Chief John Dara, a PDP chieftain in Kwara State and a delegate to the National Conference was special assistant to General Theophilus Danjuma. The 2011 presidential candidate of the deregistered National Transformation Party (NTP) speaks on the outcome of the Conference and other issues. Excerpts:

You have indicated interest in contesting as governor of Kwara, why do you want to run?

I like to see myself as a man on a mission in politics. I am not driven by ambition, I am driven by areas where I perceive that there is need and I see myself as one of the best materials to solve those problems. I look at Kwara, my state, and I feel sorry because of what we have been having for almost 40 years, mediocrity being glorified as governance. I believe the time to make the state a model and pacesetter in good governance has come and I see myself as the man who will bring about that kind of change when it is time. The people of Kwara State will know that the game changer has come.

Lots of people have made reference to the leadership deficit in Nigeria, where do you think we got things wrong?

I have always felt that our system has not worked well enough. Some will say the problem is quality of leadership, others will say the fault is in the structures we are operating. I am one of those who believe that from the colonial times, there were some deliberate lopsidedness in the balance of power; there were injustice and some of these were sustained or even amplified by the military and this has created a lot of distrust in the nation.

This is why we have this constant agitation for restructuring, constant agitation for change in the Constitution. However, I believe in the two views that the operators of the Constitution are as critical as the quality of the Constitution itself. To address the two problems of leadership and Constitution, there have been demands for sovereign national conference and Obasanjo had to give in to those demands and convened what we called the National Political Reform Conference. The recommendations were far-reaching and would have addressed a lot of issues unfortunately, because the report was compromised with third term agenda, it ended up not being implemented.

So the demands for conference that will come up with implementable recommendations continued and initially President Goodluck Jonathan was reluctant especially because some of the people calling for the conference were emphasizing the need for it to be sovereign. They felt that the decisions of the Conference will be subject to modification by the people of Nigeria. Therefore, they want the Conference to be independent of the existing governmental structures. But legally and technically, making the Conference sovereign would have meant that the sovereignty of the people is transferred to the conference and whatever decision taken by the conference would have been final and binding without the people having a need to even authenticate it again.

President Jonathan wisely avoided the principle of sovereignty. He constituted what he simply called national conference and the objective is to address every issue that we felt had undermined the progress of Nigeria; that has retarded the growth of Nigeria; that has slowed down the pace and progress of Nigeria. I think he did a very good job in making sure that the conference was as representative as possible. There are people who say the conference delegates were not elected, but they were actually elected officials of various entities that were a reflection of pluralism of Nigeria. For instance each of the six geo-political zones was called upon to produce representatives of the various ethnic nationalities as delegates and I can speak about the Middle Belt as various ethnic nationalities in the Middle Belt were called upon to send names of their representatives. In fact, we all converged on Jos, Plateau State and did a sorting out until everybody was satisfied. The same thing happened to Ohaneze, Afenifere and various interest groups, many of the professional organizations were also products of election. If it had been an INEC conducted political election, what would have happened is that most of the civil society groups, professional bodies would not have been represented and the quality of those who would have emerged would probably make it less credible. It was a clear indication that Nigerians were enthusiastic about the conference and it was a highly representative one.

We also believe that the outcome is a reflection of the desires and yearnings of the people of the country. There were sections of the country that may find one aspect of the decisions not favourable to them, but it is about give and take.

No region of the country got what it wanted and every region went away with something. To that extent I think it was a remarkable and successful conference.

Why was the Conference unable to reach an agreeable position on derivation principle? Why hand it over to the presidency?

I think the press has misrepresented the decision of the Conference on derivation. It is not out of mischief but a clear misunderstanding of what the Conference of that nature is all about. From the beginning, some of us have confided in the media to expect a lot of compromises; that things may not turn out to be in the precise terms that delegates who came with previous agenda wanted it to be. If those people want 100 percent of the things on the table that means others will have zero percent. We have to balance the various conflicting interests.

But let me point out that the conference succeeded in taking 98 if not 99 percent of the issues that were presented before it.

On derivation, there was a general consensus at the conference that the current 13 percent is not adequate and it should be increased. The problem was by how much. While some wanted it to be increased by one percent others wanted it to be increased by as much as 37 percent to make it 50 percent.

During the course of the debate, we set apart a whole day to discuss how the outcome of the conference will be implemented. And the overwhelming majority settled for the use of referendum. Many of us felt that once you take the set of recommendations to the National Assembly, the process in the NASS is cumbersome and for the next ten years, even with the best of intention they may not succeed in getting them implemented. But there is a way round it and Nigerians have been very good in finding creative solutions to their problems.

The Conference recommended that its report should be taken to the people of Nigeria via a referendum. It is based on the principle as enshrined in our constitution that sovereignty belongs to the people and every organ of government derives its legitimacy from the will of the people. That is, the sovereignty of the people cannot be curtailed by law neither can it be undermined by even absence of law. It is given. But if you go round the NASS first then you would have dumped it in a dead sea; there are three aspects of the recommendations. They include those that require constitutional changes; those that require legislation and policy and administrative changes.

It is not correct to say that the recommendations of past conferences in the country were not implemented at all. Those that required executive action most of them have often been implemented. It is just a pronouncement by the President but because it is not a product of legislation, people do not know that it is a product of a previous conference.