Alhaji Sagir Muhammed Ringim Says Yar'Adua's Administration is...

Alhaji Sagir Muhammed Ringim was a former Military intelligence officer and now a traditional ruler. In this interview with Hassan A. Karofi he accuses former Head of state, General Gowon of not handling the power sector appropriately. He also spoke on other issues.

How would you assess the state of the nation since the assumption of office of President Yar'adua?

I will like to say that since the bold step taken by the president on petrol production which has now resulted in stable prices of oil and availability of the product, progress in other areas are yet to be quite appreciable to Nigerians. For example, the socio-economic sectors are yet to improve, abject poverty is becoming pervasive, situation of the country as a whole is discouraging. Sometimes you wonder when people will begin to feel the impact of government.

These problems are telling so much on everyone, however, this does not mean that we are not appreciative of the attempts to alleviate them, but government should speed up the process.

Another dangerous signal is the drought in the entire north and unless serious measures are taken to tackle the menace head on, the north will witness hunger. I want to believe that the President is being sabotaged to discredit him.

Who are the people against his progress?

Of course there are different people sabotaging Yar'adua, with Obasanjo as the arrow head. Obasanjo is infiltrating everybody to make sure that Yar'Adua does not succeed.

Now that he has sensed that someone would succeed where he failed, he is leading the sabotage against the Yar'adua government. From 1999 to 2007, Nigeria had about 16.5 Trillion naira and if you look round, there is no single project that you can say has been completed for the benefit of the citizens.

The President recently expressed concern over the judiciary verdicts in respect of the April elections. What is your opinion on this?

He should not have said that because it could be miss-interpreted, but I am sure he meant well.

Do you think Yar'adua has failed to fulfill his promise of emergency declaration in the power sector, since the problem still persists?

I think he made the pronouncement before he was sworn in, but now that he is on the saddle, I am sure he has realized the enormity of the problem in that sector and how difficult it is to tackle. I think he gave management up to December to come up with concrete decisions or face the state of emergency.

But honestly, General Gowon must share the blame for under-development of this country especially in the area of electricity. If in 1990 we had gone for 20,000 megawatts rather than 3,000 megawatts, by now our problem would not have been this bad.

I will like to recall what a former minister of power said on the issue. He said for Nigeria to be self sufficient in energy, it will take more than 40 yrs and even at that, we have to spend 6bn dollars annually.

I think he should behave like a truly commander-in-chief in a war situation where when your enemy outnumber you numerically, you should approach the war phase by phase so that you can hit your target, because he lacks the propensity to carry simultaneous affront on these myriads of problems, so let him concentrate on energy as foundation of development, concurrent with security. If we can solve the problem of power and security, he would have made history.

But personally, I do not think declaring state of emergency is necessary, when Obasanjo was sworn-in he took power into his office, and his minister of power, Bola Ige promised to effect change but they failed. So I maintain that unless serious efforts are made to restore power to the nation, through concrete means and not emergencies, Yar'adua himself will fail in that respect.

If we had implemented the vision 2010 of Abacha, most of our problems could have been solved. Obasanjo was known to have caused a lot of set back in the system like in the case of vision 2010. Another example is the toll gate issue, when the former president just woke up and destroyed something done with appropriation, without realizing that these toll gates served as points for checking weapons, and armed robbers, and now it is to be re-introduced , what kind of country is this?.

It is generally believed that the presidential election tribunal may not favour Yar'Adua and that this may explain his seemingly slow attitude to governance. Do you agree with this?

I don't know, I am not a lawyer, but I pray he does not lose out, because he is doing a good job. At least he is not corrupt and does not unduly interfere in things that do not affect his office directly.
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/200711190402.html