 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me welcome you here to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Bill Taylor. I am the Acting Executive Vice President of the Institute of Peace of USIP and I'm very pleased to have you as well as the President and joining us here today. This is a great honor for us. USIP, of course, is a congressionally created and funded organization that's devoted to preventing, mitigating, and resolving conflict around the world, and we do this both here with events like this, but as importantly in the field, across the conflict zones. We are very pleased to welcome former President Nigeria Olusegun Obasanjo to an elder statesman who has spent most of his career on the front line of African politics. President Obasanjo has made significant contributions to democratic development and leadership in his home country and across the continent as a pivotal figure in the African Union. He joins us today just weeks after Nigeria's historic election where for the first time the opposition candidate won against an incumbent president. Those elections were inarguably a milestone for Nigerian and African democracy. Open new prospects for Africa's demographic and economic giant to strengthen governance, reverse the spread of Boko Haram insurgency. In Nigeria, USIP is working with key leaders in government, civil society, and academia to confront these governance challenges through sustained education, grants, training, resources to those working for peace in the country. President Obasanjo's remarks today on reframing Africa's leadership challenges are timely as other African nations will face elections this year while many others are struggling with leadership challenges. To join this conversation and send your questions please use the Twitter hashtag ObasanjoUSIP. Introducing our guest is Ambassador Princeton Lyman, Senior Advisor to the President of USIP. Ambassador Lyman has a distinguished career in the US government including assignments as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and US Ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa. He also served as the US Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan from 2011 to 2013. Then please welcome Ambassador Lyman and the President of Nigeria. Ambassador Lyman. Thank you very much Bill and thanks to everyone for being here. We are absolutely delighted to have addressing us today President Obasanjo. Following his remarks we're going to have a conversation and then we're going to open it up to questions that are coming in from all of you. As Bill said it's very timely that President Obasanjo is with us dressed after this very historic election in Nigeria and there was no stronger voice during the run up to the election for a successful, a peaceful and a just election than President Obasanjo. President Obasanjo began his career as a military officer and he played a major role in bringing to a close the Civil War, the Biafra Civil War. As a military head of state in 1979 he returned Nigeria to democratic elected government. When military rule took over again he became an outspoken advocate for democracy and good governance not only in Nigeria but across the continent. He paid a price. He was imprisoned for his opposition to the rule of General Sani Abacha during the very dark period in Nigeria's history. But it was fitting then in 1999 when democratic government was again restored he was elected president of Nigeria. During his two terms as president he instituted a number of economic reforms. He brought Nigeria into the extractive industries transparency initiative EITI and he won international support for a debt relief package that lifted a 30 billion dollar debt off of Nigeria's shoulders. As a diplomat he reached agreement with all of Nigeria's neighbors on the difficult maritime border issues that opened up for all the countries of West Africa the opportunity to benefit from the rich oil and gas reserves offshore. He settled a long standing dispute with Cameroon by signing an agreement on the Bocasa peninsula and he began to help bring an end to the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia and he negotiated an end to crises in Togo and Soutoma and Principe. On a broader scale he led in the creation of the Africa Union in 2000. The successor organizations to the organization of African unity. Two very important principles were established in the Africa Union. One was that it would not seat any government that came to power through unconstitutional means. That placed the AU firmly behind the democratic trend sweeping across Africa. And second with the establishment of the AU peace and security council the AU took on responsibility for resolving conflicts in Africa deploying peacekeepers and mediators often well ahead of the United Nations. Following his presidency President Obasanjo has served as a UN and an AU envoy on behalf of peace and reconciliation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Zimbabwe and most recently in South Sudan where he led a commission on human rights violations and the means to peace and reconciliation. I came to know President Obasanjo when I was ambassador to Nigeria in the 1980s. I would often drive up to his farm at Ota. He said he didn't have a telephone I didn't believe him but actually it was a good excuse to drive up to the farm and it was an atmosphere that was very conducive for candid and frank talk. We talked about a lot of things but most of all he was then engaged he was not in office at that time he was engaged already then in trying to bring an end to the wars in Angola and into Sudan. I met with him in Nairobi many years later when he was seeking the same for Somalia. He has never stopped he has never stopped seeking peace wherever there is conflict and suffering. So it's an honor and pleasure for me and for the US Institute of Peace to bring to you and introduce to you one of the world's leading statesmen President Olusiakan Obasanjo. President thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen it's a good morning to you all and let me start by saying it is a great pleasure for me to be here and I thank all of you for taking time off your busy schedule to join us this morning. I would like to begin by asking a simple question. What is Africa's most valuable resource? Natural resources and commodities such as crude oil, diamond, cocoa or even gold? In my own opinion the most valuable resource Africa has ever had and known and indeed will ever know is its people. The citizenry without question is the lifeblood of Africa's sovereign nations. A simple of this claim is the gist of it is often overlooked in important analyses. The opportunity that in here in Africa's wealth in human resources are the backdrop for my observations this morning. This is more so in the light of the transformative role of the populace in Nigeria's recent historic presidential election which Ambatal Haiman referred to in his introduction. The underlying premise for my talk is that we can learn our way out of the contemporary crises of state that appear to be a common place in Africa. In my view the paramount task before us is figuring out how best to institutionalize effective structures and processes to set up constructive dialogues and descend with Africa's challenges and opportunities. My conviction about this is strengthened by credible studies. We show that leadership can indeed be taught. I am visiting today under the auspices of the leadership enterprise for African development the acronym of which interestingly enough is LEAD. With a vision and slogan which is to let Africa lead. LEAD is a collaborative endeavor that aims to foster learning communities to harness instructive insights from pivotal learning course in Africa's post-independence history to strengthen the capacity for leadership at various levels of the polity and economy. This is with a view to deepening the processes of reform and transformation of the economy and to draw from the gains and setbacks of the architects of Africa's contemporary experience as a bedrock to nurture a successful generation of leaders who are decidedly committed to Africa's self-renewal and self-propulsion. Informed by the understanding that the primary resources for Africa's renewal and propulsion primarily exist within the continent. The idea is to privilege the lessons of Africa's past leadership and governance challenges, words and all, as a lynchpin to help systematically to enrich present practices and future prospects. For a change, let us move away from the melancholic issue of what is wrong with Africa. We have a litany of that. Let us put the searchlight to illuminate what is right with Africa. Without romanticizing or caricaturing the complexities and contradictions thereof. It takes a bit of courage, which is not in short supply for an old soldier of my pedigree, to invite an attempt to contemplate the fundamentals to shift the focus from the litany of Africa's dissenting problems to spur constructive dialogue and dissent about what is right with Africa. This is all the monsoon in an intellectual community, such as the host institute for this forum. Yet, if we are truly committed to invigorating conversations about an African full-cost, Africa-led and Africa-driven framework for substantive self-determination and sustainable development, it is important to rethink and reframe how we situate Africa as a center of inquiry. To illuminate Africa's promise, to energize research innovations and collaborations, we must engage with Africa's past, present, and future as signified by its leadership. The good, the bad, and the ugly, as some may say. Seasoned and objective analysts celebrate this present time as Africa's moment. Beyond polemics, these analysts echo resounding narratives about Africa's widespread awakening and emerging global competitiveness. After discounting for lagging performances, the recurring sentiment is that Africa, with 20 percent of the world's land, 15 percent of its population, and a collective GDP that was forecast to grow at about 5 percent is ripe with growth opportunities. But let me hasten to say that 5 percent growth is not good enough. We must aspire to double-digit and we must do so continually. The slow but steady consolidation of democracy and conducive environment that encourage the organic evolution of the necessary norms, processes, and institutions to advance the development of African solutions for Africa's problems, amplify the prospects for planned integration of indigenous resources to expand the space for Africa's critical self-fashioning and competitiveness. Critics of misguided development policies and practices that are bound in Africa seldom factor into consideration the paradox that Africa travels equally and gender unorthodox forms of resources that could be reframed and harvested as valuable materials in the quest for a viable way forward. Governance reform and capacity-building programs, for example, are apt to look everywhere but within specific African sites to mobilize the thrust of remedial resources. It is not typical for such initiatives to rigorously engage the architects of some of the inadequacies that they seek to redress as stakeholders in the remediation process. In the United States, for instance, organized efforts have evolved structures and cultural traditions to ease the twilight apprehensions, capture the post office fascinations, and leverage the dynamic energies of former public servants and high-level officials. In Africa, institutionalized programs barely exist or remain embryonic to win similar executives from power, let alone to inculcate a discipline to socialize them into statesmen deserving of recognition, have potential frontiers to bridge knowledge gaps or pathways to spur breakthroughs in understanding, managing and improving the aptitude for leadership. Let me stress the point I'm trying to make here. For example, especially because of young leaders who entertain fear of too young to retire. We have quite a number of them, from Togo to Democratic Republic of Congo, even to Gabon, where after two terms, some of the leaders are still well under 60, and then in their type of environment, they are apprehensive of giving off power, giving off power to uncertainty, giving off power to what they think may land them in prison, if not in the grave. The fact of the matter remains that even the most inductable of African statesmen have valuable knowledge that could be distilled as an analytic crust to ameliorate Africa's perennial leadership predicaments. Indeed, it is not untenable that the need to sustain cogent reforms features prominently in the calculations of some leaders whose footprints are hamstrung by various controversies. I, for one, took more than a fair share of criticisms for steps that stared Nigeria on its present course, steps which the airbound flow of vicitude may well have accounted for the maturity our democracy and democratization process demonstrated in the recent elections, where the opposition leader displaced the incumbent in our presidential elections. I hope we have time to talk more about this particularly interesting issue during the question and answer session. Often vilified for policies and practices underpinning Africa's downturn, elsewhere leaders are often underappreciated, undervalued, and underutilized, if not ghettoed into oblivion. Nevertheless, there is no denying that their roles at the helm of government distinguish them as knowledge bearers and potential gateways to help cause correct in the best interest of all. Let us consider for a moment the possibilities that could result if enabling conditions were cultivated for African leaders to routinely pay back after formally exiting from office by substantively examining and substantially engaging and constructive endeavors to verify feasible ways and means to advance Africa's self-determination and self-propulsion. What if African states persons made a coordinated effort, measured against concrete benchmarks to strategically learn from their own scorecards to help implement homegrown solutions for leadership, governance, and succession in government business and civil society sectors? What if African leaders methodically reflected and drew upon their steep learning curves as fodder to help inform blueprints with which to advance the consolidation of equitable democratic transitions among other priorities? In the interest of time, I will leave you with these questions as food for thought. In the same vein, it is also important to underscore that former political office is hardly the only way to add value in age-stratified African societies with rich tradition for consultation with elders, peer-review mechanisms, and intergenerational synergies. With adequate attention, these traditions could help to elucidate enriching lessons from harsh realities, promote cardinal values as hallmarks for public service accountability, and incubate enabling conditions to inspire the next generation to cultivate the courage, ethos, and discipline for self-transcendent leadership. In the final analysis, it warrants emphasis that ethical leadership can be both a learning experience and a practice in the art of self-transcendency. With the advantage of hindsight, my commitment to this model of leadership helped me to appreciate the importance of formalizing a structure to institutionalize the memory of my service for posterity. Within the framework of the Ulysses-Goumba-Saint-Georges Presidential Library, we aspire not just to pay tribute to the past, but to leverage our goodwill, convening power and other assets to facilitate the constructive dialogue about how best to add value to a spectrum of undertakings which seek to evolve a homegrown architecture to help, and I quote, to help fire the imagination of young African leaders as Nigeria's first president, Dr. Nandia Zikwe once observed. A flagship initiative of the Ulysses-Goumba-Saint-Georges Presidential Library is the Center for Human Security, the Intellectual Empower House of the Library, which is the anchor for our strategic partnership with LEED. We eagerly welcome your feedback on these preliminary thoughts with particular emphasis on what is right. And the lessons thereof for our collective and indeed individual self-determination. Thank you very much. I'll stop here, and then I'll be ready for comments and questions. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Mr. President. And if I can... I just want to take my glass of water. Yeah, yeah. I thought you were leaving here. No, I never leave a friend in the lodge. Thank you. If I can follow up on some of the very, very valuable ideas you were putting forward on developing leadership. But let me ask you, what are the institutions in Africa through which you can build the kind of leadership among the young for the future? For example, are political parties important? Are political parties functioning now to develop that kind of leadership? Or should that come from within government or should it come from business? If you wanted to shape the kind of leadership you're talking about, what are the institutions through which they can be built? Well, let me take Nigeria, which I know very much. If you put it in the hands of government, the government that has the vision, the understanding, and believing the objective that sets it up, there may be no continuity. Another government may come tomorrow and kill it, or not support it sufficiently for it to serve the purpose for which it is meant to serve. I will want to see it private domain, but will support if necessary by government that believes in it. But definitely, and we are coming to that now, we are having people in the private sector that have made money and can support that type of institution that I'm talking about or that I've just talked about. Even friends from outside Africa who see these as a way of strengthening governance or strengthening leadership of having institutions in Africa that can withstand what I call the vicitudes of governance and government. This will be the way I will put it. We have, I think, a few things that have been coming out of Africa with Shizano, we set up something called Africa Leadership Forum. The problem is that it doesn't have money. The other day he said he wanted to call a meeting and because there was no money, the meeting was not called. And yet it was a very important meeting. We, along the West Africa coast, we are looking at a possibility. John Kufo has raised such an issue with me and we are looking at consulting with our brothers in the Francophone and Lucophone countries. We can see whether we cannot do something, whatever we call it. And we are thinking, in the West African case, we are not going to limit it to former president or heirs of government alone. There are other leaders within our own region who are still useful. We have seen service in the international arena. We have the lack of Kufianan. We have the lack of Anyoku, the Secretary General of the Commonwealth. And we have people like that. Now can we bring them into this type of institution where their services, their experience and of course if experience can give you a bit of wisdom, their wisdom can be made yourself. Is there a role here for the African Union to make use of that wisdom and experience? Does the union do that or does it just do it ad hoc occasionally but not in a systematic way? Well, the African Union has something they call, I've forgotten, something of, I think they call it, something wisdom. Does anybody remember how they call it? Well, it's part of the Peace and Security Council where they have some African leaders airmarked to go out whenever there is crisis to go and doubts the crisis. And they refuse this. They also of course have made use of some, for instance, Tabumbeki is still the one handling CPA and after CPA in South Sudan and Sudan. I have just completed the work as chairman of AU Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan. President Boyoya is handling something in Mali and I know it's on that. I think John Kufo is also handling something somewhere. You make use of us and the Council of the Wise, yes, now. What AU has in the Council of the Wise. That sounds good. Don't get worried, I'm not a member. Can I turn your attention to an area that has been of growing concern? You know, we used to focus so much on African development issues and governance issues, etc. Now there is a real security concern internationally. A spillover from problems in North Africa into the Sahel, growth of extreme groups and then in Nigeria, Boko Haram. How do you see that area of the Sahel and the kinds of responses? There has been, you know, the French have come in and others to help on the military side. This was an area that there was at one time a fair amount of investment in development, but it doesn't seem to have translated into the kind of long-term stability. I wonder what your thoughts on that particular region and how the international community needs to deal with it. I think that strip of the Sahel, if you like, from the tip of Senegal to Djibouti, is an area that almost without exception is now invested with one form of agitation or the other. But in some cases it's much more than agitation. I think the point that must be made and must be made strongly is that where governance is faulty, particularly where a group in a country either correctly or erroneously that they are being persecuted, they are being marginalized, that they are not being included and made to have a stake in the country at all level. There's no popular, what I call popular participation at all level, political, economic or social. And the government does not pay heed to this. I think what you will get in the end is agitation which may develop into violence, which may develop into terrorism. In the case of the Sahel, I believe that is partly the situation in Mali. I believe that is partly the situation in Nigeria. I believe that if you look at even Somalia very closely, that element will be there. So I believe the antidote to these things, agitation, violence, terrorism, internal, I'm not taking it to international terrorism yet, whether I will come to that. I believe the answer really is to what I call a stitch in time to save nine. Then of course we are not living in isolation. What happened in Mali, which was waiting to happen, was encouraged and assisted by what happened in Libya. Where there was free flow of arms and people who are trained in the use of arms and wondering where they will go and they found where to go in Mali. Some of those who came to Nigeria, who are menacing us in Nigeria, who are also product of Libya, trained, some of them trained in Mali, some of them of course trained in Somalia. So the solution first is what I call the software. Where there's need to provide economic and social development for where it is lacking, that must be done at all costs. Second, I believe that internally you must have strong enough police, military to deal effectively with what I call the criminal element, those that really have become hardened criminals. Thirdly, there must be sharing of intelligence, bilaterally, multilaterally within the subregion or the countries affected. And there must also be joint multinational task force that will work together. And maybe those task forces should be eventually organized on subregional decisions. For instance, Echo House, Central Africa, Eagard and East Africa, maybe Southern Africa. But we must have real plan of dealing with this. We shouldn't just leave it. I think, let me just say this in person, that a situation in Nigeria where Boko Haram was managing for six years, and Nigeria military and police have to be fleeing into neighboring countries rather than confront and combat Boko Haram is not good enough. It's a shame for those of us who can proudly say that we have been members of the armed forces of Nigeria. Anyway, that's an invitation. But not surprisingly, I have a number of questions about Nigeria. And I'll try and group them a little bit because they relate. One question is how did it succeed? Why did we have, against a lot of worry, a very successful election? But translating that into what you were talking about, about leadership. How now can leadership be organized in Nigeria? Take advantage of this situation to deal with a range of issues. There's Boko Haram, there's the economic challenge of lower oil prices, there's the delta, etc. Is the leadership capability there? Can the new administration tap into it? Is this really the beginning of a new birth of Nigerian greatness? Or are these problems going to drag it down? Let me take the election that we have just heard in Nigeria. I think it proved what I have always believed. We are a country playing a game of moving to the precipices. But I say dangerous because one of these days I hope we will not tip all completely over. But when you look at our history, we found this, even when we were negotiating our independence with the British, that sort of thing. We nearly said we don't want independence, the British can continue. Because at this stage, we have three regions then. At this stage, the East and the West agreed that they will have what we call internal autonomy. They now said it's not ready. And some of our people from the East and the West said, well, if the North is not ready, it's either let the North go and we that are ready, let's join together. But the reason prevailed, the East and the West got internal autonomy in 1957, the North got in 1959, and the whole country got independence in 1960. We managed. Then we had the election in 1964. And in some part, my own part, the Southwest, started burning ourselves alive, started setting houses on fire. I have a friend. The best houses in his village area were burnt. So he came to me and said, look, come and see how stupid our people are. Now, they had an election. It doesn't matter who won the election or who lost the election. But the best houses in our village had been burnt. Who gains from it? But even that we survived. We had a coup and a coup led to Pokrom. Pokrom led to civil war. Some people thought that Nigeria will never survive from the civil war as one entity. We did. Not only did we do, within nine years of ending that civil war, somebody from the rebel side, as we call them, and they called us on our own side as Vandals. Somebody from the rebel side and somebody from the Vandals side. The Vandals side became president. The rebel side became vice president number two. Within nine years of our civil war ending, not many countries achieved that sort of fate. I give this, well, we went on. And then you had one phenomenon that we were not expecting. We had abacha. Abacha put me in jail because I opened my mouth too widely. That never shot me up since then. Even if anything, I have opened my mouth more widely. Look at the ridiculous extent that we went. We had five political parties. And all the five political parties nominated and endorsed Abacha as the candidate of election. If Abacha's nuclear family, his wife and children have voted for him, he will have won. No, you are laughing, but this is true. But I always say that God is the most humorous being that has ever existed. God must have been laughing with us, at all of us. Unquietly. Without anybody missing a finger, Abacha slept and never woke up. If anybody had done it for us, he would have held all of us to ransom. That I did it for you. So what do you give me? God did it and he didn't ask for anything from us. And that's why wherever I go, I say God is a Nigerian. I went to Kenya the other day. I went to Kenya the other day and said God is a Nigerian. They were furious. Look, if you say God is a Nigerian, what about Kenya? I say don't worry. God is a Nigerian. Who lives in Nigeria? But he visits Kenya occasionally. But this election was almost in the same sort of category. One month before that election, if anybody had said, well, look, we have a peaceful election. It will go well and it will be reasonably free and fair. Of course, there are some malpractices. But those malpractices, particularly in the presidential election, did not change what the will of the people of Nigeria. So people don't talk much about it. But we got it through. So what do we get from here? Without being immodest, I play a role of being in front of a moving train as a friend of my put it. And he thought one of three things will happen. As the train drew nearer, I would jump out of the front of the train. That's one thing that could happen. If I didn't jump out, I would be crushed. And then the third unlikely, according to him, is that by providence, the train would be partly derailed and stopped. But the providential never stops. So the train was partially derailed and stopped. And I was neither crushed. No, no. Did I jump out? I jumped out. But then God gave us what we desired. I won't say what we wanted because some Nigeria didn't want what God gave us. But God gave us what we desired. Now the point I'm making there is that one, and that is the point you are making, at every stage God must give us in our different countries, in our region and in Africa, leaders that will be imbued with the sufficient courage and will to stand firm when you have to stand firm. That's very important. Secondly, I think we are now building up institutions that can withstand what we may see as danger to good governance in our different countries and in Africa. I believe that what has happened in Nigeria, the Nigeria election, it's good for Nigeria. I've said it has moved Nigeria one very important step. We are building up in our democracy, in our democratic dispensation and process and in our democratic practice. Most countries, at least it's countries since that election, they were as happy as we were in Nigeria. So it's good, not only for Nigeria, it's good for Africa. And I believe it's good for the world. We should have more of it, and we will. One of our questioners, however, would take you to a country that also recently had an election, but it was more like one without opposition and where the opposition boycotted the election and that was Sudan. And this is a country that has war going on, a conflict going on in the southern part and in Darfur. And it's talked about a national dialogue and it hasn't happened. You've just been there. I wonder what your sense of perception is on Sudan and where we were. I was there, sent there by the AU Commission. The AU has set conditions and code and practice of what they call democracy and election observation. Before I was sent as the head of the AU observation mission, AU between 1st of March and 10th of March has sent a pre-observation mission to Sudan. And that's the report of that pre-observation mission. More to say the least, not. So AU then had to decide, should they not send an observation mission? Should they? If they should, how? Eventually the Peace and Security Council of AU met, actually met on the 8th of April. An election was only, I think on the 13th, only five days, and decided that an observation mission should be sent and that I should lead the observation mission. Why me was the question I am waiting to ask when I go to Addis Ababa. But we went. Before I got there, Amnesty International has sent me a letter and a report, which of course, knowing what we know, couldn't be complementary. Also, the report of the AU pre-observation mission was also included in the folder sent to me. Then when I got in, I looked into the situation. And the situation that I found on the ground is put simply. Some significant political parties have decided to boycott the election because of two things. One, they said they wanted the dialogue to precede the election. But the government said the election is a constitutional issue. When election must take place, it must take place. And by the constitution election must take place the time that has been stipulated for it. But the opposition said no. You can ask the National Assembly to defer the election. Or to amend the constitution. Anyway, we never really took side on this. Our job was to look at the election. And we also saw that there was nothing in the constitution or the law of Sudan that says you must vote on the election day. So it's your choice. You can make that choice collectively or individually. So question of boycott, which really should be prevented if possible. You cannot say anybody should not work out. So the election took place. We had 20 members of observation team. And in our report, we mentioned all the things that we thought if they had not been there, we would have enhanced the quality of the election and also enhanced the outcome. The report of Amnesty International, which Amnesty International talks of suppression of rights. And they mentioned them. And we could have them. The report of AUP observation mission, we could have them. We met three parties that boycotted the election, the UMA. I don't know what Turabi's party is called. We met Turabi himself. And a popular congress. Thank you, my dear sister. And another one. And then we met the government party. And at the end, it said, well, look, the outcome of the report will reflect the will of the voters. And mind that, we did not say like we have said with Nigeria that the election reflects the will of the people of Nigeria. Because there was nobody boycotting collectively the election in Nigeria. People who don't want to vote didn't want to vote. And then in Sudan, there was low turnout. It's low. I would say anywhere you get about 40% of registered voters coming out to vote, you can take it as tolerable, you know. But I don't believe we got 35% in Sudan. And this is the position. What happens next though? We also said in our report that that election should not be taken as a means of hindering the dialogue. If anything, it should be used to hasten and move on on the dialogue. Actually, everybody would talk to believe that dialogue should go on. Nobody says because we boycott the election, therefore we will not participate in the dialogue, no. And we make this, when I make the present one to one, I make that point. And the President told me what have been, all the preparations that have been prepared, been made, they have something they call 7 plus 7. That's 7 on the side of government and 7 on the side of opposition who are working on the dialogue. Those that will be nominated in consultation with the opposition have been done. And the impression that the President gave you that election, the dialogue will go on. We asked you about a question that relates to Sudan, but it's been an issue before the EU. And that is the question of accountability, justice and tribunals. As you know, President Bashir has been indicted by the criminal court. President Kenya was, at least for a while, under investigation. The EU has had a mixed view now. Most of the EU members are members of the International Criminal Court. What is your view on the role of justice and accountability and whether it is... When you call on the international tribunals, when do you look to the countries internally? How do you see this playing out in Africa in particular? Is it an obstacle to the dialogue in Sudan, for example? Because President Bashir really doesn't know what his future would be if he stepped down? Or is that an important element of justice and accountability? Well, I was in government in Nigeria when we became a signatory to... What did they call it? Treaty of Rome? Treaty of Rome, which led to ICC. And I believe very much in it. I believe that the EU believed in it. That's why in the new EU constitutive act, there is certainly something against impunity. You cannot say, unlike the OAU, where it says the internal affairs of your country is entirely yours and you can do whatever you like with it. Nobody can interfere. EU believes in intervention. Believes that you should not treat your citizens who are Africans with impunity. EU believes in good governance and all that. So I believe that what EU believes in and was doing was right. But unfortunately, the situation started being looked at as if it's deliberately weighted against Africa. We have nobody worried about those from Rwanda or elsewhere. When we had Charles Taylor, we had Babu, we had Kenyatta, and we had Arbashia. And people were saying, well, this is almost 10% of African leaders. And then where will it stop? And I believe to some extent they are right. But whether the action they have taken, the way they should go, I don't know. Especially when countries, without due respect, who are not signatory to that treaty are now the one telling us that we should face what they are not going to face. That's not fair. That's not fair. But what should we do? What we do, we have had going on in Senegal, the case of Issun Harpre. And I went to President Makisal when I was looking into all other things. But how is this done? And he said it was a national law that was adapted to be able to deal with this. And people have said that why can't Africa have its own ICC. And we say, why not? What people will say is that if it's being handled by Africa, will it be fair? Will they have trust in it? We have that when we were setting up NEPAD and we said we will go for APRM, Africa PR review mechanism. People said, well, anything done by Africa, they will not have, they will not command credibility of the world. And I said to her with it. We want to be able to deal with our own thing and be credible among ourselves. If the world want to go with us, oh, well, I'm good. Let us do it the way that we are satisfied and we can defend it before God a man. If the world want to go and defend their own before Satan, good luck to them. So these things of getting ourselves moved away from what I believe should be right, we should stop it and we should look. Yes, no African leader should get away with murder and whatever it takes, we should make him. And as I always say, no African country, not even Nigeria, can live in isolation. If the rest of Africa say you will not have it, we will not have it. And if that is the case, there's no reason why we cannot have our own system that will bring our leaders to book if they have heard. Mr. President, we only have a few minutes left and we've talked about a lot of issues and problems, but I want to come back and some of our questionnaires have asked. You've talked about good governance and leadership and I wonder if you, because you travel around the continent and you know the continent so well, if you see and give us very specific examples where you see this progress in governance that is taking place and one can see because it's easier to talk about the problems. I will mention too. Rwanda and Ethiopia, if you don't agree with me, don't put up your hand. You know, you're raising a very good question because they are both very well-governed in some ways but they also have very serious problems. There's no perfect. There's no perfect. Look, there's no perfect. But when you look at them, what do you want? I want the welfare well-being. I want moving my country forward. Reasonably, without corruption and waste of resources, I want a government that I can feel, look, it will protect me. I want peace, reasonable peace and security. And I want economic and social progress. And these countries have, maybe you will say some of them or one of them is a little bit high standard. Well, giving good governance is not a picnic. We want to go to picnic by the seaside. Doesn't governance also mean democracy and human rights and freedom of the press? Yeah, well, I think these two that we have mentioned, they are reasonably democratic. They are reasonably open in terms of freedom of the press, reasonably. And human rights, I believe there's a case now in Rwanda which of course I'm also talking to the president of Rwanda about and it's not advanced to being talked to about it. But this is my own opinion. You may not agree with me, but give me a country that is moving forward and reasonably, and if there are little things that need to be corrected, called the leadership to correction, get it. Let me ask my last question. What do you think the next steps should be in U.S. policy in Africa? Oh, on a lighter note, on a lighter note. Since right now, Princeton, I have no job. I'm unemployed and unemployed. Would you like to be the American? Listen, if President Obama wants to employ me as a consultant, get me from here to the White House after we have negotiated the price. Now, but I will say, and I think most African countries will say the same, I was saying that I met the Nigerian president-elect only four days ago before I came here. And after we have talked for a while, I said to him, I'm going to the U.S. People will be asking me a question. What do you expect me to say? And he said, for me, thank the Americans for the support that we have had and tell them we want more. Tell them also that we want them to encourage corporate America to invest in Nigeria. I believe most, you can say that for most African countries. I believe you can. Most African countries have had relationship with this country even before independence and we cherish our friends. This is one country we can come and feel free to talk. You have these institutions and institutes, which, of course, is good for you and we are trying to emulate. Where we go wrong, you see, we have a saying in my part of the world that we are two brothers or two friends going to the room and talk to themselves and come out frowning their faces. They have talked truth to themselves. We will want America to talk truth to us and for us to be able to talk truth to America. We have a long way to go, but let's take the issue of democracy. For me, democracy is a journey, not a destination. And depending on when you started and how you started and where you started, some people are quite far on the journey. Some are not so far. But if you have started early and you are quite some distance, now when you see us behind, don't condemn us for being behind. Understand why we are behind and help us and help us. Now the greatest obstacle to democracy is poverty. The greatest obstacle to democracy is poverty. If America will help us in the path of democracy, America must help us on the path of elimination of poverty. I think it's very important. I have always maintained and I will say it again that there's a lot that we emulate from this country. Our own constitution, for whatever reason, is modeled on the constitution of this country, except that you do not have something we call spread. You must have 25% of the votes cast in two-thirds of the states. But you also have something you call, what would you call it? Electoral College, which is always difficult for outsiders to understand. And we're taking that as your system, so that even if somebody has majority of the votes, he can still not be the winner because of Electoral College because that's your democracy. We don't criticize it. I mean that. I couldn't understand it. Somebody was trying to explain to me and said, look, it's my ignorance. Now quite honestly, I believe that the areas where we need to do a lot better than we are doing, I will be there. But we cherish our friendship. We love it. We want to maintain it. We want to strengthen it. It went somebody from America then asked me, hey, how are you doing with your new colonialists? Our new... Who are they? I say China. I say what? I say look, China has huge amount of American treachery bill which they bought and if they unload it today, I don't know what will be the fate of the dollar. We do not say that China is your new colonial power. Sorry. Because they have so much of your treachery bills. I think we should understand this. Well, I thank this country when I was president. I wanted to get a debt relief. You refer to it. We were in this country about $1 billion. When Britain decided to lead, America followed. That's one time I saw America following. That's in all honesty. You can see wherever you go here you see Africans. I go to China. I don't see Africans anywhere near. Anywhere near, not even 100th of the way I see Africans. So there's a lot that join us and we should cherish and strengthen those fabrics that join us together. Thank you very much.