Restructuring could have a big impact on the country’s future. But it should be done in accordance to the wishes of the people
Against the background of the failure by the federal government to properly manage our diversity and the growing insecurity across the country, there is a unanimous resolution by several ethnic nationalities that Nigeria is overdue for restructuring. While we have always advocated the need to tinker with the current structure for effective governance, the current ethno-religious slant to the campaign, raises several questions. Does a mere new political structure guarantee a better Nigeria? Can we identify any of our nationalities as either a zone of absolute virtue or vice?
First, we reaffirm our belief that Nigeria needs to restructure so it can work for all citizens. There is a consensus that the present structure of the federation is increasingly becoming a recipe for uncertainty, insecurity and instability. We also cannot deny the fact that Nigeria practices a weird form of federalism that is not only antithetical to growth and development, but also suffocating. It is federalism with highly unitary tendencies, where almost all powers are concentrated at the centre as the federating units – the states and local governments – are reduced to mere appendages. We therefore need constitutional adjustments to devolve responsibility from the centre to the periphery while at the same time enhancing separation of powers at state level to curtail the autocratic tendencies of governors.
From the way things are, the counter-veiling mechanisms that ensure some level of accountability at the centre are either non-existent or too weak in these fragmented units and the logical result is that the promise of good governance embedded in the theory of decentralisation is delivered almost always in the breach. Besides, most of the current 36 states are too small and too under-resourced to be economically viable and therefore structurally too weak to deliver human development. Most of these states depend almost entirely on allocations from the Federation Accounts, the bulk of which they expend on salaries and other recurrent expenditures.
