A former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Emeka Anyaoku, rekindled the flames of regional configuration of the country at a public lecture recently. He saw that system of government as the panacea for national developmental challenges and the route to Pax Nigeriana. Apparently, the loss of faith in the current system – tacky practice of federalism – which countervails all known canons of that democratic ideal, fuels the desire for its pristine application.
Anyaoku is not alone. The demand has acquired a life of its own, always intruding vehemently into the public arena. Those who gnaw at our opaque revenue allocation formula in a supposedly federal set-up, crave a return of state police and unbundling of other hegemonic symbols, such as the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board and the National Universities Commission, among others, are in the same boat with Anyaoku.
Nigeria’s journey to nationhood did not start today. Way back in 1951, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who later became the first Prime Minister, in 1951, declared the federal system of government as “… the only basis on which Nigeria can remain united,” conscious of the fact that the country was – and still is – a multi-ethnic and cultural cauldron. Consequently, its founding fathers kept faith with it. Regional governments, therefore, held sway in the Eastern, Western and Northern regions. The creation of the Mid-West Region three years after independence in 1960, and the 1963 Constitution consolidated the system until 1966 when the military struck.
Under the 1963 federal Constitution, the regions controlled their resources, retained as much as 50 per cent of the revenue generated, contributed 30 per cent to the Federal Government, and 20 per cent to the common pool, which the regions shared. Through policies that suited their peculiar spheres, each region carved a niche for itself. This was how the country became a world beater in palm oil and palm kernel production from the Eastern Region, and groundnut from the North. Nigeria was second only to Ghana in cocoa export, globally, made possible by thriving cocoa farming in the Western Region. From their programmes, each region developed at its own pace, had its police, parliament, body of laws, civil service and educational policies.
These disparate, but national, development trajectories found a convergence in healthy competition among the regions in the field of education, bureaucracy, judiciary and internal security expressed in the regional policing. Remarkable evidence was the free education policy of the Western Region, under Obafemi Awolowo’s premiership, which was adopted in the East. And when the Eastern Region established the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1960, Ahmadu Bello University and the University of Ife sprang up in 1962 in the North and West respectively, in response to the challenge.
These attributes of federalism have for long given way to hegemony at the centre and the atomisation of the polity into 36 states. Save for Lagos State, none is capable of self-sustenance. This fact is amplified by the current difficulty states have in paying their workers’ salaries, for which 27 of them recently got a N713.7 billion bailout from Abuja as Nigeria is daily being sucked into the maelstrom of cash crunch, arising from the meltdown of global crude oil prices.
According to the 2014 internally-generated revenue data of states, Kebbi made N3.8 billion, Ekiti, N3.4 billion; Bauchi, N4.8 billion; Sokoto, N5.2 billion; Niger, N5.7 billion; Kogi, N6.5 billion; Imo, N8.1 billion; Nasarawa, N8.2 billion; Benue, N8.2 billion, Osun, N8.5 billion and Plateau, N8.2 billion. Yet, some of these states have monthly wage bills that outweigh their monthly receipts from the Federation Account Allocation Committee. As the amounts shared by the three tiers of government progressively pale into insignificance, nobody needs the crystal ball to know that sooner than later, some states might declare themselves impecunious, and governance, invariably, shut down.
Therefore, the country should end this abuse of federalism by going back to its roots. It has not profited us. Instead, we unremittingly experience stirrings of separatism from the major ethnic categories, indolence and lack of creativity in governance. And, increasingly, public office is no more for service to the people, but a dubious vantage position for despoiling public treasury. Thus, real development has taken flight.
Nigeria has dithered long enough in embracing progressive ideals that are fountains of growth and development in other federations like the United States of America, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Brazil and India. Apart from the 1999 Federal Constitution being a vestigial bequeathal of the jackboot, its unitarianism, fully expressed in the 68 items on the Exclusive Legislative List, among them police, mines and minerals, and railways, further underscores its balefulness.
Unfortunately, many administrations in the past had organised national conferences purportedly to address these self-inflicted wounds, but they turned out to be grand larceny designed to serve their selfish political interests. The Muhammadu Buhari government should see Nigeria like a sick man in urgent need of a surgeon’s redemptive scalpel. Restructuring Nigeria is the way to go; this means that Abuja must shed its overbearing weight.
Nations as much hobbled as Nigeria, such as the old Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Sudan, are not the same again because of being adamant to the urgency of political reforms. But we can avoid their experience by learning from the Scottish political convulsion, which climaxed in the United Kingdom referendum for its independence in 2014. Though it re-affirmed the indivisibility of UK’s sovereignty, the country quickly learned from it and made more concessions to the Scots. Inherent in this is a huge lesson for Nigeria.
