich. Perhaps, the kind of rich people you’re even talking about are the ones that do not even have factories that employ anybody. They do not have farms that employ anybody or produce anything; their only job is be to allocated oil blocs, which they will sell to foreign companies and make their commission and come here and pretend that they’re rich.

And with those riches, they don’t even create anything that employs other people. So, the ordinary man in the North at the moment doesn’t even need oil money. If you see people in the North struggling to talk about oil, they are the idle beneficiaries of oil money that is being stolen. The ordinary northern Nigerian citizens depends on various forms of vocations, mainly agriculture. And it is the agriculture sector, take it or leave it, that is keeping this country today.

They are the ones that are eking a living without any support from anybody; it is entirely their effort. So, they don’t know whether there are oil riches in Nigeria; if it evaporates today it doesn’t make any difference. If the oil sections of the country decide to go their different ways the ordinary northerner who lives on the farm doesn’t care one bit. He will not care nor be bothered. The only person that will care, perhaps is my kind of class that eats fat from money we do not produce or work for.

If the North does not depend on oil resource, then why the cry in the North over issues of revenue sharing and power? 

No, this is not true either. I’m part of the clamour for power shift and I hope you can understand it from my background. I was one of those people who signed to form Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

I was one of 10 people who went to INEC and signed on the dotted line for PDP to become a party. Also take it from me that PDP emerged from various activities of which I was involved. I was in the first group called G18 before it metamorphosed into G34, where Dr. [Alex] Ekwueme became a leader. But the G18 stock was entirely northern and under the leadership of Solomon Lar and Mallam Adamu Ciroma. But before then, I was a member of Shehu Musa Yar’Adua’s political formation called Peoples Democratic Movement, PDM.

I was also one of those who against all odds, against the resistance of a large segment of the North, agreed there should power shift between the North and South. I was at that conference where this was agreed and in fact there was an effort to put it in the constitution of the country. Some people argued that this was too much and it’s not easy to amend the constitution but it should be part of our report for political parties to use, particularly those who won large spreads in the country, to use it as an instrument of gaining support across the country.