The lingering controversy on whether or not Nigeria should be restructured has refused to exit the front burner since it was stoked in the second quarter of this year. It really started when President Muhammadu Buhari indicated that the report of the 2014 National Conference convened by his predecessor, -President Goodluck Jonathan’s government, was fit for the archives.
“I advised against the issue of National Conference…I never liked the priority of that government on that particular issue, because it meant that what the National Assembly could have handled was handed to the Conference…, the President stated.
Buhari, thereafter, also declared that “the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable”, in reference to the massive destruction of oil and gas infrastructure and pipelines by militants in the Niger Delta region. Again, comments credited to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Mr. Babachir David Lawal, that the 2014 national confab was mere ‘job for the boys’, ignited widespread public wrath and contentions, particularly in the circle of delegates to the said conference and other eminent Nigerians, too numerous to list and across geopolitical divides, that either felt restructuring is the right way for the country to go or the contrary.
Central to the ‘National Question’ would, among others, however, include Nigeria’s federalist hypocrisy that confers monstrous powers on the Federal Government and concedes scant powers and autonomy to the federating units (states) in organising governance and mobilising/utilising their own resources; power sharing arrangement among federating constituents is also vague, marginalisation and fears of oppression by minority and even some majority tribes are largely unaddressed, while acceptable revenue sharing formula between the three tiers of government (federal, state and local), as well as resource control and peculiar problems of oil bearing communities, and so forth, have remained nagging issues
for many decades now.
Of a truth, the Buhari government is grappling with daunting national challenges, like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, one of the pro-restructuring apostles, has rightly pointed out. They include rebuilding the nation’s battered economy; creating jobs to contain widespread unemployment, poverty, frustration and desperation feeding the crime pool; fighting corruption; and securing the country and its citizens from terrorism amid other life-threatening crimes. Many, like Atiku, strongly believe the aforementioned problems may be expressly or remotely related to the flawed federation the country has been engineering, particularly after the first and second military coups of January 15 and July 28, 1966, respectively; and that restructuring will help address some of the country’s prevailing economic and security challenges.
If we take the controversy dogging revenue allocation as an example, the report of the 1987 Nigerian Political Bureau (NPB) will be instructive. Recall that the NPB was established in 1986 by former military leader, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
The said bureau was acclaimed as one of the broadest political consultation exercises ever conducted in Nigerian history. Its charge included investigating theproblems of failed Nigerian political and democratic institutions, collating the socio-political views of Nigerians and submitting remedies to curtail the perceived shortcomings of the political and economic process. The verdict of the bureau on revenue allocation in the country is as follows:
“Revenue allocation…from the Federation Account among the different levels of government has been one of the most contentious and controversial issues in the nation’s political life. So contentious has the matter been that none of the formulae evolved at various times by a commission or by decree under different regimes since 1964 has gained general acceptability among the component units of the country. Indeed, the issue, like a recurring decimal, has painfully remained the first problem that nearly every incoming regime has had to grapple with since independence. In the process, as many as thirteen different attemptshave been made in devising an
acceptable revenue allocation formula, each of which is more remembered for the controversies it generated than issues settled”.
This being so, how can the matter be resolved without peaceful dialogue and restructuring in a democracy; especially considering the fact that before the Sir Jeremy Raisman and Professor Ronald Tress’ committee that reviewed the federal fiscal structure in pre-independence Nigeria in 1958,the then regions retained 100%
of mining rents and royalties; while under the Independence and Republican Constitutions of 1960 and 1963, respectively, such revenues were shared through the
Distributive Pool Account (DPA), with the regions of origin getting 50 percent, the FG 20 percent, and all the other regions 30 percent.
The Nigerian government should not shy away from these realities. It should, instead, explore best options from experienced democracies with similar challenges to navigate the storm.
