Obong Victor Attah was the Executive Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria, from 1999 to 2007, during which period he earned a public acclaim for financial probity and exemplary accountability in addition to his unimpeachable professional integrity.
In an exclusive interview he granted Aliu Akoshile, CEO/Editor-in-Chief of NatureNews, in Uyo, the renowned architect and consummate farmer, who turned 85 years on November 20, speaks about how he laid the solid foundation of infrastructural development in Akwa Ibom state, green and sustainable environment, and challenges of food security in Nigeria. Excerpts:
NatureNews: When you served as Governor of Akwa Ibom State over 15 years ago, the issue of climate change wasn’t topical in Nigeria. How did you conceive of the landmark projects, such as the Ibom Icon Hotel, that have become the signposts of green environment in the state?
Obong Attah: Well, you know, as a town planner, in our profession, we are told to value green spaces. Even as an architect and a landscape architect, I consider the outdoor as important as the indoor. The space outside is just as important as the space inside the house because if you take the best building and plant it in an environment that is not salubrious, it won’t look as elegant as it ought to be; and it won’t be as healthy to live in as it ought to be.
So, long before I became governor, and I had no idea that I was going to be governor, we had the rare privilege as a firm of being commissioned by Colonel Tunde Ogbeha (then Military Administrator of Akwa Ibom state) to do a masterplan for the city of Uyo. As you would have observed, Uyo is among the very few cities, if not the only one, in Nigerian that are deliberately planned for ease of traffic with open spaces. And these open spaces when I talk about it, I feel saddened by Nigerian administrators. I say this because when you refer to London in some of the gatherings that we have – with its small pocket parks, you know, with dwarf fence around little greens, and so on – they say, oh that’s Europe! But I went to Nairobi and at lunchtime, you see all the people from government and private offices filled up the parks sunning themselves.
We must emphasise the need for recreation. It is not always that we are going to be killing ourselves, busy doing one thing or another. Recreation is critically important, and you recreate outdoors, and these open spaces are used for that.
NatureNews: So, you were intentional in greening the city.
Obong Attah: Oh yes, we are taught in science that the trees take in the carbon dioxide and give us the oxygen. So there must be a certain ratio when you have a population, which I observed in China in some of their cities. The fog sometimes cover a whole city to the extent that they have to build covered football fields so that they can enjoy their match without the polluted air. We certainly don’t want that. But I must say that if you give me this opportunity as I had in Uyo, I will apply this green concept to the city of Abuja. And we must thank (FCT Minister, Nyesom) Wike for insisting that Abuja masterplan must be restored, though to a very large extent, it’s a bit too late. So many of what was meant to be open spaces in Abuja has been destroyed or taken over by land grabbers. I can only call them that.
Again, some of those FCDA officials are just greedy about selling lands, and because there’s a shortage, people will buy and build whatever they want to build on what was meant to be a green space. If you don’t balance the ratio of open spaces and built areas, you will end up with polluted cities and polluted environments that are just not healthy but inhabitable. That’s really the truth.
So, it’s not just the beauty of the house and so on, but the trees, the landscape, are equally important. Whoever can not relate to nature must be dead inside. You know anybody with any kind of spirit must feel close to nature and love water, trees and things like that. It is only natural that we should feel that way. And for us to deliberately destroy the green areas in our cities is criminal.
NatureNews: If you were to evaluate your successors in office, is what you see today still in line with your vision for the state?
Obong Attah: Quite a lot of it is still following the masterplan, but any plan has to be interpreted. There are certain things I see on the highways, and I will discuss this with the governor (Pastor Umo Eno). For instance, you see some of the highways, yes. But those highways were meant to be tree lined. I don’t see the trees lining those highways. Even the median between both sides of the roads is not planted up. Those were meant to be planted up so that there is this green effect and so on. But in the same token, I can show you parts of Port Harcourt where you really have those planted medians and trees, but the leaves are not green. The leaves are black because of soot that is coming down. So you must control the nature of the industries that they have in certain areas.
And one striking thing that happened many years ago. There was a cement factory called CALCEMCO, Calabar Cement Company. It was sited by the water, but the wind direction was coming off the sea into the town, so all the soot that was coming out from there was being blown into town. And clearly medically, and this is scientific, there was a rise in asthma cases by about 15 per cent because of this soot. So when you are sitting industries, you have to think of the wind direction so it blows all the soot and pollution away from the population, not into where people live. People don’t pay attention to that anymore.
Take even this house where we are sitting now; we were taught in my days, the way we taught architecture, site your kitchen in certain location because not everybody will have air-conditioned kitchen. You don’t want the wind to come and blow the kitchen smells and cooking into your house. It should blow out. People don’t give consideration to that anymore. You can enlarge that into the city. It is the same principle. Put all these pollutants where the wind will blow them out into the open rather than into where the people live or work. Nobody considers that anymore in town planning, and the worst aspect is that land value has gone up so much that people are selling every little square metre of land meant to be for open space. That, for me, is criminal.
NatureNews: To what will you attribute these lapses in the built environment, lack of policy or non enforcement…?
Obong Attah: (Cuts in) In many instances, the next house is only one metre away from you. So you can’t even quarrel with your wife, your neighbours will know (laughs).
Lack of policy enforcement where there happens to be policy. There are many places where, in fact, there are policies, but the enforcement is not there. And those who have breached it are not penalised. So again, I have to make reference to Wike because he has demolished a few houses, and people are shouting. But some of these houses were marked ‘X’, but the developers ignored the ‘X’ mark. They continued to build, thinking that he would not enforce the policy. He has come. He is enforcing the policy. So what has he done wrong? He is helping to clean up the environment, and he is absolutely correct.
NatureNews: Given people’s attitude to environmental laws, how do we achieve sustainable Eco-Habitat in Nigeria?
Obong Attah: To get to the point where we are going to build green houses will take a while. We have to wean ourselves from what we are used to now and get into building houses that don’t consume so much electricity, that don’t pollute the air so much, and things like that. Even today, try and persuade people, which is common place now in several places, to separate their garbage: glass from plastics, from paper and so on, so that you can recycle these ones. It is difficult to even persuade people to do that. So that is why I’m saying it’s going to take us a long while to get to the point where we say we are building green houses.
But we should learn a lesson from those old native dwellings that we had. Look at the thickness of a mud house, for instance, in the North. The house will absorb all the heat in the day and then radiate it inside the evening when it is cold. We don’t do that anymore. Some people don’t even want to use 9-inch concrete blocks. They will use 6 inches… we are just killing the environment, killing ourselves because when we live in an unhealthy environment, we are not helping ourselves.
So we have to begin to learn lessons, and the client has to understand that everything is not a matter of making money out of every square metre of space. There has to be some leftover for green open activities.
NatureNews: How can the Federal Capital Territory reclaim its original plan of a green city with the city centre.
Obong Attah: I strongly recommend that we go back and look at what Dr. Modibbo (former FCT Minister, Aliyu) had started that was wrongly terminated. He was trying to create a city centre for Abuja, but the plan was aborted.
It is very unfortunate because you can not look at Abuja and say, “Oh, that is the city centre.” In other places, you will easily find the city centre within the city, and I can mention some. In New York, you will see the 5th. Avenue and Time Square. London has its Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus. In Paris you will find the Avenue des Champs Elysse. Even Rome has its Spanish Steps while Barcelona has the Las Ramblas.
There is a story, I don’t know whether it is apocryphal or it is true. When (Colonel Raji) Rasaki became the governor of Lagos state and he was flying in a helicopter. He saw this open land in Ikoyi and said, “Ah, call my commissioner for lands. There is a big open land here we can cut and make houses.” And then I understand that (Brig. Mobolaji) Johnson and a few others, even though they are retired, put on their uniform and said: You young man, you see this uniform, we wore it before you! That open space is our golf course. If you touch it, we will deal with you! But people just feel that there should be no open space. Why should there not be open spaces. We need those open spaces in the city and we need congregational places like Town Square, like where everybody will go and mingle, you know. We need them in every city. But more than anything, let them stop cutting up existing open areas and making them into building plots.
For instance, Abuja was supposed to have six different districts, and they’ve only developed Asokoro and Maitama. What about the others? Just put a little money, put infrastructure, put up lights, and let people begin to move into these places. The quality is just as good as what is in Asokoro and Maitama. It depends on what you provide there. But we just feel that everybody must come and congest because we have not expanded. We should expand and create more building possibilities and more building plots for people.
NatureNews: Talking about the restoration of the Abuja Master Plan, some of the displaced people have alleged that the government did not give them alternative locations before being displaced. Are there things the government could do as a humanitarian gesture to support the people?
Obong Attah: First of all, that’s why I say first of all, the problem is more than that of the administration of policy. If policy was properly administered, there won’t have been these illegal structures. They wouldn’t have been allowed to exist. But I remember at the time I was living in New York, New Jersey put out a notice that they are not prepared to accept any more inflow into their city because the infrastructure can’t contain it. We are not disciplined enough. People just come and do whatever they like, and we allow them. We are not disciplined enough. If you have not put in roads, you have not put in water, you should not allow people to come and build as they please then you come and tell them illegal structure. No. There should be progression. We just don’t execute advance planning. We should plan in advance, make the provision, then people will come in, and there will be none of these happening.
NatureNews: The new minister has been there for barely six months. What is your general assessment of his approach, especially on the issues of beautification and reclamation?
Obong Attah: I am not going to talk about the problem, but I can say he is doing well. Anybody who can restore the integrity of that master plan is doing well. Whether people like the approach or not is a different thing, but he is doing very well because some things that happened in Abuja should never have happened in the first instance.
NatureNews: Apart from your professional calling as an architect, you are also a large-scale farmer. How can Nigeria overcome the challenges confronting agric value chain and food security.
Obong Attah: The problem cuts across not only agriculture but several other areas of our endeavours in this country. The lack of research and development (R&D) is our major problem. I’m eating these strawberries now, and if I don’t finish them in the next two days, they will spoil. But everywhere else, they have managed to develop means of preserving it so that it doesn’t spoil, or they turn it into something else that would last longer. We allow our farm produce to just rot and spoil.
Somebody gave me statistics the other day. There is a small country with a smaller population that can not consume as much cassava as we do. Yet they produce like one quarter of the cassava we produce and exporting 90 per cent more than we do. You remember there was the issue of some exported yams that were returned by the importers because they were all bad.
Simple method of preservation to transport the yam we will not learn. Our fish that we catch, we don’t know how to preserve it, how to tine it, how to smoke it or whatever. We just believe in eating a day, and if it’s not finished that day, it spoils. We must put money into research and development in agriculture. We must find a way to fight those diseases so that the plants will be healthy and produce properly. Luckily for us too, we are not using so many chemicals as they use abroad. So our food is even preferred.
These strawberries I’m eating are superior in flavour and taste to what you get in Europe. So, if we find a way of preserving and exporting them, they will be consumed sooner than they will eat their own. And that is the truth. Same with carrots, ginger, some of our melons, and even the Irish potatoes. They call it Irish potato, but we grow better Irish potatoes than they grow in Ireland. But we just need to find ways to preserve our farm produce and package them.
Packaging is quite important so that it becomes attractive to the people as there’s always competition. However good your product is, somebody might prefer what looks better than yours even though it may not be nearly as good. So research and development will help our agriculture. When we do that, we will have clear methods of preservation. We have to preserve and begin to export.
NatureNews: People often cite our colonial experience to justify the nation’s inability to achieve food sufficiency. Is this a correct approach to the challenges.
Obong Attah: There is a story that is coming out in my biography that is about my father when he returned from the US. By the way, you know (Mr. Yemi) Cardoso is the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. One of his earlier relations was the first person in Nigeria to have a university degree in agriculture. My father was the second to get a university degree in agriculture, but he went on to become the first to get a master’s degree in agriculture. He came back here with evidence and practically demonstrated how Nigeria can feed the rest of Africa with rice. But the British colonialists suppressed it because they had just established the East Indian company with heavy investment, and they knew that if they allow this Bassey Attah to go ahead with the theory and produce rice, their investment in India will fail. That is why India produces more rice than we do.
So after that, the colonialists started saying, “Can’t we now begin to produce rice the way it should be produced scientifically?” We still have tools and all kinds of farming equipment that are required. But we don’t take pride in what we produce. We have to take pride in what we have, too. That (Ibom Icon) hotel, anywhere in the world, will be rated as a very superior resort. I’ve worked in Britain, I’ve worked in America, and I’ve worked in West Indies. In the West Indies, we were merely doing hospitality facilities, hotels, and things like that, and I know what it takes people. People talk about oh, beaches. I will not put my money on beaches because our beaches do not compare favourably with beaches around the world.
When you see a blue sea in the Mediterranean, when you see a blue sea in the Caribbean, nobody will leave that to come and see something less breathtaking. And interestingly enough, the months that the average people in Europe, which is summer month, call holiday is our heavy rain month. So, who is coming to sit at the beach with an umbrella over his head. You know, they go where there is dry weather during the summer. So if we do a little bit of research, we will know which one we have comparative advantage in and then capitalise on those ones.
NatureNews: Does it mean we can not get value out of tourism in Nigeria, especially marine tourism, with our long coastline stretching from Lagos to Niger Delta?
Obong Attah: I hope what I said did not give you the impression that we can not capitalise on tourism. We can. But we have to select what type of tourism will be of attraction to people. We can do internal tourism, which is good, but to attract people from outside, the sites have to look better than other options.
Nobody is going to risk coming here if there is no security. However cheap we may be, and believe me, as I said, may be water and beaches are not our greatest assets when you look at what other parts of the world are offering. You know what I mean. So we look for other means. I’m sure in those places (East Africa), I’ve been to some of those safaris in Kenya. They are not based on water but the forest. Even in South Africa, Kruger Park, and all those kinds of places are forests with animals. But our own national park, I was astounded to hear the number of national parks that we have in Nigeria. But nobody has developed them, and the poaching may be even the officials encourage it, may be.
NatureNews: Talking about improving our agricultural yield, people will say we have many research institutes in Ibadan, in…
Obong Attah: (cuts in) Are they funded? Are they doing the work? Is there motivation, and are we rewarding people who are able to come up with results? And were they coming up with results that help? If they were, we would have seen the impact in greater export, greater yields. For me, the best known is IITA because they came up with different varieties of maize, different varieties of cassava, and things like that.
If others could bring out even new varieties of cereal. Yes, there are many research institutes like you said, but are they yielding results?
NatureNews: Apart from the challenge of R&D, how can the nation confront climate change impacts such as flood and irregular rainfall?
Obong Attah: We know the areas that are being flooded, and we know what we should do. Let me give you a very simple example. I was very young when my father was farming in Cameroon but I remember that after so many rows of bananas he will plant wind breaks, those are trees that will resist the wind so that the wind doesn’t come and blow down your bananas stems. You know banana stem is not very strong. So they call it wind breaks. Even that we don’t do. Somebody had to do small research to find out if you put wind breaks, you can stop the wind from blowing down your banana. But here, oh, that wind came and destroyed all my bananas, you know. Find out, the solution is there. But whether the people will even accept the solution, I don’t know. But discipline is important and knowing what to do. So we just have to take what we do seriously and, may be, be a bit more dependent on it and then we know that if we don’t do this thing correctly we won’t have the kind of good life that we would like to have. Then we begin to do them correctly and properly, may be.
NatureNews: The price of food stuff has been going through the roof despite the governments huge investment in agriculture. Do you think Nigeria can attain food sufficiency?
Obong Attah: If we allow the kind of federation that we ought to have and stop depending on sharing money from only one commodity. We have had this one commodity for how many years now, decades, and in the meantime our population has almost doubled but the volume of money coming out of this oil, the one commodity has remained constant, you keep sharing it, it keeps becoming smaller per capita. How can it sustain us. And people have lost initiative. You go to the farm, and you are not sure you will come back because bandits and other people are there to kill you if you don’t pay tax to them. So, how can anybody deceive us in this circumstance. How can we not suffer food shortages.
And then the young people are not encouraged, you don’t give electricity, the basics of life so people don’t want to continue to live in primitive conditions so they move to the cities. I don’t want to blame them, but why can’t we have electricity in Nigeria for goodness sake? Same with water. Go to the remotest places in other countries, you will find toilets, you will find running water, you will find electricity because they know people need them.
But here, just get out of this city the next village you don’t see water, you don’t see electricity, so people don’t stay in the villages anymore. So, even the population that is trying to feed us may be six people in the village used to feed may be twenty people in the city. Now, two people in the village are feeding a hundred people. How can they feed us. They can’t. We have to reverse it.
NatureNews: If lack of infrastructure is a major hindrance to food production in Nigeria, how did you overcome this as a big-time pineapple farmer?
Obong Attah: If you know the story of my pineapple farm, you will pity me. Because the land is there, I can’t just leave it, so I divided half of it into palm and half of it into rubber. But I wanted to do something more exotic. I wanted to do something more different, you know. I spent time in Thika. You know, Thika is just one hour out of Nairobi. That’s where Del Monte has its largest pineapple operations in the whole world. I spent time there to study before I came back and did what I was doing, but you can’t achieve the same result here because of a lack of facilities. You produce, you must provide the roads to transport your pineapple otherwise they’ll perish. How can a country be like that?
NatureNews: You also talked about the youth and farming. Why do you think they are not showing enough interest?
Obong Attah: They can not show enough interest because there is nothing there to interest them. We must make it interesting for them and when they show interest we must make it possible for them to live reasonable standard of life. Basic infrastructure, I have said, water and electricity. So why do you want to blame them for running to the city when the basic things of life are not there in the village. We have to get a better concept of federalism, we have to get better government that will provide for the people so that those who want to do agriculture will do and be comfortable doing agriculture because there’s money in it. And those who want to go into something else in the city will go into something else in the city. Land is one of the big assets now. It will not always be so. So we must take advantage of it now while it is still there.