Senator Gabriel Torwua Suswam (Benue North -East) is the Chairman, Senate Committee on Power. He comes to the Senate with the pedigree of an experienced legislator, having  served for two terms as Member of the House of Representatives(1999-2007). The former Governor of Benue State holds strong views on knotty political and economic issues in the country.

Recently you made a public statement on politics in your party.

Well, since the advent of party politics back in 1998, I have belonged to one party, I have been in PDP since I began politics in 1998 before I got elected in 1999, I have not changed party and I intend not to change party, and so I understand the PDP very well. I have also looked at how things are done in the party and so I wasn’t making a statement that was extraordinary.

The PDP in 2019 zoned the office of the president to the North, unfortunately that ambition of having their president from the North was not realized and so the belief is that in 2023 PDP would want to realize that ambition and so there is nothing extraordinary about it. If any person has any superior argument, he can contradict what I have said, I believe that is the normal thing, you say look, I will have things thing, and I have not gotten it and you want to take it away, that does not make any political sense.

So I think the rightful thing for us in PDP is to keep to that (arrangement). Subsequently, when PDP makes a statement that this is the direction we want to go, people will believe in them, but if we keep oscillating that this is zoned to you, even though you didn’t get it, we take it to another place, I don’t think people will be happy with that kind of arrangement. So the right thing is for the PDP to keep faith with what they did in 2019.

There is this clamour for Nigeria to be fine-tuned, some call it restructuring, some say it is true federalism. If you look at how the country was running before the military introduced this unitary system veiled as federalism, so what is your take on the call for a restructured Nigeria so that the clamour for Abuja will reduce. For instance the Ohaneze Ndigbo took you up, when you talked about the PDP zoning arrangement because they felt power should come to them?

Well, it depends on what you define as restructuring

Whether you call it Restructuring or True Federalism, what those demanding for it are saying in essence is; let us go back to what we were practicing before the military intervention, you can call it regional government or as we have them now, states, and also that some of the things we have on the exclusive list should be put in the concurrent list.

You see, devolution of power is not the same thing with restructuring. It is because of lack of understanding of what restructuring is that is creating this problem. For a Yoruba man, restructuring means something different to what it means an Igbo man. The restructuring to an Igbo man means something different from me from the northern part of the country. So we must agree,  whether it is devolution of power or restructuring we want.

What do you from the North understand as restructuring?

This talk about restructuring is pure politics and selfishness because this whole project called Nigeria came into being in 1914 and from then, all forms of governments have been tried. We tried the regional government, which was parliamentary system of government, we moved from parliamentary government into a presidential system and we are asking ourselves that we should go back to pre-independence, it means we don’t know what we are talking about. It is either we are making progress or we are not. We have made some substantial progress and then some elites because they felt they cannot access power, they came up with restructuring and once you put them in power, they will no longer talk about restructuring.

That is all. Its just about selfishness, it is not for any genuine concern for the Nigerian project. What I will think will make sense is devolution of powers and that simply means you restructure the fiscal part of the country.

The sharing formula should be fine-tuned so that the states should have more money than the federal government, that is what we need and not restructuring.

There is nothing like restructuring, what we need is devolution of powers, give the states some more powers than they have now and most states can stand on their own, but when you say restructuring, it simply means breaking up the country into different countries and people who are clamoring for that are only looking for a way to carve small enclaves for themselves there and become lords and not for any other reason.

But if we sit down and say look; the sharing formula, let the federal government take may be 30% and states 70%; If you give states more power in terms of what they control from the federal government, that is the kind of thing we should be clamouring and agitating for and not restructuring because it means different things to different people, so it is devolution of powers that  people should be asking for and not restructuring.

Today, if an Igbo man becomes president, the Yoruba will say they are marginalized and call for restructuring of the country and once they have it, nobody talks of restructuring, ditto for the North, so there is nothing like restructuring, but devolution of powers is what we should be agitating for and not restructuring. I don’t believe in restructuring.

Let us talk about the situation in Benue. There has been a lot of issues in your constituency, herdsmen and farmers clashes, issues of banditry and insecurity, I know your constituency has been affected in the past with killings and destructions and other untoward things. What have been your efforts to address some of these issues?

The issue of insecurity is a national issue and not limited to any one place. Yes, there have been series of attacks even last night, if I show you my phone, all through the night the herdsmen came last night and attacked some of my villagers in my own immediate village.

In fact two people lost their lives and several of them are in the hospital as I speak to you now. Throughout last night, I didn’t sleep in time; I was communicating with the chairman of the Council.

Now that has become perennial and not just in the state but across the entire country. So what strategy is the government adopting in tackling this menace? That should be the question.

In the Senate, we have put this issue on the front burner almost every day we are sitting and it is not abating because I think the government has not adopted the strategy that can solve this problem and so we will continue to address it, otherwise people may seek for self-help and such will introduce confusion in the society because if now people lose confidence in the legitimacy of government to monopolize violence and address issues that threaten the welfare of the people, then that society becomes a failed state, so I don’t think we should allow ourselves to get to that level, but gradually we are getting to that level where people may seek self-help because government has shown incapacity to address the security challenges in the country. As members of the National Assembly in our individual capacity and collectively, we continue to urge the executive arm of government to be up and doing on its responsibilities.

But in the state, the governor of Benue has done everything humanly possible to address this issue, at one point he was vilified but now every person is engulfed in it and they can now feel the pains of what it means to come under such intense attack.

The herdsmen are controlled by people and so one would expect that the government should be more strategic in identifying the people who control them. Once you are able to do that, it will be easy to control the situation because the clashes between herdsmen and farmers are happening all over the country. The herdsmen carry cattle which is their economy, while the farmers’ economy, which is their farmlands are being trampled upon by the cattle.

So if the government has sworn to protect these two groups, then there must be a way of sitting them down together and identifying what the problem is, that has not been done so everybody is taking laws into their hands and this will continue. It is unfortunate that my constituency is most affected, we have done a lot in trying to mitigate the pains of these people, but it is not abating.

This is a very serious problem that the executive arm of government should do everything to stop otherwise, eventually, if we don’t take time we will have a lot on our hands that will overwhelm everybody.

Can you  give us an insight into your pet project of issuing scholarships to some of your constituents, we want to have an idea of what you are doing to mitigate the challenges of your constituents in the last one year as a Senator.

You know, being in the opposition, there is not much you can do in terms of extending patronage to your people, so what I have done is personal to them like students in the Law School are the ones that are targeted because they are vulnerable because the money involved in paying for their school fees and other associated things is so much. So I decided to assist them to pull through Law School. I am doing it as an individual because in the Senate, it is difficult as an opposition member to help people access patronage from government.

 I have done quite a lot, I have helped to source places of employment for some people and also in the budget of 2020, there are a couple of projects that we put there hoping that when they begin the implementation of the budget, they will see some signs and dividends of democracy, we are also keeping in touch in them and addressing their personal and community problems.

Considering the current conflict between the Joint Committees on Employment and Labour and the Minister of State for Labour, it seems the legislature wants to dabble into how the executive functions. This was the kernel in the disagreement with Minister Keyamo and  we  also understand that the National Assembly  went into micro-credits being given to people as palliatives for COVID-19 as well as many others, so what is your take in relation to the functions of separation of powers, doesn’t this compromise the oversight on the Executive?

Well, I think your question is contradictory. When you say compromise our oversight, which means we have the power to oversight and in another breadth you talk about compromising our integrity.

Let me say this, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, gives the power of appropriation to the National Assembly and it is in that same way we are vested with the power of oversight. Oversight function, properly defined, gives you the latitude to question and monitor what is going on.

Now in the process of questioning and monitoring, I don’t see how that is dabbling into the workings of other arms of government.

What happened with the Minister of State, Labour is just part of the functions that has been bestowed on the National Assembly that yes, we approved, we appropriated money for an item in the budget and we now said, okay you are going to employ 774,000 persons based on the approval that we have given and we said we will like to have a look at it and you say we should not look at it. If you employ 1,000 persons in my own local government as a Senator of the Federal Republic and you now think I should not know about it, then something is wrong somewhere.

This is the same thing that happened with the Social Investment money where N500 billion was expended and there is no record of it, nobody can identify who and who benefited from that money.

Now they also claimed to have shared N52billion Naira in just a few days and no person has been able to place his or her hand on how N52 billion was shared as palliatives. This is the same system they want to employ now, because if they say they have employed 1,000 in my local government and I look for who benefitted from my local government, I can’t find it. Is it right not to  scrutinize? 

We insist that we must know each and every person who is going to benefit from that, so I don’t see how that is a problem. In the first place, we approved the money for the programme, so why not allow us monitor its implementation?

There is nothing unusual just that people don’t want to be monitored, they want to embezzle some money, by just putting up some pseudo names and say these are the beneficiaries and you know at that point, it will be difficult for you to say anything. Even the media should ask these pertinent questions, why are they not ready to place everything on the table?

I come from a Constituency that has seven local government areas, it means that they will employ 7,000 persons in these local governments and I don’t know who those persons are. Is it the Minister sitting in the office here, who has never known those places and has never been there, what is the criteria?

They say they have appointed committees, to do what? If as a major stakeholder, I am not qualified to participate and know how it is organized to say look these are my people, I think the media should even question them more.

We have experienced it before, N52 billion was shared and I have continued to ask people from my constituency and no single person has come to testify he got that money, now it is 774,000 and you can imagine how much that would amount to, they just want to share it and say they have shared it to the people, and we are not going to allow that to happen. We have insisted that the process must be transparent and we must be involved so that we can monitor it.