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British High

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While the rest of us, foreigners and indigenes alike, living daily in fear of armed robbers (those sons of guns that have turned the most stout-hearted of us into something of a jelly-fish with their blood-chilling screams and nocturnal operations), Richard Gozney, the British high Commissioner to Nigeria, says that armed robbery attack is the least of his worries.

Go hide under your children’s bed or wife’s cupboard if you like. One man you will not see doing that with you or voting with his legs for that matter is Gozney. If this man is not worried about armed robbers from whose hands we, experts and expatriates, are daily praying to Almighty God to deliver us, what then is his own worry? Potholes.

“When you are not concentrating fully on your driving, you stand the danger of running into unexpected potholes”, he explains, in an exclusive interview with Weekly Spectator in Lagos on Wednesday. “When you are going at about 100 km per hour, that is the greatest danger. I am more worried about potholes than I am worried about armed robbers.”

Another issue featuring prominently in the list of his worries is the legal challenge that will unravel at the ongoing sittings of election tribunals probing the massive fraud that characterized the 2007 general elections. His source of worry, he says, stems from the concern that no undue political pressure or intimidation should be piled on the members of the tribunals.

Consequently, the High Commissioner has conveyed his fear to the President-elect, Umar Shehu Yar’Adua, who will be taking over the rein of government in two days time, on Tuesday, May 29. “We’ve made it known to President Yar’ Adua that the election tribunals must be allowed to do their job properly,” says Gozney. “Let’s see what they will come up with.”

In this interview, the envoy also speaks on a subject that is very dear to the heart of every Nigerian who has had the misfortune of being denied the British visa. Just what in the world is happening in the visa section of the British High Commission? If that is your question, His Excellency, Richard Gozney, has all the answer. Excerpts:

Your Excellency, what informed the introduction of biometric data collection system (i.e. finger scans and digital photographs) into your visa procurement procedure?
It is something we are doing worldwide to protect an individual’s identity, facilitate future entry to the UK and to combat visa fraud and abuse of the UK’s immigration and asylum systems. All over the world, any national that needs visa to come and visit UK is going to do electronic digital fingerprinting. And the reason for this is quite simple: it is a kind of counter-terrorism measure.

Arising from 911?
Yes, from 911 and global security situation generally. There are some parts of the world where terrorism appears to be on the increase. But it does not apply to Nigeria. Counter-terrorism is not the driving force behind the directive here. But we do insist that since we are under the same worldwide counter-terrorism ruling, we need to take fingerprinting electronically. A lot of people here are used to it because the United States has been doing it for quite sometime now. This is quite similar, except that in our case, we have five dedicated visa application centres around Nigeria: two in Lagos, one in Abuja, one in Ibadan and one in Port Harcourt.

By the new arrangement, it means a potential traveller or visitor to the United Kingdom must be physically present at any of our visa application centres to be served. It is no longer possible for people to send their drivers, protocol officers or representatives to process their application for the simple reason that you can’t send a driver or protocol officer with your fingerprint. We recognise some inconveniences for people here but we do hope we could minimize the time it takes to go through the process. We do hope the whole procedure will not take more than five minutes.

There is this impression out there that the British High Commission in Nigeria is delighted in refusing visa than granting it. Is it much easier to grant than to refuse visa?
With due respect, that is not true. As a matter of fact, we sometimes grant more visas than we refuse. Where we refuse, we give reasons for refusal, and we have an appeal tribunal in the UK that those refused can appeal to. And it costs us more to attend to an appeal than issue visa. Visa is refused when the documents which a potential traveller or visitor to the UK presents to the visa center do not convince us that the individual is going for the stated reason or if we are convinced that if he went, he won’t return. Many people come to our visa centres with false documentation like bank statements of an uncle or cousin or brother.

We also find that some people in this country have passports signed in different names and opened in different applications. People think being refused visa automatically knocks you out or puts you at a disadvantage. Therefore, rather than appeal, they throw the passport away and obtain a new one. That makes things a bit difficult because every application now goes with a set of fingerprints. What happens is, as soon as new application for visa is received and keyed into the system, oftentimes it will show that the applicant has previously been refused visa.

Our computer will show that it is the same person. So, what were doing with the biometric identification process is marrying and keeping glued to each other someone’s real identity and his/her professed identities.
The reason I asked the question is because of the impression out there that, maybe, the biometric data collection system is a peculiar arrangement for Nigerians.

No, it is worldwide. We are already doing it in countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. We have done so in the last couple of years in nine countries in East Africa. And, in Pakistan as well. In other words, with some of our biggest customers.

Is it peculiar to the Third World countries?
It has absolutely nothing directly to do with Nigeria or even the Third World. It is a global operation; it is part of the government’s five-year immigration/asylum strategy. For example, if an American is going to stay in Britain for not more than six months, he doesn’t need a visa. But if he wants to stay for more than six months, he needs a visa. And when he applies for a visa, he will have to give his fingerprint as well. So, it is not peculiar to Third World countries.
There is also the general impression out there that the British High Commission, first of all, refuses Nigerians visa before considering granting it. Why? And how true is this?
No, Nigeria does not have the highest refusal rate in the world. I am not going to name the country.

But it is one of the highest?
Yes, it is one of the highest. I think the reason is because Nigerians are very ingenuous. We’ve seen enormous number of false bank statements. We’ve seen far too many letters from universities and colleges, which don’t really exist in Britain. If hundred percent of the applicants give good convincing cases that they will do what they said, then we will give hundred percent of the visas. That means, we will be issuing about 20,000 visas per month. At the moment, we give about 10,000 of the 20,000. And, it is a big increase over what obtained three years ago before we started improving the system (a big credit to the team, led by Chris Dix, Director Africa, UK Visas, who have done it). In the past, we were issuing about 7,000 visas to applicants, now we give about 10,000 per month.

Does a virgin passport put a potential traveller at a peculiar disadvantage?
No. We have a lot of cases of people coming to us with virgin passport and saying we had a passport but it was lost or stolen. Now, I know that there are a lot of people who genuinely lost their passports or have their passports stolen. But there are also too many people who were refused visa by us and who felt ‘I better get a new passport and tell them I lost the other one or had it stolen’. But it doesn’t work because we have your name on computer and the moment we type in your name, it will come up as someone we had refused to issue with visa before. In fact, when some people go through the application form and get to the question that says: ‘have you ever been refused a visa application to UK before?’ Too many of them feel, ‘if I admit that I have, that means they won’t let me in’. But, in fact, the opposite is true. If they declare that they had never been refused whereas they had been refused, we will spot it out and that sets us in a wrong direction in terms of saying yes or no. A small lie or a white lie, if you like, but it is enough to raise up suspicion and then we wonder where else you are being truthful or not. It is a kind of disincentive. One thing is clear, however: if you had been refused a visa in the past, admit it because we have given visa to a lot of people who had been refused visa in the past but whose circumstances have changed.

What are the other flaws that are prevalent in Nigerian applicants, apart from the issue of false bank statements and the like?
We know that public servants are paid moderate income in this country, but there are a lot of people who obtain money through other ways. Sometimes, somebody who is on a very low wage will say he is going to take his wife and children on a holiday to Britain for three weeks. The cost will be more than their annual salary. We say, how is this likely? If that is their real income, will they be spending a year’s salary or more going to Britain for a holiday? Or does it actually mean that after the huge expenses, they are likely to want to stay there? And, they are making this huge expense because they are going to get into Britain and then stay there. That may be the case. Or there may be other source of income and they are a bit shy about telling us about that other source of income and, in fact they are much richer than their basic public service salary would suggest. But if that is the case, they must own up. We are not going to give their files to Mr. Ribadu. We never give applicants’ files to anyone outside the British system. I would say we have fifty cases a day in Lagos alone that will fit that scenario.
I wonder what informed the location of your offices in Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Port Harcourt and none in the North.
People could lodge in their applications with UPS in Kano, Kaduna, Enugu, Warri, Benin City. The numbers in those centres are too small to justify dedicated centres and the equipment that goes with them for a fingerprint. The average number of visas processed in Kaduna, is nine per day and in Kano, six per day. Compare that with the number that we have in our other offices, Lagos, Ikeja-400 per day; Victoria Island-400 per day; Abuja-over 200 every day; Port Harcourt and Ibadan-82 per day respectively. We have to strike a balance between the number of applications and their costs of operations because the more offices we have, the higher the cost of our operations. I wish to say that Lagos is the only city in the world where the UK visa operations has two application centres because of the population and the number of applicants).
Talking about the visa fees, those that are refused visas often don’t get a refund of their money….
No, they don’t get any refund

Why?
That is for the simple reason that British Parliament has said visa operation must pay for itself. It doesn’t make a profit; it doesn’t make a loss. That means that visa fees have to pay for all these expenses running these services. Also, the fact that you guess you have to pay fees, which you will lose if you are refused, is a bit of disincentive to those who will want to just try it on and on. If they know they will get a refund, there will be no end to their trying it on. It is not the ambassadors that decided that it was going to be so but the parliament. They say all over the world, we have a lot of people wanting to come to Britain. That’s fine, that’s good, they said, but we are not going to pay for these operations. It should be self-financing and that has been the framework we’ve worked with for several years now.
You have been in Nigeria for over three years now?
Yes

What is your frank assessment of Nigeria as a country?
You’ve got very lively, very dynamic country. And without wishing to offend my many friends in East Africa and Southern Africa, I had lived in both zones; there is the greatest confidence here in this part of West Africa than you find there for whatever reason. Nigerians are very easy to engage, to get to know. They are open. They are very frank. They are articulate. They will tell you if they disagree with you in as much as they will tell you if they agree with you. In that case, it is a very stimulating place for a foreigner to work, for diplomats as well as for business people.

What about the difficulties you’ve encountered in the course of your job?
The same difficulties as Nigerians do. We get frustrated when the light goes off. And it places a great burden on us. You have to provide generators and diesel to power them. We get frustrated with the ‘go-slows’ or traffic jam. We get frustrated about the medical system, the housing system. We run our own clinic because we can afford to do so. We get frustrated about the need to provide private security. So, we employ private security firms to guard the houses in the compounds and offices. That is the same way Nigerians find that a burden. There exist few things that make life a little bit challenging for Nigerians and a little bit challenging for us as well. But I see some hopeful signs. I really do think there is a better chance now than for a long time that electricity will increase in two or three years time with the power stations now being started across Southern Nigeria.
You’ve had occasions to move around here in Nigeria without your security apparatus?
Yes.

What were the secret fears you nursed on those occasions?
Potholes. I drove myself from Abuja to Obudu, to Benue State. I went there to have a holiday with my family. We drove down to Nasarawa, Benue, Markudi, North and Cross Rivers State. When you are not concentrating fully, you stand the danger of running into unexpected potholes. When you are going at about 100 km per hour, that is the greatest danger. I am more worried about potholes than I am worried about armed robbers.
Did you mean to say that you could deal with armed robbers better than you can do with potholes?
Well, we have secret deterrence against armed robbers: the MOPOL sticking out their guns out of the window. If you have such protection, the highway robbers may decide not to take you on. In some parts of the country, we use armored cars. So, I have this armored car. On the mainland, here in Lagos, and in the South East, things can get difficult sometimes with armed robbery. So, we have an armored car. I try to see that we don’t use them too much because they are very expensive to maintain. But when we need them we just use them.
I asked this question because your country and America have issued travel advisories in the past, warning their citizens about places to go or not to go in Nigeria.
The warning is overwhelmingly against Niger Delta. That means the three core states- Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta states. But right now, if you’ve got a white face or a brown face, if you are an Asian or European down there, you are the one that militants are looking for to kidnap. We’ve had about 25 or so such British people kidnapped in the past 18 months in the Niger Delta. And it is very harrowing for their families. It is very worrying and it is very damaging for the company that has to do business here. So, what we are saying is, don’t go near those three states and don’t take along with you your family. Elsewhere in the federation, we just tell people things they need to be careful about, for example local conflicts springing up. We do need to point all that out to people who are coming out here. So, we do a lot of explaining like that.
It is just that some of the explanations that you give could be sometimes very alarming and sometimes exaggerated….
Well, we try not to exaggerate them. But if we have the pressure to explain the reason why we said don’t travel to a particular area, we really have to. Even though places like Anambra and Edo States had been pretty violent in recent times, we have never said to anybody, don’t go to Anambra. We never said don’t go to Edo. We never said, don’t go to Abia. We never said, don’t go to Imo State or Enugu or anywhere like apart from those core Niger Delta states. So, we think we keep to a minimum of the places we are worried about.

Your country had been very supportive of Nigeria concerning our democracy in the past. But why did your reaction to the last general elections come rather slowly?
To turn the question round, why did some of the people who were counting the votes on the 14th and 21st April indulge in such exotic arithmetic after dark? I mean it was really quite marred. But we’ve been through that. We’ve explained why. We were unhappy with the way the elections were counted in some places. I think it is to accept to improve the way the next election is run. And, it is a big job for President Yar’ Adua when he takes over the government next Tuesday, May 29 - to have improved the electoral system in time for election 2011.

Don’t you think the flaws in the election will pose a huge credibility problem for the incoming administration of President Yar’Adua?
We’ve made it known to President Yar’ Adua and I think, he is very conscious of this, from what I heard him say, that the electoral tribunals must be allowed to do their job properly. People are challenging the results of the governorship and senatorial elections in particular states. I suppose INEC should give them the data, the registration sheets, the electoral return sheets when they ask for them. And I hope the INEC has gotten them from those states concerned. I hope the electoral tribunals will be allowed to do their job as quickly as possible with no political pressure. Let’s see what they will come up with. If they are allowed to do their job properly under the supervision of the President of Appeal Court, the Justice Abdullahi, a man I respect so much, I believe they will do their job well.
From what you have seen, are you saying that the new administration will have a smooth sail?
I think it will increase the confidence in the system. The most important thing is to let justice and rule of law prevail just as the Federal Government accepted the ruling of the Supreme Court on the Vice President standing in for election. The Supreme Court ordered INEC to put the Vice President’s picture on the ballot and it complied. That is the way it should be.

British High

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While the rest of us, foreigners and indigenes alike, living daily in fear of armed robbers (those sons of guns that have turned the most stout-hearted of us into something of a jelly-fish with their blood-chilling screams and nocturnal operations), Richard Gozney, the British high Commissioner to Nigeria, says that armed robbery attack is the least of his worries.

Go hide under your children’s bed or wife’s cupboard if you like. One man you will not see doing that with you or voting with his legs for that matter is Gozney. If this man is not worried about armed robbers from whose hands we, experts and expatriates, are daily praying to Almighty God to deliver us, what then is his own worry? Potholes.

“When you are not concentrating fully on your driving, you stand the danger of running into unexpected potholes”, he explains, in an exclusive interview with Weekly Spectator in Lagos on Wednesday. “When you are going at about 100 km per hour, that is the greatest danger. I am more worried about potholes than I am worried about armed robbers.”

Another issue featuring prominently in the list of his worries is the legal challenge that will unravel at the ongoing sittings of election tribunals probing the massive fraud that characterized the 2007 general elections. His source of worry, he says, stems from the concern that no undue political pressure or intimidation should be piled on the members of the tribunals.

Consequently, the High Commissioner has conveyed his fear to the President-elect, Umar Shehu Yar’Adua, who will be taking over the rein of government in two days time, on Tuesday, May 29. “We’ve made it known to President Yar’ Adua that the election tribunals must be allowed to do their job properly,” says Gozney. “Let’s see what they will come up with.”

In this interview, the envoy also speaks on a subject that is very dear to the heart of every Nigerian who has had the misfortune of being denied the British visa. Just what in the world is happening in the visa section of the British High Commission? If that is your question, His Excellency, Richard Gozney, has all the answer. Excerpts:

Your Excellency, what informed the introduction of biometric data collection system (i.e. finger scans and digital photographs) into your visa procurement procedure?
It is something we are doing worldwide to protect an individual’s identity, facilitate future entry to the UK and to combat visa fraud and abuse of the UK’s immigration and asylum systems. All over the world, any national that needs visa to come and visit UK is going to do electronic digital fingerprinting. And the reason for this is quite simple: it is a kind of counter-terrorism measure.

Arising from 911?
Yes, from 911 and global security situation generally. There are some parts of the world where terrorism appears to be on the increase. But it does not apply to Nigeria. Counter-terrorism is not the driving force behind the directive here. But we do insist that since we are under the same worldwide counter-terrorism ruling, we need to take fingerprinting electronically. A lot of people here are used to it because the United States has been doing it for quite sometime now. This is quite similar, except that in our case, we have five dedicated visa application centres around Nigeria: two in Lagos, one in Abuja, one in Ibadan and one in Port Harcourt.

By the new arrangement, it means a potential traveller or visitor to the United Kingdom must be physically present at any of our visa application centres to be served. It is no longer possible for people to send their drivers, protocol officers or representatives to process their application for the simple reason that you can’t send a driver or protocol officer with your fingerprint. We recognise some inconveniences for people here but we do hope we could minimize the time it takes to go through the process. We do hope the whole procedure will not take more than five minutes.

There is this impression out there that the British High Commission in Nigeria is delighted in refusing visa than granting it. Is it much easier to grant than to refuse visa?
With due respect, that is not true. As a matter of fact, we sometimes grant more visas than we refuse. Where we refuse, we give reasons for refusal, and we have an appeal tribunal in the UK that those refused can appeal to. And it costs us more to attend to an appeal than issue visa. Visa is refused when the documents which a potential traveller or visitor to the UK presents to the visa center do not convince us that the individual is going for the stated reason or if we are convinced that if he went, he won’t return. Many people come to our visa centres with false documentation like bank statements of an uncle or cousin or brother.

We also find that some people in this country have passports signed in different names and opened in different applications. People think being refused visa automatically knocks you out or puts you at a disadvantage. Therefore, rather than appeal, they throw the passport away and obtain a new one. That makes things a bit difficult because every application now goes with a set of fingerprints. What happens is, as soon as new application for visa is received and keyed into the system, oftentimes it will show that the applicant has previously been refused visa.

Our computer will show that it is the same person. So, what were doing with the biometric identification process is marrying and keeping glued to each other someone’s real identity and his/her professed identities.
The reason I asked the question is because of the impression out there that, maybe, the biometric data collection system is a peculiar arrangement for Nigerians.

No, it is worldwide. We are already doing it in countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. We have done so in the last couple of years in nine countries in East Africa. And, in Pakistan as well. In other words, with some of our biggest customers.

Is it peculiar to the Third World countries?
It has absolutely nothing directly to do with Nigeria or even the Third World. It is a global operation; it is part of the government’s five-year immigration/asylum strategy. For example, if an American is going to stay in Britain for not more than six months, he doesn’t need a visa. But if he wants to stay for more than six months, he needs a visa. And when he applies for a visa, he will have to give his fingerprint as well. So, it is not peculiar to Third World countries.
There is also the general impression out there that the British High Commission, first of all, refuses Nigerians visa before considering granting it. Why? And how true is this?
No, Nigeria does not have the highest refusal rate in the world. I am not going to name the country.

But it is one of the highest?
Yes, it is one of the highest. I think the reason is because Nigerians are very ingenuous. We’ve seen enormous number of false bank statements. We’ve seen far too many letters from universities and colleges, which don’t really exist in Britain. If hundred percent of the applicants give good convincing cases that they will do what they said, then we will give hundred percent of the visas. That means, we will be issuing about 20,000 visas per month. At the moment, we give about 10,000 of the 20,000. And, it is a big increase over what obtained three years ago before we started improving the system (a big credit to the team, led by Chris Dix, Director Africa, UK Visas, who have done it). In the past, we were issuing about 7,000 visas to applicants, now we give about 10,000 per month.

Does a virgin passport put a potential traveller at a peculiar disadvantage?
No. We have a lot of cases of people coming to us with virgin passport and saying we had a passport but it was lost or stolen. Now, I know that there are a lot of people who genuinely lost their passports or have their passports stolen. But there are also too many people who were refused visa by us and who felt ‘I better get a new passport and tell them I lost the other one or had it stolen’. But it doesn’t work because we have your name on computer and the moment we type in your name, it will come up as someone we had refused to issue with visa before. In fact, when some people go through the application form and get to the question that says: ‘have you ever been refused a visa application to UK before?’ Too many of them feel, ‘if I admit that I have, that means they won’t let me in’. But, in fact, the opposite is true. If they declare that they had never been refused whereas they had been refused, we will spot it out and that sets us in a wrong direction in terms of saying yes or no. A small lie or a white lie, if you like, but it is enough to raise up suspicion and then we wonder where else you are being truthful or not. It is a kind of disincentive. One thing is clear, however: if you had been refused a visa in the past, admit it because we have given visa to a lot of people who had been refused visa in the past but whose circumstances have changed.

What are the other flaws that are prevalent in Nigerian applicants, apart from the issue of false bank statements and the like?
We know that public servants are paid moderate income in this country, but there are a lot of people who obtain money through other ways. Sometimes, somebody who is on a very low wage will say he is going to take his wife and children on a holiday to Britain for three weeks. The cost will be more than their annual salary. We say, how is this likely? If that is their real income, will they be spending a year’s salary or more going to Britain for a holiday? Or does it actually mean that after the huge expenses, they are likely to want to stay there? And, they are making this huge expense because they are going to get into Britain and then stay there. That may be the case. Or there may be other source of income and they are a bit shy about telling us about that other source of income and, in fact they are much richer than their basic public service salary would suggest. But if that is the case, they must own up. We are not going to give their files to Mr. Ribadu. We never give applicants’ files to anyone outside the British system. I would say we have fifty cases a day in Lagos alone that will fit that scenario.
I wonder what informed the location of your offices in Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Port Harcourt and none in the North.
People could lodge in their applications with UPS in Kano, Kaduna, Enugu, Warri, Benin City. The numbers in those centres are too small to justify dedicated centres and the equipment that goes with them for a fingerprint. The average number of visas processed in Kaduna, is nine per day and in Kano, six per day. Compare that with the number that we have in our other offices, Lagos, Ikeja-400 per day; Victoria Island-400 per day; Abuja-over 200 every day; Port Harcourt and Ibadan-82 per day respectively. We have to strike a balance between the number of applications and their costs of operations because the more offices we have, the higher the cost of our operations. I wish to say that Lagos is the only city in the world where the UK visa operations has two application centres because of the population and the number of applicants).
Talking about the visa fees, those that are refused visas often don’t get a refund of their money….
No, they don’t get any refund

Why?
That is for the simple reason that British Parliament has said visa operation must pay for itself. It doesn’t make a profit; it doesn’t make a loss. That means that visa fees have to pay for all these expenses running these services. Also, the fact that you guess you have to pay fees, which you will lose if you are refused, is a bit of disincentive to those who will want to just try it on and on. If they know they will get a refund, there will be no end to their trying it on. It is not the ambassadors that decided that it was going to be so but the parliament. They say all over the world, we have a lot of people wanting to come to Britain. That’s fine, that’s good, they said, but we are not going to pay for these operations. It should be self-financing and that has been the framework we’ve worked with for several years now.
You have been in Nigeria for over three years now?
Yes

What is your frank assessment of Nigeria as a country?
You’ve got very lively, very dynamic country. And without wishing to offend my many friends in East Africa and Southern Africa, I had lived in both zones; there is the greatest confidence here in this part of West Africa than you find there for whatever reason. Nigerians are very easy to engage, to get to know. They are open. They are very frank. They are articulate. They will tell you if they disagree with you in as much as they will tell you if they agree with you. In that case, it is a very stimulating place for a foreigner to work, for diplomats as well as for business people.

What about the difficulties you’ve encountered in the course of your job?
The same difficulties as Nigerians do. We get frustrated when the light goes off. And it places a great burden on us. You have to provide generators and diesel to power them. We get frustrated with the ‘go-slows’ or traffic jam. We get frustrated about the medical system, the housing system. We run our own clinic because we can afford to do so. We get frustrated about the need to provide private security. So, we employ private security firms to guard the houses in the compounds and offices. That is the same way Nigerians find that a burden. There exist few things that make life a little bit challenging for Nigerians and a little bit challenging for us as well. But I see some hopeful signs. I really do think there is a better chance now than for a long time that electricity will increase in two or three years time with the power stations now being started across Southern Nigeria.
You’ve had occasions to move around here in Nigeria without your security apparatus?
Yes.

What were the secret fears you nursed on those occasions?
Potholes. I drove myself from Abuja to Obudu, to Benue State. I went there to have a holiday with my family. We drove down to Nasarawa, Benue, Markudi, North and Cross Rivers State. When you are not concentrating fully, you stand the danger of running into unexpected potholes. When you are going at about 100 km per hour, that is the greatest danger. I am more worried about potholes than I am worried about armed robbers.
Did you mean to say that you could deal with armed robbers better than you can do with potholes?
Well, we have secret deterrence against armed robbers: the MOPOL sticking out their guns out of the window. If you have such protection, the highway robbers may decide not to take you on. In some parts of the country, we use armored cars. So, I have this armored car. On the mainland, here in Lagos, and in the South East, things can get difficult sometimes with armed robbery. So, we have an armored car. I try to see that we don’t use them too much because they are very expensive to maintain. But when we need them we just use them.
I asked this question because your country and America have issued travel advisories in the past, warning their citizens about places to go or not to go in Nigeria.
The warning is overwhelmingly against Niger Delta. That means the three core states- Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta states. But right now, if you’ve got a white face or a brown face, if you are an Asian or European down there, you are the one that militants are looking for to kidnap. We’ve had about 25 or so such British people kidnapped in the past 18 months in the Niger Delta. And it is very harrowing for their families. It is very worrying and it is very damaging for the company that has to do business here. So, what we are saying is, don’t go near those three states and don’t take along with you your family. Elsewhere in the federation, we just tell people things they need to be careful about, for example local conflicts springing up. We do need to point all that out to people who are coming out here. So, we do a lot of explaining like that.
It is just that some of the explanations that you give could be sometimes very alarming and sometimes exaggerated….
Well, we try not to exaggerate them. But if we have the pressure to explain the reason why we said don’t travel to a particular area, we really have to. Even though places like Anambra and Edo States had been pretty violent in recent times, we have never said to anybody, don’t go to Anambra. We never said don’t go to Edo. We never said, don’t go to Abia. We never said, don’t go to Imo State or Enugu or anywhere like apart from those core Niger Delta states. So, we think we keep to a minimum of the places we are worried about.

Your country had been very supportive of Nigeria concerning our democracy in the past. But why did your reaction to the last general elections come rather slowly?
To turn the question round, why did some of the people who were counting the votes on the 14th and 21st April indulge in such exotic arithmetic after dark? I mean it was really quite marred. But we’ve been through that. We’ve explained why. We were unhappy with the way the elections were counted in some places. I think it is to accept to improve the way the next election is run. And, it is a big job for President Yar’ Adua when he takes over the government next Tuesday, May 29 - to have improved the electoral system in time for election 2011.

Don’t you think the flaws in the election will pose a huge credibility problem for the incoming administration of President Yar’Adua?
We’ve made it known to President Yar’ Adua and I think, he is very conscious of this, from what I heard him say, that the electoral tribunals must be allowed to do their job properly. People are challenging the results of the governorship and senatorial elections in particular states. I suppose INEC should give them the data, the registration sheets, the electoral return sheets when they ask for them. And I hope the INEC has gotten them from those states concerned. I hope the electoral tribunals will be allowed to do their job as quickly as possible with no political pressure. Let’s see what they will come up with. If they are allowed to do their job properly under the supervision of the President of Appeal Court, the Justice Abdullahi, a man I respect so much, I believe they will do their job well.
From what you have seen, are you saying that the new administration will have a smooth sail?
I think it will increase the confidence in the system. The most important thing is to let justice and rule of law prevail just as the Federal Government accepted the ruling of the Supreme Court on the Vice President standing in for election. The Supreme Court ordered INEC to put the Vice President’s picture on the ballot and it complied. That is the way it should be.