Way forward for one Nigeria is restructuring %%%%

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THE history of the founding of Nigeria is not lost on us. It was at the 1885 Berlin conference that the developed nations of the world carved out for themselves the nations of Africa on a map laid on a table without the input of those that were to be fractured and forced into unholy marriages. So, in West Africa Britain got Nigeria, Ghana, France got Ivory Coast, Benin, etc. Several independent kingdoms and empires, advanced in their self-rule and nation building, were forced into geographical expressions designed as fiefdoms of the imperial nations. Fast forward to 1914. The Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria were forced into a union called Nigeria by Lord Lugard and the center was designed to imperil the development of the nascent nation. Remember, if the foundation is faulty what can the righteous do! The problem of Nigeria has ever been that of managing a center that was organized to stifle us and our development. This gave rise to those who see controlling the center as the ultimate goal because access to power at the center is access to appropriating the nation’s wealth. So they appropriate power, position, control, and governance.

Resource control became a weapon; dominating and controlling the military became a weapon; marginalizing other ethnic nationalities became a weapon. Indeed, federalism, as we have modified its practice to suit our diabolic intentions became a weapon. Seemingly, at the center, that is the federal level, there was no allegiance to any ethnic nationality in the country. Controlling power at the center was at no cost to the power holders, especially that they are not beholding to any one directly, but a shadowy technocrat class of federal workers and their permanent secretaries who have been described as the billionaire class in Nigeria hold sway. Arguably, a ruling class emerged and held the nation to ransom in the spirit of federalism. The ministries as the agencies of centralization were not beholding to any of the federating states, but to their own political, albeit, ethnic agendas, thus stifling any part of the country and ethnic nationalities they despise. They stifle education, transportation, natural resource management, labor, commerce, and the list goes on.

Worse still, the developed nations, for obvious intellectual and political reasons, have favorites among the constituting ethnic nationalities of their colonies. They pitch their tents with some against the others to achieve their ulterior goals. The leech never reliefs its host as long as there is blood to suck! Consequently, self-determination yearnings of ethnic nationalities became an aberration to be sanctioned; expecting economic planning and self-propelled emancipation is an affront; and religious freedom and liberation is offensive. We were thoroughly divided and soundly conquered. Folks, that’s why we are where we are in Nigeria. That Nigeria should remain one is an obvious choice for me because I am schooled in the practical advantages of culturally, philosophically, and politically variegated democracies of the world, the best of which is The United States of America. Despite its shortcomings, this is still the best experiment of multi-ethnic collaboration and devolution of power and freedom and rights to constituent states and persons that the world has ever known.

Nigeria must remain one nation, but with ethnic nationalities of different destinies within the national frame. The era of ethnic domination is about done in the country where everyday, the peoples are yearning and sometimes demanding to be free. Now the atmosphere is pregnant with ethnic agitations and something better be done before it births cataclysm. The political class in Nigeria should better realize now that what the peoples of Nigeria want is to self-determine and to direct their own futures. The measure of our patriotism has to be the quantum of our political will, to allow for the restructuring of the nation and keep the peace and not to dissolve our sovereignty and national identity.

Part 1 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as Amended) decrees Nigeria to be a Federal Republic and also proclaims it to be indivisible an indissoluble. This constitutional license legitimizes the suffocating marriages of the different ethnic nationalities within the geographic expression of Nigeria. Part 1 of the 2nd schedule to the 1999 Constitution, vests in the Federal Government jurisdiction, control and oversight on as many as 68 items, including items as employment and trade union issues, stamp duties, posts, public holidays, commercial and industrial monopolies, the police, to mention but a few. Compare this to the 30 items on the concurrent legislative list, which the central government again shares with the constituent states. Section 4 of the same Constitution provides that, in the event of conflict between the legislative act at the centre and an enactment by a state, the federal prevails.

Chief Wole Olanipekun regretted this situation as he commented on the occasion of the 78th birthday of Chief Olusegun Osoba that: “This situation has foisted on us all, great hardship – no state has control over its resources; states are inhibited from effectively policing and securing themselves; constituents are overly dependent on the centre going cap in hands to the centre for handouts; state high courts virtually have no job to do as federal courts (including the Federal High Court and National Industrial Court) have an overarching, overbearing and, I dare say, overreaching jurisdictional coverage; states cannot even determine how to treat, how much to pay or how to resolve disputes with their own employees.”

He continued that “If care is not taken, or do I say pretty soon, the overarching Federal Government would or might soon lay claim to the sprawling and magnificent Olumo Rock, demanding that tourists who come visiting should pay royalties to the federal till, since tourism is now on the exclusive legislative list!”He concluded that we do not really have the temerity nor the right to call ourselves a federation. Without doubt, the present 36 states cannot be the constituent units of the Nigerian Union as they were not arrived at on the basis of any rational, cultural,linguistic, political or economic parameters but were largely products of whims, caprices and hegemonic designs of privileged past Heads of State or Presidents(as the case may be) who used their position to the advantage of their people. Many constitutional restructuring conferences have been held in Nigeria by all of our past administrations, but the outcomes were never implemented. But, of course, they were not to be implemented because the conveners were not serious about the issue of restructuring.

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