Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Odia Ofeimun:How to Restructure the Nigerian Federation Without Tears

Thanks for posting this, Prof. Falola. I wish we could have it on PDF;
it's a material for the records.
-- Obododimma.

On 10/2/16, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
> How to Restructure the Nigerian Federation
> Without Tears
> By
> Odia Ofeimun
> Preamble
> Ten years ago, I began my City People Anniversary Lecture, on the theme of
> Leadership and Electoral Reform, by telling the story of how Seye Kehinde
> was being pursued by security agents in the good old days of guerrilla
> journalism under General Sani Abacha. One day, they surrounded the office of
> the News and Tempo magazines where we all worked. Because the security group
> that came did not actually know the quarry they were pursuing, they insisted
> that I and another senior colleague must identify each of the staff as they
> came out holding their identity cards. I saw Seye in the room, lining up
> with the rest of the crowd. We all knew he had been virtually sentenced to a
> shoot at sight order. But he was there holding an identity card. As he came
> abreast of the checkpoint, his face looked nothing of this world. I waved
> him on without actually bothering to look at his ID. A moment later, the
> screech of his car tyres told us that he was gone. He was swallowed up by
> the sea of people that Lagos knows how to pool as a city. In that sea, he
> could disappear underwater to his chosen underground without trace. By the
> time he came up for air, away from guerrilla into soft-sell journalism, he
> was no longer dealing with hard core analysis of the seedy and intricate
> shenanigans in the military and cabalistic overrun of the oil industry; he
> was holding a mint-fresh copy of City People magazine whose 20th Anniversary
> we are celebrating today.
> I am here to congratulate Seye Kehinde for his artful dodger's composure,
> and escape, and to wish all of you at City People and all readers of .City
> People a wonderful twentieth anniversary. It is great to be this old on the
> streets in a country where life expectancy for magazines is at the very
> nadir of the actuary. Life expectancy for sundry enterprises especially now
> that recession is the buzzword on every lip is truly not of this world. And
> recession is not the only source of mortality for enterprises in these
> times. Our friend, the new Minister of Information, Tourism and culture, Lai
> Mohammed, ordered bulldozers to the Artists Village at the National Theatre
> in Iganmu almost as he was being appointed. Among the casualties was the
> Dance Drama Troupe run by Hornbill House of the Arts, which we were daring
> to rank above South Africa's Umoja. We told South Africa's story better
> with our own Siye Goli - A Feast of Return, and gave Nigeria a showpiece
> dance drama titled, Nigeria The Beautiful. Ten years of costumes, props and
> musical and other equipments were drubbed to a sponge by the bulldozers. To
> my knowledge, neither the visual artists, the musicians nor the other dance
> troupes at the Artist village have been compensated for what was officially
> described as an "error" resulting from a bad briefing. So let me truly
> congratulate City People for surviving the many such mishaps in the market
> place and in the cynical environment that haunts businesses in our giddy
> times.
> The Theme
> Quickly, let me make a clean breast of why, after some hedging, I have
> agreed to deliver this lecture on How to Restructure the Nigerian Federation
> Without Tears! It happens that the theme of restructuring which is so much
> on everybody's lips implies changing the arrangements in accordance with
> which we are being governed. It may imply just a change of arrangements but
> it means different things to different people. Or, it is virtually
> beginning to mean whatever anybody wants it to mean. Some elder statesmen
> who should be providing clearer perspectives, have turned the ground quite
> potty by viewing it in terms of a bid to dismember Nigeria; that is,
> seeing the demand for restructuring as a wager between a unitary system of
> government, which they confuse with national unity, as against true
> federalism which seeks to devolve power from the centre to constituent
> units. They take the position of beneficiaries of a system who do not want
> things to change. Others see it as a matter of enthroning the old
> regionalism that was smashed by military coups in 1966 but is now being
> proposed for a revamp from three and four into six geopolitical zones. The
> latter, superficially, raises fears that, having six zones like former
> Yugoslavia, is tantamount to taking a leaf from a country that has since
> dismembered into seven different countries. These fears, it would seem,
> have yielded an extremist dimension represented by President Muhammadu
> Buhari's wish, as reported in The Nation, Friday, September 16, 2016, for
> local governments to gain autonomy from state governments so that states
> will no longer be able to " act as if they own the local governments". In
> the view of all political scientists that I have ever read, this would
> result in a Napoleonic overcoming of federalism by a conqueror's logic
> resulting in an extreme case of unitarism, a bidding by the Federal
> Government to create local governments for states to run; but not as they
> wish. Ordinarily, as states are supposed to be the creators of local
> governments, deploying them as necessary instruments and agents of
> development, a view of local government autonomy which insinuates federal
> power into governance at that level, prefigures a restructuring that is
> against restructuring. This is because it further unitarizes an already
> over-unitarized federal system. Unwittingly, by reversing the usual meaning
> of restructuring which contests such a format, it gives true federalism
> its agitatorial rationale which demands for constituent units of a country a
> form of self-governance within more or less protected cultural geographies
> that are coordinate with and equal in their respective spheres with the
> central government. In essence, what is true federalism is not necessarily
> resolved beyond question. But it is a striving to be in sync with K.C.
> Wheare's classical definition in his book on Federalism. I dare say that
> what is true in true federalism is actually a backhanded response to the
> need to move away from the hangover of a militarized and unitarized federal
> system of government in order to embrace its more authentic mode or
> modality..
> In the face of people who may see a unitarized federalism as a way of
> restructuring, it is not surprising that there are others who over-react to
> them by going completely overboard to reject the concentrated power of
> the Presidential system itself. In their bid for restructuring, they would
> rather have the collegiate leadership in a Parliamentary system of
> government which they consider a more befitting alternative. There are
> some other peculiar proposals which take virtually every re-arrangement in
> government, even a mere reshuffling of cabinet ministers, a reduction in the
> cost of running legislatures, or alteration of the revenue allocation
> formula, as amounting to restructuring. I think however that it is
> important not to harm focus by packing too much into the restructuring bag.
> Truly, focus is being harmed when the concentrated power and centralism of
> the Presidential system, which is not responsible for its habits of jumbo
> expenditure in the Nigerian circumstance, is allowed to yield distracting
> debates as to whether to have a parliamentary system in addition to
> part-time legislators either in order to save costs, or escape the tyranny
> of the Executive Governors.
> The distinction between a Presidential system and a parliamentary one, or
> between full-time and part-time legislators is tangential to, if not
> completely outside the debate over how to restructure or not restructure.
> As I may not be able to look at the issues too closely in this intervention,
> I am merely mentioning it as a means of setting the stage for an
> appreciation of what restructuring is really all about in our climes. It is
> more crucial to concentrate on the hard core issue of federalism and its
> enemies amongst whom I would not like to add the name of President Muhammadu
> Buhari who, surveying the Nigerian maelstrom from a helicopter view,
> appears tempted to strike at powers that should rightly be exercised by
> other tiers of government rather than his own federal charge.
> My purpose in this lecture is rather straightforward . I see restructuring
> as a change in the spatial arrangements by which we are governed. It calls
> forth the necessity to have protected and defended cultural and economic
> geographies for the exercise of power. The point is to bring it all down to
> the level of serious interactive discourses so that it is not left simply in
> the hands of those defenders of the people's interests who, being human, can
> sometimes stumble and fall in the course of waging the good fight to right
> the wrongs of our time. Let's just say that this intervention is about
> proper definitions, accounting, and monitoring of how we got to where we
> are, and may yet arrive at what is most desirable about Nigerian Federalism
> without falling into half-way houses, shabby compromises and complete
> reversals and displacements of goals - such as what I call the Khalifah
> Syndrome - which accompanied and mangled many of our national struggles in
> the past.
> The Khalifah Syndrome
> Here I want to make a special mention of the June 12 Struggle. Let us
> remember, that once upon a time, we all woke up to find that key stalwarts
> who were standing on June 12, began to ask for General Sani Abacha to
> intervene in order to unlock the jam and immobilism that had overtaken the
> country. Our own Gani Fawehinmi, Beko Ransome Kuti, Bolaji Akinyemi, Ken
> Saro Wiwa - all the pro-democracy princes were rooting for the man whom all
> those conversant with the politics of the Nigerian Army called The Khalifah,
> the successor. It was spooky; and it was clear that someone they had a
> reason to trust had overcome their sense of vigilance. I had to ask on the
> pages of TheNews magazine: how many battalions had they so that if the
> invited General began to fun-fool, he could be checkmated. Soon after, the
> General actually took over power and all the pro-democracy people including
> the avatars of the National Democratic Coalition, Nadeco, were nominating
> their chosen ministers into Abacha's cabinet. Even the custodian of the
> mandate, Chief MKO Abiola himself later admitted that he too agreed with
> General Sani Abacha that he could stay for a while. Except that nobody
> really cared to ask: how long is a while? That is, until the General proved
> his status as Khalifah by digging in so deep, it required his seizure of
> the custodian of the mandate to define what a while could mean. Thereafter,
> at his death, and after the passing away of the custodian himself, another
> opportunity arose to refocus. It became a turf war between the radicals in
> the pro-democracy movement who wanted pure democracy and the patriarchs who
> wanted a select group of elders from across the country to constitute a
> transition council. It was actually a fruitless debate because there was no
> way an electoral process - with electoral commissions etcetera - could be
> adopted without giving the military, already in power - a significant role.
> So, poor strategizing gave the baton back to the military. They promptly
> rooted for one of themselves, already appropriately civilianized after
> jail, to come to power. This created the opportunity for another chance
> when the Alliance for Democracy decided to work with the newly elected
> President Olusegun Obasanjo's government. It was made to appear as serious
> decision-making even when the real issue was no longer whether to work or
> not work with the government but who should be sent from the pro-democracy
> bracket. In my view, at such critical conjunctures, the pro-democracy
> stalwarts in our midst have always managed to flunk the test because of
> being too strapped to a personality profiling of issues rather than bother
> with core ideas or agreed goals.
> In my view, the most heinous of such strategic failures and one that is
> being made to appear like a success story, is the pursuit of the coalition
> that yielded the fusion called All Progressive Congress, APC. It is a highly
> dispiriting failure that cannot be properly understood by looking at its
> presumed success in ousting President Goodluck Jonathan from Office. In
> itself, that ouster was the failure; especially, given the replacement that
> was rooted for with so much vigour by people who said they wanted
> restructuring. Only the day before, restructuring of the Federation had
> been the rousing mantra. It was so swiftly abandoned or let us say toned
> down to the point of denial, after the advocates discovered a beeline to
> political power as a more valued project. They began the distancing of
> restructuring away from themselves; they, who had literally driven the whole
> country to a frenzy, a virtual apoplexy, in pursuit of a Sovereign National
> Conference that was supposed to achieve restructuring! True, no matter how
> they defined the sovereign in the national conference, it was clearly an
> impossibility to get it according to their agitatorial designs. But they
> ought to have been the first to know that. It turned out that the mode in
> which President Goodluck Jonathan eventually pulled it off was the only way
> to get it right without self-deception. Which still did not prevent the
> lack of sovereignty from being raised as a rationale for rejecting the
> Conference. The rejection thrived on other bits about its rushed nature,
> it's coming too close to the General election, and therefore it's being a
> part of a hidden agenda. I dare to say that only those who were not paying
> attention to the setting up of the Belgore commission, the civil society
> confabs, and the reviews in both houses of the 7th National Assembly, could
> stake such grounds for their rejection of the National conference. Anyhow,
> the big snag, and the actual source of delay in putting the conference on
> the road in the first place, was that some stalwarts who had once supported
> restructuring as the spine of their political projects, simply acceded to
> thoroughly unfounded reasons for joining the push against the President of a
> minority ethnic extraction whom a Doctrine of Necessity had put in Aso Rock.
> By the way, I mention the minority factor because no matter how well
> concealed as the ground for rejecting Jonathan as President, it stands on
> top of the reasons that the Northern catchment of the Nigerian political
> class had for deciding to move out of the PDP en masse.
> Let's put a finger on it: It was not just because there was an agreement
> inside the PDP that only a northerner could take over from Umaru Yar'adua .
> Even if there was, a private arrangement in a political party should never
> have been considered fit to overawe a national constitution. To concede
> office to the Vice President after the death of President Yar'adua, should
> have been automatic for true patriots. The more plausible rationale for not
> doing so was that all former Presidents of Nigeria, and shadowy cabals
> around them, wanted to have their leg in the door for the next round of
> bidding for oil blocks. They could not trust a leader of minority
> extraction, whose siblings were sitting with explosives on the ready, on top
> of the oil reserves, to do it in their own interest. President Goodluck
> Jonathan himself, not being a child of the bride's chamber in his party,
> really could not have had any clue as to what the hullaballoo was all about.
> His trying to be his own man, as the whole country obviously expected, was
> at the heart of the crisis. No one knew this better than former President
> Obasanjo whose inability to put strings on either Yar'adua or Yar'adua's
> successor, was his core reason for wanting to build a national constituency
> to oust a President regarded by many as his protege. President Jonathan
> was so very snidely, and so quickly, slapped with being clueless in a way
> that was meant to de-legitimate him before he could do any damage to his
> putative minders after the Doctrine of Necessity that brought him to power.
> This was compounded by those who knew that this President of minority
> extraction, who was already putting his foot down to hold a National
> Conference even before he was sworn in, was not averse to restructuring the
> Federation. Yes, in spite of Goodluck Jonathan's wily naivity, they knew.
> Another way of saying this is that the split that led a large Arewa bloc to
> exit from the People's Democratic Party was, properly speaking, a move in
> the war to restructure or not to restructure the Nigerian Federation. The
> big salvo about Jonathan's cluelessness had taken off within that famous oil
> war, the occupy Nigeria episode, in which many people fought against their
> country while imagining that they were protesting against a clue-less
> President. Along the way, while President Jonathan was literally bending
> over backward, through appointments and projects sited in the North, to win
> back the masses from those who had left his party, the leader of the pack,
> former President Olusegun Obasanjo, zeroed in. He had wasted his first term
> in office as President in so much grand-standing before he suddenly realized
> during his second term that he needed a third term in order to do grand
> things that he could make grandiloquent speeches about. The pity is that it
> was this searcher for a third term, through a successor, that the Action
> Congress of Nigeria ACN as a party had to embrace as Prince Henry The
> Navigator, as the party joined a standing open conspiracy. No question
> about it: it remains one of the great tragedies of the Fourth Republic, one
> great defeat of rationality in Nigerian politics.
> As it happened, all the forewarnings about coalitions that could destroy the
> basis of decades-old agitation for restructuring and the politics of social
> welfare were ignored by the adventuring coalition-builders who soon landed a
> truly unique but quite unprepossessing fusion called APC. Every indicator of
> danger in the highly quixotic search for a messiah was poohpoohed for
> standing in the way of the search for Power. They saw restructuring of the
> Federation no longer as a core issue but a peripheral one to be dispensed
> with, according to the coming electoral heist. This was why very little was
> done to define what kind of restructuring they needed. It was a case of Get
> the messiah first, and restructuring would follow; that is, if it would
> still be needed. Or was it a case of if we have power, why should
> restructuring matter? Either way, it was another return to the Khalifa
> syndrome which had enabled Abacha to stay for a while and to dig deep
> without anyone having laid a basis for reclaiming the boggled mandate. The
> parameters were simply never laid out, nor was there a reasoned
> apportionment of personnel to guarantee commitment to shared goals.
>
> Quite unsettling is that, listening to, and reading what is being poured
> down by many old and born-again champions of restructuring, it is clear that
> there is so much missing in the discussions, with too many people too much
> at sea to know what to do about it. Officially, having rejected the way of
> the National Conference, with President Muhammadu Buhari, interning the
> Report on a shelf that he may never return to, it has become obvious that
> those who wish to have Nigeria restructured have a fight on their hands that
> may be tougher than any they had yet seen. No one imagines an easy triumph
> but as I wrote in the book, This Conference Must Be Different, which was
> meant to anticipate the conference, "Even if there is some alchemy that can
> prevent it (the Conference) from taking place........whoever succeeds in
> achieving such a negative feat will have to carry the burden of making it
> happen again, sooner rather than later. Or earn opprobrium that will never
> cease"
> So to say, the battle for restructuring is not one that Nigerians can lose.
> But it could be won for the wrong reasons. And that would be tragic. Which
> is why advocates of restructuring need unusual thinking caps while they are
> at it.
>
> So many are bidding for time to garner positions from all sorts of brain
> storms. Some are hoping that they could call for another conference to
> settle the matter. The Chairman of President Buhari's Transition
> Committee, Alhaji Ahmed Joda, a very wise man, has thought of another three
> years of ruminating over how to hold another conference. But how can
> Nigerians who blamed President Goodluck Jonathan for waiting till too late
> to put his conference on the road, how can they be asking President Buhari
> to do the same; that is, jump the nation into a national conference, when
> the report of the last one has been left unread, undigested and without
> usable annotations even if it is only to stop the current pattern of
> poaching ideas from it in second-hand and haphazard fashion?
>
> What one would have supposed is that those who distrusted the conveners of
> the last National Conference would by now have done their own thorough
> study, provided their own report, or do a close reading as a way of showing
> how much they disagree with it, or how much better they would have wished
> it to be. That is how people behave when they care about their country and
> are averse to either deceptions, or leaving people stranded waiting for
> answers to life-threatening situations. If the wish not to deceive or leave
> people stranded is their reason for putting the National Conference Report
> in the freezer, then it ought to be a reason to start debating it.
>
> Let me quickly add that this lecture is not an attempt to look at the
> National Conference Report but to offer a reasoned historical analysis of
> the inevitability of restructuring. I am merely providing a narrative that
> aspires to put our implacable realities on the table so as to ward off the
> Khalifah syndrome. My approach to the question is essentially an
> abridgement of a number of other lectures which I have delivered in the
> past two decades and many of which are beginning to appear in books after
> publication in newspapers and journals. One such lecture was the one
> delivered on this same platform ten years ago on Leadership and Electoral
> Reform which would soon appear in a book titled Media Nigeriana. The others
> have been published in Taking Nigerian Seriously, When does a Civil War come
> to an end and This conference must be Different. They are books you wont
> find in the next bookshop. But never mind, their time will come. This
> lecture is a promissory note to the one titled The Nigerian Agenda. What
> unites all of them is a concern for not just restructuring but bidding for
> true federalism that speaks to Nigeria's history from the presumption that
> no part of Nigeria possesses interests that are so radically different from
> those of any other part as to warrant a different treatment. All the talk
> about an Arewa strategy, a Southwest approach, an Indigbo factor, or a South
> South or North East position must be taken as partial interventions, as of
> blind beggars trying to describe an elephant and, ending with the worship of
> various gods and schemes of incompleteness. A case of Christians, Muslims
> and animists, each side-minding only their stalls, and therefore unwittingly
> empowering a raging fire to consume the whole supermarket. All the assumed
> solutions, frankly, are becoming so insidiously self-defeatist at a time
> when shoddy attempts are being made by some parts of the country to craft
> their own foreign policy, and others are seeking to fight poverty by
> engaging in external borrowing, as if the rest of the country will not be
> implicated in the amortization of any debts incurred. I dare say that the
> best way to have a handle on the theme How to Restructure the Nigerian
> Federation Without Tears is to look at the grating competitions and
> distracted conversations between North and South regions and the
> nationalities in-between in our history.
>
> Along the way, while it may be trite, to say that the natives, Nigerians,
> were never involved in the construction of the system that has mauled their
> lives, it happens to be quite rational to ask: why has it taken so long to
> change the obvious lopsided architecture that distorts past present and
> future in our Republic? Why has the mischief of treating North and South as
> two separate countries, been sustained as a way to go? Why has every change
> attempted or effected become a means of reproducing the lopsided colonial
> architecture? These are questions that I wish to confront within the theme I
> have chosen. I take it that we all expect restructuring to imply a
> re-arrangement of structures, a movement that alters the architecture of the
> country in such a way that repositions the lop-sidedness and makes it more
> balanced, such that no side remains a dead weight upon the other. It is no
> use running away from the reality that restructuring is a difficult subject
> because it is first and foremost about tackling the North in order to remove
> factors that have kept Nigeria backwards by sequestering that vast and
> potent geography behind a colonial facade. In relation to Nigeria's
> history, restructuring does indeed imply that a way can be found to ensure
> that all parts of the country can be made free, relatively self-governing,
> and more creative than hitherto by streamlining relationships between all
> constituent parts that have been grating upon one another and hurting
> relationships. My approach is to indulge in a narrative that, first of all,
> removes the blinkers from the history, and lays bare the heart of the matter
> from which we get to know where the rain started to beat us, as Chinua
> Achebe would have put it.
>
> Regionalism and National Regeneration
>
> It is quite uncontroversial to note that, beginning with Frederick Lugard's
> era, which closed in formal terms in 1919 but has not quite ended, there has
> been a rank competition between different regions of Nigeria for control of
> the whole Federation and that this stemmed from the manner of their
> creation. It is important, to consider first of all, how the structure of
> the Federation was consummated as different parts were taken over by
> different British authorities. The Colonial office took the Lagos colony and
> environs; the Foreign Office poached the southern protectorate, and the
> Royal Niger Company took most of the North before the trading company was
> dispossessed by the British Parliament. Where better therefore to start the
> discussion of structure than the colonizer's refusal to allow the North,
> three times larger than the south, to be split before or after the
> amalgamation in 1914! As readers of Margery Perham, Lugard's biographer, can
> attest, proposals made by Charles Temple, Governor of the North, for an
> eight-region structure for the country and the one by E.D Morel, editor of
> the Daily Mail for a four region Federation, were thrown out by Lugard out
> of pure imperial mischief. The culture of One North versus the South was
> cemented with a universalized Indirect Rule System, a common culture of
> emirates with a tough-minded Fulani ethnic core, a more or less generalized
> Hausa language, a slowed-down educational system for the North, and a
> virtual veto based on gestimates of population that have hardened, over the
> decades, into an immutable law. The law must be seen as active today in the
> fact that every Census has been turned into a negotiated deal with
> distortive implications for revenue allocation, voters' roll, employment,
> and admission into Federal institutions and departments. The result is that
> more than 100 years after amalgamation, the question - when would Nigeria
> have a normal census? –cannot be answered well because it has become a
> loaded reference to problems of the divide between North and South. The
> problems were sharpened with the two-way split of the smaller Southern
> Protectorate into western and eastern region in 1939. With that split, the
> basis was set for the consequent three-way competition - one hegemonic North
> over the East and West – which has been the mother of all demarcations, a
> form of regionalism that has created unethical fixtures and distancing in
> Nigerian politics. Indeed, although most Nigerians like to see ethnicity as
> the prime fault-line that has fractured all national aspirations, the
> reality of the lopsided three-cornered structure deserves to be credited
> with being the real destroyer of fellow-feeling, promoter of distrust, and
> farmer of that lack of empathy that has been the constant generator of
> corruption in our society. It can be stated without fear of contradiction
> that not to seek to remove it, and to continue pumping hyper-inflated
> sentiments about building a united country, is to engage in absolute
> self-deception.
>
> From the beginning, the regions were practically goaded into a culture of
> unwholesome competition with a mental and material infrastructure that has
> turned what could have been a healthy interaction into a very unsavoury case
> of mutual self-annihilation. It began with colonial officials who were
> determined that never the twain, North and South, shall meet. While they
> wanted money from the south to be used to cushion deficits incurred in the
> North, and they wished for personnel that the North could not immediately
> provide to come from the south, British officials in the North, under
> Frederick Lugard and after, did not want to have a form of interaction
> between the two protectorates that could unite the country against colonial
> rule. Or, more like the same thing, they did not want the kind of liberal
> governance that Sir William Macgregor and Sir Walter Egerton had established
> in the Lagos colony and southern protectorate where great development
> projects, schools, railways, electricity, town planning, and a critical
> newspaper culture made Lagosians think that they were a part of Britain.
> Lugard and his men did not want the colony to contaminate the conservative
> control they had in the North. They saw it as the Indian disease: that
> business of allowing an educated middle class to emerge which soon begins to
> appeal civil rights cases to as far as the Privy Council. They wanted
> amalgamation of the North and South only as a means of access to the riches
> of the south. They were amalgamating protectorates, not peoples. They
> wished to retain the split between the two, including splitting up the
> Yoruba in Ilorin from their southern Oyo siblings who spoke the same
> language and had deep cultural affinities. The antipathy that they built
> into the interactions, or lack of interactions, between North and South, led
> to the encrustation of regionalism as a normal binge that has virtually
> grown into a seemingly immovable political culture. This culture is what
> restructuring seeks to break to remove the grump between North and South.
> There is no running away from it.
>
> The place to begin in my view is the colonially tele-guided and manipulated
> All-Nigeria Conference of 1950 at Ibadan in which Nigerians were first
> induced to take active part in designing their own fate as one people. It
> was a conference between those who did not want to lose conferred advantages
> and others who did not want to be or remain hapless victims. The core
> issues at that conference and since then have centred on the management of,
> or the need to change, the structure of the country. Objectively, the goals
> have been about laying a basis for a new Nigeria; one in which the centre
> may not be controlled by one part of the country at the expense of others;
> and the whole country may accede to the cognate principle which allows equal
> rights for all citizens irrespective of their place of origin or where they
> live. It is the extent to which regionalism has prevented such a new Nigeria
> that has been at the heart of the search for restructuring from one
> national conference to another and has yielded so much investments in
> falsehood as a means of hiding inequities and making claims of dubious
> entitlements to sustain why, and why not.
>
> The myth of one country, but two un-socializing parts was maintained by
> colonial fiat under Lugard's aegis and his Dual Mandate. It simply said: we
> are British, we govern through your own chiefs; or conquerors as the case
> may be. In pursuit of heady strategic interests, they saw their charge as
> one country only by carefully distinguishing it from campaigns by
> nationalists who, idealistically and out of reckless optimism, made the
> presumption of a country that had become united with immediate effect simply
> by being amalgamated. We are all Africans was a good slogan for the
> nationalists led by the returnees from civil rights-suffused America but
> without an appreciation of a modus for working together within obvious
> differences. It was pure reckless optimism. The fact that the country was
> brought into existence as a geographical fact, by force of British arms, a
> semblance of Common Law and the English language, was turned into a means of
> flogging those seeking to defend their homelands, ethnic groups and
> nationalities, from undue exploitation and repression. Idealistic
> nationalism made common cause with the colonial office in preferring
> regional arrangements for administrative purposes but seeing the expression
> of ethnic identity as an anti-nation phenomenon. It was called tribalism
> before it was even allowed to be seen as a necessary means of protecting
> people who needed to have their self-governance enshrined as part of
> whatever new dispensation was being consummated. Without providing a
> procedure for a truly cultural citizenship across the country, the
> imposition of regionalism made it a matter of strident gravity. Much later,
> when Ahmadu Bello, the Northern Premier, told Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Premier
> of the East, that it was better to understand differences rather than
> seeking to forget them, it was a catch lifted that should have led to a
> search for commonalities. The answer to both positions lay in understanding
> that a mere geographical expression, as Obafemi Awolowo described it in Path
> to Nigerian Freedom in 1946, needed to be acknowledged because it is no use
> forgetting differences, except as part of a design of the right educational,
> economic and political measures to reduce the differences, and hence turn
> the geographical expression into what, today, we ought to call and regard as
> a cultural expression.
>
> Not doing this led to a virtual, but misguided, criminalization of ethnicity
> by those who think, wrongly, that unless primordial brackets were
> forgotten, they would displace the application of a common morality and
> law. Those who think in such outmoded terms are of course closet ethnic
> bigots, who see every difference as a basis for applying a different
> morality to other people. The point is that a common law across ethnic
> groups and fractions is possible and necessary for people who must live
> together. By the same token, it is supposed to aid the entrenchment of
> self-governance. It happens that there is always a tendency, in competitive
> situations, to dress shared commonalities in wrong tropes and robes in order
> to create differences. Such differences are then promoted as a basis for
> gaining advantage over others. The reality is that having, for instance,
> common welfare programmes across the board, could be counted upon to end or
> reduce fissions. Without the security offered by such shared welfare
> measures, as a catchment of the nationalists campaigned for, there was no
> way of removing the inequality and inequities between various regions. The
> truth is that competitions tend to become less benign and more antagonistic
> the more each region seeks to have veto powers over others rather than
> creating a basis for genuinely shared decision-making. This explains the
> format that existed between Nigeria's three colonial regions right into the
> independence era: thus keeping the issue of re-structuring permanently on
> the agenda . It has become, in this millennium ,a case of we must
> re-structure or die. Surely, our wish is not to die but thrive.
>
> Grating competition and Regionalism
>
> At this point, let me note that Nigeria's odyssey, particularly since the
> Lyttleton Constitution of 1954, has been hostage, to the different and
> incongruous ambitions of the three colonial regions. The most significant
> factor in the shaping and re-shaping of their interaction, was that, in
> each region, there was one hegemonic majority ethnic group against many
> aggrieved minority groups demanding regions of their own in order to have
> secure geographies for their cultural economic and social development. This
> factor has been the core de-stabilizer as well as the life-wire of the bid
> to ensure that democracy is not merely an issue of one man one man vote but
> that no group of Nigerians are lorded over by others. In the first Republic,
> each of the three majority ethnic groups was a prime sponsor of the ruling
> political party in each of the three regions: the Hausa/Fulani in the
> Northern People's Congress, NPC for the North, the Yoruba in the Action
> Group, AG, for the West, and the Igbo in the National Council of Nigeria and
> the Cameroun, NCNC, for the East. On the matter of restructuring, the
> Eastern region was seeking to take over the West in order to confront the
> North with a southern solidarity; the West sought to break up each region by
> creating states for minority ethnic groups to achieve a Federation in which
> no one part could hijack the centre. For the North, the goal was to stem the
> possibility of East and West cooperating to turn the Middle Belt into a
> proper and viable region whose 'freedom' could end the logic of the veto
> that size and population, no matter how disputed, had placed in the hands of
> the northern princes. The latter were the beneficiaries of the deliberate
> mis-structuring of the country by the hegemonic faction of the British in
> Nigeria. Each of the parties had an attitude to the demand by minority
> ethnic groups for regions of their own which had implications for the
> pattern of regionalism that eventually emerged.
>
> The oldest of the parties, the NCNC, started out as a brilliant Congress, a
> catch-all of ethnic unions, labour collectives, debating societies and
> students organizations, but it soon lost nerve in the face of ethnic groups
> outside its fold that could not be pacified or wished away. It could neither
> disavow its strong Igbo base nor turn the country into a place of ethnic
> neuters, as it seemed to want to do. Also, it could not accede to a unitary
> format in accordance with the rhetoric of its leaders nor could it treat the
> campaign for federalism in any consistent manner. It tried but failed to
> treat federalism as necessarily a divisive ploy of the tribalists or those
> it called Pakistanists. The NCNC support for the demands of the minority
> ethnic groups was therefore consistently conditional and ruthlessly
> unforgiving in relation to its Eastern base where repressed and marginalized
> minorities were in a state of permanent disquiet.
>
> The case of the NPC and the North was rather unique. As a virtual custodian
> of the heritage of the Jihad and the induced spread of emirate culture that
> Lugard had affirmed and extended with his indirect rule system, the NPC was
> heir to a conqueror's imperative over the north. It could not countenance
> the demand for a separate region by the minority ethnic groups in the north
> without undermining its own heritage and it's conqueror's logic. It would
> have amounted to giving up the virtual veto based on colonially contrived
> size and declared population figures which formed the basis of Northern
> power in the Federation. The party could not disavow the ethnic geographies
> of the north, nor openly criminalize ethnicity, because it had a deep-rooted
> Fulani core which it sought to bury or hide under a common Hausa language
> and a commonly shared religion that was however not cover-all across the
> region. There were ethnic and other differences to contend with but this was
> counteracted by the imposition of the indirect rule system which, after
> Lugard, was ritualized into a means of building the North into a common
> bastion by the former colonial resident for Katsina, Richmond Palmer who in
> 1924-25 took over the North after successfully uncovering a Mahdist Revolt
> that was being planned to turn the North against British colonialism. He
> organized what he called Conference of Residents in the North which brought
> all the Emirates together periodically to strategize for the North. He it
> was who created the format of local provincial organizations that detracted
> from the centralized control at regional levels and thus successfully cut
> off the North from the south. His organizational form aided British
> officials who eventually began to organize riots to ward off any threatening
> rapproachment between North and South. Although Palmer was Lugard's
> battering ram for the more unsuccessful establishment of indirect rule in
> the south, the spirit of parochial provincialism that he helped establish
> across the North was reinforced when the electoral pattern of the
> parliamentary system was grafted upon it. Accordingly, all that a candidate
> for parliament needed to do was to win an election in a locality and then go
> to the centre, by agreement with like-minds, or like-sharers, to become
> member of parliament, a Minister or Premier, making laws for and governing a
> whole region. In essence, candidates for office were not required to or
> encouraged to have a wider sense beyond emirate politics in the North, not
> to talk of a good sense of the larger country beyond the small constituency.
> Thus, an emirate sense was universalized that has since refused to go away.
> Although everybody complained of tribalism, all were hooked on this
> parliamentary system that encouraged it in a different format. It was
> therefore merely shadow-boxing with the idea of national unity when each
> group attacked the other for tribalism. Clannishness, provincialism and
> ultimately, regionalism became the order of the day. It functioned in
> virtually the same way across all the regions as majority ethnic groups in
> each region dominated the ruling parties that fought relentlessly for
> ascendancy over one another. This meant that each region tried to impose a
> unitary code within the region but sought to federate across the lopsided
> gaps across regional boundaries. Specifically, the idea of the regional
> ideal implied a hierarchy of ethnic nationalities in which some are under
> other ethnic groups. Peculiarly, in the First Republic, the NPC and the
> radical opposition party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU,
> appeared agreed on this as they were both simply 'Northern' seeking to rule
> the whole country by ruling the north. To do this in a democracy implied a
> capacity to enforce a laager, or block vote, or at least a largely common
> view, for all in the region. The difficulty of achieving this meant that
> largely undemocratic methods always were needed to keep the northern veto in
> place.
>
> The reality came to roost for all concerned, that is, for the majority
> ethnic groups and the political parties that they dominated, when ethnic
> minority groups in each region stood adamant in wanting the anti-colonial
> struggle to be not only a matter of securing freedom from British
> colonialism but wresting freedom from the internal colonialism of the
> majority ethnic groups. In a sense, although or because the resistance to
> the creation of more regions for minority ethnic groups had become virtually
> a colonial/national industry, the political parties of the minority ethnic
> groups were unrelenting in their pursuit of secure and protected, cultural
> geographies for self governance within the Federation. If each of the
> minorities was considered too unviable to have a region of its own, more of
> them were prepared to band together to escape the annihilation that awaited
> their languages, culture and self-worth unless they had regions of their
> own. The United Middle Belt Congress, UMBC, sought to create a Middle Belt
> region out of the North; the Cross River/Ogoja/Rivers State Movement aimed
> at splitting the East; and, the Midwest State Movement pursued the break up
> of the West.
>
> The saving grace in the case of the Midwest State Movement was that the
> ruling party in the West, the Action Group, never stopped demanding creation
> of more regions along ethnic lines and in a manner that heightened the
> politics of social welfare. From 1914, after the death in exile of Oba
> Overamwen, the Obas of Benin had led a campaign to have Edo people in the
> Northern protectorate returned to the nationality fold, and gradually turned
> the West of the Niger, Benin and Delta provinces into a Midwest state
> Movement. As early as 1955, the Western Region House of Assembly had voted
> for the Midwest to be created out of the West. It was a dangerous vote that
> could weaken its regional position irremediably in the national competition
> for living space unless the other two regions also allowed their minorities
> to go at the same time. But this was not to be. The AG was caught in a
> catch 22 situation. As it turned out, after years of stalling, it was
> actually that vote in the Western House of Assembly that would be used
> later in 1963 to achieve the actual creation of the Midwest state. Indeed,
> when it had to happen, it was done within a spanking strategy deployed by
> the ruling coalition of the day merely to split the home base of the AG
> whose leader had been making such a song and dance of the issue of state
> creation. However, as the leaders of the AG had hoped, and as Awolowo had
> written in AWO, his 1960 autobiography, once the Midwest was created,
> nothing could halt further agitations for the creation of states in the
> other regions. Not even the jail terms that later took AG agitators out of
> circulation into jail and exile, could squelch the demands. In fact, the
> untoward and unconstitutional methods deployed against the agitators for
> states in the North and in the West hastened the breakdown, and military
> takeover, of the First Republic in 1966. Rather than kill off agitations,
> state creation came back on top of the agenda after the nature of the coups
> and counter coups of that year. Yakubu Gowon, a northerner of minority
> ethnic stock, on becoming Head of State after the July Revenge coup,
> released Adaka Boro, a most dramatic state agitator, who had been sentenced
> to death for armed declaration of the secession of the Niger Delta Republic.
> His release told many observers that new states were on the way, long before
> the announcement of the creation of 12 states in response to the imminence
> of Biafran secession. When it came, less to accede to state agitators than
> to stem secession, it opened the floodgates.
>
> Ethnic Competition and State Creation
>
> It does need to be highlighted that chronicling the subsequent patterns of
> state creation is important mainly because of what it reveals about the
> nature of political power in the country as it changed hands from one
> military dictatorship to another. Quite critical is that military rule
> removed the democratic factor in the process of state creation. This allowed
> for speed and also made the individual wielder of power more readily
> obvious as the creator of states. Equally important is that the
> displacement of the democratic factor exposed how the struggle between the
> three majority ethnic groups for the control of the country intersected with
> the bid by the minority ethnic groups for their own states. Essentially,
> there were genuine fears of domination marked by several movements for
> ethnic unionization which had led to the setting up of the Willinks Ethnic
> Minorities Commission in 1958. After conceding that there were clear
> infringements of the rights of minorities in the modalities of management in
> each region, the colonial authorities however thought it was a matter to be
> settled by merely inserting fundamental human rights in the Constitution, as
> NEPU proposed, rather than providing secure political geographies for ethnic
> or regional self-governance. At all times, intra and inter-regional
> scuffles continued in the form of bids for advantages and affirmative
> actions that mixed xenophobia with straightforward bargains. Thus, the North
> embarked on a policy of Northernization in the civil service which proved
> its anti-south features through a blatant preference for non-Nigerians,
> Asians for instance, who were largely not as qualified as southern Nigerians
> for the positions on offer. After independence, it became normal policy
> for the northern political parties, radical and conservative alike, to join
> in ensuring that if the North could not catch up in education,
> industrialization, and general development, the South had to be prevented
> from moving too fast. Arguments for southern advantages to be reduced or
> hacked were actively canvassed by northern elites without any
> self-consciousness. It had taken on a very visceral turn in the mid-sixties
> when the pre-independence agreement between the NPC for the North and the
> NCNC for the East, was simply aimed at sharing power at the centre to the
> exclusion of the West.
>
> Within that coalition, formalized from 1958 under British auspices, the East
> was granted leeway to take over strategic posts and offices across the
> Federal bureaucracy and public life. In a manner to which Easterners were
> initially indifferent, the North took over the commanding heights of the
> economy and politics. The weight of the sharing became bothersome for the
> Eastern coalition partners however because, too obviously, what the north
> got included the railway extensions, the Kainji Hydro-electric dam, military
> installations, iron and steel industry, and soon enough, control of the
> Federal Civil service that had been richly manned by the NCNC. The Western
> Region, with its prime leaders in jail or exile, had become mere pariahs in
> the share out. Premier Akintola taunted the AG with lack of Federal largesse
> to show for so called progressive politics. Since the struggle was about
> how to share and exclude rather than develop and equalize conditions across
> the country, it soon yielded an antagonistic interface between the North and
> the East. This led to leaders of the East and the North planning to carry
> out coups against one another. The first salvo in the coup bids came with
> President Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe's refusal, in a speech already published in an
> advance edition of his newspaper, the West African Pilot, to call Prime
> Minister, Tafawa Balewa, to form a government after the General Election of
> 1964. No one could be sure whether he had the power to refuse to do so after
> an election; but he had refused because, according to him, the election was
> rigged. Among other infractions, it was an election in which 80 out of 134
> candidates of the NPC were returned unopposed.
>
> On sound legal advice, to the effect that only he could command the
> obedience of the military, Tafawa Balewa simply called in the army to put
> Zik in what was virtually protective custody. Zik capitulated. This was
> when Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu had tried unsuccessfully to convince Zik and many
> of his own colleagues in the army including David Ejoor, Yakubu Gowon and
> Victor Banjo to let a coup take place. He knew only too well that on the
> ground, the East had the officers but the North had the men in the army.
> Zik had to write another speech that called the Prime Minister to form a
> government. From that moment, all innocence was lost. Both coalition
> partners thereafter began to plan coups, and organize riot squads, against
> one another. Even NEPU, which was in alliance with the NCNC, and had been
> helping to ferry Camerounian militants to Eastern Europe for guerilla
> training, was not left out of the coup--making game. NEPU also needed to
> train tough resisters of NPC's Dan Mahaukatas - 'sons of madmen' - the
> thugs, who did mayhem in the emirates. In the midst of all it, Tivland, in
> the Middle Belt, exploded in virtual Guerrilla warfare against NPC
> pacifiers. In the West, after many Action Group leaders had been jailed or
> driven into exile, the promise that Awolowo had made - that he would make
> the West ungovernable if they, the powers that be, took it over by untoward
> means, began to materialize. The Wetie, the dousing of opponents with petrol
> caches to set them and their properties ablaze - was in full swing. The UPGA
> (NCNC and AG) and the NNA (NPC and Ladoke Akintola's NNDP) entered unending
> fracas that made the streets in the Western Region unsafe. Soldiers were
> called in. Upon intelligence that a coup, supposedly organized by the
> Premier of the North would take place on January 17, 1966, the five majors,
> as some of them have since narrated, moved their own coup backwards to
> January 15 1966. Peremptorily, the era of military rule had arrived. As
> fate would have it, the January 15 coup was promptly hijacked by an Igbo
> echelon in the Army that was soon also dispossessed by a revenge coup
> organized by northerners who made genocide a part of the bargains that
> eventually invited a civil war. Ultimately, the civil war came merely as a
> struggle over the maintenance of the territorial integrity of Nigeria, and
> principally a struggle over the control of oil wealth in the East rather
> than dealing with the inequities that actually led to the coups, and
> countercoups in the first place.
>
> Now, let it always be said that the absolute lack of justice in the heady
> competitive circumstance of Nigeria at that time led to vast calamities. The
> arrest and punishment of about ten majors involved in the January 15 coup
> could have assuaged those who decided that all Igbo people must be punished
> for the assassinations that took place in the January 15 coup. By the same
> token, the punishment of those who organized the pogroms, all of them
> clearly identifiable, led to generalizing their crimes to cover the whole
> North and therefore making the pogrom a crime without perpetrators. This was
> why the civil war, when it came, was merely an excuse for increasing the
> inequities and normalizing them as national standards. The critical issues
> were displaced. No. They were exacerbated especially as they concerned the
> structure of the federation, in terms of the creation of states, the
> share-out of revenue and development projects, access to office, and the
> determination of policy directions.
>
> Specifically, on the issue of creation of states, the northern control of
> the army was virtually ritualized after the countercoup of 1966 into a
> unitary format. Under the presumed unity of command in the military, the
> unitarization of the country under northern control, was sped up. Although
> the Unification Decree which unitarized Nigeria was the spark that lit the
> fire of the pogroms and the counter coup, all the fixtures of that Decree
> were simply re-roaded in a different garb. Military control was accompanied
> by formal reduction of the power of the regions and states in relation to a
> centre that was under a Northern oligarchy. The structural changes, more
> than ever before, resulted in a case of one large North over the East, West
> and Midwest. The state creation odyssey tells the story well. In 1963, four
> regions. In 1967, Yakubu Gowon created six states for the South, six for
> the North, one for the Yoruba and one for the Igbo. There was parity in the
> numbers if not balance. In 1976, the Murtala/Obasanjo regime removed the
> parity by creating 10 states for the North and nine for the South. In 1987,
> Babangida created Katsina State in the North and Akwa Ibom in the Southeast
> retaining the lack of parity 11:10 in favour of the North. Between the East
> and the West, a 5:5 balance existed although the Yoruba had 3 to 2 Igbo
> states. In 1991 30 states were created. North 16, South 14. With Abuja
> being treated partially as a state, the North had 17 to 14 Southern States.
> In 1996 General Abacha added six states: North 20, South 17. The East had 9
> and the West 8. So four states in 1963, twelve in 1967, 19 in 1976, 21 in
> 1987, 30 in 1991 and 36 in 1996.
>
> The case of the local governments was particularly intriguing: In 1970, as
> the war was ending, the local governments were 299 across the country. They
> were mostly determined by the states. In the 1979 Constitution, they were
> increased to 301 and removed from the ambit of states. An increase of the
> number to 480 in 1981 was cancelled by the General Muhammadu Buhari
> Administration in 1984. It reverted to 301.In 1987, with the creation of 21
> states, local governments were increased to 499, and then to 589 with the
> creation of 30 states in 1991. In 1997, 774 local governments were created.
> In due course, Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory ended up with six local
> governments. Of interest is that by the creation of 36 states in 1997, the
> northern states had 421 local governments, the old Midwest had 44 local
> governments, one less than Kano with 45, and the six Yoruba states had 137
> local governments. The old Eastern Region got 175 local governments out of
> which the ethnic minority states of the Niger Delta were given 80 and the
> Igbo speaking states 95 local governments. Something rather peculiar is that
> Lagos with a population of 9,013,534, generally regarded as an under-count,
> was given 20 local governments and Kano with 9,383,682 got 45 local
> governments. Kaduna with a presumed population of 6,066,582 got only 23
> local governments - the same as three other states - Benue with a
> population of 4,219,244, Rivers with 5,185,400 and Sokoto with 3,696,999.
> This has led to questions being raised about the criteria used in the
> process of demarcating the local government areas. The case of Lagos and
> Kano in particular juts out. It demands stretching the questions to cover
> the criteria used in the original creation of states. Besides, why should
> states not be left to determine the number of their own local government
> areas? What manner of Federalism allows the Federal Government to create
> local governments for states to run?
>
> These questions are literally crying to be pursued; if only because every
> effort that has been made to create states and local governments has been
> financed directly from the Federation Account with monies derived from a few
> oil producing states in the Niger Delta. What this says about the nature of
> Nigeria's Federal system has been very well summarized by Major General
> (Rtd) M.Chris Alli, former Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army. In his
> memoirs, The Federal Republic of the Nigerian Army, page 154, he writes that
> federations are "moderated and conditioned by many factors which include
> size, population, wealth, tribes or nationalities, number of states or
> political regimes, for example, presidential in the United States of
> America, collegial in Switzerland, parliamentary in Austria, and
> hierarchical authoritarianism in Nigeria. As some have postulated, true
> federalism must lie somewhere halfway between confederation and unitary
> state. The reign of absolutism of Babangida's comprador regime and Abacha's
> consquitador era allowed for excessive centralization, that placed all power
> around a small group of persons of questionable motives, capability and
> nobility, in the centre of the capital. More so, governance appeared to
> serve the mundane short term interest of the political elite of the
> geographical North". Chris Alli adds on page 155 that "The Federal
> Government has become a regular and monthly paymaster, and the states, its
> waste pipes, accounting to no one in particular, not even to its subjects,
> or itself. Many otherwise vibrant and enterprising nationalities have been
> reduced to beggarly, unproductive natives living off the central government.
> Commodity and raw material produce for which Nigeria had been famous have
> been neglected and ignored. What is in place is a skewed revenue allocation
> formula that emphasizes land mass, need, population and other weird factors,
> rather than derivation, for sharing the national cake. It is a perfidious
> arrangement that reflects the greatest injustice in the national system. As
> successive military dictatorship sought legitimacy and local support, they
> created more of these states without regard for viability and considerations
> of the nation's macro economic conditions. Why not? It gave their base
> ethnic group greater and closer access to the wealth of others, in this case
> the Niger Delta resources."
>
> State Creation and Revenue Allocation
>
> Major General Chris Alli (rtd) cannot be faulted. The military command,
> preceding but exacerbated by the civil war, simply unitarized the country
> and removed the weighted sharing of revenue based on derivation. The
> consistent reduction in the percentile devoted to derivation principle
> attests to the lopsided picture: From 100% in 1946, the Philipson Commission
> recommended 50% for derivation; in 1951, Hicks-Philipson recommended 50%;
> 100% was actually disbursed in 1953 when the Western Region pushed for it;
> in 1958, however the Raisman Commission set derivation at 50%; in 1960 it
> was 50%; by 1970, the regime of General Yakubu Gowon at a "time when the
> civil war and the creation of states had laid the regions prostrate" reduced
> derivation share to 45%. The entire offshore take of the oil producing
> states was reduced by 20%. In 1975 the derivation fell to 20%. The Obasanjo
> Yaradua administration in 1975 fixed it at 25% after the 'service' of the
> Technical Committee on Revenue Allocation headed by Professor Ojetunji
> Aboyade. The Okigbo Commission even more than Aboyade railed against
> derivation. Shagari reduced it to 5% in 1981. Under Buhari, in his first
> coming as Head of state, it crashed to 1.5%. General Ibrahim Babangida
> raised it to 3%. What is interesting about these figures is not only the
> progressive withdrawal of enthusiasm from any allocation to the states but
> the heightening neglect of the area that accompanies the reductions
> especially in the case of the Niger Delta which produces the black gold.
>
> It is a serious matter: In a footnote to his Introduction to Nigerian
> Politics, Billy Dudley wrote: "Between 1967/68 and 1976/77 , whereas state
> revenues grew by 650 percent, those of the federal government rose by 1,574
> percent . Also where in 1968/69, 40 percent of state revenues were
> internally generated, by 1974/75 that figure had declined to 28 percent. The
> relative disparities between federal and state revenues is shown by the fact
> that out of a total of N11 billion appropriated for 1980 only N2 billion
> (18.18 percent) was allocated to the 19 states."(p.342). It is commonsense
> economics to appreciate why states consistently getting less from the
> Federation Account would have less to invest to improve on internally
> generated revenue. Actually, with internally generated revenue averaging
> about 22% these days, it is clear that the Federal Government is truly
> playing colonial overlord in a way that British colonial officers could not
> do it.
>
> From one revenue allocation commission to another since and even before the
> seventies, the scorecard has been grim against the states. In 1978 the
> Aboyade Technical Committee on Revenue Allocation gave 57% to the Federal,
> 30% to states,10% to local governments and 1% to Special Funds. In1980, the
> Okigbo Commission reduced Federal allocation to 53%, kept states at 30%,
> local governments at10% and Special Funds at 7%. In 1981, the Allocation of
> Revenue (Federation Accounts etc) Act put Federal at 55%, states at 35% and
> extinguished the Special funds. Following CBN Annual Reports and Statements
> of Account over three decades, the great matter of interest in this regard
> is that allocation to the Federal governments, except for 1990-92 when it
> hovered between 44.8% and 28% while state allocation ranged from 18.7 to
> 12.9 with local government between 10% and 8.3%, hovered between 76.3% in
> 1998 to 54.2% in 1989. Never lower. Other federal accounts in the three
> years were between 27.5 to 50.8%. In the first term of the Fourth Republic,
> covering 2000 to 2003, Federal allocations appeared to have fallen to 31.33
> with only a one year kink of 41.4 in 2002 while FCT and allocation to
> states with a high kink of 22.4 in 2002 stayed between 13.2% and 16.3%.
> Correspondingly, other federal accounts were at 49.3 in 2000 and 28.8 % in
> 2002. The fixed pattern, across the board, has been for the Federal
> government to take the bulk of the revenue while leaving the states to
> perform enormous functions without matching taxing powers. The fact that the
> Federal government is then having to be appealed to for grants and supports
> is part of the shame of a federal system in which the states are supposed to
> be, according to the theory, equal and coordinate. The hidden sword of
> Damocles is that a Federal government hijacked by a section of the country
> could then simply become a handmaiden of self-aggrandizing states, favoured
> in terms of access to federal revenue. Apart from the use of whimsical
> criteria to determine where to create new states and how many local
> governments to grant to each state, the real destabilizer of federal ethics
> and morality in the distribution that takes place is in the truly absurdist
> principles imported into revenue allocation such as land mass to counter
> ecological demands from the Delta and all the talk about even development,
> needs, and equality of states principles which end up presumptively to make
> the already unequal appear equal. All these account for why a 48 percent
> take by all the states of the old Northern Region by 1982 could rise to
> about 52 percent by 1995. At any rate, to have announced earlier, as under
> Babangida, that allocation would be based on needs, "as the needs of the
> states are not the same", turned absurdity into impunity. Giving more
> states or local governments to a zone and much less to another zone and then
> treating all of them as equal, or as having different needs, is to revel in
> open statutory robbery. Especially, when the favoured states are not
> encouraged to contribute a mite to the size of the Federation Account from
> which they derive so much.
>
> The ritual rip-off that it constitutes would have been considered criminal
> but for the acquiescence of the unfavoured states or, shall we say, their
> inability to sue effectively for sanctions against marginalization, neglect,
> environmental degradation and the scary rise in the incidence of diseases
> rampaging from the prospecting for and exploitation of oil, the national
> bread winner. Interestingly, it had to take a court redress, initially met
> by an impervious streak in the hands of successive federal governments until
> joined by the rise of the Saro Wiwa phenomenon, for consideration to be
> given to a 13% rise in the principle of derivation as proposed in the 1995
> and then the 1999 constitution.
> The Federal deployment of special grants and sundry interventions like
> Petroleum Trust Fund, OMPADEC, Niger Delta Development Commission, VAT, and
> other virements to circumvent derivation and fair allocation to states is
> part of the matter.
>
> The case has been well made by the Niger-Delta Project which has shown how
> in the heyday of River Basins between 1979 and 1983, three River Basins
> Chad River, Hadeijia-Jamare and Sokoto-Rima Basins shared N1 billion while 8
> River Basins, one in the Middle Belt, the Upper Benue Basin Authority, and
> seven in the South shared another billion. If this was not part of the
> dividends of internal colonialism, it was clearly a major revision of the
> concept of revenue allocation. That kind of solidaristic corruption, carried
> out in pursuit of regional cum ethnic hegemony, has now been further beefed
> up by the well-worn variety, always part of the game across Nigeria's
> history, of people in power, in brazen plutocratic corruption (of the rich
> and well-placed) padding the budget. Emerging facts suggest that it could
> rise up to and higher than 46 percent. As a persecuted whistle-blower in the
> current 8th National Assembly argues, It could be matter of a few
> legislators sharing in advance what the padding of the budget is too slow to
> deliver. The pity is that the areas from which the funds are supposed to
> derive, the Niger Delta, gets to be treated as outright pariah. It shows
> the low ebb to which national consciousness has sunk among policy makers and
> reveals the sheer regionalist and partisan afflatus that has governed
> national standards. In a country where a federal character principle has
> been enthroned which grants the power of incumbency to people from one part,
> more than other parts of the country, it means that such plutocratic
> corruption, tends to be wrapped up as collective or communal benefits. The
> sham in it is that citizens from other states who are ritually discriminated
> against in strategic public employments and entrance into federal
> institutions, are then berated to accept that oil wealth belongs to all
> Nigerians. Yes, those who pad budgets and share loot will insist that the
> oil wealth belongs to all Nigerians, including the three out of every four
> children across the North who are prevented from going to school by the
> mis-carriage of allocations that smudge out merit across the country with
> quota and federal character. Simply a case of leaders whose regionalism
> normalizes corruption or is so much in cahoots with it that no rational way
> of ending the latter can be imagined without dealing with the former. The
> discriminations that this pumps into the heart of federal finance and the
> wonky nature of devolution of powers that has become its camp-follower needs
> to be confronted in a special way. It may sound trite, but it is an absolute
> imperative to draw special attention to the area of education, which was
> supposed to be the site for pressing the equalizing conditions to enable the
> North catch up with the South so as to remove the colonial drawline
> in-between. Brusquely, northern control was insinuated into the area of
> education at the Federal level ostensibly to erase educational backwardness
> and to speed up the process of truly nationalizing education. In the end,
> due to a misguided elimination of merit, and the quota propensity built into
> the system, it had the palpable effect of under-developing educational
> standards across the country without improving education in the North.
> Patently, less energy and ingenuity has been put into lifting the North to
> catch up with the south than ensuring that the Southern lead was reduced,
> halted or neutered. This has been achieved through deliberate under-funding
> of education, rejection of interaction between northern educational policies
> and southern personnel, and the disruption of the school year through an
> open hostility to standard international approaches to educational policy.
> The deliberate disruption of mass education, maltreatment of teachers and
> university administrations, in cynically rude fashion, has been nationalized
> in a manner that fits the half-serious joke about Northerners being sent to
> school merely to learn how to fight southerners rather than helping the
> North to develop.
>
> In the face of the implacable divide, many southerners have made it appear
> natural that the south acquired education without the hassles across the
> North. To proceed with some clarity, it needs to be pointed out that in the
> fifties, while Obafemi Awolowo was sending riot police into the villages and
> towns of Western Region to force supporters and opponents of his free
> education and free health policy to pay a once-for-all levy, there was
> widespread gloat at his travails which included his party's loss of the
> Federal Elections in 1954. In the sixties into the seventies, an arcane
> argument was crafted by Northern elites against free education for all
> Nigerians on the grounds that the South, which already had more children at
> school, would benefit more. If the North had more population, argued the
> free education advocates, southerners may benefit more at the initial
> stages, but Northerners, with a much-vaunted larger population, would reap
> the higher benefits in due course. It did not jell with the opponents. The
> argument was foreclosed when quota system and federal character were made
> the basis of granting admission into federal educational institutions as
> well as sharing government offices across the political economy. It was a
> rule based on permanently disputed but unverifiable population figures.
>
> In a country that could not have a proper census, and therefore could have
> no proper register of voters, or a fair revenue allocation formula, it has
> been so much sham talking about a movement forward in genuinely modern
> terms. Besides, the organized demolition of national institutions in order
> to find room for quotas that shun merit has merely inspired a debilitating
> southern recourse to the withdrawal of faith in government-controlled
> organizations. This has given rise to the promotion of private sector
> orientations that favour down-sizing the public sector beyond what is normal
> for a developing country in need of all its got for goal-oriented pursuits.
> Hence the distancing of the north from the south along the lines of the
> rejection of a common educational policy. It was institutionalized with the
> creation of a common services agency for northern states to reconnect the
> old interests of the divided region. This was specifically to separate their
> common interests from those of the South. In the West, a similar banding, to
> be in tune with the northern pattern was achieved by the Odu'a Investments
> which, shorn of hegemonic force, lacked the extended purpose of refreshing
> old regional security reflexes. The emergent pattern, entrenching caucusing
> by the Governors in the interest of their old regions, amounted to
> reassertion of the old lopsided contraption of the Federation which the
> creation of states was supposed to change. The case of the North was not
> merely better formalized than that of the West; it yielded an open trade
> union of Governors, and various other strata of decision-making in the
> region for the purpose of streamlining competitive moves, planting
> representatives - qualified or unqualified - in strategic employments,
> reworking census figures, battling for higher revenue allocation, and
> particularly inducing the weighting of appointments at the Federal level in
> favour of the North.
>
> It happened to be within such a fare that the creation of states became a
> major ploy that every dictator had to add to his agenda. It had simply
> become a struggle for advantage in the sharing of revenue. The Federal
> Government's control of land and mineral resources across the country
> became a robber baron's approach to regional competition in the sense that
> whoever could hijack the federal government used the power of the centre to
> steal, loot or conscript resources that belonged in other regions. Military
> dictatorship under regional control made this a normal ritual of state
> action. With Federal control of oil revenues, agitation for more states was
> no longer a matter of minority ethnic groups seeking to defend their
> interests against majority groups but a demand by various groups to get an
> ever greater share of the so called national cake. It rose to become an
> incipient argument for even development in the sense that state creation
> enabled development to spread to areas that would otherwise have been
> neglected. This in itself would not have been a bad reason for creating more
> states, yes, to enable the hinter of the hinterlands to be reached by
> development. Oil money made it possible to reduce the exploitation of
> herdsmen and the peasantry with sundry taxations. It also lowered the
> tendency for the peasantry and the ethnic minorities to revolt. The
> core-content of NEPU and UMBC resistance to NPC power could very well be
> reached by cooptation strategies.
>
> Once oil came into the picture, the agitation for more states by the
> minorities was hijacked by the majorities to create more states for
> themselves. Except that, with so many minorities uncared for by this
> venturous pursuits of more states, it proved to be the proof of internal
> colonialism. Call it a case of increasing the federal character of majority
> ethnic groups by increasing the number of states. As more states for the
> majority ethnic groups meant more money for them, the original criteria for
> state creation were being annulled, shifting from the strategic ethnic
> considerations of yesteryear to the merely contingent, even farcical and
> absurd. No criterion appeared to matter anymore beyond the whim of the
> reigning dictator or regional security jobbers. One certainty was that the
> maintenance of the old divide between North and South played out in a
> manipulative form with the minority ethnic groups across the country being
> overawed by the combined weight of all the majority ethnic groups. The
> contrived lopsidedness of the Federation became immutable: with both the
> majority and minority ethnic groups from outside the oil-producing areas
> being complicit in the exploitation of the oil-producing Niger Delta.
> Importantly, it bears emphasis that once oil money started flowing, from the
> sixties, and the oppression of the peasantry of the North was eased, the
> outs became ins in the matter of Niger Delta exploitation.
>
> It has been more than a case of triple yoking of the areas that bear the
> black gold in the sense that apart from the environmental degradation that
> result from oil exploitation, the higher cost of meeting normal
> infrastructural development in the creeks was compounded by the ritual envy
> that denies the areas the benefice allowed by the independence arrangement
> which put the derivation principle at 50 percent.
>
> OMPADEC and NDDC
>
> It takes no special pleading to see how the progress of the revenue sharing
> formula has always been a matter of pure bad faith. This was especially the
> case as beneficiaries of the largesse from the Niger Delta found no
> accommodation for ameliorative schemes that cover environmental degradation,
> blatant biocide and sundry diseases and travails that follow oil
> exploitation in the Niger Delta. Bad faith it may be further described when
> the Federal Government established, supposedly, for the benefit of the oil
> producing states, a Federal quango called OMPADEC which was granted less
> than a fifth of its due fund for the purpose of correcting what a fair
> revenue allocation was meant to but never properly addressed. As it turned
> out, by 1996, OMPADEC had received an actual disbursement of a mere N13,
> 154. 29 billion out of a total allocation of N85. 489 billions. The
> significance of these figures lies in the fact that OMPADEC like all
> previous commissions devoted to the Niger-Delta were overtaken by the fiats
> of military dictatorships. It really had no chance of fairing better. It
> was merely an excuse for funneling loot to the ruling cabals in the rising
> Military/Agricultural Complex.
>
> All told, OMPADEC's mission suffered truncation to the point of non-payment
> while the creation of the Petroleum Trust Fund, PTF, which enjoyed a grant
> of N134 billion for similar purposes across the country, managed to have its
> funds paid. No one needed to be a cynic to see that PTF was for ameliorating
> conditions that should have been left to normal revenue allocation/fiscal
> schemes, but was vired more for the Northern states than any other part of
> the Federation. The successor quango to the OMPADEC, the Niger Delta
> Development Commission, NDDC, has had no better format. Like its
> predecessor, it is the product of a Federal trap for oil producing states
> that ought to have, but were not allowed, access to their due share of
> revenue. It is only too well known, in this regard, that the Land Use Decree
> and the Petroleum Act remain the instruments that an unjust Federation has
> used to repress the peoples of the Niger Delta. Considering that oil is a
> wasting asset that may be exhausted when no other part of the Federation may
> have resources that the Niger Deltans can share out of, how would the
> national argument be staged to explain the literal scorched earth overcoming
> of the lower Niger where only an incommensurate recompense is available to
> prepare for the acid rains of the future that already started falling?
>
> This is the kind of question that is not asked by those who suddenly, after
> years of preaching a form of regionalism that wards off other regions with
> quota and federal character propositions, have suddenly arrived at a
> philosophy which brings oil and minerals into federal exclusive jurisdiction
> that they hope to control with the veto built into the mis-structuring of
> the Federation. Ritual envy, quite pronounced, is what it comes to. More
> than this is that it has yielded a most grueling form of what Ken Saro Wiwa
> described as internal colonialism. The most brazen expression of it is the
> system of giving oil blocks to individuals or corporation who are then
> allowed to exploit it as they deem fit. This method has yielded protests
> from the Niger Delta against the pattern of virtually declaring other
> people's hometowns as oil blocks which are then handed over to cronies or
> individuals to whom any brigand in power takes a fancy. Niger Deltans have
> consistently, in this respect, been revolting against a system which has
> allowed oil blocks to be given to northerners who, on their own, proceed to
> command more money than even the states or regions to which they belong. How
> does one explain an oil-block owner from the depressed North East whose
> catch earned more than 500 million dollars while the state to which he
> belonged could only scratch 250 billion from the Federation Account. What
> do people in the domicile of the lucky block-owner get? A 100 million
> dollars mansion as a tourist attraction that no tourist may see because the
> poverty in the area instigates so much violence, political and religious.
> Knowing this, it amounts to pure illogic to argue, as some misguided
> jingoists do, that the north is too poor to meet basic terms of social
> welfare for the people. The has been a matter for revenue allocators who use
> several underhand methods to pool resources in favour of zones that
> unfortunately would prefer to give fifteen percent of revenue for laundering
> traditional pomp across the federation rather than put children at school.
> The implication is that the rest of the country, is being underdeveloped by
> northerners who, having access to loot by seizing the nerves of the Federal
> Government in the name of their region, simply do not care a hoot about
> the region. The core reality is gross. Elites of the North continue to
> insist on taking an ever larger share of national revenue without making a
> contribution to it. This has truly become the National Question.
>
> It does need to be seen in relation to a national circumstance in which,
> initially, land size and population had put a virtual veto in the hands of
> the ethnic core that served as overlords in the north and used that veto to
> overcome the rest of the country. Another veto it would have been in the
> hands of Niger Deltans if the oil-producing states that produce the bulk of
> the money in the Federation were not hamstrung by the veto exercised by the
> North. The 24 other states that live in sheer dependency would seem either
> to have agreed that the exploitation of the Niger Delta must be a matter of
> national duty or they are prepared to sleep-walk into a situation where the
> Niger Delta, to free itself, must treat the whole country in the manner in
> which all colonialists should be treated, as death-deserving enemies. This
> is the source of altercation around the restructuring of the Federation and
> the creation of special security forces to pacify the Niger Delta in order
> to make sure that oil continues to flow. The heart of the matter is not even
> that the Niger Delta wishes to exercise the veto that its resources have
> provided but that the possession of black gold has become a reason for
> others to wish them dead. At the 2005 Constitutional Reform Conference, a
> delegate actually demanded that the area should be cleared of human
> encumbrance to allow unfettered access to the oil wells. After decades of
> profligate consumerism, under unconscionable military/civilian leadership, a
> sense of entitlement has been so encouraged not only in the north but
> across the federation which makes states imagine that the Federal government
> is a Father Christmas that delivers largesse without regard to effort and
> achievement. Like the palmwine drinkard in Amos Tutuola's novel, it is the
> case of those who do not work for a living who therefore must either die of
> hunger or cashier slaves. The choice that the Federation has made is to
> clamp a slave/colonial logic upon the Niger Delta rather than work out
> systems of production to obviate disaster.
>
> Since it is too much of a strain for the political class across the country
> to slow down the profligate habits in favour of productivity, the situation
> has remained one in which most states and local governments in the
> Federation would be literally grounded if there was restructuring in favour
> of derivation as the prime principle of revenue allocation. In the best of
> moments, the question that many other states ask themselves is Where will
> the next tranch of allocation come from if restructuring takes place? In
> essence, there is a consensus, poorly disguised among non-oil producing
> states that the Niger Delta must be exploited, to the bone, if need be, if
> the largesse must continue to flow. The panic that overcomes all the states
> whenever militant groups rise up in the Niger Delta to cause the largesse
> from gushing should have been so much entertainment but for the tragedies
> that usually always accompany them. It can be imagined how much more panic
> results when the militants can prevent the flow of oil at times when the oil
> prices are hitting close to ground level in the international marketplace.
> Rather than see the situation as an emergency requiring a thinking outside
> the box, the old moribund ways of thinking have remained: the more the
> conferences that are held from the states to the Federal level declaring the
> emergence of an era of development without oil, the more resilient are the
> habits of profligacy and un-programmatic reform-mongering that are usually
> hedged with the choking question: where would the next allocation come from
> if there is re-structuring? Moving the question around to how to diversify
> the economy to remove the fiascoes of a mono-cultural economy that depends
> on oil for more than 90 percent of annual revenue, remains a question that
> the continuance of the flow of oil, even if in underpriced trickles, has
> actually tended to block. The saving grace so far is that stopping the oil
> flow completely in order to confront the country with the rude reality is
> still only a mere threat that the Niger Delta militants have represented on
> the scale of extremity. Unfortunately, they have so far not offered a
> solution, nor provided the people of the Niger Delta with a programme of
> development that is self-respecting, viable and capable of going beyond the
> craze for loot-sharing that is the bugbear of the Nigerian political class.
> Nor have they adverted attention to how to continue with the governance of
> the Federation even after we shall all have come to face resource control as
> an imperative beyond the balance of terror that is the vogue of our times.
>
> All the same, to the extent that the withdrawal of the oil question is being
> posed in this extreme manner, the question of restructuring, very starkly,
> devolves upon its original motivation; not so much as a matter of the
> economy but a system of self-governance for each of the multiplicities into
> which Nigeria may be divided for the effective and efficient arrival at what
> the proponents call true Federalism. As things are, the choice
> confronting Nigeria, in more than fifty years of trying, has not moved from
> that of a country in which one region acquired a literal veto from colonial
> overlords that it has maintained with size, population and military power.
> The paradox is that the logic of a similar veto is available, though not
> being exercised, by the six oil producing states in the south south whose
> wealth outweighs what the rest of the country produces. The realities are
> stark. So to say, the North has a veto by size and disputed population which
> frustrates the South South's capacity to exercise its putative economic
> veto. The real question is how to move from a country that must be governed
> by vetoes.
>
> Arguably, for this to happen, diversification has to take place in terms of
> productivity and movement from a mono-cultural syndrome. The speed required
> by the urgency of the situation however has lagged behind the bragging and
> puffing about development without oil. Hence, it is still actually by
> depending on the rump of what remains of the internationally underpriced oil
> industry that Nigeria may get the take off funds to build without oil. It
> remains stark: how to stop the exploitation of the Niger Delta which happens
> to be made up of ethnic minorities that always wished to be free from the
> internal colonialism of the majority ethnic groups? Or how to entrench
> self-governance of the minority ethnic groups within the Niger Delta region
> without depriving the rest of the country of the means to climb out of the
> doldrums that must be the lot of the national economy unless a sensible
> formula is evolved that allows for oil production to be deployed less like
> a curse than an opportunity. As it happens, the search for a sensible
> formula, is not just a matter of the Niger Delta demanding and getting a
> return to the independence agreement of 50% derivation and more or even
> getting a 100 percent resource control with taxes paid to the Federal
> government. It is also about context: What kind of structures must Nigeria
> have in order for it to be possible to trust any agreement that is worked
> out as a result of ongoing skirmishes?
>
> The answer must matter not only to those who have been reaping where they
> do not wish to sow, but to all Nigerians who know that in the coming months
> and years, unless a grand formula was found, recession and even depression
> could swing a sword of Damocles over the Nigerian economy to bring Nigeria
> back to the era when the peasants of the North and the minorities of the
> Middle Belt and the Niger Delta were being hideously exploited. It was an
> era in which the stabilization fund for cocoa, which beefed up the marketing
> Board, would have been viewed by the farmers as stolen money but for the
> welfare schemes of free education, free health services, added to industrial
> and agricultural estates, in the Western Region's management of popular
> welfare. To be frank, it is because Nigeria can still be governed into the
> future along such lines of popular welfare that one can insist that it is
> possible to have a way out of current quagmire; or, that the seeming
> cluelessness of government and opposition can be remedied in favour of a
> truly great and beautiful country. In a very basic sense, such a common
> pattern of social welfare across the states of the Federation, which some
> may regard as investment and others as waste, holds out at least, great
> hopes for the equalization of conditions and enhancement of commonalities
> between the states. This in any case is the import of the fundamental
> objectives and directive principles of state policy, whose champions have
> been angling for transfer from chapter two of the constitution to chapter
> four to make them justiciable. The snag so far has been that to find the
> means to realize it, requires enhancement of the revenue generating powers
> of the various tiers of government, matching them to the functions that they
> must perform, and finding a revenue allocation formula that can actually
> pull it off. In principle, the state governments are closer to the problems
> and ought to have the tax powers to match the functions. In reality, the
> Federal government has always appropriated critical tax powers that could
> meet the functions. The situation has been made critical by the fact that
> the greatest wealth generator is within the ambit of a few oil producing
> states in the federation. Which is why dealing with the Niger Delta question
> has remained on top of the discussion of revenue allocation in Nigerian
> politics.
>
>
>
> Objections to the Niger Delta Position
>
> In the search for solutions, the hard part is that the present-mindedness of
> the political class exposes Nigerians as hostages of the mind-set that
> Frederick Lugard, in what appeared quite a racist putdown, regarded as the
> modus operandi of the Nigerian/African approach to problem-solution. Like
> hunter-gatherers waiting for nature's bounties, the average Nigerian leader
> has been more adept at scuffling and scrambling over the droppings from the
> tree rather than thinking of how to plant new trees or working out a means
> of climbing or plucking the fruits of nature. Without a thought about how to
> create a productive system different from the preceding love of waste, the
> Federal Government and therefore Nigeria's political class like true
> profligates, have been asserting the right of might rather than the might
> of right over the Niger Delta. It is defended under a dubious form of
> patriotism that has used disreputable decrees passed by unconscionable
> military dictators to put all land and mineral resources in the hands of
> whomsoever manages to take over the Federal government.
>
> The plume goes to Olusegun Obasanjo, before and after he became an elected
> President. He has been given to venting his sheer lack of empathy for the
> Niger Delta by arguing that the minority ethnic groups of the Niger Delta,
> too small in population to constitute a huge threat to the rest of the
> country, ought to be grateful for being freed from oppression by the
> Biafrans. To escape Biafra and for the oil resources to be treated as war
> booty by the so-called liberators is the fate therefore of the oil
> producing states. No greater admission of the internal colonialist ploys of
> the current system was ever more brashly acknowledged. It has amounted to
> saying that the travails of the Delta should be seen as the price to pay for
> having been freed once upon a time from oppression. A very crude colonialist
> logic has often been drawn from this, not only in terms of imposing
> organizations like OMPADEC and NDDC upon Niger Deltans as if the people
> require a consul from Abuja to tell them how to plan their development.
> There have been brazen attempts to demand that Niger Deltans should prove
> how they have spent the monies already granted to them to improve the lot of
> their people. The latest of such demands was made recently by the Governor
> of Katsina state, Bello Masari, who imagined that it was such a progressive
> idea, in a party fighting an anti-corruption war to demand accounting from
> Niger Delta elites as to what they have done with so much from 13 percent
> derivation. The truth is that it does not have to depend on how well the
> money allotted to the oil producing states is spent for them to get their
> due. It is their due irrespective of how it is deployed. In a country where
> every state in the Federation and successive Federal Governments have been
> hostage to an elite padding of budgets and cantankerous looting, it is
> rather thick to have one side accusing the other of not fulfilling mandates.
> Who is so free of corruption as to be considered well-placed to throw the
> first stone! Which is not to argue that the leaders of the Niger Delta
> should be allowed to storm barns and loot as they please but that it is too
> presumptuously colonialist to require that Niger Deltans may only get their
> due by being of good behaviour in any form. It amounts to treating minority
> ethnic groups as minors, a very savage assault on the integrity of a people
> who are being robbed dry by those making the accusations. It necessarily
> challenges the victim to think of ways out of the oppressive and
> exploitative bind. Hence the hullaballoo over re-structuring and the armed
> militancy against the Federal Government and the multinational oil
> corporations licensed by the Federal Government to engage in oil prospecting
> and exploitation.
>
> All the same, this is only one of so many jingoistic propositions as to why
> the oil-producing states should not be allowed to have their 50 percent
> derivation or 100 percent resource control constitutionally determined with
> taxes paid to the federal government as all states, self-respecting
> citizens, organizations and all earners should. Apart from Obasanjo who, in
> or outside power, has had the haughty obtuseness to voice the obvious that
> the Niger Delta has no strategic power, in size, population or military
> standing, to resist imposition, all successive military/civilian
> administrations have generally acted out the code of the internal
> colonialist that cares little about the welfare of the peoples of the Niger
> Delta but covet the largesse that the area produces. The sober truth is that
> there are too many specious and absurdist arguments that have been canvassed
> against derivation or resource control as it relates to the place. These
> include the simply ridiculous one that because the oil in the Niger Delta
> was formed by debris and sediments brought for eons from the Fouta Jallon
> and all along the course of the river Niger and Benue passing through
> Northern Nigeria, the oil at the end of the river's odyssey must belong even
> more to the north than to the Niger delta. As I have noted in Taking Nigeria
> Seriously, the surprise is that this argument is not invoked as a reason for
> insisting that the oil in the Niger Delta belongs to all the people along
> the course of the river all the way across West Africa from the Fouta Jallon
> High Mountains. The oddness of the argument is so obvious that a supposedly
> more plausible claim is then made for the North; by insisting, as Professor
> Ango Abdulahi of the Arewa Forum has done, that it was money from the North
> that was used to prospect for the oil in the Niger Delta. There is the rider
> that it was money from Northern groundnut that was used to ward off the
> Biafran take-over of the oil wells. Appropriate information provided by
> Professor Itse Sagay, once upon a time, demonstrated that the Western
> Companies that actually engaged in the exploration and exploitation of oil
> did not depend on Nigerian funding or state funding, for their enterprise.
> To so claim is an absolute falsehood being deployed to justify access to
> wealth that belongs elsewhere. But even if money from the North was used in
> the exploration and general prospecting for oil in the Delta, how does that
> confer ownership of the oil wells on the explorers. It remains the oil of
> the area where the oil is found irrespective of the entrepreneur who
> explores and finds it. To argue otherwise is literally to concede that the
> Western oil companies operating in the Niger Delta own the oil. Or was it
> the North that employed the British companies which did the explorations? It
> is too disingenuous as an argument for a true and proper citizen to make in
> order to share out of a considered patrimony.
>
> The speciousness gets further compounded by the added claim that, in any
> case, the British colonized the whole of Nigeria as one country and granted
> independence due to agitation by all Nigerians as one nationality; so,
> supposedly, there is no reason for any region or part of Nigeria or group to
> lay special claim to the oil resources in its domicile than other
> Nigerians. But since when did the notion of common nationality eliminate the
> notion of individual and communal property? Otherwise, to say that all
> Nigerian citizens own the oil of the Niger Delta and have equal rights over
> it is to imply for instance that people in one region have the same rights
> in their region as they have in other people's region. What is the point of
> creating regions if people from other regions are to be treated exactly as
> if there were no boundaries in social, politico-administrative or economic
> terms? To have no regard for regional boundaries and therefore to insist
> that the governors of one region can stray or barge into the administrative
> bracket of another region is to ask for anarchy as a norm of governance. It
> would amount not only to an attack on law as a bounded means of controlling
> behavior, it would be an attack on the notion of property; making a hunter
> gatherer's case for whoever so pleases to walk into a farm and reap what
> others may have sown. Or what others have acquired as a matter of longevity
> of occupation. Also, the implication is to press the thoroughly dangerous
> idea, amounting to a declaration of civil war, which holds that no ethnic
> nationality has a homeland which may nurture its language and culture and to
> which it can lay claim as a matter of identity. This would be a denial of
> the plurality of Nigeria and therefore a serious questioning of the
> principle on the basis of which one province, region or state has been
> distanced from another since 1914. If the principle of freedom of movement
> is what it is supposed to amount to, it does not require abuse of the
> freedom of others. Had it been considered acceptable for the British to use
> the same argument as a ground for colonizing the country, there would have
> been no need for them to grant independence at all. What we have we hold
> would have sufficed as a response to the nationalists who demanded exit of
> the colonizers. It happens to be an argument that, quite snidely, defies
> rationality and denies the possibility of an identity other than the one
> that stems from law. But what kind of law would that be which denies the
> essence of regional boundaries and insists that authority cannot be limited
> by such boundaries?
>
> Generally, it is the denial of language and culture as particulars of
> association or bonding that has enabled anyone to press such arguments. It
> rejects any mandates of pre-colonial society and would rather that all
> Nigerians became ethnic newts or neuters, setting out on a clean slate, as
> if the world only just began when the British came and knocked all the
> tribes and nationalities together with gatling guns, a semblance of English
> common law, and the English language. This would give anyone the right to
> go occupy wherever whim and will may allow. As a means of absolute erasure
> of ethnic identities, this would have been a perfect way of solving the
> problem of diversity in the Nigerian maelstrom; except that the reality,
> which cannot be squelched, is that ethnic homelands have always existed and
> do exist in Nigeria and those making these propositions are doing so on the
> basis of, and to promote larger frames of access for their ethnic groups
> and nationalities. They ill-disguise the sheer bid to widen living space
> for their ethnic groups in order to take what has, from time immemorial,
> been allowed as the domain of others. Otherwise, it cannot be denied that
> even colonialism largely recognized the boundaries; and where assaults on
> the lands belonging to others had been carried out, there were agitations
> throughout the colonial era for restitution to be made. The idea of Nigeria
> as a multi-ethnic state has been so well entrenched that any attempt to
> change it at this late stage in the name of sudden notion of a Nigerian
> sovereignty that denies the notion of constituent units, will amount to an
> attempt to split the atom.
>
> Once the reality of Nigeria's multi-ethnicity is accepted, the proper
> engagement with it is not to attempt to forget the differences but to seek
> to appreciate and manage them aright. If a multi-ethnic perspective has to
> be adopted: the judicious approach is to have a horizontal rather than a
> vertical notion of citizenship, so that there is no hierarchical ranging of
> superior against supposedly inferior ethnic groups. Those who imagine that
> they have acquired a divine right to rule others may not understand this.
> They are the ones who get into all sorts of stratagems and spoils when
> confronted by the need to share space or power or revenue. Where
> urbanization and the general trends in internal migration pitch once distant
> ethnic groups into shared domains, merit and equity are, frankly, the surest
> builders of civic harmony. But, not to overplay it, be it noted that those
> who move into the domain of another ethnic group ought to try to become part
> of the new environment by not having disdain for the language, traditional
> culture and chieftaincy systems. Those who move into the domicile of other
> ethnic groups to wish to impose their own traditions, and language, and to
> entertain ambitions that displace the traditions of their hosts are not just
> uncivil; they are the wreckers of national harmony whom the rest of us must
> engage and turn into normal citizens. In the manner that hate speeches are
> being criminalized in many democracies, these days, such uncivil behaviour
> should be liable to judicial sanctions. The point is that in a multi-ethnic
> situation people have to learn to share in each other's goodness and
> travails to avoid rampant incivility. I think the first rule is that
> individuals and organizations, local governments, and every state in the
> federation must be schooled to mind the trail of merit and equity. The
> feeling of not being imposed upon helps confidence in citizens, no matter
> how tribalistic, such that they become more civil, able to view merit as a
> necessary measure of access to education and employment. Once the vaunted
> sense of entitlement is brought down to the level of common citizenship, all
> attempts to solve problems begin to appear less harried, less of a game of
> hoodwinkers playing at missioners.
>
> Nor is it historically tenable to insist that all of Nigeria was taken
> together by the British or handed back to the natives without
> differentiation. To begin with, relying on colonialism for a determination
> of such formalities is rather like using injustice as a standard. Whatever
> the British did or did not do is unfit as the basis for measuring what the
> future should be. Otherwise, to be historically objective, it is important
> to note that Nigeria was taken, kingdom by kingdom, by the imprimatur of the
> foreign office, the colonial office, and the Royal Niger Company. The
> movement towards independence was never at the same pace across the country.
> The three colonial regions attained self-governance at different times
> before eventual independence. Although, the reality of diversity upon which
> Nigerian federalism is based has been cavalierly determined more by regional
> rather than ethnic boundaries, there is a general presumption across all
> political opinions that putting people of the same ethnic group in the same
> state, wherever possible, is more conducive to peace and harmony than
> ramming people of different ethnic groups together. Those who seem not to
> mind the altercations that accompany such mish-mashing and mis-structuring
> of people and states must be charged with creating the basis for the
> disharmony and insecurities that they presume to be fighting against.
>
> Ethnic Homogeneity and national harmony
>
> Let's face it: the old inequities within the regions, which the minority
> ethnic groups experienced and resented, have been so transformed that both
> the majorities and minorities across the country now literally live off the
> Niger Delta. The old power relations between the regions have worsened in
> terms of the north/south divide which provided the model for even the
> relationship between different states of the same ethnic group or
> nationality. In these days of hyping the six geopolitical zones as a way of
> imagining an escape from the North/South divide and the old regionalism, I
> prefer to present it as a juncture to be overcome. As a leaf borrowed from
> This Conference Must Be Different, I see the putative six geo-political
> zones - Northwest, North East, South East, South South, South West, Middle
> Belt as six types of regionalism mauling Nigeria at the moment. The most
> celebrated I describe as predatory regionalism which seeks to overcome
> central authority in the Federation in order to determine what others can
> make of whatever advantages they may possess. It instigates a second type,
> defensive regionalism, which seeks to enhance its power as a means of
> resisting the capacity of the predator to overawe it. The third type is
> reactive regionalism which seeks to arrive at its due by demanding benefits
> akin to the ones others have derived from their predatory and defensive
> ploys. The fourth type is assertive regionalism usually designed to protect
> its more bountiful lot from being poached by others directly or through
> deployment of a hijacked Federal authority. The fifth type is insurgent
> regionalism based on organized armed resistance to perceived deprivation or
> poaching by other types. It may be distinguished from a sixth type,
> resurgent regionalism which attaches itself to the cover of predatory, or
> other types of regionalism in order to pursue its own arrival at regional
> status. What needs to be stressed here is that the six geo-political zones
> touted since Abacha's constitutional conference but yet to be formalized,
> fall into each of these categories although they may behave with a mix of
> the characteristics of one or the other. The hard reality is that they are
> all responses to predatory regionalism which won't change until the ground
> is altered for a different kind of architecture in the country.
>
> Consider, in this connection that while the state creation bingo has not
> only not touched many minorities that really deserve secure geo-polities for
> their self-protection, the talk about zones appears grievously facetious,
> unrealistic and liable to being turned really into the kind of Yugoslavian
> mess where not even a rotational Presidency of the type some Nigerians are
> proposing, will ensure harmony. Poorly attended, the differences that are
> not taken care of can actually become the absolute dissolvers of the whole
> pack of cards called six geopolitical zones. Nor should we forget that there
> have been many states of the same ethnic nationality that discriminate
> against workers of the same ethnic group from contiguous states. supposedly
> to find places for so called indigenes. Thus, arguable as it is that the
> creation of more states has brought relief and development to the minority
> ethnic groups, and to all parts of the Federation, it remains true that
> it has been reduced to a matter of multiplying the federal character of
> some ethnic groups in order to take more money from the national spoils
> system while abusing if not neglecting others.
>
> Nothing spells it better than to consider that although the ethnic
> minorities began to demand states as secure geographies for their own
> cultural, political and economic development, it has been reduced to a
> matter of how many more states to create in the North or South, in the West
> or East, in order not to unbalance a crude, lopsided system. This has
> allowed many genuine cases of old inequities to be ignored. At the same
> time, the absence of clear and determinate criteria has allowed many
> minority ethnic groups to be abandoned in the domain of truly bullish
> majority ethnic groups. The result has been marginalization without redress
> for the minority fractions involved. The altercations that have attended
> such evident disjunctions have yielded demands for a general revaluation of
> the whole state creation process; but in a way that goes beyond geopolitical
> zones and regionalism. The point is to grant secure geographies to ethnic
> groups that have always deserved but never managed to get the attention of
> the dictators and veto wielders. After that, we need to pay attention to the
> wisdom of the sage of Ikenne who demanded states created on an ethnic basis
> but asked relentlessly for common social welfare policies to cut across all
> the states.
>
> As I have argued in This Conference Must be Different, the Gbagyi of central
> Nigeria deserve their own state if only because Kaduna, capital of the
> North, was hived off their domain by Lugard; and when the Federal Capital
> territory was going to be carved out years after independence, it was taken
> from Abuja, another part of Gbagyi territory. Having them scattered between
> six different states makes it seem like a concerted effort to disable them
> or literally wipe them out. Whom have they offended apart from the strong
> resistance they put up against slave labour administered by a chief who had
> no love for their self-governing ethic. They were punished with a British
> expedition which they defeated and which earned another expedition that
> literally destroyed their putative capital, Gusoro. For many decades, the
> people were denied all social amenities. Not even a primary school would be
> allowed in the area as if to show the people how not to resist internal as
> well as alien colonialism. But who is the internal colonialist that wishes
> to have them contained and neutered forever? Even the title that they gave
> to US President Bill Clinton, as I point out in Taking Nigeria Serioulsy,
> during his visit to Nigeria was promptly rendered as a Hausa title?
>
> The case of the Gbagyi, a contiguous people, who never wanted to be divided
> and placed in different states, and who would have preferred a chance to
> nurture their ways and culture within a common fold, is different from that
> of the Fulani who wish to have the freedom to move not as individuals but as
> groups into cultural geographies that have always been occupied by other
> well known ethnic nationalities, Their demand for special grazing reserves
> in local governments across the country is generating altercations at the
> moment as herdmen have been mounting armed propaganda for living/grazing
> space all over the country. The civilized solution which requires herdsmen
> to build ranches in cultural geographies with which they have cultural
> empathy and from which they can gain economies of scale by living in
> contiguity in a state of their own, has been spurned by political stalwarts
> who appear to think that using guns to clear lands for takeover would work
> some alchemy of national unity. What if every ethnic group, especially those
> dispossessed by herdsmen, decide also to buy guns and constitute raiding
> squads to do unto others what has been done to them? Surely, it would amount
> to a concerted effort to dissolve Africa's most populous state with virtual
> mfecanes, anarchies and traumas, not too dissimilar to what Africa
> experienced during the era of the slave-hunting wars that literally
> despoiled our continent and prepared the way for colonialism. This is
> actually what some people have been asking for in the tradition of Muammar
> Gaddafi of Libya for decades. To set in place another millennial waste of
> Africa, rob Nigeria/Africa of a chance of genuine developmental pursuits, by
> fighting internecine wars of possession and dispossession while other
> continents are virtually getting ready to move to another planet, is too
> grim to think about. Who wants such a fate for Africa's most populous state?
> This is the kind of question that has prompted many Nigerians to craft
> slogans such as restructuring or death!
>
> For the Ekiti as a people, it is thanks to Frederick Lugard's initial two
> country policy that those in the North were never allowed to join their
> kith and kin in the South. Now it may seem quite a battle royale for the
> current Kwara and Kogi states to seek to keep the Ekiti in the north from
> being united with the Ekiti in the south. Actually, it ought to be agreed
> that one way of dismantling the north/south divide is to simply have a state
> that is made up of Ekiti of the North and South. Now that a fraction of the
> Ekiti sub-nationality is actually an Ekiti state in the South west, it was
> time the old colonial bogey was removed which kept one fraction in the North
> and another in the South. Why can't all Ekiti, being contiguous, be in the
> same state? In my view, there are other ethnically homogenous zones in
> this country which ought not to need special pleading for them to be granted
> states of their own.
>
> Beyond the matter of relieving ethnic groups of divisions, there ought to
> be a pro-active pursuit of state creation which recognizes the necessity of
> having ethnically homogenous states and local governments freed from the
> overlordship of others. The struggle for Apa state, as the Idoma people have
> been struggling for, is a case in point. When the lopsided ethnic divide
> between the Tiv and Idoma in Benue state is considered, it becomes obvious
> that a colonial type relationship is being encouraged as a permanent reality
> that breeds animosities where mutual respect ought to be norm. The case of
> Anioma state follows the same pattern. The idea that there should be a Nupe
> State or a Kanuri state, or that no people of the same ethnic stock be
> separated where it is possible to keep them together ought to be adopted as
> a national dictum. In the case of the Kanuri, we ought by now, so many
> years after independence, to be thinking of an African Federation bigger
> than Nigeria which should make the Kanuri, on the Anglophone and Francophone
> sides, part of a common nationality. In the same way that the peace of
> Indian democracy was secured by the decision taken two years after
> independence not to disrupt the homogeneity that ought to attend the affairs
> of ethnic nationalities, we owe ourselves a similar restructuring. The
> seeming criminalization of ethnicity that says it is wrong for people of the
> same ethnic group to stay within the same principle of governance, is
> actually a creator of disharmony in a Federation. It is unethical: quite a
> source of the many schisms that have resulted from the mis-structuring of
> the country. Indeed, the fact of having minority ethnic groups crammed into
> the same states with fractions of majority ethnic groups is like a bidding
> for slaves in the 21st century. It shows a critical lack of empathy and
> fairplay as factors in our national decision-making. All the same, although
> there are even more puristic arguments than the ones expressed here about
> ethnic banding, it really ought to be argued that where a people, even
> within a homogenous set up, feel different enough to want a state of their
> own, irrespective of their assumed homogeneity, a mere referendum ought to
> be all it requires for them to have it. An Ijebu state in this connection
> simply reminds us that the Egba had a United Government before Lugard's
> over-graft of British suzerainty. The proviso should be: So long as issues
> of viability, not to be overplayed, are accommodated studiously, let
> Nigerians be free to avoid over-lordship of any kind.
>
> In a way, it may appear like good moral suasion to say that ethnicity ought
> not to be allowed to interfere with issues of governance. But the salience
> of ethnicity is not to be removed by insisting that it should be ignored
> while it mangles the lives of millions. It happens to be true that
> ethnicity manifests through the language and culture of a people. It cannot
> be wiped out just like that. As an aspect of social reality, with very
> resilient features, it needs to be recognized so that its more deleterious
> features can be addressed with appropriate policies and programmes. To deny
> it while those features are active is actually the bane of the current logic
> of distancing. Actually, the more the spread of self-governance, the easier
> the empathy that aids shared values. People who feel unsafe or insecure
> hardly give the benefit of the doubt to the other party. The higher morality
> that it requires to make people of different ethnic groups co-exist in
> harmony is easier to generate when each group, assured of its welfare and
> security, has little reason to be in fear of the other. This is one reason
> why state creation based on ethnic groups should also always be accompanied
> by welfare and security programmes which do not detract from the feeling of
> wellbeing that self-governance implies.
>
> From the standpoint of relationships that must exist between one ethnic
> group and another, the golden rule, if common nationality across the
> Federation is to be assumed, is that the welfare available to a citizen in
> the domicile of one ethnic group should be available in the domicile of
> other ethnic groups. So long as no disability accrues to people of one group
> when they move into the domicile of another, a basis can be assumed for
> intercourse within a common morality. This is why those agitating for the
> creation of states on the basis of ethnic groups have always been rather
> vociferous champions of common social welfare programmes like free
> education, free health service, full employment, old age pensions, and
> integrated rural development. The goal is to ensure a basis for genuine
> intercourse and interaction that respects ethnic identity without letting it
> become a basis for disabling others. Ethnic differences must be given their
> due acknowledgement while freedom of movement and association are
> accommodated through a shared sense of welfare and therefore commonality of
> interests and rights across ethnic and cultural boundaries.
>
> It is of interest in this regard that the bid, across several constitutional
> conferences, to move welfare programmes from Chapter Two of the
> Constitution, on fundamental objectives and directive principles of state
> policy, to Chapter Four, on fundamental human rights, in order to make them
> justiciable, has been one of the most critical defenses of ethnic harmony in
> Nigeria. This is because they are aimed at removing the source of
> inequality, inequity and therefore friction between ethnic nationalities.
> Hence, those who think that they need to impose a unitary view under the
> aegis of one region, religion, ethnic group or state, as a way of uniting
> the country, ought to be made to see that they are the ones pursuing the
> un-natural way to national development. Otherwise, it is by recognizing the
> diversity of the country and providing a means of common intercourse at the
> level of welfare, that a sense of shared well-being can be entrenched as a
> normal factor in national life. Those who wish to eliminate, criminalize or
> simply defeat ethnic identities and consciousness, are pursuing the
> whirlwind. They are creating a source of permanent dissatisfaction that they
> may then always throw at their fellow human beings. Simply put, ethnicity
> is not a problem until it is turned into one by those who are afraid of
> diversity at the level of culture. How do we help such people in a world in
> which diversity is the very stuff of life itself?
>
> This question, answered wrongly, has always been part of the assumption that
> ethnicity destabilizes national unity. The troubles that such evident
> mis-apprehension and therefore mis-management of ethnicity have caused
> across the country is the reason that those who dismiss ethnicity as
> unimportant are often heard blaming tribalists instead of beating them at
> the game by relying on appropriate programming. The short of the matter is
> that ethnicity does not destabilize national consciousness; ethnic
> diversity is actually a creative boost; unless it is denied its place as an
> ineradicable datum. It ceases to be an obstacle to progress when it is
> recognized; and allowances are made for its manifestations. In the
> circumstance, it actually becomes and can truly be seen as a difference that
> aids vibrancy in ethnically heterogeneous societies. It is fair to be
> reminded that the idea of creating states along ethnic lines was what saved
> India from having Nigerian-type conflicts along mis-primed ethnic and
> regional lines. Once it was realized that the ethnic factor could not be
> eliminated through wish-full thinking, the creation of states along ethnic
> lines was treated as palpable necessity. This point bears repeating even in
> the face of a country like Somalia where people of the same ethnic
> nationality have waged a virtual civil war upon one another for decades. The
> reality of that situation bids the doubter to remember that different parts
> of the Somali territory were colonized by different European countries and
> that the differences that this brought into Somali homogeneity needed to
> have been given proper administrative coverage. People of the same culture
> separated for a long time may well learn to device a federal arrangement
> that accounts for the acquired differences. To insist on running such a
> wounded culture within a unitary formality without minding the differences
> occasioned by decades of distancing is truly unfair to all concerned.
>
> It is all about reality that cannot be changed: if ethnicity matters enough
> for quota and federal character and rotation of offices to be proposed and
> to be allowed to gain some centrality in Nigerian political life, it may be
> asked: what hypocrisy makes recognition of ethnicity so crucial at such
> levels but discountable in the matter of actually defending the cultural
> geographies that state creation amounts to? What cannot be fairly denied is
> that ethnic groups are endangered, or feel unfree, in the present
> dispensation in Nigeria. This should be taken as datum enough to require
> redress. The feeling of insecurity that it has generated almost as a
> national culture is one that a country wishing to be free ought to begin by
> eliminating. Ethnic groups need to be free for Nigeria to be free.
> Otherwise, those who are opposed to restructuring because they want to
> continue with the imposition of one ethnic group upon another, are digging
> graves for their children to jump into.
>
> Viable and Unviable states
>
> The sheer necessity to have ethnically homogenous states may well, in the
> opinion of some pundits, amount to creating so many unviable states in a
> country of up to four hundred different ethnic groups - among the highest
> rated of such societies in the world. But what makes a state unviable? In
> India, Kerala used to be rated among the poorest of the poor. Not just in
> India but world-wide. It was a socialist state that offered free education
> and free health and basic amenities that covered the whole population. The
> value of her social welfare policies did not become so obvious until the
> emergence of the World Wide Web when those educated in Kerala began to ship
> to the United States to work in blue chip companies. The funds they
> repatriated home made all the difference to the poverty of the state. They
> turned the traffic around when they discovered they could still work for
> those companies by remaining in Kerala. Suddenly, Kerala began the journey
> to self-regeneration, outstripping other states that once scoffed at the
> developmental model of the poor free education state. The short of the story
> is that Kerala survived on its own steam, by doing just the necessary and
> needful within secure borders untrammeled by the central government of
> India. The obverse of the Kerala story is the example of California, a state
> within the United States that, on its own, is among one of the richest
> countries on earth, able to pool and exercise the power of its knowledge
> industry, with innovative and challenging links to production. In effect,
> between the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich, the elixir, if
> it might be called that, is about what Niger Delta agitators call resource
> control. States that have it within a normal democracy can turn their turf
> into their own type of Eldorado. It is also about living within the
> framework of the resources available. So to say, the term viable is
> relative. So long as the poor do not bid for a life of profligacy as may be
> happening among richer neighbours, viability is indeed very relative. This
> is not to say that there is no reason to worry about creating so many more
> states without considering their viability. In Nigeria, in the face of the
> critical dependence of the whole Federation on a few oil producing states
> for upkeep, the issue of the unviability of any new states ceases in my
> view to be a matter to be overplayed. The reason is that most of the states
> in the Federation are simply unviable if judged by the existing patterns of
> profligacy that mark their management. There ought for this reason
> to be a decided constitutional position on how much of the revenue of a
> state ought to be on recurrent expenditure. An expert assessment of the
> basic minima for a state ought to be considered part of the job of the
> Revenue Mobilizattion and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC). Rather than let every
> state remain a spoilt child of the oil industry, a scheme for the viability
> of every state needs to be entrenched while phased granting of full resource
> control to the oil producing states should be rigorously set out. So long as
> it is agreed that each state ought to be able to retain 60 percent of funds
> derived from its ambit. Public officers who fail to abide by the
> constitutionally prescribed position must be held responsible for their acts
> of commission and omission.
>
> Simply: there is no reason why state administrations should be so expensive.
> The conqueror's logic that leaves gladiators, once in office, free to seize
> state power and to personalize it for self-aggrandizement, must be addressed
> through an Incomes Policy that devices upper and lower limits of
> remunerations in the public service. This should cover allowances and other
> perquisites. Also, beginning with electoral laws that provide for subvention
> to political parties, the pursuit of low-cost government must be firmed into
> a national political culture for the purpose of restructuring. It is more
> politic to go after cutting down on the high cost of running a state than
> going after the wilder bid to cancel or merge already existing states as
> some Nigerians are tempted to demand. This is an important issue
>
> Otherwise, if an ethnic nationality that is part of an actually existing
> state is to be granted a state of its own, its normal share of the resources
> of the state should be considered within the requisite criteria: that it
> must have enough to keep it in stable self-sustenance after its creation.
> Beyond the mere creation of the new state, it should also be assumed that a
> new format of state finance needs to be adopted which emphasizes internally
> generated revenue rather than the current dependence on Federal handouts
> which is another name for undue exploitation of the Niger Delta. Properly
> speaking, many ethnic groups that wish to have states of their own may be
> considered viable, even without federal subvention because of so many
> panaceas already at the centre of national fiscal management which should be
> further entrenched not deleted or reduced simply because, for instance more
> states have to be created. What must be changed is the bloating of executive
> powers that has made leader-centred misappropriation the soul of our
> governmental systems at all levels: Federal, State and local. Besides, the
> notion that a state needs to be of a particular size to be viable is old
> hat. Nothing should prevent a state from collaborating with a neighbouring
> state for the purpose of undertaking projects that such collaboration could
> enhance.
>
> On this score, I have argued elsewhere that: "Talking viability is a
> way of avoiding the core issue of the injustice meted out to people who, on
> their own, without the weight of a country that maltreats her people, would
> eke out a living and round out a self-respecting circumstance. Arguably,
> how to ensure that states will live within their means is a matter deserving
> of attention. Across Nigeria, there is proof enough that the creation of
> states has brought development to so many parts. Although this is a great
> impetus for more demands, it is also true that the initial conditions making
> for the demands have not been exhausted. There is room for so many more
> states. Fifty two, as has been proposed for the National Conference, is not
> out of place. But certainly not the kind of states that we are having at the
> moment. This brings up the question of the cost of governance; and how
> states are to cope with so much that is being pressed for justiciability in
> the current constitutional process. Of great interest here is that only the
> reports of the National Political Reformof 2005, among all the reports of
> several decades, addresses the question of the cost of government. A
> country intent on making so many social welfare measures justiciable does
> need to be concerned about the cost of governance. Social welfare measures,
> as Awolowo taught Nigerians, most of whom have been running from reality,
> are genuine and serious investments that prepare a society for a future of
> shared prosperity. The prosperity of the future could be dissipated however
> by feckless and unruly expenditures through feckless creation of the kind of
> states that we have been having.
>
> Hence the necessity which the NPRC observed to reduce federal ministries,
> commissions and parastatals. With so many special advisers, special
> assistants and personal assistants to contend with – up to 90 for the
> Presidency alone – it is understandable that a culture of waste is being
> valorized across the public sector; that is, when it is not being imposed
> through monetization measures. In a situation where for instance state-owned
> houses for one generation of legislators and other public officers are sold
> before it gets to another generation, the costs of governance are bound to
> be high. More so, when people go into government expecting the government to
> provide them with cars for personal rather than official engagements. The
> idea of having everything sold off so that every generation starts afresh
> with new demands is clearly a drain on national coffers. How better can
> waste be described? Travels at home and abroad, and health and
> entertainment expenditures by public officers at home and abroad, ought to
> be seen as matters for statutory discipline, mostly to be banned, so that
> chief executives across the tiers of government would come together to build
> and support substitution agencies. To think of it: Teaching Hospitals used
> to benefit from Big Government people purchasing equipment for hospitals
> because of their wives, relations and cronies. Now that our doctors are
> being forced to expatriate and everyone tends to go abroad to India or
> wherever else, leaving the local houses of illness for the hoi polloi,
> where do the hospitals even find the Bigmen to blackmail for equipment and
> proper medicare facilities? How ensure that there is a proper institutional
> means of controlling expenditure? How prevent government from helping
> foreign organizations to triumph while our domestic services are pushed
> further into doldrums? Nor should it be allowed for security votes to
> overwhelm the budgets as happens in every state at the moment! A
> constitution can at least make it mandatory for the cost of all services -
> travel, security, entertainment, living allowances - at every level of
> government to be subjected to quarterly oversights by the legislature if
> only to keep things within laid down codes of conduct. The conqueror's logic
> that puts a chief executive and legislators on the road at the high cost of
> current interminable motorcades, and general pompous living, encourages more
> than waste; it creates a culture that becomes intrinsically and rudely
> malfeasant.
>
> If anything, this is why the viability of any new state must be assessed
> outside a prevalent mind-set that takes the job of government as that of
> giving leaders the freedom to do as they please rather than following a
> law-governed budgetary process guarded by a bureaucracy that is answerable
> to executives monitored by proper legislatures. The fear that no proper
> legislatures can exist in our Presidential system of government is another
> matter: it has led to quite bizarre suggestions about fielding part-time
> legislatures that will, assumedly, be less profligate, more disciplined and
> less prone to padding budgets. I cannot see the relationship between having
> a part-time legislator and the presumed benefits. Nothing follows. It is not
> because the legislators are full-time that they over-spend or fail to take
> their jobs seriously. Actually, an underdeveloped country that chooses to go
> by part-time legislators is priming an irresponsible executive into place
> that would brow-beat the nation with impunity. Nor will part-time
> legislation prevent the kind of robber baron affairs that are mangling
> mandates, padding budgets and lifting more than forty percent as loot
> outside executive proposals. Basically, it is a factor of a political system
> that is a regular kleptocracy. I should add that kleptocracies tend to be
> products of situations where a common morality is made impossible of
> application due to prevalence of unpunished malfeasance in a divided
> society. The profligacy of governments in such situations enters the
> discussion of viability along a very unhealthy weighting of rationality in
> favour of tradition and incumbency, rather than innovation. The abuse of
> bureaucracy that this leads to is why it is generally said not only that
> nothing works but that anything goes, thus creating a self-immolating
> national culture in which all are complicit hostages to a pile up of scams
> and debilities.
>
> It is of course assumed that new states would benefit from having every new
> addition to the population through birth or migration being entitled to a
> federal subvention that must cover education, health, employment and
> pensions. In effect, if the old competitions must be annulled, a Federal
> assertion of responsibility must make the insertion of any new comer to a
> state a necessary and sweet burden by providing fiscal coverage. If some
> states are more attractive than others, whether because they have better
> climate, more jobs or more friendly people, they deserve to be compensated
> for the crush and weight of population pressure they must bear. No situation
> should therefore arise in which a state expels citizens from other states,
> not for security reasons, but for weighing down finite resources. The more
> the load, the more the federal subvention should be. This should reduce the
> kind of angst that has bedeviled states in which people of the same ethnic
> stock, civil servants from contiguous states, are expelled to make room for
> supposed indigenes. An Igbo-speaking state driving away Igbo people from
> other states to make room for indigenes, or a Yoruba state refusing to
> employ the wife of an indigene who happens to come from a neighbouring
> Yoruba state is callous to a degree that must pass as inhuman. How would
> such states respond to non Igbo or non Yoruba in their midst? Of course, the
> bad behaviour may be defended in the jaundiced spirit of competition
> between different parts of the country and humoured as necessary banding to
> resist old and new laagers. But this is the of point of the fundamental
> objectives and directive principles of state policy: a Federal arrangement
> to make sure that no child is denied rights by reason of birth or domicile.
> Those who have objected to such federal coverage for all Nigerians
> especially because they abhor the insistence on merit as a determinant of
> access across the board, must be deemed the arch-despoilers of the
> commonwealth. If they are unavailable for a restructured Nigeria, they may
> be given a special dispensation such as in the old arguments against
> allowing states that are opposed to sale of alcohol to share in taxes
> involving alcohol.
>
> What many do need to appreciate however is that the North/South divide
> turned such national programme into obstacle races: derived from bad habits
> of travelling without maps, bedeviled by unreliable census figures, the
> miscarriage of the National Identity Card projects, and sheer wheedling and
> using fictitious statistics to bid for national largesse. If however a
> revenue allocation policy based on derivation is made the touchstone of
> national restructuring, and those states losing populations to others get
> deprived of federal subventions, it is likely, I believe, to induce a change
> in behaviour consistent with rational expectations. The idea that states
> can get away with so much malfeasance, taking more than their due share, can
> be brought to an end, once the principle of derivation is properly emplaced,
> especially with more items on the Exclusive Legislative List taken to the
> Concurrent List.
>
> Ideally, no state ought to be allowed to fall below a declared national
> standard; by the same token, the deepening of advantages that any part of
> the country may have should be a means of promoting development. The
> El-Rufai doctrine, which argued, at the height of the de-Federalizing angst
> under Obasanjo, that Lagosians wished to, but should not be treated like
> special citizens, needs to be made more difficult if not impossible to
> invoke. The older, Buhari doctrine which preferred to use Federal might to
> pay for a metroline not to be established in Lagos, should be abnegated in
> advance by new principles. The idea that basic education should not be
> granted free to all Nigerian children because a part of the country might
> benefit more, an argument that has led to literal carnage in the education
> sector, ought not to be allowed to generate new versions in the public
> space. Any government that allows educational institutions to be closed down
> for any reason must be considered obtuse and backward in this regard.
> Otherwise, the grand ideal is to encourage every citizen, group or state
> that has a unique gift to develop and enhance its use. This must be seen as
> the way to make Nigeria, as a country, more buoyant rather than wrecking
> the advantages that one side or the other may possess. In the end, it
> amounts to making Nigeria poorer without making anyone else better if what
> makes a state or ethnic group unique is destroyed in order for others to
> catch up or feel comfortable. The latter merely leaves room for a
> withdrawal of commitment to the country by those who, as a result, feel
> repressed or marginalized. To think of it: in the same way that the unique
> position of Lagos deserves to be continually upgraded as a national
> strategy, so the city of the confluence, the city of wheat, of coal and
> cities of oil and gas ought to be granted leverages as national assets. It
> can be argued that the smashing of the old dream of turning the North East
> of Nigeria into a great producer of wheat partly yielded the pauperization
> that has helped the rise of Boko Haram. This raises the hotly contested
> issue concerning how much the state that bears a good or gift should derive
> from it. It goes beyond the derivation principle but it is part of it.
>
> I hold it as uncontroversial, in this regard, to argue that every local
> government should hold all wealth within its authority and coverage for
> itself on behalf of the state of which it is a part; as the state holds its
> own for the federation. It is absolutely wrong for any region to play the
> tail wagging the federal dog by using access to centrality to steal or
> privatize what belongs to any other part of the country. It would amount to
> such regions existing merely to swindle the rest of the country. This is one
> reason why the discussion of restructuring falls within the format of a war
> between the haves of the South South and the have-not states of the North
> that have been wielding incongruous power over the rest of the country. To
> deny this of course is more than fraudulent. Even if the scars of old
> battles have yielded a certain form of indifference to the travails that the
> deprived and marginalized undergo in our climes, dealing with it is part of
> what restructuring is all about. Because a serious country cannot be built
> on such a basis.
>
> For the same reason, to return to it, the kind of haughty assumptions that
> have enabled many to argue that the poorer states should never have been
> created and should now be merged with others should be side-stepped. It
> makes a lot of sense only at the level of the old angst of states grating
> against one another in competition. What it does not attest to is that, if
> the grand purpose is to support development in every part of the Federation,
> the steps to be taken would actually reduce the burden that they constitute.
> This is also what restructuring should be all about. While I think it should
> be procedurally allowed for states to agree to merge after due referenda, I
> am strongly opposed to campaigns for states to be merged or for new states
> not to be created. In the first place, it does not liquidate the populations
> that must be covered by welfare policies. The size of the problems that a
> state must face are not necessarily pared down as the result of a merger.
> Whether we reduce or increase the number of states, the population to be
> cared for will not thereby reduce. So it is first and foremost about
> resource management. It is not as if the creation of states is an escape
> from accommodating the welfare needs of the people in any of the areas. The
> principle must be to appreciate that state creation has been one great means
> of spreading welfare, for good or ill, across the country; also for purposes
> of enhancing freedom and equity, ethnic nationalities have been granted
> states of their own. As such, those measures must be considered wrong which
> suggest the removal of any part of the country from benefits as a means of
> maintaining efficiency, political order, or fair restructuring. It is not
> merely a question of being your brother's keeper. It is a self-upkeep to
> ensure that neighbours in distress do not become a source of depression for
> others.
> Still the question must be answered: what happens to the poorer
> states without resources to stand up to the over-expensive administrative
> infrastructure that mauls the nation at the moment? It is a question that
> must be confronted, not merely parried. In the run up to the last National
> Conference, PRONACO provided a way of dealing with the issue of viability of
> states by going truly formalistic arguing for revenue sharing on the basis
> of fifty percent derivation, 35 percent to the distributable pool and
> fifteen percent to the federal Government. It was rather pre-emptive on the
> assumption that there has to be a first line draw from the Federation
> Account in favour of education, health and housing, full employment,
> citizen's wage and old age pension. Similar thinking informed the position
> of the Seventh Senate which merely voted for the existing format of the
> Revenue Mobilization and Fiscal commission to continue outside direct
> constitutional determination. But none may be taken as solution. What must
> be said is that too many states in the Federation are truly 'parasites' that
> take but add little or nothing to the national income. A change cannot be
> asserted by verbiage. Proper restructuring must mark how all states can be
> supported by a Federal Fund and National Plan that will take the states out
> of parasitism. It wont do to have a trickle down economics of the nature we
> have been having at the top, with jingoistic central bankers who give away
> charity instead of standing by instrumental theories that can revive dead
> textile factories, comatose machine tool industries and flagging domestic
> production - as ought to be demanded in an emergency. Industries must be
> established through a deliberate Federal targeting to raise standards that
> make a difference to issues of viability of states. A deliberate
> apportionment of funds in favour of such states need to be considered and
> ought to be enshrined in the Constitution.
>
>
> Necessarily, therefore this goes beyond the notion of an equalization fund.
> States without much natural resources need to be specially placed within a
> grand development strategy that covers planned redress of the imbalances in
> development. Specially targeted projects to meet the establishment of
> industries in the poorer states must be such as to be able to amortize
> debts. The common denominator is that all the local governments created by
> such a state must be viewed as production bases, each with its own essential
> product, monitored by the state, as the state is monitored by the Federal
> Government, along the lines of supportive interventions. The necessity for
> all states to abide by national standards, and not be allowed to fall below
> them, requires that treating a local government as a production unit, turns
> a state into a coordinator of development plans. State governments must look
> towards the local governments rather than sit pat awaiting federal
> largesse. The idea of the Federal Government barging into or disrupting the
> relationship between the states and local governments should not arise.
> This is actually a case where normal revenue allocation sorties have to be
> set aside to beef up industrial targeting funds for states across the
> federation. The understanding must be that they are not grants but
> investments that must make returns and should be monitored as such.
>
> It requires emphasis, that the matter of all states acceding to common
> standards, or some states enjoying national affirmative allocation of funds,
> should fall within a proper warrant. Or, it would amount to punishing
> enterprise in some states and thus giving comfort to profligacy. The idea
> of giving money to a poor state for the maintenance of national standards
> goes beyond providing free education and free health services to children up
> to a certain age. Such welfare quotients we hope should be generally taken
> for granted. If a civil war has to be fought to ensure that schools are kept
> open and for all children to be at school, why not?. It should, however, be
> properly designed to ensure that it does not become a case of giving money
> to the ruling class of a state to play fast and loose with. A major task is
> to prevent state governments from stealing what belongs to the people.
> Proper sanctions should be invoked to deal with states and state officials
> who connive to defraud the system through padding of budgets and distracted
> expenditures outside statutory suasion. At any rate, a state that is not so
> rich should, through open campaigns and statutory guidelines, be dissuaded
> from raising the cost of governance to the astronomical limits of the richer
> states.
>
> At any rate, while viability, so much dispensed with, need not be over
> played, it should mean that all future creation of states ought to be
> structured upon well considered management of internally generated revenue.
> Over a temporal distance, a newly created state should be assumed to need
> special funding, marching grants - but not on a platter. It should depend on
> performance along specified criteria that entitle a state to matching
> grants for thriving production systems. More critical is that Federal
> subvention to a state must meet criteria available to all states in similar
> circumstances. This should be based on population and verifiable
> performance, but not land mass or some such shenanigans, between the new
> state and the other fraction of which it was a part! An obligatory
> assessment procedure should exist which, as with other states, determines
> when internally generated revenue, should be specially augmented to achieve
> specified national goals. It must be clearly understood that nothing in the
> arrangements between a state and Federal authorities prevents one state from
> cooperating with another to perform a function or service.
>
>
> Restructuring as Resource Control
>
> To borrow a leaf from an earlier intervention on this theme, let me note
> that "since 1966, most Federal instruments of law making have been heckled
> by the likelihood of the Niger Delta seceding from the Federation or
> obstructing access to her resources. After the attempted secession by Isaac
> Adaka Boro and his group in 1966, followed by the trauma of Biafran
> secession, the matter literally caught fire. Adaka Boro's secessionist move
> was directed against the Eastern region government for neglect and
> repression of the peoples of the Niger Delta. However, the prospect of the
> whole of the Eastern Region seceding from the federation was so much more of
> a threat to the Federal Government that it had to take over the "protection
> of the Niger Delta" from the Regional Government. The price of that
> "protection", as it seems, was the seizure of the oil wells in the Niger
> Delta and the rank deprivation of the people of the oil producing areas. It
> has been a case of exploitation without redress.
>
> The nature of what happened has left other states in the Federation, not so
> well endowed, complicit in their own abasement; except that the case of the
> Niger Delta is more visible because of oil. Hence, whatever is claimed for
> the Niger Delta has become a way of drawing attention to the travails of
> every other state that has watched the Federal Government literally gobbling
> up the bulk of national revenue, and leaving all the states to be mere
> mendicants at the gates of revenue allocation. Virtually all the states
> today are looking for changes locked in constitutional provisions that have
> yielded controversies and altercations for more than six decades. Take it
> from Section 140 (1) of the 1963 Republican Constitution of the Federal
> Republic of Nigeria. It provides that "There shall be paid to each region a
> sum equal to fifty percent of the proceeds of any royalty received by the
> Federation in respect of any minerals extracted in that Region and any
> mining rents derived by the Federation from that region". This implied a
> factor of ownership which the central government could not, and did not
> deny. It was like our writ of independence.
>
> However, in the 1999 Constitution, a convolution is inserted to the effect,
> as stated in Section 44 (3) of the Constitution that "..... the entire
> property in and control of minerals, mineral oil and natural gas in, under
> or upon any land in Nigeria... shall vest in the Government of the
> Federation and shall be managed in such manner as may be prescribed by the
> National Assembly". Irrespective of the prescribed necessity for the
> National Assembly to take into account, any "allocation principles" in
> determining the formula to be employed, as stated in Section 162 (2) of the
> Constitution, what is critical is that there is no implied ownership by the
> states of the on-shore or off-shore oil which, in the 1963 Constitution,
> were in the determinate ownership of the region in which oil was found. It
> raises the question: Are states tenants of the Federal Government rather
> than associated citizens holding their land in trust for the whole
> Federation? If not, why would Part 1, item 39 of the 2nd Schedule of the
> Constitution state that "Mines and Minerals ...and Geological Surveys are
> within the sole purview of the federal government". The implication is that
> colonialism may have ended but Nigerians, irrespective of where they live,
> are denied proper citizenship. In effect, no state is adjudged by the
> Constitution to be citizen enough to have rights of equity. This is one of
> many core items making Nigerians wish to remove the whole constitution
> itself from Constitutionality. It has not only turned the Federal Government
> into an overlord, with powers to traduce the natural rights of whole
> nationalities, it has made too many people subordinate in their own country
> to prospectors for oil and gas in the Niger Delta. Whoever is prospecting
> for oil and any other minerals across the country acquires rights above
> indigenes and may be said to have superior rights over Nigerians. To
> repossess the rights of citizenship over the oil wells and minerals
> wherever in Nigeria any prospecting and exploration may be happening, the
> spelling of restructuring must itself become a right. Restructuring must
> lay the basis for other rights across the country. An appropriate procedure
> for ensuring that this occurs may yet be quite unavailing but there is a
> natural rights issue involved which cannot be browbeaten by invoking the
> years of impunity that have transpired since the first decrees that enabled
> the Federal Government to take over the oilfields. It turns the matter of
> restructuring into an emergency which the desperate situation during the
> civil war gave an air of normality. Once the war ended, a reversion to
> status quo ante bellum was simply imperative. No dice! If Nigerians are not
> all conquered people, it must mean that the time to assert full citizenship
> has arrived.
>
> It is of great importance therefore that in the discussion of restructuring,
> the over-weaning weight of the Exclusive Legislative List that took oil and
> minerals from Nigerians must be pared down in favour of the Concurrent List
> whereat the states and federal government cohabit. The latter List may have
> been beefed up, in the past decade by accretions of judicial interventions
> in favour of the capacity of state governments to extend the exercise of
> their powers. But the grand imprimatur of constitutional instrumentation is
> what is actually required to remove them from proactive but disputatious
> judicial pronouncements. This was what, as I have noted in This Conference
> Must Be Different, the 7th National Assembly had done at its plenary. The
> Senate had removed pensions, prisons, railways, stamp duties, and wages from
> the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent list; adding road safety,
> healthcare, public complaints, arbitration, aviation, and environment. The
> House of Representatives added health, housing and electricity to the
> Concurrent list. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha ..... explained that health and housing
> were moved from the Residual to the concurrent list because "apart from the
> extensive practical involvement of the Federal government on both
> matters….the decision to transfer the right to primary and maternal health
> care and Basic Housing from Chapter II to chapter IV as fundamental Human
> Rights would bring undue pressure on the governments of the states. Hence
> the decision to cast the burden on both the states and the federal
> government".As I added: " There is a reason to believe that much more by
> way of wresting burdens from the states would have to be undertaken by the
> Federal Government in the face of Basic Education which would now be
> justiciable. In the process, the area of first line draw pertaining to the
> Federation Account is being judiciously enlarged to meet the increased
> responsibilities. This in my view is the only way for true federalism to be
> properly registered in a multi-ethnic environment. It follows a trend in the
> disposition of all Federal Governments across the globe. Strictly, it is by
> following the suasions of the Seventh National Assembly, as we hope the
> current National Assembly would, that Nigerians across all the states can
> begin to have back the rights of equity retrenched from the constitution.
>
> With equity assured, a firm reversion to the provisions in the 1963
> Constitution on the principle of derivation is actually no longer to be
> considered a fit and proper response to the situation on the ground. More
> appropriate is the demand for resource control not for one or a few oil
> producing states as usually haggled. The demand is for resource control for
> every state of the Federation over all that is within their domain. As the
> Federal Government is only a proper state through its constituent parts, to
> deny any of its constituent parts their due implies a derogation from its
> presumed wholeness as a state.
>
> A state that has resource control is assumed to be one in possession of its
> wealth and holds it perpetually in trust as part of the body Nigerian. Each
> state in effect is an owner, not a pariah, and not relating to a superior
> colonial state but to its own resources as an ultimate carrier of equity.
> The proper presumption must be that as a citizen, the state government will
> pay taxes to the Federal Government of which it is a part, rather than be
> an absence, without equity holding, to be treated cavalierly in relation to
> resources, mineral and otherwise within its domain. In a truly buoyant
> situation, a rule of thumb concession of 60% derivation to the states
> ought to be assumed as quite uncontroversial. A responsible federal
> government should be seeking ways to help the states exploit and improve on
> those resources rather than play the albatross distracting from the wager
> that being a state, a constituent part of the Federation, constitutes.
> Resource control, in effect, implies a sure wager against the evident
> centralism imposed by the Federal Government in the face of states in the
> Federation that are not experiencing the same level of incidence of
> exploitation and taxation.
>
> Not to forget: the Federal Government has always taken a preponderant share
> of the Federation Account without leaving a proper margin for the removal of
> environmental disasters in the Niger Delta. As Federal seizure/ownership
> of the oil wells has not led to a proper management of the environment, nor
> to the establishment of an efficient oil industry, nor altered the necessity
> for each state to mind its ecology as a matter of environmental health,
> the implication of resource control is that it is not the business of the
> Federal Government, but the states closest to the problems, to handle them.
> Every state in the federation is therefore to be understood as having
> original jurisdiction within its domain which cannot be alienated even in
> war time. It is for the same reason that the part of the country that is
> closest to the sea is deemed to entitle a country to any portion of the sea
> that is in contention in any dispute. Without the abutment of land, you
> search in vain for seaward caper. No seaward claims are defensible without
> its abutting a constituent part. This is what resource control means in a
> federal state that has accepted the coordinate status of its constituent
> parts. It is the basis upon which, in a foreseeable future any neighbouring
> country wishing to join the Nigerian Federation may be viewed as an additive
> of equity.
>
> In this regard, one significant rationale for restructuring and therefore
> the emphasis being placed on resource control is that at the present time
> virtually all the states of the Federation have internally generated revenue
> capacity of only about 22 percent of annual budget. It suggests that a
> crisis of grave proportions has always existed. In recent years, this has
> manifested in many states lacking the capacity to meet monthly salaries and
> wages thus requiring the federal government to arrange bail out funds. All
> authorities are agreed that one of the reasons for the impecunious state of
> the states, apart from what may be considered the profligacy that
> characterizes their expenditure patterns, is the lack of correspondence
> between the functions that the states are required to perform and the means,
> the equity holding capacity, and taxing powers, which are allowed to states
> by the constitution. A federal state that has barged into the domain of the
> state governments to appropriate equity without minding the functions to be
> performed, creates a vertical imbalance that makes the whole system appear
> too lopsided to be functional. Leaving the states with functions too big for
> their revenue base is tantamount to a form of injustice when what belongs to
> the states is already over-appropriated without attention being paid by the
> federal government to developing them. This is proved, very amply, by
> decades of the federal government's neglect of minerals that are known to
> exist in various states of the federation but untended and unexploited in
> the face of world demand and national needs. What is the point of having a
> super-leviathan overtaking and overcoming the rightful ownership of minerals
> by states barred from exploiting them. Nor are they even allowed to survey
> them. What a general resource control perspective implicates is the
> necessary acknowledgement of this fact and an appreciation of how the
> current shambolic economics of misery may be negated by each state having
> the right to deploy the resources in its domain to achieve its goals.
>
> At a time when alternatives to oil in the world market are being heatedly
> pursued by many industrialized countries, the point is to consider how all
> the states of the federation currently depending only on Niger Delta oil may
> be unfettered to embark on exploiting resources in their domain that are
> currently simply untouchable even if accessible. Should the crisis in the
> oil market persist, all the states across the country will be left equally
> high and dry. Although oil prices may improve in the world market, and soon,
> the war on oil in favour of other alternatives has become such a project and
> a challenge in the international market place that sooner rather than later
> a decision will have to be taken as a matter of serious strategy. If care
> is not taken, what would be left, when the real Armageddon comes, are oil
> producing areas looking like sinkholes of rot and disease without prior
> investments to withstand encroaching hard times. Knowing this, and since
> state governments across the Federation are actually more involved with
> provision of welfare and services than the Federal Government, it was time
> to let the states embark on developing and controlling resources within
> their domains to meet great challenges and opportunities. Once this is done,
> it will become obvious that, over the years, too much slack funds had been
> kept at the Federal level for the kind of unconscionable expenditures that
> have become the norm. Now, the time has come for State governments across
> the Federation to take back their due in order to become genuine production
> units, not just enjoying resource control, but with each one accounting for
> investments that could ensure, within the term of the present
> administration, that Nigeria would be producing as much as 70 percent rather
> than the twenty or so percentile, of what she consumes today.
>
> To achieve such a goal, the anti-federalist provisions which litter the
> pages of the 1999 constitution must be accosted and changed. This is to give
> a sense of self-determination to the states within the ambit of the Nigerian
> Federation. For instance, if only to be sure that where there are
> opportunities to be tapped one state may be able to choose to merge with
> another or split from one for more effective participation in and
> exploitation of the resources that abound, it is important that the frigid
> nature of the Nigerian state represented by the unitary format of Nigeria's
> militarized constitution is put to rest once and for all time.
>
> To be faced promptly is the necessity to give a sense of order and solidity
> to existing states so that they can achieve any of their aspirations within
> the constitution. May it be noted here that state creation is not merely a
> matter of people bidding for a share of the national cake as it has become.
> State creation began as a matter of the integrity of ethnic nationalities
> and their right to develop their linguistic, cultural, political, social and
> economic interests. It has involved the correction of aspects of inequities
> that continue to impinge on citizenship rights as in the cavalier cut and
> paste approach adopted by the colonizer who created royal kingdoms for
> republicans and a free people to bow down to; putting people of the same
> ethnic stock in different but contiguous regions instead of allowing all of
> them to be in one state. As things are, anyone thinking of state creation
> has to worry about the virtual impossibility theorem built into Section 8
> (1) of the Constituion which sets out a cumbersome procedure that requires
> that to create a state, there must be a concurrence of two thirds of the
> population of the areas and 2/3 majority of members in the National
> Assembly, state assemblies and local governments representing the area
> demanding, and the area affected, by the boundary adjustment and that a
> particular request must receive a simple majority of members of each House
> of the National Assembly and House of Assembly. Whereas, the Senate of the
> Seventh National Assembly was out-rightly against the creation of more
> states, the House of Representatives .... offered terms for the creation of
> states that makes it much easier than the existing provisions. The House
> .... brought in practical good sense by providing for only two thirds of the
> registered voters in a state as against 2/3 of the population of a state.
> States where registered voters have always been inflated are the ones in
> trouble if they are never able to make two thirds for any purposes of this
> nature. It shows how far Nigeria had gone on the road to restructuring
> before the impingement of the General Elections that handed over the baton
> to the 8th National Assembly.
>
> With specific reference to the case of local governments, it may well be
> stated that a near sacrosanct life-line has been given by the 1999
> Constitution to the 36 states, and 768 local governments listed thus
> ensuring that, whatever injustices were perpetrated in the exercise of state
> and local government creation in the past, will remain unchanged almost
> indefinitely. Among the injustices: Sections 3(6), (5) and 162 (5) (7),
> dealing with local governments, introduces so much ill humour into our
> federalist tradition by granting the central government powers that should
> normally belong to states. Accordingly, the Federal Government creates and
> determines the funding of the local governments, granting responsibilities
> but grossly inadequate powers to the states in the maintenance of whatever
> political structures exist at the local levels. It spells a unitary
> intervention in the affairs of a federal state which, properly speaking, can
> only constitute a disruption of the relationship between a state and local
> governments. How does the Federal Government create local governments for
> states to run; above whatever the state governments may wish? Rather than
> wait for disorder and lack of coherence that may obstruct planning for
> development, the purpose should be to prevent the assault on the local
> government system by chief executives. This was already on the way when the
> House of Representatives of the Seventh National Assembly recommended that
> only an elected local government, with a mandatory 4 year tenure, shall be
> recognized or allowed any share of the Federation Account. It was a form of
> protection for local governments under pressure from chief executives of
> state who sometimes swiped as much as 60 percent off LGA allocations thus
> leaving the chairpersons to view the funds in their charge as sharable
> loot.
>
> Except for our need to caution against direct local government access to the
> Federation Account, it is important, from the standpoint of restructuring,
> that the establishment of a Local Government Council Allocation Account
> into which all monies due to the local governments shall be paid would be a
> better arrangement; that is, so long as it it tied to an indissolubility
> provision so well entrenched in the constitution that in the performance
> of its functions, a local government cannot be cavalierly displaced within
> its area of competence by a jealous chief executive of state. The
> implication should be that a chief executive that interferes with the
> funding of a local government ought to lose immunity and be liable to
> punishment like a petty criminal while still in office. Such an apt
> constitutional cover should carry the presumption that local governments
> must constitute production and development units for the states in the
> manner that states should do for the federal government
>
> At one level, it may well be argued that current difficulties in the way of
> creating new states and local governments, should be regarded as protection
> for community rights. But what does it profit a state to have secure
> boundaries if, as several provisions of the Constitution stipulates, laws
> could be made for the state by the National assembly literally if not out of
> whimsy? Section 4 deprives all other tiers of legislative rationale once
> the National Assembly chooses to barge into their area of jurisdiction.
> Section 4(2) for instance stipulates that the "National Assembly shall have
> power to make laws for the peace, order and good government of the
> Federation and any part thereof." This should be standard for emergencies.
> But by making no distinction between Federal jurisdiction over the Exclusive
> legislative list and shared legislative competence on the concurrent list,
> the National Assembly (Federal Government) is granted near absolute powers
> to change the grounds of performance and to make a chief executive redundant
> even if the National Assembly may lack the powers to remove a govenor from
> office. The powers are made even more absolute by section 11(1) with respect
> to the maintenance and securing of public safety and public order, providing
> and maintaining and securing of such supplies and services as may be
> designated by the National Assembly as essential supplies and services. We
> must propose that just as the powers of a state chief executive to overawe a
> local government needs to be made less whimsical, the powers of the National
> Assembly and the Presidency to intervene in the affairs of a state ought to
> be made a factor of democratic promptings through which all interveners must
> operate. In the case of a local government, federal interference ought
> simply to be deemed unconstitutional unless through the agency of the state
> assembly and state chief executive as the constitution may stipulate.
> Otherwise, Section 11(1) is tantamount to a retrospective endorsement of the
> Federal Government's intervention and takeover of the Government of the
> Western Region in 1962, an anti-Federalist move that set the basis for the
> demise of the first Republic. As in the old Western Region where a State of
> Emergency was declared after a brawl on the floor of the house of Assembly,
> an emergency could simply be declared in a state because two legislators
> exchanged blows on the floor of the House. To depend on the whims of a
> National Assembly of such a stamp that may be hostile to a particular State
> Assembly is simply not good enough. This is one reason why a State Police,
> which can be misused, as all police systems have always been misused in
> Nigeria, requires a special crafting. Anyone who has seen the virtual life
> and death scuffles between Chief Tony Anenih and Adams Oshiomhole in Edo
> State should not ask whether state police will be misused. But to have a law
> making body that has no statutory means of effecting its laws should be
> considered incongruous. The proviso may be entertained that a police board
> be established at the level of both the state assembly and National Assembly
> which assesses periodically, if need be, quarterly, in the format of the
> Judicial council. how to get a police system that truly works. A board made
> up, not of former Police officers but proper human rights lawyers,
> criminologists and nominated exclusively by ASUU, NBA and NLC may be
> preferred.
>
> Above all, there is the matter of the economy. In the 1999 Constitution,
> which shows that a daring state, with an ambitious economic programme is
> promised a liberal drubbing by section 16(2) (4) which empowers the National
> Assembly by a resolution of each House to declare certain economic
> activities as "major sectors of the economy which shall be managed
> exclusively by the government of the Federation. What does this mean?
> States intending for instance to take advantage of "market forces" will have
> to do a rethink until the National Assembly makes a resolution to the
> contrary. This is in conformity with sections of the constitution which deny
> a state Executive or House of Assembly powers over subjects on which there
> is a distance from a Federal law. Unlike India's Kerala, a very poor state
> which, unwilling to join in Federal grandiosities, could carry out daring
> socialist programmes that laid the basis for a future prosperity, an
> ideologically ambitious state, could get frozen out of buoyant sectors as in
> the case of the oil industry which is at the heart of Nigeria's resource
> control crisis. Here, the Federal Government has had a coverall suzerainty
> over the whole economy that freezes out the states. Pity, the residence of
> oil and oil-mining on the Exclusive Legislative List has not however
> ensured a well-run oil industry. Item 39 on the exclusive legislative list
> which takes mines and minerals, including oil fields oil mining, geological
> surveys and natural gas away from the states, takes away all the economic
> leverage residing in the states. Now, no community as in the Middle Belt,
> where solid minerals have become an European community-coveted resource,
> would be able to look to the future for benefits from the solid wealth of
> their environment as a result of this exclusiveness which, properly
> speaking, should be ruled as invalid in so far as it relates to state
> governments. To put it straight: Government ought to be taken as just
> government if the extant business, of a commercial nature, unrelated to
> security issues, takes place within the jurisdiction of a state.
>
> Beyond the economy, the inhibiting power built into Federal legislative
> capacity is exacerbated by the fact that the judiciary in the state is a
> handmaiden of a National Judicial Council which recommends the appointment
> and disciplines State High Courts. State Executives are constrained by the
> predominance of federal appointees in that council; which is part of the
> reason why there have been proposals by some judicial activists that there
> should be an Attorney General of the Federal Government and an Attorney
> General of the Federation in the same way that there should be an Accountant
> General of the Federal Government and an Accountant General of the
> Federation. No wahala! I think the officer of the Federation should be
> the higher officer in the circumstance and ought to be considered the
> norm-server in the sense that the officer of the Federal Government
> represents only one of the many 'coordinate' governments in the Federation
> while the officer of the Federation represents the whole. Even as a matter
> of mere formality to emphasize the federal nature of the Nigerian society,
> It ought to follow that although the President of the Republic may send the
> names of both to the Senate for approval, the presumption of one being a
> representative of all the states should be given special constitutional
> recognition over the other.
>
> In the same manner, i think some out-of-the-box intelligence is necessary to
> raise the possible source of independency in the electoral process in the
> states as against the distortionate code of unitarism that requires that the
> independent National Electoral Commission may not ( in accordance with
> section 223(b) register a political party unless "the members of the
> executive committee or governing body of the political party reflect the
> Federal character of Nigeria." This provision effectively annuls political
> parties that may choose to operate only in a state. In a country with
> ethnic demands based on histories of marginalization of minorities and
> supposed majorities, this dis-allows formation of political parties aimed at
> defending the integrity of ethnic groups and fractions. For instance, no
> political movement devoted to off-setting the specific pains of the Niger
> Delta would pass the test of section 221 which stipulates that only
> political parties shall take part in or fund elections. The short of this
> is that grievances un-accommodated by the political parties registered by
> the independent National Electoral Commission would be deemed to be
> non-existent within governing frameworks and circles. Given the status
> granted to political parties as the only means by which interests could be
> aggregated and articulated in an authoritative manner in the political
> system, it follows that the only way to pursue the special interests of the
> people of any particular section of Nigeria is first to seek the
> "permission" of those whom the people accuse of neglect and marginalization.
> If this is the case, what happens if the interests of the majority is to
> continue with the exploitation of the minorities? This leaves undemocratic
> means as the only instruments for seeking redress. After the hard example of
> the Niger Delta in which militants have had to remain faceless while
> choosing those who may speak on their behalf, it ought simply to be
> considered unbecoming in a democratic society for people who wish to express
> themselves to be so incommoded as to resort to undemocratic means. Political
> parties that seek to govern just a state, so long as they can win the local
> government prequisites for registration as political parties, ought to be
> allowed to exist as political parties. Such parties will necessarily be
> parochial and federally ungainly. But to deny them their right to govern
> local governments or even a whole state in which they may actually have a
> majority is an infringement of their freedom of association and freedom of
> speech.
>
> In my view, so long as the people of any Nigerian cultural geography
> consider it a viable proposition to remain part of the country, it is for
> them to determine how they may organize the political party or parties that
> will enable them navigate the system. Once a state wide party decides to
> join a nation-wide movement or party, it should lose the perquisites that
> parochial party formations confer. It is baseless homily to demand of such
> parties that they should not project their ethnic or regional frame, as the
> old NPC and NEPU did. Except that they cannot decide in the manner of the
> Northern People's Congress to operate outside their region until they abide
> by the national standards prescribed for national political parties. They
> may operate only within the state and cannot send legislators to the
> National Assembly. In a properly restructured country, there is every reason
> to suppose that the state-bound party will sooner than later join the
> mainstream. The point is not to block freedom of association at that level
> in order to be politically correct on the side of oppressive national
> behemoths.
>
> Specific to the pursuit of restructuring, it stands to reason that all
> Nigerians who are agreed on the kind of restructuring that they want,
> should have draft provisions or draft constitutions, to which they may
> solicit adhesions and supports from far and near. When they are able to get
> a critical mass of supporters from other parts of the Federation for a
> provision or even a whole draft, they may seek to make an issue of it in a
> referendum. Alternatively, motions and bills may be sponsored in local
> government councils and state assemblies to begin the process of not just
> raising awareness but priming legislators at the federal level to act
> correctly. Constitutional bills need not originate only from the top but can
> emerge from groundswells at lower tiers of government. Where local councils
> and Houses of Assembly fail to perform their role as expressions of the
> wishes of the people as it pertains to restructuring, an election issue can
> be made of particular provisions. This may be the more efficient approach as
> a referendum does not necessarily allow for item by item adumbration of
> constitutional provisions. Uncooperative Houses of Assembly or an
> uncooperative National Assembly could be voted out of office for dithering
> or watering down or abandoning critical provisions. In effect this is
> proposing that restructuring is not about breaking up the country but
> ensuring that the democratic promptings in our social fabric be not abused
> by whoever may be, or wishing to be, in power. To fight for Nigeria to
> become and remain a real democracy in which constituent units are free to be
> free and productive is what restructuring is all about.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Toyin Falola
> Department of History
> The University of Texas at Austin
> 104 Inner Campus Drive
> Austin, TX 78712-0220
> USA
> 512 475 7224
> 512 475 7222 (fax)
> http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/
> http://www.toyinfalola.com
> http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
> http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
> http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
>
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--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

Fellow,
Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
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Skype: obododimma.oha
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