Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo talked himself into a storm recently when he appeared to dismiss separatist agitators and advocates of restructuring as mere job-seekers. Although he has since denied using such derogatory terms, his pronouncements and that of the government on restructuring suggest a retrogressive push-back against the popular clamour to reorganise Nigeria along more rational lines. Unless the government and the reactionary forces bent on retaining the current political contraption give way, the direction of the debate may assume an unpalatable and unpredictable ramification.
Already, the seeds of a possible chaotic bust-up are visible. Groups such as the Indigenous People of Biafra, its forerunner, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, the Coalition of Arewa Youths and the shadowy, heavily-armed Niger Delta militants, are dispensing with dialogue altogether in favour of uncompromising belligerence. In response, the state is showing signs of weakness, deploying kid gloves against Arewa youths and killer Fulani herders and using, strong-arm tactics against others.
Osinbajo and President Muhammadu Buhari, who returned on Saturday from London, where he had been convalescing, had better read the mood of their countrymen correctly before they blunder and tip Nigeria into the abyss. Restructuring is an imperative whose time has come: true; it cannot be an easy or painless task, but peaceful engagement by all stakeholders guarantees less traumatic outcomes than blind resistance to reform.
Osinbajo’s “better together” position — the fiction that Nigeria as presently constituted is viable — is problematic. He is not alone. Buhari likes to say that those agitating for separation were not old enough to have witnessed the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). He is wrong. He, like other elite from Northern Nigeria, prefers a continuation of the status quo that confers great advantages on that region and gross disadvantages on southern states while pauperising the majority irrespective of ethnic nationality or faith. But asking for restructuring is not a call for war.
Yes, we are better together under a just and productive political structure. But the country was forged on a faulty foundation engineered by the departing British colonial authorities who contrived to confer perpetual advantages on the north. That contraption started unravelling shortly after independence: the safeguards put in place by the 1963 Republican Constitution that gave the four regions considerable autonomy and control over their resources came apart when impunity derailed the checks, resulting in the military coups of 1966 and the civil war. The military-induced centralisation of state power and defenestration of the federating nationalities have delivered poverty, atrophied economic development and foisted a false sense of unity. Nigerians are becoming more divided by the day.
When a polity is coming apart at the seams, statesmen know it is time to make peaceful change. Wisdom acquired by humanity over the centuries dictates that when a country is multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-cultural, the natural system of government suitable for it is federalism. This point was well articulated by the late Obafemi Awolowo and accepted in principle at independence and also underpinned the 1963 Constitution.
Development was fast-paced as the four regions competed: the Eastern Region economy was based on palm produce, farming, fishery, rubber with plantations established in Ohaji, Egbema, Igbaram, Uzo-Uwani and Boki and industries like the Nkalagu cement factory. The Northern Region relied on groundnut, cotton, mining and animal husbandry, while the Western Region set the pace in education, state capitalism and social services. While the regions retained 50 per cent of revenues raised, contributed 30 per cent to the Federal Government and 20 per cent into the distributable revenue pool and shared by all the regions, today, the atomised 36 beggar units, save Lagos, are perpetually reliant on shared oil and tax revenues arrogantly monopolised by the centre.
The imperative of restructuring is about justice, equity and economic development. There is a strong correlation between political structure and economic growth. There is no doubt that democracy with sound federal structure will achieve greater economic growth for the country. A 2011 Brookings’ research report, Political Institutions, Economic Growth, and Democracy: The Substitute Effect, states that political polarisation and federalism help poor countries to achieve better economic performance. We have to change from sharing and consumption and return to the only viable system of production, where all federating units are creative, self-reliant and self-sustaining economic centres.
The political elite should drop their self-serving posturing. Osinbajo, like his party, the All Progressives Congress, is exhibiting the usual penchant of politicians for strident restructuring advocacy when in opposition only to transform to defenders of the status quo when they mount the saddle. This brinksmanship also applies strongly to the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party, that in its 16 years in power resisted and squelched all calls for restructuring and, instead, enthroned a reign of impunity and corruption that peaked under Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015), only to hypocritically turn around today to mouth restructuring rhetoric.
Democratic federalism is working all over the globe. Belgium started out as a unitary state, but tension and the quest for self-determination by its Walloon (French and Dutch), Flemish and German-speaking people prompted a change to a federal status in 1993, some 162 years later. Federalism has been used to forge formerly autonomous political entities into the formidable world powers of United States, Canada and Australia, while it has been used to remodel what were failing unitary systems in Brazil and Mexico. Federalism rescued the rump of the crumbling Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation is the better for it. The victorious allied powers that forced the former Austro-Hungarian provinces of Moravia, Bohemia and Slovakia to form Czechoslovakia in 1918 watched as wise men on both sides negotiated the Velvet Divorce in 1992 to form the separate Czech Republic and Slovakia. The two nationalities are today better as two separate countries. While the late Josip “Tito” Broz, the leader of Yugoslavia from 1945 till his death in 1980, managed to keep the country together, the ultra-nationalist Slobodan Milosevic who became President of Serbia in 1989advocated Serb domination which led to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Today, the seven independent states are better apart. In an article published in The Institute of World Politics, Cushman Laurent and Thomas Melady say the sovereignty (of the seven states) should be respected… as “they are at peace with one another. Their futures are in their hands”.
But an acrimonious and unjust political structure cannot be considered sacrosanct or non-negotiable. Nigeria need not resort to separation or violence to satisfy the yearnings of ethnic nationalities for self-actualisation and end an unjust system that denies all nationalities of control over their resources and allows the least productive to legally take the lion’s share of revenues. The demand and agitation for change and self-actualisation is a basic human right.
Nigeria’s framers did not opt for federalism as a fanciful concept. Rather, they adopted it because it fitted the country’s plural setting.
