Let’s go back to the educational sector, when the present government came into office, there were high hopes that the educational sector will experience a resurrection taking into consideration that both the president and the vice-president were from the education profession but with the present development now much still needs to be desired as can be seen from what transpired during the teachers strike, the government did not show that interest in the matter that concerns colleagues as it were. Now you are a lecturer and you have pointed out some of the problems in the sector which of course every teacher should be aware of, what then happened to your colleagues in the profession who now have the mantle of leadership in this country that they are not delivering in that particular sector?

Let me quickly say that unlike most Nigerians, I am not surprised at all at the disaster that the so called Yar Adua-Goodluck government has exposed itself to be. If you read my column I have never called Mr. Yar Adua President Yar Adua, as far as I am concerned he is an occupant of a stolen office, he is the inheritor of an illegitimate mandate and in a lot of ways one doesn’t want to get there. And I say to Nigerians it serves us right! 

When somebody blatantly rigs an election, when somebody accepts a stolen mandate and yet Nigerians, the Nigerian media spread the falsehood that this person is honest and has integrity, I said that that definition of honesty and integrity I will not use it. My parents raised me to understand that any form of stealing is unacceptable. I would have believed Yar Adua to be honest if, having been rigged into the office by Obasanjo, he came out and announce ‘I have realized that this whole thing was a hoax, I did not win an election but I want to lead Nigeria so I am going to present myself to Nigerians in a credible election. Deny yourself; a lot of people think that I am so naïve by making this prescription but if you don’t prove to me that you are honest by acting in an honest way, I can’t award honesty to you.

But Nigerians ascribe honesty to criminals. What we have is a criminal enterprise that masquerades as a government and so there are people that put Yar Adua there so he is primarily answerable to those elements. Yar Adua is not in government as a lecturer; the intellectual constituency did not put him there, you understand. He did not even speak to the intellectual community when he was running. Yar Adua would have said to students and to lecturers in this country, ‘I am going to change this country. I am one of you and I want you to put me there.’ Yar Adua ran as a candidate of Mr. Obasanjo, of the Iboris of our world and of other corrupt elements who otherwise put him there. He is serving the interest of those who put him there. I am not disappointed but instead I will say that Yar Adua is doing exactly what I expected him to be doing.

Now you have being a lecturer in so many institutions around the world and you have seen what the governments of some of those countries you happened to have lectured at are doing to put their educational sector in the right track, what is this that they are doing that our government isn’t doing and again, you are always criticizing some of these government officials, I will like to know if you have at any time offered proposals on some of the people in government on the right steps to take to making our educational institutions work?

Okay, there are actually two questions so let’s take the first one: what is it that other countries do? What they do is that they recognize fundamentals; that education is the heart of any countries prospects for development. They recognise that a country that gets its education wrong gets everything wrong. They also recognize that the ethical and moral capital of a country is of fundamental value when you talk about growth. What Nigeria needs more than good roads is a well formed citizenry.

You form citizens with good values and everything will fall in place because if somebody is a civil engineer and works in the ministry of works and has been formed to understand to what it means to be part of a community then if a contractor does a wishy washy work on a road contract and says to this ministry official, ‘sign that I did this job to specifications,’ the man will say no, you betrayed the public trust, I will not sign that because I will use this road, my children will use this road, my relatives will use this road, my friends will use this road.’

But we have a culture where we operate by the dictates of the rat race so everybody is looking at the main chance of what can I steal for myself. If I build a house in Ikoyi then I will be fine, if I buy two or three properties in major cities then I am set; if I can have a good car then I am fine; if I can have a contact with the commissioner of police and he gives me two or three policemen to escort me the I am fine. And we don’t look for cooperate well being.

What we need and what other countries apply is what is called delayed gratification; we want it all today, Nigerians want to drive the best cars today so they steal the last penny in the government coffers and they buy Rolls Royce to this country, they have Bentleys to this country but have one of the worst roads in the world. If you look other cultures that have tried and are trying, it is because people make sacrifices; I save money to make sure that my children go to very good schools and be given a chance.

One thing I could do is to spend all the money on myself so that when they grow up and they have to go to school, I will tell them to manage with any school and then there will be no growth and my children will go to sub-standard schools. But because I am making a sacrifice with my wife, my children will hopefully be better than us. That is how a society moves. So when a president comes to power he says to himself, ‘I have the opportunity to steal billions and also I have a chance to better the lives of my people, I am going to do the latter.’ Being in that office as a governor, you are already too well paid; they don’t buy food, they don’t buy clothes, they don’t pay for flight tickets or pay for hospital bills or rent because all of these is paid for and so they have an excellent salary and allowances; when he travels abroad he has all the money he wants to spend plus estacode yet they steal and Nigerians are not outraged enough.

Because if we are outraged when Obasanjo came, the fact that we are talking in this country that $16billion was spent on power and we less power supply in this country and the House of Representatives which carried out a probe in this country are trying to cover it up and Nigerians editors, reporters and everybody is just looking like Yeah Imoke is spreading money so I will try and get mine so I will go and buy myself a generator, then we should be talking. We should have a long time rethink, with generators we have environmental degradation, we have climate changes that causes higher hazards to ourselves so we should have a long time rethink.

We should reject the bribe that we are being offered and want to do the right thing. That’s one. Now the other thing is that you asked have I considered the option of giving the government officials advice on the way to go, well two things I will say because I am sure you follow the internet, this is a familiar refrain amongst my critics who say that Okey Ndibe doesn’t proffer solutions.

When you condemn evil in the society in the prime stand of the condemnation implicit in this country is the solution; when I say that elections that was rigged what is the solution? Do not rig the elections; when I say that the press should not ascribe honesty to a man who is not honest, what am I trying to pass across? Call dishonest people dishonest; when I say that contracts are inflated in this country or are poorly executed, what is the solution? We should insist on proper execution of the contracts. Obasanjo did not rig the election of 2003 and 2007; he did not rig because he didn’t know the right thing to do, he knows that the right thing to do is not to rig the election.

But Obasanjo did not do what he ought to as a presidency which is to give his all for this country and so he knew that his chosen candidate will lose in a free and fair election so he decides not to have a free and fair election and announced figures. And some of our cowardly Judges are authenticating and validating this robbery; a lot of our journalists and columnists are taking money and are authenticating this hoax, this absurdity. So I will look foolish if I wrote a memo to Obasanjo and say, ‘Oh you will become a great man if you let Nigerians vote freely and fairly.

He will tear the thing and throw it away. A governor who steals money with all the money they get legitimately along with all the money they get as Security Votes, which shouldn’t be given to them that they get and pocket, goes ahead and award a contract for a road contract and tells the contractor, ‘We are not going to build the road, we are just going to announce it and we will split the money.’ Do you think that if Okey Ndibe writes a memo to the governor and say build the road that the governor will say, ‘Ohh I didn’t know that building the road was an option so I am going to build the road because Okey told me to.’ No. We have allowed criminal elements in our country to hijack all the levels of governance and we are reaping the results. I have continued to tell people that Nigeria is akin to a country that goes to a jail and ask where are the worst criminals in this jail; people who have killed people, those who have even killed their own brothers and stolen from their fathers and this people come out and we say, ‘Okay you are the worst criminals please come and become our president, the other criminal should become our vice-president.

The other strong criminals should go and become governors while the other less strong criminals should occupy the state assemblies and legislatures. So if you expect me to start writing memos to criminals to say let’s build roads, lets fund education, they will ignore you and continue doing what they are doing.

What ways can the reading culture in Nigeria be restored especially in the younger generation?

So many different ways, we have to create space for kids to read. Nigeria is becoming part of a global culture without really mediating the way we entered that global culture so we are getting the items of global culture without understanding in-depth the meaning of this culture; everybody has a cell phone these days and some others have ipods and other gadgets around the world but we are not curious about the forces that are producing those things. It’s not been studied in the universities.

There is a very constricted sense of what is the legitimate area of study. You have to teach young people and meet them where they are, we must write literature that describes their experience and speaks to their experience; that animates that experience. And we have to in our curriculum begin the subjects they are interested in; they need to understand the cell phone culture and where it is coming from and the kind of communities it is going to foster in the future and the communities that are being created in the present. So when you speak to children in a term that illuminates their experience they get interested. It is difficult for them to get interested when you take an approach that is remote from their experience.

Some of your commentaries you make it clear that you don’t believe there was an election and some of the election tribunal judgements have confirmed to an extent what you predicted in your write-ups, now we have a situation where some of the contestants that were relieved of their offices are winning in the re-run elections in which we are hearing of scandals rocking some of the tribunals, will you say that the judiciary has done well enough in this tribunals and Court of Appeal judgements?

I will say that we are in too much of a haste to give credit before it is earned and I will say I am guilty of this as well. In the last waning years of the Obasanjo regime, the Nigerian judiciary came out strongly and gave some rulings that were promising, that showed their reluctance allow Obasanjo to be transformed into the kind of vicious dictator that he fanaticized on becoming. And so Nigerians began to say that the judiciary is our salvation. Some of the tribunal then gave rulings that again inspired hope but very soon, other tribunals like the one in Oyo State gave an absolutely cowardly, dishonest and corrupt ruling in the case of Alao Akala upholding him as the governor. I think at that point a lot of people especially after the Court of Appeal gave its very disastrous ruling  upholding the integrity of an election that even Yar Adua himself had admitted was deeply floored, became aware that the judiciary has offered Nigerians nothing but disappointments.

They wanted the Judiciary to stand up and be a voice of the rule of not only of law but the triumph of judgement so that when the tribunal in Edo State ruled that Adams Oshimole ruled that he was the winner of the election, there was celebration not only in the streets of Edo State but throughout the country. The same situation was witnessed in Ondo State when Agagu, the usurper and pretender, was ordered removed with Dr. Segun Mimiko declared the rightful winner of the elections, it was an instantaneous reaction not rehearsed, not a packet crowd that was rented but a genuine outpouring of elation on the people.

My suspicion and prediction is that the Court of Appeal has shown itself to be one of the least spineless and perhaps the most corrupt arm of the judiciary. We look at the Edo State situation perhaps accept money and say lets’s have re-run election that have Adams Oshiomole proclaimed the rightful winner and will also look at the Ondo State situation and say lets have a re-run knowing that Iwu is more or less a PDP chief rigger.  So Iwu’s entire agenda in every re-run election is to prove that he got it right the first time and so gives it back to PDP. Everybody knows that it is the same rigging process but executed with perhaps greater finesse and done in a way that the people will throw up their hands in the air and say we can’t help it, how many times can we go to court?

We don’t have the finance while the governor that they have been fighting legally can deep his hands into government coffers and pay lawyers, can deep his hands inside government coffers and bribe judges and can as well bribe electoral officials. Meanwhile you are the candidate who has been jeopardized of your mandate and you can’t tell your lawyer go and represent me, you are doing the right thing; lawyers have to be paid and so after a while the opposition candidate does not have the resources to fight on. So this country is descending into a depth of sinicism and opportunism that is dangerous and if you ask me that is why I fought Andy Uba with such passion quite apart from the fact that I am allergic to fraud, the kind of fraud that Andy Uba represents.

But if Andy Uba had been allowed to succeed with all the lies he told and all the fraud he perpetuated in his person and through the instrument of government, if he had been allowed to thrive, a lot of young people watching him will say ‘whoa I can get away with worse, all I need to do is to get into government, get money through any illicit means and proclaim myself even with a secondary school education I can say I am a Doctor. I’ll bribe the Nigerian press and everybody will start calling me a Doctor and I can go and steal power from a place that I am greatly despised and say that the people have spoken and God actually spoke to me more loudly.’ I was frightened about that prospect and I said I have to give it my all.

Hearing you write and talk about some of this issues so passionately you seem very very sure of what you are saying and I have a , I will like to ask you how sure you are of your facts and allegations since you are based in the United States and these things happen here? And from all your commentaries you usually refer to newspaper reports, I will like to know if you go a step further to verify these reports as evidences?

Let me put it this way, there are things about which one cannot be sure Okay, I can’t sit down here and tell you that I am sure that Alao Akala did not win the governorship elections in Oyo State; I can’t tell you that but I have a hunch that he didn’t win and in such cases I resolve to my intuitions. Part of my intuition is that when Alao Akala was proclaimed finally as the winner there was very little celebration in Oyo State; there was a mum moment, you could feel the pulse of the people. I have sources from the country and the Nigerian papers also reported it.

On the other hand when Oshiomole was proclaimed the winner, you live in this country and can you tell me any Edo person that did not rejoice at that development. I have friends in Oyo State and I have friends who live in Ibadan who spoke with me and expressed their shock and described the mood in Oyo State. When the Supreme Court of Nigeria removed Andy Uba as governor, I got calls from all over the country and calls from Nigerians in Kenya, in Namibia and a Nigerian businessman who was visiting China on a trip, he called somebody in Nigeria and collected my number before he now called me and said thank you so much for the fight you put up on the matter. I got calls from Kaduna, from an Hausa Fulani and he said to me,

‘Okey I want you to know that there is as much celebration in Sokoto and Kaduna over Andy Uba’s removal.’ You were in Nigeria at that time and I am sure that if you wanted to have a drink there was somebody, a lot of people were ready to buy you a drink.  Two callers called me from the US and told me that I should go and take any drink that I wanted and they would pay for it. Now I don’t think that if Andy Uba was proclaimed the winner by the Supreme Court people would have called their friends in celebration, maybe a few people who would get money from Andy Uba would have called.

I have details in my columns how I was offered bribes by Andy Uba and I will go into details about all of that when I write my memoirs. Now you ask how do I get my facts, Sowere Omalua of Sahara Reporters investigated Iwus’s degrees and contacted Bradford University in England where Iwu claimed he had his Masters and PhD, the university said that Iwu presented a certificate that represented an equivalence of a first degree from Cameroon on the basis on which they admitted him to do his Masters and PhD. When Sowore published that in one of the online publications, Sonny Ofili’s Times of Nigeria and denied Sawore’s report. Sawore then wrote to the university because Iwu then claimed that he had all his three degrees, Bachelors, Masters and PhD from Brandford, Sowere wrote to Bradford and they wrote him officially saying that that’s not true so I said to Iwu to reconcile these discrepancies. Because Iwu was unable to reconcile the discrepancies and also because the university insists that he didn’t have a first degree there, I regard Iwu as a fraud. In the case of Andy Uba, anybody could have found out. Andy Uba put on his website that he had his first degree from Concordia University in Canada, his second degree from California State University in California and his third degree from Buxton University, again very resourceful Nigerians investigators called those universities and presented the case in a certain way and the report that was given to them officially from the universities stated that Andy Uba started his undergraduate degree at Concordia as he alleged, said and claimed but left after one or two semesters.

Apart from getting his Masters from California State University he began his undergraduate studies there and left after a semester or two. If you check online Buxton University is described as certificate merchant online; it doesn’t exist. Andy Uba cannot tell you today what who his supervisor for his PhD was or who his graduating classmates were.

He is a fraud pure and simple. So how do I get this information? Some of these are available to us, some of them are there for everybody and some Nigerian commentators have that information and they refuse to use it; sometimes perhaps out of cowardice, sometimes because they want to be invited to the circle of those in power, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes out of comfort; you know they get money put in the bank sometimes by the buffoons who run the country or who ruin the country. I have absolutely no desire to be in the company of thieves; I feel myself polluted when I am close to these criminals. I keep saying that Nigeria is run mostly by criminals and I don’t to fraternize with those criminals and I call them by their proper names.