He also makes suggestion on how the federal government can tackle the unending security challenges confronting the nation and his plans for the future as well as other sundry issues.  Excerpts

Intro

The immediate past Minister of Sports, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, is a graduate of the University of Lagos, Akoka-Lagos. He started his working career as a volunteer and part-time worker in civil society organisations and international agencies before joining ThisDay newspapers as a reporter in 1997. In his first year as a journalist, he won a nomination for the Nigerian Media Merit Award for the Best Newspaper Feature of the Year. In 1998, he joined the Africa Leadership Forum (ALF), a civil society organisation based in Ota, Ogun State as a Publications Officer, and later a Programme Officer. He returned to ThisDay in 2000 as the Deputy Editor of ThisDay on Sunday, and became the Deputy Editor of the Newspaper a year later.

In 2003, he was appointed Special Assistant, Communication and Strategy to the Governor of Kwara State, Dr Bukola Saraki, and in 2005, he became Special Adviser on Policy and Strategy to the Governor.

In April 2007, Abdullahi was appointed the Commissioner of Education, Science and Technology, a position he held until May 2011. Thereafter, he was appointed the Minister of Youth Development by the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in July 2011 and headed the ministry of youth and Sports till he was unceremoniously sacked by President Goodluck Jonathan as a result of political misgiving in March 2014.

Can you tell us the intrigues that led to your sack by the Jonathan administration?

Let me start by saying that it was a very wonderful experience for me to serve as a minister under the present administration. At different points, one was made to feel that your relationship with your immediate boss is based on his relationship with someone else rather than being judged by what you contribute to the government.

But I think with time, the president realised I was happy to serve and that I was serving the nation diligently. For example, we won the African Cup of Nations for the first time after 19 years, we also qualified for the World Cup and we were doing well in athletics and all that, which was a good story for the government.  

But at the end of the day, the political situation made the President to see things differently because of the way other people were interpreting what was going on to him on different occasions. Personally, I don’t think Mr. President had any problem with me and I don’t have any problem with him also.

But when my leader, Dr. Saraki fell out with the PDP and left for the APC, at that point, I knew I was only bidding my time, though the president still believed in the work that I was doing. If you’ll recall, as soon as the announcement was made that some governors and senators were leaving PDP for APC, about nine ministers were subsequently dropped. In fact, my name was removed personally by Mr President from the list of the ministers dropped.

But at a point, people from Kwara PDP began to agitate that this minister, who is supposed to be the most senior political appointee from the state was not with them. They told Mr. President they needed someone else to occupy the seat because I wasn’t doing their bidding.

And in fairness, the then Chairman of the Caretaker committee of PDP in Kwara, a gentleman I think from Delta, came to my office and ask me to lead and fund the party as the most senior political office holder from the state.

I made it clear on that occasion that I was not a politician and that even before the division happened, nobody can claim to have seen me in any political gathering. In all the conventions that PDP have held, no one could claim he has ever seen me in any of them. The responsibility I was given by the president was very clear and he did not adjust that mandate, so I was not going to be part of that. And of course, I didn’t have any money to give as I was in the sports’ ministry. My ministry was not a funded ministry as it was, so I was not in position to fund any party.

The situation remained like that until Mr President on March 3 came for the rally here in Ilorin; I was required as a minister from the state to arrive the state early to receive him, which I did, a day before his arrival.

I was at the airport early in the morning alongside other people to welcome Mr President and from there; we headed straight to the Emir’s Palace. I was also with him at Metropolitan Square, venue of the rally.

The first thing I think created the problem was that I was not wearing the party uniform. In fairness, I was offered the party’s uniform but I however did not feel I have any obligation to wear the party uniform, so I did not wear it.

I was also given the party (PDP) muffler, which I rejected as well. So when we got to the venue of the rally, everyone was pressurising me, including my colleagues and I eventually collected the muffler and wore it around my neck, at least to show that I was with them.

At the venue, I was required to join my colleagues and other PDP leaders from Kwara State on the podium to condemn Dr Saraki but I said I was not going to do that. That was where I drew the line, in fact I was willing to wear the PDP Babanriga at that point but I was not going to join anybody on stage to abuse my primary boss, Dr Saraki.

But at that point I was embarrassed at the venue of the rally because some people in the PDP were shouting that I should be removed.

By the time we left the rally ground that day, I knew I was going to be sacked because if you stand for certain principles, I think you should be honest enough to expect some consequence. I was very clear about the consequence and I am not a hypocrite, I knew what will be the consequence of me standing for what I believed in, so I was prepared for it.

The next day, I was to attend an Athletics Indoor Championship in Poland, so I left and was air-borne when my sack was announced. It was when I had a stopover in London that I switched on my phone and I got to know about my sack and I said Alhamdulillah,  because it was a big relief for me.

How did you react to the situation?

I felt relieved because if you have been on death roll for three years, every single night you heard footsteps and you’ll think the warder was coming for you and if that night someone else is grabbed and he is killed, you become a bit relieved. If the next day again you hear movement around your cell, it’s like living your own termination every single day. So, when you are eventually terminated if it possible to feel what you feel, it has to be relieved and if you are not terminated but released, you will feel relieved. So, the immediate feeling for me was relief.

I could not proceed to Poland  after that as I had to stop in London for a couple of days to actually take in the significant of what happened and the second feeling that I had was; how would my family take this? So I started calling but I have got a remarkable family, they were all praying saying we thanked God, you have done well, don’t worry. Then I called my daughter who was schooling in Harling and that was the turning point for me. When I called her and I said I was coming to see her, she said daddy why are you coming to see me? I said we need to discuss something with you and she asked, is it your sack? I said yes, she said you don’t need to discuss anything with me, I understand you were removed because you refused to betray your friend. I remain very proud of you.

That brought tears to my eyes, and at that point, it was pure joy for me but the complication for me was how do I explain to those people I mentored and motivates? I like working with younger people as youth minister, who had built a network of so many young people that I mentor in the cause of my work.

How do I explain this to them, that working hard is not enough to keep your job,  so when next I talk to them and say work hard, won’t they ask me work hard, then what? You worked hard then what happened to you? So that again was another level of complication for me. When you tell young people, be patriotic, love your country, work hard no matter what, don’t steal public funds; will they listen to you? I used to preach those words a lot and if you know me very well since I was in  Kwara, you cannot come to my house (in Ilorin) and find anything  that I didn’t have before I became a minister. I did not add anything to my asset throughout the time I was minister and I am bold to say this.

Like I said earlier, I am not bitter about my exit but I felt that may be because of what we have achieved together, Mr President should have at least waited for me to come back and say look you have to go and I will take it gracefully. Having said that, I will like to say I enjoyed working with him. He is a wonderful man that is totally committed to sports development. He really wanted to develop sports and that was evident when during the Sports Summit, he sat for more than 14 hours. No other president has ever done that and each time I sent request to him for approval, I was rest assured he will approve it. I got approval for the 2014 World Cup and Commonwealth Games since end of February, which has never happened before. Mr President approved everything that I submitted and directed the Finance Minister to release the funds. So that was the kind of experience I had working with him but obviously work is one thing and politics is another thing entirely.

With the way you were removed from office, what in your opinion is the message to countless youths who honestly want to serve the country if offered the opportunity?

I think it was wrong; the manner was wrong. I think it should have been managed differently. But I think the president was pressured, he was really pressured. Even before we left the venue of the rally in Ilorin, there was this gentleman, the Governor of Bayelsa, Seriake Dickson, who mounted so much pressure on the president to remove me. The president was still hesitant and was considering the implication as the World Cup and Commonwealth Games that I had planned for were fast approaching.

But they were busy telling him, what the hell; will he be the one to play the ball or is he the coach? Remove him! They put so much pressure on him, alongside members of Kwara PDP, who felt they could benefit from my sack, unfortunately till now; they have not been able to get themselves together to get a successor.

I think it is not good for anybody as it was a difficult thing to explain, especially to those young people who want to learn from what we did. The implication of that is that you are telling young people that hard work is not enough, that integrity is not enough, that honesty is not enough to keep ones job.

People were talking about divided loyalty but that was not the case. I did not divide my loyalty; I was absolutely loyal to Mr President. I swore an oath with the Qur’an to be loyal to the president of Nigeria as a minister, so if it got to a stage that I will not be able to be loyal to him the way I swore to be, the honourable thing for me to do will be to resign but I never had any cause to be disloyal to him. I was totally committed to the work he gave me.

And it may interest you to know that Senator Saraki never for once never interfered with my work. He did not for once ask me what was happening in government. He never put me in that situation and I was never invited to any political gathering of either APC or PDP by him. So, the issue of divided loyalty did not even exist because he realised my situation and was willing to protect me by not involving me in whatever he was doing.

I remember the Petroleum Minister, Mrs. Deziani Allison-Madueke after those 9 ministers were sacked, called me and asked, “Who nominated you for minister?” I said obviously Senator Saraki did but I work for the president, so why are you asking? She said, “No problem but Kwara (that’s what she calls me) wait, I will see you when I return”. I said madam, if the reason you asked me the question is whether I am related to Dr. Saraki in the way you just mentioned, yes I am related to him but if you are asking whether I am part of anything he is doing politically, no I am not. But if anybody want to punish me for somebody else’s perceived offence, there is nothing I could do about that but if you are going to speak to the president on this, I will be glad if you can converse to him the assurance of my loyalty to him but whether I am Dr Saraki’s man, there is no doubt about it. So she went in, came out and said “don’t worry Kwara, you can go, you are fine”.

But the point I seek to make is that it was such a complex situation and some of us were been punished vicariously. Some of my colleagues that were sacked during the PDP crisis were relieved off their duties vicariously as it was not as if they committed any offence.

I am however not in the position to speak for them but for me, it was very clear and I am delighted that Nigerians saw what happened. I thought we were about to achieve something together but I have moved on.

What will you describe as your greatest achievement as a minister?

If people talk about what we achieved, I don’t like to talk about my achievement; I would rather talk about our achievements as a team. Among what we achieved, I will like to point to the obvious ones; we won the Nations Cup after 19 years and qualified for the World Cup. It is easy to think that qualifying for the World Cup is no big deal but if you realise that in all the years of our playing football since independence, we did not qualify for the World Cup until 1994, then you’ll realise that it is a big deal to qualify for the tournament. And if you realise also that we did not qualify for the one held in Germany in 2006 then you will know, it is a big deal to qualify for the World Cup.

Also, we never qualified for the final of the African Championship (CHAN) but we did for the first time and came third. I don’t consider these however, to be my most important achievement. My most important achievement will be that we were able to set up a League Management Committee (LMC) that redefined the way the domestic league is being managed. When I got to office, the league was in total mess; no tittle sponsor, no broadcast sponsorship and all kinds of anarchy. We were able to restore sanity to the league and within the first year, we were able to get a $4 million deal with Supersport and the league came alive.

The second one, I will point out is the introduction of National Youth Games. Before then, there was nothing of such even when we talk about discovering athletes to represent Nigeria, we are still relying on the National Sports Festival and the average age of those competing at the festival is 24-25 years. How then do you discover someone at 25? In today’s world, if you don’t discover an athlete between 10-12 years, then forget it. I think, the National Youth Games, which we held its maiden edition in Abuja is another major achievement.

You spoke about the fact that you brought sanity to the Nigeria Premier League through the introduction of LMC, how has the domestic league fared since you left?

It’s normal, in every reform, you should always expect that there will be resistance and difficulties, because what does reform means? It means changing of the status quo and what brought about the status quo in the first place - people’s interest.

So, when you are bringing about change, you are talking of dismantling people’s interest and they are not going to go away without putting up a fight. When the LMC set out the rules, we discussed it over several weeks and I remember during the U-17 World Cup in Abu Dhabi, we spent several weeks debating the condition for registration for the new season and we came to the conclusion that, that was the only way to go if we must make our league work. In fact, CAF regulation said if you don’t acquire the license to play in the league then you will not play in any continental championship starting from this year. And we said minimum, a club should be able to pay an average of $1,000 monthly to each player. Any club that cannot pay such salary has no business or right playing in the league. N160, 000 for young boys who run around and train every day of the week is not much. If you know the condition of service of some of these players, you will pity them and cry for Nigeria. Some of those boys run around the pitch for 90 minutes on empty stomach and drink only ‘pure water, which is wrong.

We are saying that for you to compete in Nigeria’s elite league, you should be able to pay a thousand dollars, and that was why Nembe City and Giwa FC were initially not registered, which later made LMC postponed the league kick-off. Left to me, I won’t postpone or wave it, because we had earlier agreed that if it was only eight clubs that were able to meet the licensing requirement, the league should go ahead and build from there.

But my vision was that individual investors will be able to buy off some of those clubs that may be considered non-viable. I envision a day that maybe Aliko Dangote will own a club, people like Femi Otedola will own a club and all that. If you look at it as at last season, we had only one private club owned by Senator Bukola Saraki.

My hope was that so many private clubs will come up and we will begin to have players from maybe, South America and Europe, leave their countries to play in our domestic league.

Is there any decision you would have loved to take which was made impossible due to your sudden exit from office?

Not decision actually, but I think we had started building the high performance system because when we went for London 2012, people were saying we did not win any medal. There was no way we would have won any medal because sports had gone so scientific that you cannot just go to the Olympics and hope for a medal. After the Olympics, there is no next level. You can’t go to the Olympics and pray that miracle happens. If you are going to win a gold medal in 100m, people would have known that this person is likely to win based on the time you were running. And if you are going to win silver or bronze in 200m people would have known you, you won’t just come from nowhere and say you want to win 200m gold.

We discovered that every country that has achieved success in sports have done so because they have consistently and deliberately grown as athletes to perform at the highest level and prepare them for podium success. This preparation is based on science and that explains why Mr President approved that we hire a High Performance Director and build our high performance system. We had already built an athlete hostel in Abuja and procured equipment. But I am not sure that has gone on since I left. Some of the feedbacks that I get do not suggest that it is going on well, which is quite unfortunate.

If given another opportunity to serve your country, will you still love to return to the sports ministry?

I cannot say that I will like to go to the sports ministry or not. I am a problem solver and not a trader. I don’t want to work in a place where I will be doing merely business. I want to be able to solve challenges such as that of sports or anywhere else. I got to sports ministry at a time sports was almost completely down and that is the kind of challenge that I love. I am glad and thank Almighty Allah that by the time I was leaving, though we were not there yet, but nobody would have said we were at the same spot we met the ministry. Even when I was commissioner in this state (Kwara), I tried to reform education and that is the kind of challenge I love to take up.

So if I have another opportunity to solve problem in a way that will advance our country and the people, why not?

Talking about building on success, during your tenure, the nation’s national teams and athletes performed incredibly but what would you make of Super Eagles outing in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil?    

The tournament has just started and I don’t think we can begin to write off the team so early. Sometimes the Eagles are slow starters and if you remember what happened in South Africa, during the Nations’ Cup where the team struggled to qualify from the group. We however went ahead to beat Cote D’Ivoire in the quarter final and that was the turning point. I believe the Eagles will do well in subsequent matches, though there are issues that I believe should not have happened in the first place. But I don’t think we should begin to write that yet.

When you came up with the National Youth Games (NYG), what did you set out to achieve?

The thing about National Youth Games is that you can only hope to see the result in the future but I can tell you that many of the children that came out of the tourney are already representing Nigeria in junior competitions. Many of them were discovered from school sports and the Schools’ Sports Federation is a strong organisation with a totally committed leadership. In the past, there was no such preparatory competition for young people but that is the vacuum the NYG is filling but the result can only be noticed in future.

Can you explain the rationale behind your decision to introduce the League Management Committee (LMC) as a management company for the nation’s elite domestic league?

I felt football is big business throughout the world and we can no longer afford to run our clubs like political parties where you hold conventions, congresses and appoint people into offices, which were the basis of the confusion we had in our league then.

I knew what I needed to do then was to change the game by setting up a company to run the league, which gave rise to the LMC. I held discussions with the Chairman of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), Alhaji Aminu Maigari and he quite agreed with me that we needed to change the game, hence the decision to bring on board the League Management Committee, LMC (now League Management Company). The LMC had been licensed to run our domestic league for 90 years by the NFF, which is the sole authority of running football in Nigeria and for any club to compete in the elite division, such club will have to meet up with the requirement of the company.  

It was that decision that made SuperSport put in $4million for Broadcast Right, even Globacom that had earlier described the league as useless and worthless came in to sponsor it.

We knew the moment we set up a well-structured committee, the sponsors will come and that was the same process we were trying to achieve with our basketball league.

Many club owners fumed at your decision to introduce the LMC then with an allegation that the committee was being introduced to run the domestic league due to your personal agenda, how were you able to manage the crisis?

One of the things you must be prepared for when carrying out a reform is that you must be ready for allegations. Now that I am no longer minister, is the domestic league bearing my name or am I benefiting anything from it?

Things have gotten so bad that our people no longer believe people can be so nice to them without a price. When you are totally committed to your work, people believe you have an ulterior motive.

Have you noticed when you travel abroad and someone offers to help you with your luggage, you begin to wonder whether such person has an ulterior motive.

What will you describe as the achievements of Nigeria Academicals Sports Committee (NASCOM) while you were in office?

NASCOM has been there for a while but was being led and single-handedly funded by Chief Segun Odegbami. The poor man was then running around seeking for support without much success, so I felt we should re-jig it, so that was how I brought in some young hands.

Under NASCOM, we were able to launch the Rhythm & Play to discover and bring additional 2million children into sports across the country by marrying entertainment and sports.   

Our first zonal launch was in Nasarawa, where we brought 10 schools together. It was an amazing experience and one of the highest moments of my career in sports. The experience was so interesting, especially when you see children putting three sticks together to do high jump, gathering sand and dust for long jump and holding rope on both ends for high jump.

It was an incredible experience and we had already mapped out strategy to repeat the event in other zones in the country. We had commenced the training of Games Masters and had distributed sports equipment to schools but unfortunately, we could not continue or achieve our target due to my exit from office.

Away from sports, presently the country has been battling with security challenges and things seemed to be getting out of hand, without sounding like an alarmist, it is like the country is living on the edge. In your opinion, what is the way out of the nation’s precarious situation?

No doubt the kind of challenge we are facing at the moment, we have never experienced in the history of our country before. The Boko Haram challenge is a kind of battle that Nigeria was never prepared to fight. The way I see it is that the problem we had with Boko Haram is a problem of definition. We need to know what Boko Haram is and what they represent. If we begin to say that Boko Haram is part of international network of terrorists or the Nigerian franchise of the global terrorist group, then we are totally missing the point.

It may interest you to know that the last three months that I have been out of office, the only thing I have studied is Boko Haram. In fact, I am attending a seminar on Boko Haram in Harvard in August.

It is incredible how much literature Boko Haram has generated and I have studied virtually everything that has been written on the group with an intention to writing my own book.

What is clear to me is that we don’t know what Boko Haram is all about or maybe it was deliberately contrived to make us feel the group was part of Al-Qaeda; no it is not but a domestic problem. Boko Haram is simply a made-in-Nigeria terrorist group. It was never part of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb or part of any other foreign terrorist group.

What is clear to me was that, what eventually became Boko Haram was that people who have doctrinal disagreement, whose interpretation of Islam is different from other people’s interpretation of the religion. And they did not start by saying let’s kill or lynch people, it was almost polemical.

When they say Boko Haram, people interpret it to mean western education is a sin. In fact, the group never called themselves Boko Haram but it was the media that called them that name. When they said western education is a sin, education under the context of what they are saying is no longer a technical but ideological term.     

When they say education, they are not just seeing going to school, they are seeing cultural permissiveness, nudity, capitalism, corruption and everything that is western is encapsulated in what they call western education.

It’s a lot more complicated than that but that is the best way I can put it. What you see as Boko Haram started as vengeance for the killing of Yusuf, their leader. It was basically vengeance because at a time they relocated to the top of the mountain and said they were no longer part of the society and security men went to remove them, Yusuf Muhammed was not part of them, he was in Iran. When he returned, he told them he was no longer going to be part of the violence but several influential people told Mr President all these were part of northern agenda to ‘pull down your government’.

But I think if we had a better definition and interpretation of Boko Haram, we would have dealt with it much longer. People say it is part of Northern agenda to colonise Nigeria but that is not the case. They are just bunch of hooligans terrorising the country for whatever reason.

 It is lot more complicated now because even when we send security to those areas where Boko Haram operates, I’ve seen report where some elders in Borno said government should rather leave them with Boko Haram instead of JTF that is killing more of their people than the terrorist group. I think if we can solve this security problem, if we begin to be more practical in defining what it truly represents, we will be better for it.

Despite all the challenges, I don’t think the nation is in crisis. I think the challenges are isolated situation and we can decouple the Boko Haram challenge from political manoeuvring going on and whatever 2015 portends, I believe 2015 will come and go and Nigeria will not collapse. I believe Nigeria will remain Nigeria and our democracy will not fail.

Still on Boko Haram, what is your impression about the way and manner government is managing the issue of the abducted Chibok girls?

You see, it is a very complex issue. It is easy to say why haven’t government rescued the girls yet. The best thing would have being to avoid the abduction of the girls in the first place.

But the moment they were abducted, it becomes a lot of more complex. May be if we had reacted earlier, it would not have degenerated to this.

Again, my experience tells me one thing; Mr President is just one person and he relies on people who have primary responsibilities for things, to give him advice and when those advices are not forthcoming, the way they should, that could create other kind of challenges.

Having said that I feel very sad because as a parent I know what it means for ones daughter to be kept by some deprived people that you don’t know. For me, I would say let’s keep praying and supporting our security men because we have no  other choice than to continue to support them like we support our football team regardless of how badly they play.

However, I am not comparing the Chibok situation with football; that will mean trivialising it but I was only reiterating the need to keep supporting our security agents and the government because we have nothing to gain if they fail.

A lot of Nigerians have suggested that the federal government should go into negotiation with the leaders of the sect, do you also subscribe to such view?

I think it is possible to negotiate because even the government of America that said they have a philosophy of not negotiating recently went into negotiation. What is more important for me, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, is that Boko Haram days are numbered, it’s only a matter of time.

The most important consideration for me is; what happens after and how do you ensure it does not happen again? I’ll outline a couple of things we need to deal with to ensure that it does not happen again. To start off, we have to tackle education and when I say tackle education, I mean we have to make it worthwhile. One thing I feel very strongly about and pray that I am wrong is that at the moment, when we talk about recruitment of people for Boko Haram, where do you look? We look at the streets; we say they are jobless people on the streets that are hired to join Boko Haram. I, however, have a very strong fear that if we’re not very careful, the future of fundamentalism will come from the campuses. This is because when you have several youths who have acquired education and whose education have no meaning and unlikely to improve their situation in life, it takes one person to come out to tell them that the system has been rooted against them and is able to find a religion to anchor for his disaffection. When I was in the University, we had MSS, which is for the Muslim students and we were just doing our thing. Now I could see an increase in the number of students coming back from the University with long beards and three quarter trousers, taught not to bow down for their parents and all that. I think there is a challenge in that and we need to address our education, we need to make it worthwhile.

Also, all over the North, we have hundreds of millions of children in Madrasat where they learn Quran and may be, the Hadith. We have to make this system economically viable for them. The schools in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or other Islamic countries teach their students in Arabic and I believe strongly that we can make Madrasat the pathway to living a fulfilled career. It is possible for us to look at the curriculum. When I was the Commissioner for Education in Kwara State, we passed a law for establishment of Islamic Education Board and we went to the National Assembly for the public hearing. Some Christians alleged then that we were funding Islam with the state’s money and I replied, it is not a case of using your money to fund Islam but when these children that will be enrolled in the schools have nothing to do; they will become terror to the society, and will spare neither Christians nor Muslims. It is enlightening and not self-interest for all of us to join hands together to give those children life. They’ve chosen to go to Madrasat and that is legitimate. The fact that we do not attach the word Christian to western education does not make it less Christians’ in value and orientation. So, if we have people who want to subscribe to Islamic education, the only thing we can do is ensure that they do not become a menace to the society by providing them the platform to live a fulfilling life.

The third one is that Islamic scholars and those who have moral and intellectual credentials must speak out on behalf of Islam. I think one thing we have done is that we have abandoned the definition of Islam to people who want to use the religion to unleash violence on people. Theologists from Saudi Arabia have strongly come out to condemn Boko Haram and have said this is not Islam; however, scholars in the country must come out to say this is not what Islam preaches. Also our Christian counterparts, especially those who represent the elite of the Christians, should stop seeing an Islamic agenda as a means to convert every Christian in Nigeria, in the activities of some hoodlums who are creating trouble. We should stop being paranoid in reacting to anything branded Islam. This Boko Haram people who are killing citizens are criminals, nothing more than that. They are only using the name of Islam to perpetrate their crime. I

am from Kwara and I can’t see a situation of anyone trying to convert anybody to another religion in the state. I have a sister that is married to a Christian, so who can I forcefully convert? So, these are part of the problems, we have to tackle head on.    

You have been dubbed the best Nigerian Sports Minister ever, how ‘ll you react to this?  

I have spoken earlier on how I felt after my sack but the way Nigerians reacted gave me hope and made me conclude that no matter what happened Nigeria is worth serving! And that if you have the opportunity to serve the country, you need to put in your best. I am proud to be a Nigerian judging by the way Nigerians reacted to my exit from office.

What have you been doing since you left office and what is your plan for the future?

I’ve told you what I have been doing. Aside from reading literatures on Boko Haram, I learned boxing, run 4km daily and have read virtually all the books I had wanted to read. Again, all this while, I used to say that I was not a politician because the responsibilities that I had then required such definition of myself. But now that I am free from such encumbrance, I can tell you that I am a full time politician and a card carrying member of the All Progressives Congress (APC). I’ll openly join the party at the appropriate time that’ll be determined by my leader. I have been in public service for 11 years and if anything, the way I have exited my last assignment shows that politics is everything, no matter how technically competent you have to be rooted in politics. What used to happen is the people who play the game as politicians decide what happens, then pass it on to people like us who say we are technocrats, to implement. I want to continue to solve problems and be part of delivering the expectations of Nigerians whenever I am given the opportunity. I also believe that what determines whether any policy fails or succeed depends on how the politics of it is managed and to even decide what gets on the agenda is political. For example, the decision to put sports high on the agenda of government is political and not technocrat. So, the decision of what gets escalated is political. I think the people like us have to be in the heart of it and we can bring politics in the service of development. It is almost pejorative to say you’re a politician. When people who are credible don’t show interest in politics, then people who are less endowed will continue to occupy those offices. For instance, if you say I am not a politician and you go into business and one untutored fellow who does not believe anyone is better than him could make a statement or decision to ruin your business overnight.

If there is one lesson I have learnt in my 11 years of public service, it is that politics determines everything. At this point in my life, I want to be part of the decision making and that process that determines what gets on the agenda. By nature of my upbringing, I know what it means to be poor. I used to joke that I and poverty went to the same Primary and Secondary School, so, I know what it means to be poor and what it takes to get the issue of poverty on the political agenda. I know how that decision is being made and carefully negotiated. And that was why I said moving forward, if you ask me what is my occupation? I will tell you I am a politician.