“Godfatherism almost killed ANLCA, but thank God…..”……Prince Olayiwola Shittu
His name has been ringing bell much more loudly since his committee successfully organised elections into the hitherto difficult western zone of the Association of Nigerian Licensed Customs Agents (ANLCA). Prince Olayiwola Shittu, chairman ASECO of ANLCA ,in this interview which held in his house spoke about the initial challenges of the assignment, how he was able to over come them and how he successfully led his team of equally patriotic ASECO members into achieving the feat and helping ANLCA to get back on track. He spoke on the dangers of reducing ANLCA to a Yoruba – Igbo (and others) association rather than being a national association in name and indeed. It was the vintage Olayiwola Shittu who in this first part of the no-holds-barred interview declared that most Yoruba freight forwarding leaders are godfathers; only for the sake of their pockets.
Congratulations on the successful conduct of elections into the Western Zone of ANLCA, how do you feel?
Thank you very much. My feeling would have been expectedly, hysterical, as if we(ASECO) have done something that somebody else could not do, but that’s not my nature, I have always believed that if you do the right thing, it will work, so it is not beyond my expectations that we will see it through. I spent the first one month of the appointment closeted with members of ASECO and letting them know the direction that I think we should go and as soon as they agreed with me and put their personal interests aside, I knew we were focused, it is one of those things and that’s what I will call it, because I don’t expect anything less.
What did you consider as the toughest challenge?
It is about winning the confidence of the people because they had an experience that was not good for them. I have always believed that ANLCA members are not the rabble rousers that people take them to be. What happened to the last ASECO was a reaction from the people seeing that injustice is being done, they believe that there are some groups of people who are hell-bent on installing their stooges; they believe hat there are some people who will collect money from them and not do the right thing. So when they now discovered that there is another ASECO, they were (naturally) at first sceptical. I have the benefit of the fact that we have done it before (in 2006), but on the other hand, they just still believe that well you never can’t tell because a man can change, so it took some time to win back that confidence and that was why the first thing that we did was to go round the whole chapters in Western zone; educating them and asking them for suggestions, we put down our proposal and our thoughts and as soon as they were accepted, we knew that we could follow it through. So, those were the challenges, apart from that, I regard our people as disciplined, because the election came out in a very disciplined manner because the people disciplined themselves, they saw good things happening and they participated, everybody obeyed the rules and I am sure that those who did not win would have learnt their lessons, that maybe they did not do enough home work in carrying along the people who would have voted for them and that’s why they did not win. People left the election venues without any rancour even up till today because we challenged them that after doing the right thing, if you know you are not satisfied you can recourse to the constitutional requirement that says you write petition to the BOT and in the alternative if you are not satisfied you can go to court.
What do you think was responsible for the failure of the former ASECO to conduct a successful election?
Alhaji Inua Mohammed was the chairman of that ASECO, you will agree with me that he was our formal president, but along the line he became too soft and was not in charge; that was the problem he had, he delegated functions which he ought not, its true that you can delegate functions, but there are some functions that you have to take responsibilities for and at the end of the day, there where rumours here and there about bribery and also there where external influences on him to just do the deed and go. You need to have a little firmness, for example if you know that the candidate does not have the required documents, why will you say that he should go through, and the news is that the person must have dropped money in order for him to go through; will money change a bad thing to be good? So I think that was his problem, honestly, Inua Mohammed is not a fraudulent or a bad person, he is not a poor man that will run around, but external influences used him to further their goal and that was his problem.
Some people have said it that your ASECO succeeded because you are a Yoruba man conducting elections in Yoruba land
Let me tell you what happened, after the 2006 elections that we coordinated in Apapa, I was removed unceremoniously, but I was never bothered because I felt that if somebody else can do what I am doing, then its okay by me. At the end of the day, they said “the election cannot go on after being tried three times and now Shittu can you come and do it”. What some people expected was for me to say no because I was removed before, but that is not life, I just felt that this is what ANLCA needs, we had a president whose tenure has expired and presently, it is about one year and two months, how can we continue without a president, the vacuum is not good, if what will help us is to conduct a national election, then why not go for it and that was what informed my decision to accept. And the first thing I did was to find out why the elections were not holding? There must be a reason for it so I made enquiries and discovered that it is the same old story of certain godfathers who live on ANLCA, who never bothered to go and look for work, who even behave as if they are agberos. Their own is: somebody has a (clearing)job and he is having problem with Customs, he needs X amount to solve it, he goes to him to collect the money to solve the problem and put the money in his pockets and uses his position, and so on. When officials are to be elected, they go to them, when they have wedding or other ceremonies, they come and take responsibilities, they drive to Seme (border), and they put rice in the booth of their cars. When I discovered that those are the things causing the problems, I now decided to chart a new course; we decided first and foremost that we are not going to get any godfather to be involved in the process of ASECO.
ASECO had godfathers before
ASECO does not need godfathers. But I want to tell you what the godfathers were doing, in the political arena of Nigeria today; they say it is very difficult for you to win without godfathers, what they do is that if you are a candidate and you don’t have the wherewithal to get money for campaign, get people, hire a hall, buy food for people and so on, the godfather will now come up and he provides you the funds for you to campaign. Definitely, if you eventually wins the election, you will owe your allegiance to that godfather. But the godfatherism in ANLCA is that once you said you are interested in any elective post, they will call you to go and bring money before they will allow you to contest, the reverse is the case now. We now felt that we should educate the candidates that they don’t need any godfathers for them to contest, we told them that “all you have to do is buy your form and deal directly with ASECO” and that was what they all did, even those who out of fear, still doubted ASECO and still gave money to godfathers because these godfathers told them that they were in charge, those who gave such money are regretting it today, saying that if they had known they would have listened to ASECO. So the removal of the interest of the godfathers enabled people to look at things more committedly and to deal with us directly, we even went a step further and ensured that the interim administrations that were put in the chapters did not have anything to do with ASECO, it was a unique style that left everybody bewildered, some of them will call me ask that what do you think we should do and I will say don’t bother yourself, because we are dealing directly with the people. What we did was to go to the chapters and addressed the chapter members and informed them that it was possible for the godfathers to use an interim executive to prepare the list of the eligible chapter members and if they don’t like you or you have not ‘settled’ well enough, they will make sure that your supporters are not listed and that is to short-change you.
So, how did you set out?
We told all of them that if you are interested in participating either as a voter or as a candidate, write a letter to ASECO directly; we received all those letters from the chapters and compiled them into a list and we also told the chapter interim executives to give us their own list of those they feel they have registered, we compiled all and discovered that the intention has been done to short-change some people, but we told them that if you know you are in the chapter, you have nothing to fear, then we also introduced the fact that ANLCA membership is by license, that is, by agencies, so an agency can not vote in more than one chapter, unlike before when they recruit licenses from other chapters to beef – up the number of their supporters. But, this time around, if you vote in Tin Can, for example you can’t vote in Apapa because the agency which you own has a starting point, so they will choose where they intend to vote. We discovered that it is tidier to set us on the part of reasonableness, that one company; one vote will achieve that for us. That was what we had in the days of Alhaji Sani Kamba; especially when we where having the problems and heat from Panalpina, Panalpina was using all the contacts they had to rubbish ANLCA and made sure that we are not there, we now felt that if they (Panalpina) were a member of ANLCA and there is need for votes to be decided, will they have more than one vote?
We asked ourselves and decided to use this election to test the waters, apparently we did not even lock up the arrangement, you can have your license operating in the western zone and you are operating in the eastern zone, you can vote in both zones, but within the western zone, there must be a chapter that your company belongs to and that is where you will vote. It is better for us to limit it that allows people to use that as an opportunity. The tradition in those days is that once you are a candidate you go and recruit licenses from one company to the other and the companies which are also members of this association don’t bother to know what is going on but when there is election, they will come forward, so the candidate pays the company to borrow license because of election, they also pay for the company to register in the chapters and I am telling you money that goes as high as N50,000 and sometimes N100,000 for one exercise of a vote, if you multiply it by the number which means that if you have the money you can recruit as many licenses as possible, then those who don’t have the money will result to forgery by going to cleaners or clerks to get them letter headed papers, they forge peoples’ signatures as representing the company. So, in order not to have that we say let these companies voluntarily on their own come and participate, let them pay their subscription and then we will know that they belong to that chapter, when people indicated interest in voting in more than two or three chapters we wrote letters to them and published it to say that it is multiple interest, so take one or we select one for you, that’s what we did. There was this reluctance at first, but when people began to see that it might work out, an example is when we were to do Tin Can chapter, I believe we had about 750 applications to participate and at the end of the day, the total number of people that contested was about 150, that will also show you that when you try to do the right thing eventually it works, the people might resist in the beginning, but they are meant to accept it as the norm now and the number we have per chapter will form the basis of the register for ANLCA. I can tell you that if you ask today where the register of membership, there is is none, because we don’t even have a secretariat; how can we have all that. So we need to start from somewhere and its going to be a serious task for anybody who is going to lead ANLCA to really look at the problems and build it up from the beginning.
Do you also agree that the western zone of ANLC is not well organised?
It is because of the system that has been going on in the western zone
Does the system not operate in the eastern zone?
No. why it does not operate in the east is that the number of ports in the east and the volume of import does not compare with what we have in the western zone and don’t forget that Lagos is the melting point of Nigeria; where there is this geometrical increase in population after every December which automatically means that the people must find something to do and its the best place to start-out without funds or godfathers, all you need to have is a clean shirt, a tie and a pair of trousers, a briefcase and off you go to the port hoping that one day, maybe fortune will smile on you by duping somebody. What I am trying to say is that Lagos is a melting point of sort.
You are yet to answer my question as regards the insinuation that you are a Yoruba man…..
Yes, you said that people said the election was conducted free and fair because I happen to be a Yoruba man, are the Yoruba’s really the problem? I am very dispassionate about the issue of tribal inclinations because ANLCA is supposed to be a national association. More than 20 years ago, I was chairman of a chapter in the east where there are not many Yorubas and as I am talking to you now even in Port Harcourt, there is a Yoruba man who serves in an administration as of today. I just believe it’s because the most active people are the Igbos; in the sense that they value politics, anything that will enhance their position, they go for it, while the Yoruba man will dilly dally, he will not go and get what he wants but to force his way into relevance, the Igbo man is doing his home work. For example, freight forwarding from the beginning has been the job of the Yorubas, the Igbos find it as a means in their normal enterprising way because their enterprise is more like traders, so in their own trading enterprise they believe that every opportunity should be seized and that’s what they did, they came here (western zone)and discovered that before you can even be relevant at all, your company needs to have a license, so the first thing they do is to go and establish a limited liability company and then apply for a license, even when the Yoruba man is thinking of how to go and get N300,000 for a license, the Igbo man will go to the village and raise money from the town unions and get a license and that is why gradually and over time, they have been increasing in number. You know they love associating, they love unionism and from there they can raise funds to get what they want. There are more Igbo people with license now in the western zone than the Yorubas and when it comes to participating politically the Igbos are more politically aware; while the Yoruba man sits back. Mark you, there are some very hard working Yoruba people who hold licenses, but they don’t border about this issue of ANLCA, instead they delegate functions, the Yoruba man will employ an Igbo man in his company as a staff and when it comes to the issue of elections, he tells the Igbo man to go and represent the company, but the Igbo man who is the Managing Director of his own company will come forward because he wants to know what is happening, but in our own case, we will delegate that responsibility and we are not ready to spend money, our godfathers are not ready to spend money for us, so anytime there is election, we will end up making noise that this is our land, but a federal activity can not be restricted to tribal activity. So, when I came I discovered that the problem on ground was not the Yoruba or the Igbo but rather, the Yorubas and the Igbos have been going into agreement to share the chapters among themselves while the Yorubas takes five the Igbos take four, the Igbo people produce their first eleven, but the Yoruba people refused to do so but rather they keep saying you must give us. But, there is a standard and benchmark for everyone, if you want to be a chairman, you must be a director of a company with license, your company must be a member of the association for not less than five years, we discovered that majority of our people are not even directors of companies, some of them have been in the port for 20 to 30 years and they don’t own licenses, they are not even directors of any other license, so are we now going to ask the Igbo man who is qualified to step down just because of tribal reasons and let a Yoruba man who is not qualified to go in there? So by the time we came in, we were determined to do the right thing, they told me that they have an agreement and I said the only way you can have the agreement is to do it at the chapter levels, this ASECO will not be used for that kind of arrangement because we are ‘legalistic’ ASECO and not ‘political’ ASECO, we have to do things that can stand the test of time and that is legal, but if we want to go ‘political’, we can as well sit down in our houses; you bring money, we decide who goes and everybody goes to sleep; but eventually it will create problems. We then told them that look “if that is what you want- that the chapter which you know that the Igbo man should handle, go and tell the Yoruba man there to step down for the Igbo man and when we get the records that it is the Igbo man that is standing, we will still go ahead and conduct our elections and vice versa for the Yoruba head”. But you will discover that the area that is supposed to be headed by a Yoruba man, they could not get a high calibre person to go in there and it was becoming a problem. Even the chapter that was supposed to have an Igbo man as chairman, the Yoruba man who have the ambition will say no, he will insist that no godfather can go somewhere and bargain their interest and so they refused to step down and I told them that there is nothing I can do, they said I should disqualify them, but I said no, once the person is qualified there is no way he can be disqualified. Even the Apapa you are talking about was supposed to be taken by a Yoruba man, but I said no, we are not interested. When they discovered that the ASECO can not be manipulated, they stayed off. I want to tell you that I met all the people who created crises during the Inua Mohammed time; one on one to ask them what was wrong; both the Igbos and the Yorubas with their leaders, I took my time to go to them one by one, there are some whom I invited to my house here and I explained to them the system that we intend to use and as long as they accepted it and everybody accepted it, everybody was happy about it. So the fact that I am a Yoruba man does not count. You are the one who is even telling me that I am a Yoruba man, because some of our Yoruba brothers are saying that I am an Igbo man. So where do I go from there.
(To be concluded next week)
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