FG should swap detained B’Haram members with kidnapped schoolgirls –Ozekhome

June 7, 2014

 

 

Mike Ozekhome

Chief Mike Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, who is a member of the National Conference Committee on Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms, speaks with FRIDAY OLOKOR on the Boko Haram insurgency in the country among other issues

Boko Haram insurgents have continued to put Nigeria on the edge, giving the government great concern. What options are there for government to end or check these terrorists?

We are talking about life that is sacrosanct and irreplaceable. We are talking about our young and innocent girls, over 200 of them, who are being traumatised on a daily basis and going through horrific circumstances. I believe that this is the time the government should dialogue with Boko Haram, after all the government itself in the last two years has invited Boko Haram to dialogue with it. It was the Boko Haram group that said it was not ready for dialogue. Now that members of the group have said they are interested in dialogue, I advise the government to seize the opportunity to dialogue with them, not just on the release of the over 200 female students of Government Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State but holistically on all the issues involved so as to stop the bloodletting in the country.

Do you believe the extension of state of emergency in the three Northern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa was a good option?

Many people are being killed in this country, but I do not agree with those people who felt that the state of emergency should not have been extended. Nigerians at times suffer selective amnesia like the Bonbons of European history that learnt nothing and forgot nothing to the extent that they still had to fight World War II even after the treaties of Wessex in 1919. How many people remember that only up to February and March last year, before the first proclamation of a state of emergency in May last year, this Boko Haram insurgents had actually invaded and taken over some local government areas in Borno and Adamawa states and actually removed the Nigerian flag and planted their own flags and were exercising sovereignty over those parts of the country? It was the declaration of a state of emergency that made President Goodluck Jonathan to send military there; this was later created into a whole division. Many people have forgotten that it was because of the harassment of the Boko Haram members that they themselves have taken into the Sambisa forest because they could no longer live in the villages. They now come to the villages, attack and abduct villagers, and run away. So you cannot say because you are going to Lagos and your car breaks down and the need to continue the journey at all cost will make you carry the car on your head. What you have to do is to find a way to repair the car and get it moving again. Democracy, we must learn, is not a Usane Bolt’s 100-meters-quick-race that you get the result with immediate effect or by fiat as we were used to having during the military regimes. Democracy is a marathon that requires a lot of patience, sacrifice, a lot of give and take, horse trading and a lot of pampering. Both centrifugal and centripetal forces are what make democracy strong.

Is it possible to dialogue with a faceless group?

These people have links, they are not spirits. Boko Haram members are not ghosts; why are they saying they should release their family members if they are not people that can be seen? The truth is that they have roots and homestead and many of their family members have been captured. For me, those family members who were captured not on the field of battle, not in the war-front but arrested from their various houses for having links with these Boko Haram members, should be released and traded off for the abducted Chibok girls. They are different from those people that were caught operating and have been tried.

You advocated that environmental rights should be made justiceable at the resumption of plenary in the ongoing National Conference; why?

Environmental rights are very important; man by nature is an animal, we live in our environment and if our environment is degrading, then we cannot claim to be better than the lower classes of animals. If you want to punish your pet you lock it up in a cage and living in a bad environment is more or less like living in the Hobbesian state of nature where life is short, nasty and brutish. All over the world, rights have gone beyond fundamental rights to what we call ECOSOC rights: Economic and Socio-Cultural Rights. Fundamental rights are no longer the issue because they are taken for granted; they are rights that are inalienable. My freedom of speech is merely put in the constitution and I have freedom of speech because I already have a tongue given to me by God to speak. My freedom of movement is only put in the constitution as a mere dress rehearsal because by giving me my legs to walk, God has already given me freedom of movement and association. My rights to liberty or rights to life are not rights given to me by the constitution because by my mother giving birth to me, God has already given me right to life and I was born free. I was not born in a cage, so we have gone beyond those rights. The issues now are economic rights, shelter rights and environmental rights. Look at environmental rights for example in Nigeria and use the Niger-Delta as a case study, these are people who have water everywhere but like in the Ancient Mariner, none is fit enough to drink. These people defecate in the same polluted stagnant streams that they also drink from. These people have light 24-hours a day not from the national grid but from constant gas flaring that leads to acid rain and causes cancer. This also leads to the impoverishment of the soil meant for agriculture and the killing of the fish in the waters. People’s means of livelihood are being taken away.

Nigeria is one of the highest gas flaring nations in the world, flaring 76 per cent of our natural gas reserves. So of less than 3 trillion cubic fit of natural gas reserves, a significant volume is flared a daily basis and the multinational companies are not on being held accountable. We are not taking them to courts of law; we are not punishing them for degrading our environment. Netherlands also has oil but its gas flaring is zero per cent, America flares 5.4 per cent, while Nigeria flares 76 per cent. If you continue to flare gas and bring diseases and avoidable illnesses to the people, then you cannot say you have protected your environment. I come from a small village called Ivbiokwe near Agenebode in Wepa-Wenno Kingdom in Etsako East Local Government Area of Edo State. I am, therefore, a minority within a minority. To go home from Auchi, erosion is cutting off the road and by the time you manage to get to Fugar through Oben to Ohame, the road has been divided into two and then from Ohame to my village, Ivbiokwe, and from there to Agenebode you see gully erosions. Are you now saying that I have no right to go to court and sue the state government or the Federal Government for not protecting my environment or my habitat? That is wrong, that is why I agreed with the Committee on Environment when it recommended that Section 20 of the constitution, which deals with protection of our environment, our wide-life and our natural habitat, should be taken from the non- justiceable section, which deals with Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy to Chapter 4, which deals with fundamental human rights. In other words, these rights should be made fundamental and I also recommended that Section 6(c) of the constitution, which makes Chapter 2 dealing with these fundamental objectives, including the environmental rights non-justiceable should also be deleted from the constitution.

Why did you also advocate that the Land Use Act should be made an ordinary Act of Parliament?

That is another aspect that is dear to me. The Land Use Act has to be taken away from Section 315 of the constitution because you cannot amend the Land Use Act as it is now. The reason is that you can only amend the Land Use Act in the same way you will amend the constitution under Section 9. This means that you need the 2/3 majority vote of the members of the National Assembly. You will also need the 2/3 majority votes of all the 36 State Houses of Assembly in Nigeria, which is a gigantic task that you can hardly ever come to. So, in this modern time when the world is moving on, how can you leave a Land Use Act so sacrosanct and so sacred as not to be touchable? The issue now is for state governors to grab lands belonging to communities allegedly for a public purpose. What is a public purpose has not been defined. A public purpose, I can tell you, is when you are talking about building hospitals that are accessible to the whole world, building of roads, building of a mosque, church and market all of which are accessible to the people. But some state governors now forcefully acquire the land of the peasants, pay little or no compensation and sell these lands to multinational organisations and businessmen all in the name of acquiring the land for a public purpose. Whereas all those big organisations will come up with shopping malls; and these are individual purposes for which they are making money. I therefore agree with the Committee on Environment that the Land Use Act should be taken away from the precincts of Section 315 of the constitution and made an ordinary Act of the National Assembly that you can amend going by the dynamics of the society. It is a contradiction to say for me to use the land that belongs to my ancestors and family I have to apply to my state governor to give me a Certificate of Occupancy to be able to use my father’s or ancestor’s land. It is actually an expropriation of my family and ancestral lands by the government. Such should not be allowed in our laws. The land tenure system in Jigawa State or Kano, Borno and Bauchi states, for example, is quite different from the land tenure system in Edo State. Why don’t you therefore leave land as a state matter to be dealt with by state Houses of Assembly according to the nuances of the people of that place? I therefore support fully that the Land Use Act should be removed from the constitution and made an ordinary Act of parliament.