Chief Mike Nnanye Ajegbo, a lawyer, has been part of the constitution-making process of the country since 1988. He was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1988/89. In 1994/95, he was also in the Constitutional Conference. He served as the Chairman, Senate Committee on Judiciary and Legal Matters between 1999 and 2003.  Ajegbo was also a member of the Political Reform Committee during the administration of former president Olusegun Obasanjo. In this interview with ENIOLA DANIEL, he speaks on sundry issues in the country, including his role in the civil war while also talking about his life at 75.

Congratulations on clocking 75. Tell us, the journey so far; how have you been able to remain scandal-free as a politician?
My background would explain the person I am.  My father was the first attorney general of Eastern Nigeria. He became a judge of the Supreme Court in 1964 and came to Lagos, then went back to the east during the Nigerian crisis. I was born in 1949.

In the 50s, when I was growing up in Onitsha, when a man sees a woman he wants to marry, like what some people do these days, he sends her to the university. Then, they sent women to where they could learn something and my mother used to have a lot of people sent to her. She taught them how to sew, bake and all that. In short, my background meant that I had a family name to protect. So, I cannot afford to do anything to mess it up. I think that influenced my life.
My elementary school was at Holy Trinity School, Onitsha; secondary school, Christ the King College, Onitsha. Then I went to do higher school at Government College, Akpugo; that was when the war broke out. I didn’t finish, I ended up entering the Biafran army. I was commissioned as an officer.
I had a bullet wound, which I carried in my body for almost 30 years. I had shrapnel wound. Then after the civil war, I took the entrance examination into the University of Ife and the University of Nigeria.  I passed the two to read Law. We decided that I should go to the University of Ife so that I could be out of the war environment and see how the rest of the country is doing. I graduated in 1974. I entered in 1970, did a four-year course then came to Lagos for the Nigerian Law School after which I went to do my youth service in then Benue-Plateau State in 1975/76.
I came to Lagos and started legal practice. In 1979, four of us – Abuka, Jibue, Iloga and Nwaorgu – teamed up to form a law firm; I was a partner in the law firm. It was the biggest partnership then in Nigeria. Most of the time, the law firms had single practitioners, though they employed juniors. Ours came out as the biggest partnership.
Another interesting partnership then was the Odujiris. – Ade Odujiri, Adefulo and Ayelaja; but we were four, they were three. We became the biggest and of course, we made a lot of waves in the legal practice.
President Ibrahim Babangida came up with opening up the media. I applied and I was one of those given licences for a television station. I started Minaj Broadcast.

When I got my license, I started my media. In 1988, even before I got my licence, I was nominated as a member of the Constituent Assembly. Also in 1994/95, I was also nominated as a member of the Constitutional Conference. The Constituent Assembly was under President Babangida while the Constitutional Conference was under General Sani Abacha. Then in 1999, I won an election to the Senate. I was in the Senate for four years. When I left the Senate in 2003, I didn’t want to go back into politics for several reasons including the feeling that my business was suffering but funny enough, instead of doing that, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
For five years, I was battling cancer. I am a cancer survivor as of today. After that issue, I started again. My wife also is a lawyer. She has a law firm, so I teamed up with her. We have offices in Lagos and Abuja.
When I left to do my broadcast business, our law partnership after a while didn’t work out again. One of our partners, Mr. Nworgu, is now late. We didn’t continue with that partnership. Mr. Chidi Ilogwu is now a learned silk and Mr. P.C. Abuka is a big businessman. After my cancer, I got back into business and my law practice.

Tell us about your political life, the process of being a lawyer to becoming a lawmaker?
When I was in the University of Ife, I was elected as the Secretary-General, National Union of Nigerian Students. I was active in student politics. The two are actually related because there is something that has been happening in Nigeria; the fact that we have had so many military interventions that whenever the military comes in, the only arm that suffers is the legislature. The military makes laws. They are the executives but they make laws. But under a democratic set up, you have the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. In actual fact, the legislature is supposed to be the number one because they make laws. What the executive is supposed to do is to execute laws made by the National Assembly, while the judiciary interprets these laws.

You referred to the Biafra war, revealing that you were an active soldier on the side of Biafra. How was the relationship between the Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba before the civil war? Did the war affect that?
When the war started, I was 18 years old and in secondary school. The crisis started in 1966. The war itself began in 1967. My perception then could not be used as a yardstick. I was in school in Onitsha, Christ the King College, when the crisis started in 1966. When it started, it didn’t mean much to young people like us until we started seeing the exodus of people from the north to the east. Many of those people tried to trace their relatives and where they are from. It destabilised the system. There was a cause for Biafra but the major thing is that we were trying to protect ourselves because the fear at that time was that the soldiers were coming to eliminate us.
Some of us took the decision that we would rather die by fighting than die doing nothing. And the Asaba massacre in a way justified the fears of so many people. There were so many mixed feelings. When the war started, the issue of sectionalism in the Eastern Region wasn’t obvious as when the war started going wrong.  Some of the things that happened to alienate the Igbo man from the Ijaw man or the Efik man were most unnecessary but it has happened. Some people blamed different actors for what happened but the major thing was that easterners were being killed in the north and they came back home. Nobody can deny that fact. But at the end of the day, Gowon declared no victor, no vanquished. And that encouraged a number of people to go back to their previous stations.

Another interesting thing that happened out of the war economically was the issue of flat 20 pounds; anybody who had pounds in the bank got flat 20 pounds. That thing came up and it affected a lot of Igbo people.
They had three divisions of the Nigerian army. The first division was pushing down from the north to Enugu area; the second division was pushing from the west into Onitsha area; then the third division was coming from the riverine areas. So, at the end of the war, you had the three divisions stationed in the east, basically southeast. Three interesting things happened.
Every month they get paid their field allowance and soldiers would start spending money. Suddenly, people started getting money. That started empowering the people of the southeast. These soldiers were stationed there for quite a while. Before you know it, the average person from the southeast could survive. And it enhanced the trading capabilities of people from the southeast because they had to trade to make quick money and turnover.
Another interesting thing that happened was that a lot of the Nigerian soldiers ended up marrying people from that area including President Babangida. So, the issue of reconciliation started happening without being planned.
One other thing that happened was that it started affecting the educational system in the southeast. Trading then became more important; people got money. It’s only recently that awareness was created on why people should go to school. These are the three things I take away, based on my personal opinion, on the consequences of what happened.
Another thing that happened simultaneously after the Civil War was the issue of oil business. The oil heated Nigeria up to the extent that our then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, said that money was not our problem but how to spend money. That led to so many things. When the government decided to resettle the soldiers in various areas, they started ordering cement to build barracks and the Ministry of Defence was in-charge of that. A mistake was made; they took the agreement of one person without taking into account a number of other things. Before you knew it, they had over a hundred ships bringing cement to Nigeria. And that came about the Cement Armada. Our ports were blocked. That gave rise to the building of Tin Can Island ports. However, the Port Harcourt and Calabar ports weren’t deep enough to accommodate big ships. All the ships carrying cement headed to Apapa. Those are some of the things that happened as a consequence of the war.
Let us talk about your time in the Senate. Now senators are collecting N500 million as constituency allowance; was it so during your time at the senate?
Whenever I hear about it, I get upset. This issue started during our own time. Chief Pius Anyim was the then President of the Senate. When you win, one of the things they expect is development in your area. So, there was a negotiation with the executive that for each constituency, they should vote an amount of N500 million to do a job in the constituency. That money was not meant for the senators or members of the House. That money is resident with the ministry.

What happened during my own time was that I held a meeting with members of the House of Representatives from my senatorial district and we agreed that we will provide boreholes. We wrote to the Ministry of Works that the N500 million allocated should be used for that and I was the Chairman, Senate Committee on Judiciary and Legal Matters. It is not the duty of any legislator to execute any project; that it is the duty of the executive. But as the legislator, you have to vote money for projects to be carried out.
During my time, there was no legislator that was involved in the disbursement of money. What happened, thereafter, I cannot vouch for; but in my own time, we had people in the Senate who meant well.
For example, from Anambra, we had Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, Dr. Ori Obula and myself. Then from Abia, you have people like General Ike Nwachukwu and others from different parts of the country. We had people of substance. The issue between 1999 and 2003 was to put the government on a sound footing after the military rule so that the military doesn’t have any reason to come back. This issue of N500 million is not money meant for the senators. It is money meant for projects to be executed in a senatorial district.

How much was your take home at that time?
Honestly, I cannot remember but it was a ridiculous amount like N7,000 or thereabout. I never even bothered touching it because I had a business.  We don’t pay ourselves; the revenue mobilisation decides how much we get paid. So, we did not fix our salaries. At our own time, the Revenue Allocation and Mobilisation Committee was responsible for that. That is what the constitution says.

When the military was in power, there were some things that Nigerians couldn’t comprehend; the same thing is happening in democracy. How did we get here?
Looking at it from the outside, because I left that place in 2003, some things happened. One, we have never from then till now had a visionary leader, somebody who says I want to take Nigeria from here to there. The only person that tried to do something was Chief Obasanjo. He had been a head of state, so he came with some experience; but the experience he came with was only enough to stabilise things but not enough to push Nigeria out of where it was into a developed economy. The only person I was happy with what he said was Peter Obi. He has a basic philosophy to move the country from consumption to production. At least he knows where he wants to go and how he wants to get there. Whether he could have achieved it or not is a different thing. The other contestants, I cannot tell you I understood where they wanted to move us to.

Our current President, Bola Tinubu, has had a stint as governor of Lagos State. He had an idea on how to develop Lagos State but he didn’t communicate to Nigerians what he wanted to do for Nigeria. What he said was that because he developed Lagos State, he would develop Nigeria but I don’t think the two can work. But whether we like it or not, he is now the president of the country, so we must do what we can to ensure he succeeds because if he succeeds the country succeeds. I like us to be giving him constructive criticism. We are no longer running an election; now it is the issue of governance, how to get Nigeria out of the mess we are in. But if we look back, the only person I have seen who had an idea of what he wanted to do and came into the scene was President Babangida. At least up to the time of the Orkar coup, he had brilliant ideas but a lot of things went wrong because if you ascend the throne by battle, you have to ensure you maintain the loyalty of the people around you and in trying to maintain their loyalty a lot of things may go wrong.

Some people think that Nigeria lost an opportunity to establish itself as a satellite television provider when you got into politics. What happened to Minaj?
Minaj story is quite interesting. Before Minaj, I wanted to establish an African network. I was on satellite and that was the first television station on satellite and I was the first in Europe.
What happened was that in 1998, when General Abdusalami announced his political programme, I was building Minaj. I had an arrangement with a satellite operating company called Panamsat for them to give us receivers, which we were going to put around African countries. I put them in some places like Cameroun, Namibia, Kenya and Ghana. I was in Kenya with my team when my wife, who was in London, called me and said that Chief Alex Ekwueme called and said he wanted to see me but she told him that I was in East Africa. He said I should try and call him. She gave me his number, so I called him.
He asked why I was not in Nigeria to register because registration was ongoing. I told him that I purposely left Nigeria because if I register, I will end up being dragged into politics. But if I don’t register, I will not vote and I will not be voted for. He kept me on the phone for over an hour telling me why I must register. He told me that the late Abubarkar Rimi told him the same thing. He had to convince him to register. So, I called my team and informed them that we had to cut the trip short. On that trip, we visited Uganda and Zambia trying to build up alliances. We flew back to Nigeria. I wanted to go back to the east but by the time I got back to Lagos, I decided to stay because if I go to the east and register, that is the governorship waiting for me to contest for. I registered in Lagos, so, I couldn’t contest for governorship but eventually having registered in any state in the federation, you can run for a federal post. That was why I was able to run for Senate.
Then, Minaj had the English Premier League (EPL), Bundesliga and NFL. Part of the arrangement was for me to have an African station and I would now sublet the rights to different people around Africa. We were already in negotiation with some people in East Africa, South Africa and Cameroun to allow them to download the matches. I came back, registered and then travelled to see Ekwueme in London; when I got there, he had left for the U.S.; I then went to see him in Washington.

Then, the father of my friend died in December 1998. We went to the village and it was there they convinced me to run for the Senate. And the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) nomination was closing on January 20. I abandoned everything I was doing to get the PDP nomination. I had very tough people contesting with me like the late Annie Okonkwo, Chris Ngige, the late Mark Okoye and Arc. Ejikeme.  I couldn’t leave Obosi. So, during that period, I forgot I didn’t sign off for the English Premier League. They were looking for me for two weeks. That’s how I lost the EPL and that was one major thing that hit Minaj. I then faced politics.

I won the senate seat and went to the Senate. One of my executive directors I thought would have captured my vision didn’t get it right. Thereafter, my wife took over to stabilise it. When I got back from the Senate in 2003, I told myself I would rebuild it but I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I forgot about everything to fight cancer.  Five years later, when I got myself, I decided to get people to run the place. Some young men came to me that they would run the place; we signed a management agreement for them to manage it. I didn’t realise they were fronting for some people. After a while, they started speculating that they had taken over Minaj. I got upset and decided to shut it down. When I tried to revive it, it wasn’t working out.
But there is one interesting thing about broadcasting in Nigeria. In the developed world, the media is divided into two, government-owned media and commercial. Private media depend on commercials but government-owned media depend on funding from the government. Take for example the BBC; people pay TV licences. In Nigeria, the government media get funded through the budget and they still collect money for commercials and because it is the government, they have a bigger reach. So, people would rather patronise them because an advertiser is not interested in whether you are private or commercial; he wants to get his message across and reach the biggest market. You, as an individual, are competing with the government. That is the story of Minaj. But if God grants me more life, before I quit the scene, I would want to revive Minaj. And I have plans for it. God willing by next year, I will put things together.

Do you have any regrets looking back?
There is something about me; I don’t regret anything. I have this sense of self-contentment. I am happy with myself.  Oyibo people have a saying that water has passed under the bridge; so, if you start regretting, where will you stop, where will you even start? It has happened; it has happened. Take it that way; look at the future.

You do not look your age. With your personality and everything else, how do you cope with women?
I have this sense of self-contentment. I have about 124 lines blocked.  I am not a monk though. One philosophy I always have from time is that I enjoy it better when I chase a woman and succeeds but unfortunately, at this age, what am I trying to prove?

At 75, what are you most grateful for?
I thank God for a healthy life. God has saved me on both big and small occasions. One, during the Civil War, I had bullet wounds; I could have died. I had cancer and the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) was over 40 and once it is 10, it is trouble. I survived it. I had COVID-19, alongside my wife and one of my kids and we survived it.

Should we still consider our diversity as a strength in Nigeria? What is the hope for Nigeria?
I believe in Nigeria. If we don’t get it right today, we will get it right tomorrow for several reasons. A country that has the type of resources we have including human resources cannot fail. The problem we have is that the Muhammadu Buhari government had no idea of what to do. There was much that went wrong, and that is why we have no choice but to pray for Tinubu to succeed so that it doesn’t get worse than it is. I think one of the things we must do is to tackle the issue of security because if we get it right in that aspect, even if it is the only thing he does, it will now allow farmers to go back to the farms. It will allow investments in agriculture to flourish. Agriculture alone can catapult Nigeria into a developed country. We have so much arable land. But for farmers to go back to their farms and investors to make long-term investments in farming; there must be security.
If we don’t tidy up the issue of security then we have a problem but once we tidy it up, all the other issues about ethnicity and others would die down. The issue of ethnicity is strongest when there is hardship like now. Once there is hardship, people must look for excuses.