Former Vice Chancellor of Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Prof. Peter Olufemi Adeniyi, launched his autobiography, Lifted, and Foundation in October last year. In this interview with ONYEDIKA AGBEDO, the former Managing Director of Unilag Consult, who had also served as the Pro-Chancellor of Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, and as Chairman of the Presidential Technical Committee on Land Reform, unveils his plan for the Foundation. He also speaks on sundry national issues, saying the audacity of Nigerian leaders to break the law and go scot-free has laid a wrong model for young Nigerians that need to be corrected to enhance the course of national development.

What are your takeaways from the launch of your autobiography in October last year?
When I look at myself, I know I have never been alone. I thank God for the people who were able to come. We had about 400 people in attendance in all at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) and Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA). You know it was done in the university environment because that is the area I know much; I couldn’t have gone to rent a hall outside.

Again, it is not so much of the story itself; it is about the proceeds of the story – what I want to use it for. I am just interested in helping others. Since I only depend on my pension, which is actually not adequate, I decided to put the story together and it was well received in both places.

I will encourage anybody who has the grace to tell his or her own story to do so. I have been getting feedback from some people who have read the book that there are a lot of things to learn from it. Recently, a chief from Akure was discussing with me about the last chapter and how lucky I was because I had a colleague, a vice chancellor that was killed by his house-help. Here our driver tried us but God saved us. I didn’t know the book is that interesting. Some even said it should have been two books instead of one. Some said it is too detailed; some said it is too specific in some areas. And I tell people that what I would not do is to lie against anybody. If what I was saying in the book is the truth, so be it. There was nothing personal. I was just thinking that we could do better and allow the rule of law to guide our lives.

For instance, when I was at UNILAG Consult, the Council did a good job by approving that the place should be run like a business concern. But the leadership would not allow that. So, I was struggling to ensure that the right thing was done and in the process one could not but step on toes. But I believe in the rule of law; I definitely obey my leaders but what my heart would not take is for any of them to be doing the wrong thing and I will acquiesce. It’s not part of me and that is what has been happening in Nigeria. You know what the law says; people are going against the law and you look the other way maybe because it’s not affecting you, forgetting that tomorrow it can affect you.

So, in the long run, the book launch was okay. What I was looking for in terms of resources, I may not have gotten it. Few people made pledges and I am praying to God that they fulfill their pledges. So, we are trying to set up the foundation properly. We want to see how far we can go. We might not be able to move as fast as we thought we would, but we will try to do a good job and also try to sustain it.

So, henceforth you will be preoccupied with setting up the foundation properly and using it to impact society positively…
Yes! We have opened an account for the foundation. You know the launching of the book and the foundation happened simultaneously. As I finished the book I started working on the foundation – registering it and all that. The resources we have now are not much per se. But once we get a programme officer, part of his work will be resource mobilisation and implementing the objectives of the foundation.

Part of the objectives of the foundation is to give scholarships to undergraduates. However, the number of beneficiaries will be dependent on our resources. It’s not just for university students; if we get young ones in secondary schools with unique talents, which they might not be able to develop due to lack of resources, the foundation will like to support such people. We also want to focus on some areas of innovation and on re-orientation.

As a people, we are moving away from volunteering ourselves to do any job. People look for paid jobs once they graduate. It is a good idea to do that; but you can volunteer yourself to be helping your community, a society or an organisation through which your talent will emerge and that may give you a leeway. But if you just keep your talent to yourself and carry your certificate about and organisations are asking for experience and you don’t have any, you are at a disadvantage. So, the foundation will be encouraging unemployed graduates to render services to certain organisations. The foundation may wish to take responsibility for some token. That is why service is part of the objectives of the foundation. You can have education but you need to use that education to render service.

You made reference to Nigerians not condemning wrong doing the way they should and it seems to have become an acceptable norm. How did the country get to that level?
In the past, there was a cultural activity in my town called Osuru, which came up once in a year. They monitored the behaviour of individuals in the community. If you were a thief, during that festival, they would dance around the community and come to the frontage of your house and be talking about you. The person would know that they were talking about him; the whole community would know that they were talking about him. That cautioned people because nobody would want to marry from such a family.

Now, that culture is dying. We are now moving to a situation where wrong doers are glorified. Corruption means nothing to anybody; in fact, corruption is seen as a virtue now. When you complain, people will tell you that you are complaining because you are not in that position. If you relate that to the spread of Islam and Christianity in the country, you will be left wondering what these religious bodies preach to their adherents. This is because as they are growing, bad things are equally growing. They are highly correlated. Is it that religious bodies don’t have values anymore? And why do we, Nigerians, think that we will not die? We don’t recognise that our lives are terminal to the point that once they make a law, what Nigerians want to do is to break that law and not to obey it. Worse still, the people who are to enforce the law also participate in breaking it. Why is it that public buses are allowed to break the law without facing the consequences but once a private vehicle makes any little mistake, law enforcement agents will swoop on it?

The same thing is happening in the legislative arm. You send people to go and legislate on your behalf but when they get there they become tin gods. They think about themselves. Yet people are praising the tokenism they are doing. I mean, if a senator buys motorcycles for some people, he is not using his personal money; he is using public funds. And then we sing their praise. Why?

At one point in time, former vice president Yemi Osinbajo said it clearly. When you commit an offence and you are not punished, it encourages others to do the same. So, inability to enforce our laws and the audacity of our leaders to break the law, to think that they have the resources to buy their way out, are what is destroying the younger ones. These young ones see that once you have money and are in power, you can do whatever you like.
For instance, a former governor is imprisoned and then he comes out and people will dance to meet him.  To them he has done the right thing. This is someone they should shame.

How do you think these abnormalities can be corrected?
The government recognised the problem before and set up the National Orientation Agency (NOA).  There was War Against Indiscipline (WAI) during the Buhari/Idiagbon regime and also MAMSER during the Babangida junta. People began to queue and respect one another in offices. It was very effective then, though briefly. It broke down simply because the leaders that should uphold it were the ones flouting it. And their children did exactly the same.

The family itself has broken down considerably. We have a situation now where parents organise teachers to write exams for their children. That is why you would see someone score A1 in almost all the subjects but when he or she is admitted into the university he or she will not be able to solve simple quadratic equations. So, where are we going? You are destroying that child. He or she will believe that he or she can get anything through any means. Recently, ASUU came out to plead with parents to let their children write their exams by themselves.

The orientation is no longer there. I mean there are so many establishments that were created to correct one thing or the other but each one falls short of expectations. EFCC is there; I don’t know how they do their job.

Why do Nigerians not love their own country? Why are we not wishing to develop our country? Why are we lying against ourselves? For example, I was a member of a committee; precisely I was the chairman. When it was time to present the report, the civil servants said they would award a contract for the annual report. It was a committee of seven people. What did we do? How many times did we meet in the year that we could not write our report? The worst thing is that at the end of the day there was no report. So, the orientation is not working for now. And we have a long way to go to get things back on track. We have to start from primary school. It will take us a minimum of 20 years to get back to where we will believe in all the values we have destroyed. That is my own estimation if we start now. It would not have taken that long if the religious organisations are doing the right things. But they are all involved in money; evangelisation is five per cent; resource mobilisation is 95 per cent.

So, we have to begin from the family. You can see how we denigrate everything that is ours. Everything that is ours is not good; everything that is coming from the West is good. The West is now taking over some of what we do and later we will go and learn it. I know of a school in the U.S. that teaches Yoruba language. Here in Nigeria, we call our own language dialect. And if your children are speaking Igbo or Yoruba, you forbid them and insist that they must speak English as if English is our language. It’s not!

So, how would you react to the anti-migrant policies of President Donald Trump of the United States, which definitely will affect a lot of Nigerians?
To that extent I agree with him. Let me put it this way so that people can understand it. I was born in Ootunja in Ikole-Ekiti. We didn’t have any industry at that time and we still don’t have one. All we had was a secondary school. We didn’t have places where people could work so we japad (migrated) to Ibadan, Lagos and Port Harcourt.

I left secondary school in 1963 and went to Abeokuta for HSC. I finished in 1965 and I have been in Lagos since 1965.

Precisely, what has happened to us even though we are in the same country is that we japada from Ootunja to this place and we are contributing to the development of where we are.

The same thing happens when a country is not doing the right thing or when the leadership of a country is not doing the right thing. We have resources but we cannot manage them for our own good. The man is right now! Sixty-four years of independence and you habour all the minerals you can think of in this world in your place and your leaders are selfishly mining the minerals, who do you blame? Is it not recently that we knew that there is gold somewhere in this country and they have been mining it and at the same time fighting people to death over the oil in another place?

Nigerians are doing wonderfully across the world because of the structures that are in place in those countries, because of the strong institutions in those countries and because they allow the rule of law to prevail.

I was with my son on the street of London; the moment the speed limit reached 50 he slowed down. I thought something was wrong with the car and asked him what happened and he just told me that he didn’t want his insurance to move up. But here, we don’t care.  You make a law and you discover that the law is not working for you and you have been struggling under it, yet you can’t change it. Every Nigerian government has been talking about the constitution not working for the country as if somebody else made it and imposed it on us. We enacted the Land Use Act; everybody knows that it has not been working for us but we stick to it. And we are not moving forward.

So, I totally agree with that aspect of what Trump said even though he is punishing the wrong people. What he is trying to do is use negative to get positive by sending those migrants home to become problems to their governments. His idea is to send the people to go and become problems to their governments; they will fight their leaders and force them to change.

But he has the power to do more. After all, when these people steal the money where do they go and hide it? They take the money to the UK, America, Europe, and other developed countries of the world. Why do you allow them to bring the money to your country? Now you want to send the people you are using in your factories home but you are still encouraging fraudulent leaders to bring stolen funds to your country. You should have stopped “robbers” from developing countries from bringing their money to your country so that they too will not have a place to run to. When they are sick, they use hospitals in their countries; they will also send their children to schools within their countries.

Even though I may not like some other directives by Trump, I like his position on homosexuality. God made human beings male and female; why must people think in terms of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman? What kind of absurdity is that? So, to a large extent the man is correct in those areas and we have to look inward as a country.

I love Nigeria so much; I am not saying I’m the only one like myself. I mean I could have stayed back in America. In those days I was being paid 10 dollars per hour as a PhD student just to put data in the computer. That was in 1975/76. It was sufficient to keep me there. But I told myself that the University of Lagos sent me; they were paying my salary and I owe it to them to come back. I had professors who were asking me why I was going back. But I told them that I had to go.