Vice President Kassim Shettima’s comments on federalism expose the avalanche of the country’s post-independence leaders’ pretentiousness about federalism as a political construct and the reasons the concept has been misapplied since it was aborted by the military in 1966.
At the seventh Leadership Conference and Awards in Abuja, Shettima said the “problems attributed to the current federal system often stem from the poor management of resources rather than any inherent flaw in the country’s constitutional architecture…We must resist the temptation to romanticise foreign systems or prescribe imported solutions that fail to account for our distinct social, ethnic, and demographic complexities. What we seek, therefore, is not a photocopy of another country’s model, but a federal structure tailored to our aspirations”.
The VP is wide of the mark on federalism to say that Nigeria’s federalism is not inherently faulty. It is, and it is broken. Those entrapped by the lopsided benefits of ephemeral power pretend never to see the glaring incongruities of the 1999 Constitution. Every attempt to deodorise the 1999 Constitution as a federal document is bound to end in devastating disaster.
With 68 items on the Exclusive Legislative List, the 1999 Constitution is a worthless unitary document that turns federal logic on its head. It is the only federal constitution in the world out of 26 that operates a single police structure.
Unwisely, there is no fiscal federalism: the centre appropriates 52.6 per cent of all incomes. Prisons, marriage, railway, electricity, minerals, and stamp duty are controlled by the centre. This is a unitary document masquerading as a federal one.
To begin with, “poor management of resources” is an anathema to any form of government. However, no government founded on shaky and faulty structures can be solely redeemed by effective management of resources.
It is even worse in a polity where there are multi-ethnic and multi-religious configurations like Nigeria, where these tendencies incessantly spark centrifugal tensions.
Federalism is adopted by countries to deliver equity, fairness, and justice to their pluralistic components. The federating units are given the independence to produce their own resources and contribute to the centre on agreed terms. Hence, federalism operates a lean centre and independent federating units.
The 1999 Constitution upends this, unfortunately. The result is insecurity, stagnation, economic disharmony, anomie, corruption, and political chaos in which the centre can suspend a federating unit!
In the United States, Germany, Canada and Australia, there are only the centre and the federating units. The local councils are subordinated to the states for effective management and control.
Under this arrangement, each state creates its local councils according to its capacity. The councils have their own wealth creation and distribution mechanisms to deliver good governance. The US had 90,837 local councils in 2022, down from 155,067 in 1942. Germany operates 11,000, while Australia has 537.
Even though democracy and federalism are not indigenous to Germany, Australia, Belgium and Brazil, these countries get the political systems and good governance right.
Mr VP and the political leaders should concentrate on rallying the National Assembly to enthrone true federalism and stop chasing shadows.
Contrary to the VP’s postulation, Nigeria’s lacklustre post-independence performance is a result of federalist dysfunctions and jaundiced interventions by the institutions involved in law interpretation and policymaking.
Nigeria’s excellent experience with federalism during the First Republic rubbishes the VP’s submission that Nigeria’s problems did not emanate from “any inherent flaw in the country’s constitutional architecture”.
During that period, the regions controlled their resources, sent 20 per cent to the centre, 30 per cent to the distributable pool and retained 50 per cent. True federalism mixed with good governance to deliver prosperity, and each region developed at its own pace.
The military scuttled that arrangement and collapsed the country into a unitary state that has produced an amorphous federalism and economic disruptions till today. Nigeria must revert to this glorious past.
The “country’s constitutional architecture” is a charade concocted to repress the people and serve the interests of the political elite. The 1999 Constitution delivers a federalism that is inherently a bundle of contradictions and confusion, thus making good governance a mirage.
Rather than grant the right to manage their resources to the states to aid accelerated and competitive development as operated during the First Republic, the Constitution established a rent-seeking arrangement among the federal, state, and local governments.
This “feeding bottle” federalism cannot deliver development. No level of prudence can redeem structural defects as professed by the VP.
According to the 2005 National Political Reforms Conference, each of the 36 states has at least five solid minerals buried under its soil in commercial quantities.
They are left untapped because of anti-investment laws that give exclusive authority to mine to the Federal Government. Instead of allowing the states to mine the resources, Nigeria has operated a monolithic, oil-dependent economy since its independence. Is this gross economic anomaly a management problem, too?
Even the sharing of the allocations to the states is done in an unjust and inequitable manner, as it is partly based on the number of LGs listed in the Constitution.
This provision is unfair to resource-producing states, which are grossly short-changed. Bayelsa, a resource-based state, has eight LGs and consequently takes allocations far lower than some non-resource-based states with plenty LGs.
The 13 per cent derivation for resource-based states is a drop in the ocean compared to the states’ contributions to economic development.
Nigeria must return to the recommendations of the 2014 Constitutional Conference, which prescribes federalism and restructuring, to return it to the path of peace, justice, and prosperity.
The Supreme Court judgement on LG autonomy that orders direct disbursement of allocation to councils contradicts Section 162(6), which prescribes the establishment of ‘State Local Government Joint Account’. Both conflicting laws exist, thus adding to the confusion and uncertainty in the polity.
The Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo, described absolute autonomy to the 774 LGs as “an impossibility” and “a recipe for humongous chaos”. These are not administrative challenges as the VP would want us to believe, but constitutional incongruities setting governments against each other.
Besides, the 774 councils are listed in the Constitution. This is a bastardisation of federalism copied from the US.
The Supreme Court judgement is a back-door option that will breed corrupt LG chairmen, as was the case during the Olusegun Obasanjo administration, create lazy and non-creative chairmen and steep Nigeria deeper in underdevelopment.
Nigeria’s economic challenges derive squarely from constitutional anomalies. These constitutional incongruities that place a monolithic economy over economic diversification, prioritise rent-seeking over production and give unwieldy economic power to the centre over the states are the reasons for Nigeria’s economic and political misadventures since 1966.
As these constitutional imbalances rage, the country’s economic disruptions, political development deficits worsen by the day.
The World Poverty Clock, an online poverty monitoring tool, tagged Nigeria the poverty capital of the world in 2018. In 2022, the NBS classified 133 million Nigerians as being multidimensionally poor. The World Food Programme reported in 2023 that 24.8 million or one out of eight Nigerians experienced acute poverty.
Therefore, Nigeria cannot progress without engaging in true federalism and restructuring. These hold the ace for justice, equity, and prosperity. It takes an audacious leader to achieve this, not one who plays to the gallery for personal political aggrandisement.
