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From: Ibini Olaide <ibini_olaide@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:30:23 +0000 (UTC)
To: ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com<ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com>
ReplyTo: "ibini_olaide@yahoo.com" <ibini_olaide@yahoo.com>
Subject: prof's column
JUNE 12 AND THE QUEST FOR TRUE FEDERALISM
AYO OLUKOTUN
"Nations are built and nurtured on the principles that uphold justice. The absence of justice explains the enduring resentments over tragic portions of Nigerian history".Armsfree Ajanaku.
Journalist, writer and activist, Armsfree Ajanaku, quoted above, pinpoints the essence of the June 12 struggle, whose 23rd anniversary was marked across the nation on Sunday and Monday. June 12 was a struggle to overturn the tragic impunity of a military cabal operating with the born to rule mindset of the northern oligarchy in an artificial nation state. It witnessed also the efflorescence and the finest hour of a resurgent civil society in magnificient combat with an oppressive political arrangement in which the consent of the nationalities which comprise Nigeria was taken for granted.
As history repeatedly teaches, the manner in which crises are resolved have important consequences for the unfolding of later events. The transition by transaction which produced the Presidency of General Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 and the so-called appeasement of the Yorubas failed to grasp the opportunity for reinvention and the redrawing of the political map to institute a truly Federal Nigeria. Obasanjo's imperial Presidency under a unitarist Constitution did not speak to the yearnings of the people for a new Federal bargain but settled for the contrivance of awarding an unreformed Presidency to the ethnic group with the highest nuisance value.
Typically, the political and military classes settled for the short term, wrestled with contigencies and emergencies like Generals preparing only for the last war. In the same way as the nation's leaders scandalously consigned our economy to the mono cultural straitjacket of oil whose prices they did not determine and failed to explore diversification options; politics fell far short of the strategic turn around that would have granted the nation a new lease of life. That is another way of saying that the fundamental lessons of June 12 were not learned and that a succession of mediocre leaders lacked the vision to raise enduring questions regarding the survival of the polity and to address them. That is why today, the nation stands on the brink of dissolution or being overwhelmed by pull apart influences with frenzied agitations in the South-south, in the south-east and a portion of the South-West. Before developing the narrative further, I crave the reader's indulgence to offer two short-takes.
The first very brief one is to apologize to the readers of this column for the unceremonious "break in transmition" of this column last week.This was a result of a technical hiccup which developed in the process of finalizing it. Readers, several of who made anxious inquiring calls will recall that no such break had occured since September 2012 when the column made its debut in The Punch. Steps have been taken to avoid the kind of hitch that prevented devoted readers from having their weekly fill of analyses and short takes.
The other matter which warrants brief intervention concerns the disagreement of this columnist with the ill-advised scrapping by Government of the Post Ume exams through which our universities cross-check the sometimes erratic scores from the Joint Admission Matriculation Board. Several years ago at the University of Lagos and shortly before the commencement of post ume, I was part of a committee which screened applicants with good jamb scores to the Political Science Department. Unforgetable for me is the response of one lady with very high jamb scores to a question fired by a colleague: "Who is the author of Things Fall Apart"? The lady looked up towards the roof and after a moment's hesitation, unblushingly came up with an answer. "General Sanni Abacha". The committee members convulsed with laughter that soon gave way to pity and sadness about how things were turning out.
This was not an isolated case and it was with considerable relief that the universities welcomed the second window which post ume offered for quality control. Abolishing it without adequate consultation with stakeholders will send our degrees further down the alley of degradation. I do not buy the argument of commercial exploitation because underfunded universities ought to be free to generate modest revenue and in any case,that problem could have been addressed by setting a ceiling on how much could be charged. At a more basic level, as part of the ongoing conversation about the need to restructure Nigeria, is it not time to revisit the suitability of managing education through overcentralised institutions which were set up by militay fiat in the late 1970s? For now, the ministry of education should consider reversing itself by restoring post ume
To get back to the main discourse, the growing clamour for revalidation and renewal of our rickety federalism would have been unnecessary had successive leaders not evaded the thoroughgoing answer of a geniune national conference. Whatever the weaknesses of the 2014 National Conference, it remains the most far reaching attempt so far to address the endemic problems of ethnic nationalism and that of an imperial center lording it over the federating units. Recent events have exposed the futility of maintaining a strong center which appropriate a huge chunk of the nation's resources while the states become the recipients of successive, unavailing bailouts.
To be sure, the 2014 National Conference did not address several dimensions of the national question for example by failing to forsee that the creation of several more states which it recommended will make the center stronger at the expense of mushrooming unviable mini states. That not withstanding, it remains a brilliant piece of constitutional re-engineering of a troubled state rapidly falling apart. Since it will be economically unwise for an insolvent nation officially in a recession to organise another national conference for the purpose of restructuring the country, it stands to reason as many of our Elder Statesmen have suggested that President Muhammadu Buhari should inagurate a committee to consider the modalities of implementing many of the key resolutions of the Conference. Anything short of this, will be sentencing Nigeria to the wild play of centrifugal forces and to borrow a phrase from a well known political scientist to the "inevitability of instability".
In addition, it should be obvious that a nation so hopelessly divided such as Nigeria is today, cannot make much progress regarding our many governance woes without revisiting the terms of our unity in diversity. Just as we have made a mess of our far flung economic opportunities and endowments, it is possible to also make a mess of the current opportunity for political change via restructuring by sticking to jaded mantras such as" the unity of Nigeria is not negotiable". Patrick Wilmott it was who said while lamenting Nigeria's wasted opportunities that a future generation will wonder why there were so few wise men in leadership positions in contemporary Nigeria.
Of course, that statement would even ring more tragic if Nigeria were to dissolve in ethnic fratricide or wars of cleansing. What is admonished therefore is to go beyond the short term responses that have merely postponed the resolution of our problems and to proactively redesign our wobbly federalism on the principles of justice and fair treatment of all our citizens. That is the abiding lesson of June 12.
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