I’m a frustrated Nigerian –- Donald Duke – TheNigerialawyer

Donald Duke was a former governor of Cross River
State between 1999 and 2007, and the presidential candidate of the
Social Democratic Party in the 2019 election. In this interview
with MUDIAGA AFFE and MOBOLA SADIQ, the 58-year-old law graduate of
the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria talks about his foray into
politics and his lifestyle, among other sundry
issues

How do you maintain your good
looks?

If I look good, it is God’s grace, nothing conscious. But right
now I don’t feel good. I am tired and a frustrated Nigerian.
Because the truth is, we all know we can do a lot more than we are
doing right now if the environment were favourable. I find the
Nigerian environment very tiresome. And if I am saying so imagine
what people less privileged are going through. You have a lot of
young people bustling with energy. They can’t express themselves,
so, they are looking for relief, either they are trying to leave
the country or they easily take to crime, it’s all part of the
frustration they are going through. I was speaking with someone
about the drug problem in the northern parts of Nigeria. I put it
down to frustration, the young folks out there are frustrated, they
want to get out of their reality and thus take to drugs.

You schooled in the North and your parents were in
the South, how did they feel comfortable allowing you to go to
school in Sokoto at that time?

Well, my father was in the public service. He wanted me to be
more pan Nigerian because I grew up essentially all my life in
Lagos, and he wanted me to know my country more and to toughen me.
Initially, I had admission into Kings’ College, Lagos to do my
secondary education but he changed it overnight so that I could go
to Sokoto. It was a big blow but I am glad he did. Not only did I
have a good time out there, but I think that it gave me a better
appreciation of Nigeria. From there, I went to Ilorin.  I
schooled in the far North, in the Middle Belt and I did my
university in Zaria. Our elite parents these days won’t allow that.
They find it difficult to allow their children to crisscross the
country to school. Even for national service, they won’t allow
their children to go out of their immediate vicinity. In other
words, they have lost faith in the country- that’s the truth. The
fact that you will not allow your child to a school outside your
immediate vicinity, or you prefer your child to go to school in a
foreign land means that you are not confident of your environment
and your society and that is something we seriously have got to
deal with. I understand the security considerations and a poor
educational environment, but running away won’t solve it. It’s a
problem we have created and will have to solve it.

How old were you when you went to school in
Sokoto?

I went to Sokoto at about the age of 10 and there were kids
about my age in school. They travelled from all over the country to
Sokoto. They didn’t necessarily have guardians there, but we were
comfortable, we were fine. We mixed easily and got to appreciate
our ethnic and religious differences with respect.

So, at what point did we get it
wrong?

Well, I must say it crept in. It is difficult to put a timeline
to it because when things creep in on you, you don’t know you just
find that you’ve lost it. From the 80s, it started accelerating and
by the time we got into the 90s we had lost it completely. It will
take a herculean effort to reverse it. It cannot be politics as
usual; it would take leadership that sees the responsibility of
leadership as providential to reverse where we are now because it
is appalling.

You became governor of Cross River State at age 37
how did you cope with that huge responsibility?

I was lucky and very fortunate to be so prepared, because at the
age of 30 I was Commissioner of Finance, Budget, and Planning. At
the age of 33, I was a member of the National Economic Intelligence
Committee and concurrently a member of the National Economic
Council. So, I had tremendous exposure by the time I became
governor. Sadly, we are not affording our young people similar
opportunities and it is haunting us already. Whether you like it or
not, sooner or later they will assume the leadership of this
country. So, we’ve got to prepare them, mentor them, tutor them and
expose them. We are not providing the exposure, we are abdicating
to ill-prepared people mostly past their prime and they are not
connecting with global trends. Past prime is not only a factor of
age but a function of exposure. The people running the country
largely do not have the exposure that is required for this current
generation, for this time, not only for Nigeria but globally. So,
there is a major disconnect within and outside the country. We
should have an internship system where interested young people are
exposed to understudying governance.

As the governor of Cross River State for eight
years, you developed the idea of Tinapa, Obudu Cattle Ranch and
other major tourist sites in the state, even the Calabar carnival
you brought to the international limelight, what gave you that
inspiration?

No, the carnival was my wife’s initiative, but I get the credit.
You need to understand something about the location of Cross River.
When I ventured into tourism it was to draw attention to Calabar
and Cross River states in general. Cross River is at the end of
Nigeria, not like Benin City or Kaduna where people pass through.
Edo and Kaduna in the context of Nigeria are ideally located, if
you are going from east to west, north to south or vice versa you
will pass through Benin or Kaduna respectively. In the case of
Cross River if you have no business there you will not be there.
So, we needed to make people go there because when people visit
they spend, they pay for accommodation, feeding, transportation,
etc. Yes, we would like to industrialise the economy, but that
takes time. Industrialisation can take several years to achieve,
but the quickest way to jump-start the economic environment is
tourism. Look at Dubai. Its development thrust has been over the
last 30 or 40 years and you can appreciate what has been achieved.
The essence is to increase the traffic into the state. So, Tinapa
for instance as a business hub would have attracted large volumes
of traffic. Nigerians travel out of the country mainly for
commercial reasons. We aimed to redirect a certain fraction of
those numbers into Cross River State and that would be huge. When
KPMG did a study on Tinapa they said we should expect three million
visitors annually into Calabar as a result of this investment and
if each one of them spent N100, 000 purchasing goods from Tinapa,
hotel accommodation, feeding, and transport, that translates to
about N300bn annually and with its attendant multiplier effect that
would have been an economic game-changer. The same thing happened
when Obudu Cattle Ranch was active. The community there had a boom,
everyone wanted to build a house. The biggest challenge we had at
the ranch was managing the physical development going on there by
the inhabitants of the community. We had to set up a planning unit
because the residents were building houses all over the place.
People were visiting and spending lots of money and that is what
tourism is all about. In December, close to a million people go in
and out of Calabar. I’m not talking of people coming from overseas;
we were not looking for foreign visitors. We were looking for
Nigerians to visit. In Calabar, the tourism and hospitality
industry conservatively achieves 60 per cent of its income in
December. Last point here, the Calabar airport became the fourth
busiest airport in Nigeria. At the time it was Lagos, Abuja, Port
Harcourt, and Calabar in that order, we had nine flights in and out
of Calabar daily. In fact, over the Christmas period, it increased
to about 12 flights in and out daily. Again, December being within
the harmattan season, we had to install an Instrument Landing
System so that flights were not impaired because there is nothing
as frustrating as a disappointed tourist.

Are you disappointed that over the years some of
these legacy projects have become abandoned?

I am naturally and it’s not limited to what we did in Cross
River State. Personally, it’s very painful when you spend your
youthful energy in putting up something that you believe will
change the landscape, then your successor comes in and childishly
wants to do something that can be personally identified to himself
rather than see the bigger picture of what we can collectively do
for our people. I tell folks that governors are shift workers. You
have a four or eight-year shift, your successor comes in and does
his shift. If each time we change shift we go back to the beginning
of the construction we would never finish the construction. That’s
the problem, and it’s a very unfortunate phenomenon. Look at
Ajaokuta Steel Company, it was built over 40 years ago, but what
have we done with it? We have abandoned such a pivotal project and
there are a plethora of abandoned projects throughout the landscape
of our country begging for the same attention. The broad spectrum
of our leadership is so short-sighted, so parochial, so selfish
that they do not see the commonality, the common good of
everyone.

How do we address this issue of continuity in
governance in Nigeria?

It is a very difficult thing because you see our system is
messed up. Once a man is in charge, his true attributes come
forward. You never know a person until he has the authority or
money or when he thinks he does not need of you, and then the real
beast in him steps forward. It is very difficult to, for instance,
pass legislation that will ensure continuity; rather it is for us
to continually preach that we cannot afford to abandon established
projects. The governor who started a project or an initiative is
not using his resources, it is public funds, if you don’t complete
and utilise it you are wasting public money. And these so-called
leaders are even crazy enough to abandon schools. I know of a state
where a governor started a tertiary institution, a very modern
tertiary institution at that and the next administration just
abandoned it and said he wasn’t going to continue with that. I mean
if you don’t continue a school what are you going to continue?

What endeared you into politics?

I am primarily a student of history, a subject I enjoy very much
and if you like and identify with history you are not too far from
politics. Secondly, I got into politics at university. At Ahmadu
Bello University, I was a member of the Students’ Union Government.
I was the social secretary on my campus. ABU was a very political
university in my time. I was 18 years old when in the Union so
politics had always been beckoning on me. Do I like politics? I’m
not sure I like politics, I like governance and I like being an
agent for change and making things happen. Politics is just a
necessary route towards being that agent. You cannot govern a
people if you don’t know them and the best way to know people is to
be involved in the politics of the people because you get to see
their nuances, their character, and traits, the nature of the
people and politics affords you this first-hand experience.
Otherwise, they will remain strangers to you and you to them and
that is the flaw in military rule. You send someone from Sokoto to
govern Cross River, no matter how well-intentioned he maybe, if he
doesn’t know the people there is a limit to what he can
achieve.

What are some of the qualities that got you to where
you are today?

The Grace of The Almighty and I mean this with all sense of
sincerity. My life is a testimony to this, I am not better than any
other person and I have made countless mistakes that should have
thrown me under the bus. It is always His Grace that has held me
on. Many people say this as a cliché, but I mean every sense of the
word. When I look back, at my circumstance, I cannot but be
grateful for His Grace. Let me tell you a story when I was in
Zaria, I decided I was going to establish a night club on campus.
In that part of Zaria, the Kongo campus of ABU, alcohol is not sold
and I said that I would sell alcohol and I dared the Muslim
Students Society. They rose up against me and put a Fatwa on me and
they moved en masse from the mosque to my room to effect the fatwa
edict on me, a Southern Christian daring to say that I was going to
go against their norms and sell alcohol and nothing would come out
of it. You won’t believe it, I had a friend in my room, I was going
to warn him to get out due to the impending problem, but on my way
to my room, they were already marching, about 200 of them with
machetes’ and all sorts of things. So, I couldn’t go forward and it
was dark, about 9 pm, these people walked past me. I was a
well-known student and they were students but none of them
recognised me. Some of them looked at me but didn’t recognise me. A
few weeks later, a chap walks up to me and says, I recognised you,
I opened my mouth to say look at him there, but nothing came out of
my mouth. How do you explain such circumstances?

Can you recall a particular incident that changed
the course of your life?  

There are many of them. It’s difficult to pick just one. There
are several persons that influenced the course of my life. One of
my greatest influences was my father. He was the sort that
encouraged you to do whatever you wanted. He guided you but he
never discouraged as long as it was legit. I remember once when I
was about 13 or 14, I said to him I wanted to be a musician, you
know those were the heydays of the Jacksons and all that, lots of
young people got carried away and thought it was the best thing to
b. He said to me ‘‘that’s a brilliant idea, but first go get your
degree then you’ll become a better musician.’’ He didn’t say don’t
do it although I know he wasn’t for it, because as a teenager if he
tells you “don’t” you probably would rebel. So, as a role model, he
was amazing. Another person who was an incredible role model was Dr
Pius Okigbo. He was my father’s friend, Nigeria’s first Economic
Adviser. He adopted me as his own, loved me as a father would and
he was just a reservoir of wisdom and he shared his wisdom through
jokes. And another friend of my father, a lawyer, Goziam Onyia, he
actually got me to study law, I wanted to do history but he said
no, go do law after you’ve done law, you can then do your history
and Pius Okigbo said same to me, he studied history before opting
for economics and added that if after law I still felt strongly for
history then I could go about it.

You are a Jazz enthusiast. Do you have plans to
release an album?

If they were, I think I have passed that stage now. There was a
time we did recordings. In fact, my wife was our manager, but we
never got to release an album. I have a talented group of young men
whom I play music with and we did some very interesting recordings
but we never got around to releasing it in form of an album.

Where and how did you meet your
wife?

Interesting! I was campaigning for Social Secretary in 1980 and
she was trying to register in the Faculty of Law. So, while on the
campaign trail I saw her, I was with a friend of mine called Col.
Sam Amadu, he is retired now from military, he was my campaign
manager even though he was also running for Sports Secretary. I
looked at him and I said, you see that lady going over there,
that’s my next campaign. She was wearing a light yellow pair of
trousers and a yellow and pink horizontally striped shirt which she
tied around her navel, I remember it like yesterday. At that time
she appeared very tall, indeed we used to wear the same trousers
for a very long time. After the campaigns, we became friends and
the first time I asked her out she looked at me and said are you
drunk, we are friends, how can I go out with you? The rest is
history as they would say.

As a young handsome governor, how did you manage
your female admirers?

I don’t know how to manage anybody, my wife manages me. 
Let me put it that way. Once my wife was managing me everything
fell in place. And frankly, I think this handsome business is
exaggerated and only skin deep.

What is the secret behind the successful
marriage?

First of all, you must be determined to stay in the marriage.
For that determination to work you must be ready to give and to
take. You must accept each other’s flaws; you mustn’t hold on to
anything, you must perpetually forgive each other because you are
going to continually annoy and offend each other. You are two
different people rubbing against each other and hoping you can
smoothen out your flaws and rough edges. Like I said for that to
work you must be determined to stay in the marriage. You mustn’t go
in with the attitude that might is right or I am the man of the
house. Even if you are right it doesn’t matter, both of you are the
same now. Harmony trumps all including rightness. Sometimes when my
wife is convinced over the rightness of her course or views, she
just lets me have my way, unfortunately, more often from her than
me. It is “give and take”. You must accommodate each other; you
must tolerate each other, knowing that it is not going to be fun
times all the time.

As an influential father, training children could be
quite difficult, what morals and discipline did you instil in your
children?

You know on that score I’m going to give it all to my wife. When
I look at my children and I think we have done pretty well with
them, I give 80 per cent if not 90 to my wife, maybe 10 per cent to
me for hanging around the house. But certainly most of it would go
to my wife. She has been an incredible mother. She stood in the gap
even when I was in public service. She would be with me in the
morning in Calabar, but by the time I come back from work at 7 or 8
pm she has gone to Lagos to see the kids and is back to Calabar.
And it didn’t happen once or twice, it happened frequently within a
week, she would say “I saw the kids this afternoon”. They were in a
school in Lagos that demanded the presence of their parents so she
was frequently there. She was also in charge of the girls’ scout at
the school. She was always there, at the same time she lived in
Calabar, how she did it, I don’t know. She is an absolute
phenomenon and my daughters and I truly appreciate her.

You recently became a grandfather how do you feel
about that?

I am still trying to come to terms with that part of my life. My
90-year-old mother was so emotional about it because not many of
her peers can say they are great grandparents, it’s a rarity in
these parts. And I, a grandfather, I’m still tripping. I remember
so vividly when my girls were born, I remember changing their
nappies, you know things like that and now I watch them changing
their babies’ nappies, so it’s like a baby caring for a baby.

What’s the best thing you have achieved at age
58?

Being alive is a good thing to start with because once you still
have a life you have hope at working at being a better person. But
I think one charge my father gave me, he said, “Donald I’m
bequeathing my name to you without stain I hope you would do the
same to your children.” In other words, I hope your name would not
be an embarrassment to your children, those words are deep,
particularly in the environment we are. So I think reasonably, I
can hold my head up proudly.

How do you relax?

I love music, very much. When I was in Calabar my band and I
would play every Sunday and that was therapeutic for me. if I
didn’t play on Sunday I would feel cranky and irritable all week. I
don’t play as often as I would like to and I don’t relax as often
as I would like to. Lagos is a very difficult place to relax. I
relax more when I go to Calabar but I don’t go there often enough.
I’m hoping that next year when I can get one or two things that I
am doing behind me, I would get my life back and start
recalibrating myself, being able to sleep for six to eight hours.
Now I get about three to four hours and that’s not good enough. I
want to do my eight hours; I want to go to the gym. I want not only
look healthy but to feel and be healthy.

What is your dressing like?

It depends on what you are dressing for; you need to dress for
the occasion. I’m conservative, I like wearing suits in dapper
colours, my ties are conservative too and I usually wear white
shirts. Until lately, I wasn’t wearing traditional clothes.

Your recent presidential outing was riddled with
legal tussle, emphatic disappointment, how did you feel at the end
of it all?

You know, let me say something about public office. You seek it
to make yourself available, give it your best shot and if it comes
your way take it and make the best of the opportunity. If you don’t
make yourself available, you will never get it. People sometimes
say it is impossible you can’t get it. Nothing is impossible, but
make yourself available and be realistic. I joined a party that did
not have a national structure, but I just wanted to make myself
available, you won’t believe but without spending a dime we won the
primaries then we got embroiled in some nonsensical legal issues up
to the Supreme Court. There was no way we could have raised the
funding required in that environment. So, we had a lacklustre
outing. Am I disappointed? Yes, I am, but I’m proud that at least I
got the ticket and I was on the ballot.

With your last two experiences will you still
attempt it again?

Circumstances would determine that. Let’s see what happens and
how things go. I ran not because I need to have the prefix,
president, before my name, I’m a very frustrated Nigerian. I’m a
Nigerian that believes that we can do better than we are doing and
if we, the so-called elites don’t stand up to correct the flaws of
this country then all hope is lost. I hope that circumstances would
compel someone who believes in a loftier aspiration for the
country, seeks and achieves that office. Too many people that seek
the presidency or governorship, local government chairmanships are
content with the mundane. You have people celebrating payment of
salary, upgrading road, etc, those are mundane, and those are the
norm. In another thirty years, our population would be about 400
million, we would have doubled, we are 200 million now, and we were
45 million when we attained Independence. Let me tell you
something, between 1979 and ‘83, President Shagari budgeted $25bn
averagely annually for four years. Our population was barely 80
million, 40 years after we are budgeting about $24bn for a
population of almost 200 million. We are a society in deep
regression and if that doesn’t call for some sober reflection, I
wonder what would. What fundamental things have we achieved in our
almost 60 years of independence? Next year we would be 60 and we
are going to roll out the drums, the soldiers are going to march,
school kids are going to march under the sun, governors and the
president would take the salute. We should ask ourselves, over what
are we celebrating? When will we celebrate the quality of our
lives?

Culled Punch