Somewhere in the Bible, the Psalmist lamented, “If the foundation be destroyed, what will the righteous do?”
History after all is man’s eternal quest for his foundation. The quest is to discover or reconstruct the broken pieces until we strike a narrative chord that tells the story of our past. Our successes and failures.
Applied to Nigeria, that quest often leads us to broken shards. It was colonial Britain’s idea that the hodge-podge of national entities should be forged into a single entity called Nigeria. Flora Shaw, Lord Luggard’s mistress, in her moment of poetic Eureka, decided that the disparate entities should be called Nigeria—a blend of Niger and River.
So ingenious, the two lovers must have felt. I guess they were.
But not surprisingly for anything forged out of romantic clouds rather than hard-headed realism, not enough thought was spared for the fundamental rubrics of making a national entity from so many divergent roots. Our nation then was hewn from a foundation of colonial convenience rather than our synergy of interests where everyone brings something to the table.
From this perspective, Nigeria then had remained a misnomer to many. But only a misnomer—fortunately—not incurably so. There is strength and power in numbers as illustrated by China and India. In the wisdom of our founding fathers, the best way to extract our nationhood from the grips of imperial Britannia, despite our apparent fissiparous tendencies—cultural, religious, economic, political, social and otherwise—was to have a strong federalism.
At the beginning, such federalism was based on strong regional pillars. At least in those days, the regions were comparatively strong centres of power and development with a high degree of autonomy that enabled each of the major federating entities to develop at their own pace. Of course, it was not perfect and could never have been since it was to all intents and purposes, a learning process for all the operators at that point. The pioneers made pardonable errors.
But the impatient military incursion not only stalled that learning process, the famous Unification Decree 34 of 1966 imposed a unitary system on the country. At that time, it was forced by a national exigency. But this was a recipe for disaster in the years ahead.
Command and control works in a military culture—an environment with many zombies, according to Fela—but in a dynamic civilian setting, it is disastrously fraught with a lot of pitfalls. Command and control as have been demonstrated in Communist jurisdictions around the world, was and is a fertile ground for corruption, dictatorships, under-development, vast abuses of power and human rights, among others. From the collapse of Communism, fall of Berlin Wall, China’s resurgence as an economic power arising from free enterprise to the Arab Spring hurricane, there are no shortage of living examples of what happens when the true aspiration of the people are suppressed by any sort of political hegemony.
Nigeria is certainly not an exception to these rules. The point of those who agitate for a Sovereign National Conference or a semblance of it has been that unless you redress the basis of our co-existence as a political entity or create a system that guarantees true federalism, you fertilize the ground for potential implosion. The symptoms of such implosion are already noticeable in the swathes of bloody ethnic and religious killings, especially the terroristic mayhem of the Boko Haram sects to whom the federal government now waves the white flag of surrender.
A ‘Somaliasation’ begins when a federal government whose first duty as a sovereign state is to protect lives and property now outsources that responsibility to ethnic militants as exemplified by the award of multi-billion contracts to some leaders of the Niger Delta militants and OPC to protect pipeline vandalisation. As an aside, one must wonder why such “chop, chop” as President Obasanjo described such contracts, is not yet extended to the leader of MASSOB, Ralph Uwazurike. Or are there no pipeline vandals in the Southeast or any federal facilities?
Back to our story, despite all the democratic pretensions to the contrary, it seems that successive civilian governments at the federal level had remained so enamoured of our warped version of federalism that allocates so much power to the centre as to make the states ineffectual vassals of an imperial federal power. In other words, our so-called federalism wears a unitary uniform!
I will illustrate this argument with two recent developments. The first, is a lecture by the Lagos State Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkin University, Washington, USA. He had pointed out the fact that whereas the federal government takes 52% of the federal allocation, all the 36 states take only 26% while the 774 local governments share only 20.2%. Using Lagos State as an example, he contrasted this lopsided revenue sharing formula with responsibility of each strata of the federation.
In Lagos State, he noted, the local governments have 6,415 roads; the state government has 3,028 roads while there are only 117 federal roads in Lagos State, a state which probably has so many federal roads in the first place only because Lagos used to be the federal capital. Yet, the federal government keeps 52% of the national revenue!
Such surplus fund translates into enormous powers. It has been said that the Nigerian president is probably the most powerful democratic leader in the whole world. It is because of this surplus fund at the disposal of the federal authorities that fuel so much corruption at the centre. Governance has become a big racket at the expense of the people.
Fashola raised other absurdities in our federation: “Although we have a ‘Federal Government’ the constitution was written by the military. So we have state courts where judges are picked by the Federal Government. We have state legislators but no state police to enforce the laws they make. There are no state prisons so we rely on Federal officers to police our states and keep convicted persons away from law abiding citizens.
“We have Federal Traffic Safety Officers to issue Driver’s Licences to drivers in the state and also seek to regulate municipal traffic inside the states. Many states cannot control the sources of their finance such as local taxes on consumption, lotteries and hotels. (City state taxes for drinks in New York).”
With so much power and resources to play with without commensurate responsibilities, the federal authority can afford to dispense with multi-billion patronages as in the example of pipeline monitoring contracts to ethnic militants which is probably a grand euphemism for bribery. We’ve become more creative in inventing new sources of corruption rather than services to the people.
With so much power at the centre, the federal government, often perversely translated as the president in power, can afford to abuse the power and get away with it. It is such power that creates the ground for the second example—the manipulation of the power of impeachment. Under the mercurial era of President Obasanjo, state legislators were compelled under duress to summarily impeach state governors who fell into Obasanjo’s bad books. Diepreye Solomon Alamieyeseigha, Joshua Dariye, Ayo Fayose, Rasheed Ladoja, Peter Obi, were thus sacked, despite the screaming public’s displeasure at the abuse of process. The end justifies the means.
The only reason the Governor of River State, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, is in the danger of impeachment today, despite being one of the most successful governors in the country, is because the federal government has unlimited powers. In nursing alleged ambition to run for vice presidency pairing with some other candidates, he had made himself obnoxious to the president—enough grounds for impeachment under the cover of a federal might!
Amaechi might do well to read Dr. Peter Odili, his predecessor’s memoir, Conscience and History: My Story, for no sooner had Odili withdrawn from the presidential race than Obasanjo order the release of all Odili’s commissioners in the EFCC’s net. It’s then a question of whether Amaechi can stand the heat or wish to exit from the kitchen so soon.
President Jonathan had been guilty of many shapes and forms of non-performance, but nobody until now ever accused him of abuse of power. Such a meek and mild gentleman who does not even inspire fear in criminals. That such a man seems to be resorting to Obasanjo’s discredited methods to push his political objectives for 2015 says something about the desperation that is setting in the president’s camp. But when the chips are down, history would record such desperation as sign of weakness rather than strength.
History after all is man’s eternal quest for his foundation. The quest is to discover or reconstruct the broken pieces until we strike a narrative chord that tells the story of our past. Our successes and failures.
Applied to Nigeria, that quest often leads us to broken shards. It was colonial Britain’s idea that the hodge-podge of national entities should be forged into a single entity called Nigeria. Flora Shaw, Lord Luggard’s mistress, in her moment of poetic Eureka, decided that the disparate entities should be called Nigeria—a blend of Niger and River.
So ingenious, the two lovers must have felt. I guess they were.
But not surprisingly for anything forged out of romantic clouds rather than hard-headed realism, not enough thought was spared for the fundamental rubrics of making a national entity from so many divergent roots. Our nation then was hewn from a foundation of colonial convenience rather than our synergy of interests where everyone brings something to the table.
From this perspective, Nigeria then had remained a misnomer to many. But only a misnomer—fortunately—not incurably so. There is strength and power in numbers as illustrated by China and India. In the wisdom of our founding fathers, the best way to extract our nationhood from the grips of imperial Britannia, despite our apparent fissiparous tendencies—cultural, religious, economic, political, social and otherwise—was to have a strong federalism.
At the beginning, such federalism was based on strong regional pillars. At least in those days, the regions were comparatively strong centres of power and development with a high degree of autonomy that enabled each of the major federating entities to develop at their own pace. Of course, it was not perfect and could never have been since it was to all intents and purposes, a learning process for all the operators at that point. The pioneers made pardonable errors.
But the impatient military incursion not only stalled that learning process, the famous Unification Decree 34 of 1966 imposed a unitary system on the country. At that time, it was forced by a national exigency. But this was a recipe for disaster in the years ahead.
Command and control works in a military culture—an environment with many zombies, according to Fela—but in a dynamic civilian setting, it is disastrously fraught with a lot of pitfalls. Command and control as have been demonstrated in Communist jurisdictions around the world, was and is a fertile ground for corruption, dictatorships, under-development, vast abuses of power and human rights, among others. From the collapse of Communism, fall of Berlin Wall, China’s resurgence as an economic power arising from free enterprise to the Arab Spring hurricane, there are no shortage of living examples of what happens when the true aspiration of the people are suppressed by any sort of political hegemony.
Nigeria is certainly not an exception to these rules. The point of those who agitate for a Sovereign National Conference or a semblance of it has been that unless you redress the basis of our co-existence as a political entity or create a system that guarantees true federalism, you fertilize the ground for potential implosion. The symptoms of such implosion are already noticeable in the swathes of bloody ethnic and religious killings, especially the terroristic mayhem of the Boko Haram sects to whom the federal government now waves the white flag of surrender.
A ‘Somaliasation’ begins when a federal government whose first duty as a sovereign state is to protect lives and property now outsources that responsibility to ethnic militants as exemplified by the award of multi-billion contracts to some leaders of the Niger Delta militants and OPC to protect pipeline vandalisation. As an aside, one must wonder why such “chop, chop” as President Obasanjo described such contracts, is not yet extended to the leader of MASSOB, Ralph Uwazurike. Or are there no pipeline vandals in the Southeast or any federal facilities?
Back to our story, despite all the democratic pretensions to the contrary, it seems that successive civilian governments at the federal level had remained so enamoured of our warped version of federalism that allocates so much power to the centre as to make the states ineffectual vassals of an imperial federal power. In other words, our so-called federalism wears a unitary uniform!
I will illustrate this argument with two recent developments. The first, is a lecture by the Lagos State Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola at Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkin University, Washington, USA. He had pointed out the fact that whereas the federal government takes 52% of the federal allocation, all the 36 states take only 26% while the 774 local governments share only 20.2%. Using Lagos State as an example, he contrasted this lopsided revenue sharing formula with responsibility of each strata of the federation.
In Lagos State, he noted, the local governments have 6,415 roads; the state government has 3,028 roads while there are only 117 federal roads in Lagos State, a state which probably has so many federal roads in the first place only because Lagos used to be the federal capital. Yet, the federal government keeps 52% of the national revenue!
Such surplus fund translates into enormous powers. It has been said that the Nigerian president is probably the most powerful democratic leader in the whole world. It is because of this surplus fund at the disposal of the federal authorities that fuel so much corruption at the centre. Governance has become a big racket at the expense of the people.
Fashola raised other absurdities in our federation: “Although we have a ‘Federal Government’ the constitution was written by the military. So we have state courts where judges are picked by the Federal Government. We have state legislators but no state police to enforce the laws they make. There are no state prisons so we rely on Federal officers to police our states and keep convicted persons away from law abiding citizens.
“We have Federal Traffic Safety Officers to issue Driver’s Licences to drivers in the state and also seek to regulate municipal traffic inside the states. Many states cannot control the sources of their finance such as local taxes on consumption, lotteries and hotels. (City state taxes for drinks in New York).”
With so much power and resources to play with without commensurate responsibilities, the federal authority can afford to dispense with multi-billion patronages as in the example of pipeline monitoring contracts to ethnic militants which is probably a grand euphemism for bribery. We’ve become more creative in inventing new sources of corruption rather than services to the people.
With so much power at the centre, the federal government, often perversely translated as the president in power, can afford to abuse the power and get away with it. It is such power that creates the ground for the second example—the manipulation of the power of impeachment. Under the mercurial era of President Obasanjo, state legislators were compelled under duress to summarily impeach state governors who fell into Obasanjo’s bad books. Diepreye Solomon Alamieyeseigha, Joshua Dariye, Ayo Fayose, Rasheed Ladoja, Peter Obi, were thus sacked, despite the screaming public’s displeasure at the abuse of process. The end justifies the means.
The only reason the Governor of River State, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, is in the danger of impeachment today, despite being one of the most successful governors in the country, is because the federal government has unlimited powers. In nursing alleged ambition to run for vice presidency pairing with some other candidates, he had made himself obnoxious to the president—enough grounds for impeachment under the cover of a federal might!
Amaechi might do well to read Dr. Peter Odili, his predecessor’s memoir, Conscience and History: My Story, for no sooner had Odili withdrawn from the presidential race than Obasanjo order the release of all Odili’s commissioners in the EFCC’s net. It’s then a question of whether Amaechi can stand the heat or wish to exit from the kitchen so soon.
President Jonathan had been guilty of many shapes and forms of non-performance, but nobody until now ever accused him of abuse of power. Such a meek and mild gentleman who does not even inspire fear in criminals. That such a man seems to be resorting to Obasanjo’s discredited methods to push his political objectives for 2015 says something about the desperation that is setting in the president’s camp. But when the chips are down, history would record such desperation as sign of weakness rather than strength.
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