What 17 Southern states must do to end North’s perpetual domination —Ogunyemi

Associate Professor and former head of Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Dr Tunji Ogunyemi, speaks to DARE ADEKANMBI on Nigeria’s 61 years as an independent country. The economic historian, lawyer and public affairs analyst wades in on the 2023 permutations across parties, advising the Southern governors on how to achieve political freedom from the North.

 

Nigerians who are in their 50s and below have been hearing the older generation relates nostalgic feelings about the good old days of Nigeria with reference to the colonial era. 61 years after independence, why is our past better than our present and with pessimism from many that the present may even be better than the future?

Immediately, anyone shows enthusiasm or nostalgia towards the past, particularly Nigeria’s colonial past, you know that person is indicting the current leadership and we should not be surprised. Colonialism was akin to a military rule. In fact, those who established colonial rule in Nigeria were actually members of the Frontier Force for the British Army. Fredrick Lugard, for example, was a colonel in the British Army. So, it was not as if he was a civilian. He was not. But let us leave that.

The main issue really is that things worked in colonial Nigeria. What I mean by things working then was that the formal sector, the government sector worked. The civil service worked. The post and telegram service worked. Not many were posting letters then. But as many as did post and made telegrams, they had services then and things really worked.

But now we have a situation where things are not working and we are in charge of our affairs. So, people are most likely to express some disappointment with the system and when they do not want to voice it out, they begin to have some reminiscences about the better past that they had. And it is in all sectors of the Nigerian economy that our past was much better in comparative terms than our present.

 

Like Brutus said in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, is the fault in our star as a country? Or is it in our style of government and the manner the political leadership has chosen to run the country and its economy?

It is in the latter, in our style and our choices. Don’t forget that out of the 61 years we have existed as an independent country, the military governed us for 29 years, about half. The first time they came, it lasted 13 years, from 1966 to 1979. The second phase lasted 16 years from December 31, 1983 to May 29, 1999. It means half of the life of the country after independence, those who were never elected and had no vision about the founding of the country and did not participate in the negotiations for the distribution and allocation of power and revenue at the Lancaster Conference in 1953 started governing. No wonder, they misgoverned and there was maladministration. No wonder they destroyed the fabric that held Nigeria together and what was the fabric? It was the delicate balancing of the division of power between the centre and the components. I hope you know that the current 1999 Constitution is a Decree. Imagine, the foundation of our Fourth Republic is actually on a diktat. A copy of the 1999 Constitution was not ready by May 29, 1999 when President Olusegun Obasanjo was sworn in.  [Professor Auwwal] Yadudu et all just gathered in one room and just wrote what they liked. That is why the constitution we currently run has 18 errors, a constitution of just about 340 sections. That goes to tell you why people believe that the 1963 Republican Constitution, which flowed from the 1953 Lancaster Conference agreement and the 1954 Lagos Constitutional Conference and the 1957 resumed Constitutional Conference in London, is a better document to guide us now and under a restructured Nigeria than the 1999 Decree which is erroneously being called the 1999 Constitution.

 

So, how do we get out of this quagmire?

We can do it. This time round, we can do it by a determination to refuse to be harassed and oppressed by the dominant elite. My problem really, which is with the elite and not with the ordinary people, is that there is no elite consensus between the perceived forces that are governing Nigeria from the South of the Niger and the forces governing it from the North of the Niger. There is no elite consensus as to exactly what we want. For example, the South wants a decentralised, devolved federal system in which states will have authority over their sales and consumption taxes, personal income taxes and in which company income tax will be paid to the states where the companies are located, following the principles of location and localisation of industry. But the North wants exactly the opposite. Two, the South wants a restructured Nigeria in which there is a delicate balance of power between the centre and the South and in which the 68 powers that are contained in the Second Schedule Part 1 of the 1999 Constitution as altered will be whittled down or pruned to just about 38 powers and vested exclusively in the Federal Government and the remainder will be put in the Residual List where the states and local governments can have authority. The North wants exactly the opposite. Three, the Southern elite want a devolved police system in which the states and the local governments will have their own police, in fact, a metropolitan police. Ibadan should have its own police called Ibadan Metropolitan Police. There is nothing wrong in that. We had it before anyway. We called them local constabulary then. Now, the North wants exactly the opposite.

The North is opposed to these reforms because it is the zone that is benefiting from the existing ludicrous arrangement called a federal system. The skewed and not very balanced structure of the Nigerian system favours the North. So, the North does not want restructuring, except now that the centre of the North, which is the North-Central, after having been under some vilification and suffering as a result of the Senior Advocate of Nomadic Killers worsting their people in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, is not seeking an alliance with the South. That will be reasonable, but it leaves a lot to be desired because even if you look at the people that are advocating this, people like Dr Mailafia Obadaiah, who was ex-CBN deputy governor, Oxford-trained and one of our finest brains in the Northern part of Nigeria, just died. Obadiah was tutored and mentored by Chief Olu Falae. These are the leading lights in the North wanting a restructured Nigeria. Another problem is that the North-Central feels it may be the one that will be worse off in a properly restructured Nigeria because the zone feels it is already benefiting a lot from the Northern part of the country and so a restructured Nigeria will leave it open to the possibility of an uncertainty and it losing its advantage, if you like unfair advantage. This is why it is still difficult for Nassarawa and Niger states that are also in the Middle Belt. In fact, Niger State is more conservative than Sokoto State when it comes to devolving power.

How to get out of this is for the states of the South to bind themselves together in an unquenchable unity. Not that they should have a mono-party arrangement, but they should unite and bind themselves together in a class action on any issue affecting the South. We have 774 local government councils if we had the six Area councils in FCT as local government councils. Out of these, 415 are in the North which is clearly more than 50 per cent. Even if they can’t win because they are just 17 states versus the North’s 19, it will prevent a situation in which the North can use its majority to hold them down perpetually. Whoever is going to be declared president must, in addition to wining majority of votes, get one quarter of the votes cast in two thirds of the states of the country which come to 24 states. So, the South can, through unity, make it impossible for them to achieve that proportion. Why was it possible for the Petroleum Industry Act to sail through, even though it is very injurious to the South? Out of the 15 Senators from the South-East, 11 of them absented themselves from the floor on the day of voting on this important bill. So, they voted in favour of the North by being absent on the Senate floor so that 30 per cent of the income of NNPC will now go be for the prospecting of oil in the North. That tactical withdrawal in exchange for filthy lucre is not a demonstration of unity at all. It is our people in the South-East that we need to plead with to at least show some sagacity now by insisting on being bound together.

You can see now that the Rivers State governor has gone to court on the issue of VAT. The states that are supporting Rivers in this campaign are from the South-West, Lagos and Oyo states. Have you ever seen any single South-East state wanting to join? They want to see where things will fall and then say that is where they belong. They don’t want to offend the North and they have been behaving like that since 1959. So, the problem really is for the South to bind. But if they do not bind together, they are sentenced forever to domination.

 

But Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who is the spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum,  boasted recently  that no matter what the South does, it will be at the mercy of the Northern oligarchy because the North has the number advantage over the South…

Hakeem Baba-Ahmed is not a Nigerian. He is a Mauritanian, of the first generation. So, ordinarily it does not lie in his mouth to speak about our national discourse when it comes to politics. His father is from Mauritania. The records are there. But let’s leave that and come to the real issue which is about people boasting that they have the number. The North does not have the number, standing alone, to make anyone president. It will fail. Where is the number? We are talking about 19 states. Can 19 ever win? They need 24 states. So, they need to take five other states from the South. And that man that was talking, is he including Samuel Ortom of Benue State in his calculation? Is he including Theophilus Danjuma’s Taraba State which has backed out of the Northern hegemony? I think it is just askance, somebody just talking beyond the capacity that he can wield. So, we should just dismiss his statement as arrant nonsense.

No part of the country can ever win any election standing alone. The South can’t do it with its 17 states. The North with its 19 states can also not do it, standing alone. The requirement of the law is that they must win in 24 states. So, if they win 100 per cent of the votes from the North, which is not possible, that can’t make them president because they will only get absolute majority in the region in terms of number. But it will not get a majority in terms of the proportion of the total number of states in the country that are in their support. It is for lack of a sense of arithmetic that he is saying the North has the number. Which number do they have? I know that the least part of the country in terms of registration of voters is the South-East and Anambra is the worst.  They hardly go to register and they hardly go to vote. You will see that the total number of people who will vote in the November 6 governorship election in Anambra will be less than 40 per cent of the registered voters and those who registered vis a vis the number of people in the state is significantly less than 30 per cent. That is the problem with the South-East. They are so loud in complaining of marginalisation, but when it comes to real political action, they either absent themselves or allow themselves to be convinced. They are never there. Go and check the history since 1959. They have consistently gone North and voted North and supported North. Then they turn round to say the North is dominating them.  During Chief MKO Abiola’s pan-Nigerian mandate, it was only in Anambra State that he won. All the remaining four states voted against him. How about that? Anambra is a highly blended state, the cosmopolitan part of the South-East. Abiola who only won in one state in the South-East won in four states of the South-South out of six.

Our people in the South-East need to wake up politically. They need to up the ante in actual political activities of registering, voting and being calculative and being more strategic and not looking for pecuniary benefits and then working with their kith and kin in the South-West and the South-South. The time has come for them to stop seeing the South-West only in the picture of Zik and the wrongly created impression that Chief Obafemi Awolowo prevented Zik from becoming the Prime Minister by cornering his votes in the South-West. This is actually not true. In the Second Republic, who was more pan-Nigerian in the selection of his running mate than Awolowo? Did you know that Awo’s vice-presidential candidate was Philip P Umeadi from the South-East? Shehu Shagari, a Northerner from Sokoto, picked his own running mate form the South in the person of Alex Ekwueme. A highly trained and highly cerebral gift to Africa, Awo picked a Southern person and not a candidate from the North. Did you know that one of the leaders of Awo’s party was Odinamadi Oyibo from the South-East just to create a bridge to end the wrong impression of the 1959 issue? The South-East has refused to forget it and stop their unjustifiable anti-West position. Today is not a day to deconstruct that.

In the second part of the Second Republic in 1983, when Awolowo was to contest as president, he had to accept and was almost blackmailed by his lieutenants who said he could not go further without picking somebody from the North as his running mate. That was when he picked Alhaji Kura from Bauchi State. But Philip Umeadi was Awo’s preference because he saw the man as being so cerebral and that a person who would deputise him would be someone who is almost as good as him. So, he chose one of the best. Anybody talking about people being parochial, clannish, certainly that is not the politics of the South-West of Nigeria represented and personified in Chief Awolowo. And you could also see these qualities manifesting in some of the leaders we have today.

So, we need that pan-Southern Nigeria unity and South-South is already convinced now because they have seen the way they were defeated hands down during deliberations on PIB. When they ought to rally lawmakers from the South, they were busy making noise in the newspapers and television, thinking that by being loud in complaining, people would vote in their favour. They ought to have been strategising with their colleagues from the South-East and South-West.

 

11 lawmakers from PDP and APGA have dumped their parties to join the APC in Anambra State. Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila has raised the alarm that the country is drifting towards a one-party state, a development he said portends danger for democracy.  Everybody is going to APC despite complaint in some quarters that the party has brought misery upon them in the last six years… What is your reading of the development?

You are correct in terms of that complaint against APC. They had a good plan and they came to power. But the arrowhead decided that nepotism will supersede progress and development. So, he decided to isolate the people through whom he came to power and then befriended those people who worked against him. In order to be able to keep in perpetuity the political strategy, he now wants to recruit and bring in more people into the APC to dilute the power of those whom he joined to create the party. It is actually to whittle down their influence. Otherwise, in Ebonyi State, before the governor said he crossed to APC, the APC did not have a single representation. The governor, David Umahi, crossed to the APC when he no longer would be of political relevance, when there is no election to win again. Would he have done this, when he needed a second term? Could he have won? He was also brought in to dilute the relevance and strength of the South-West in APC. In fact, the person they are really aiming at is Bola Tinubu. They want to dilute his influence and begin to say ‘all of us matter in this party, everybody is equal.’ Look at Enugu State, for instance, which, since 1999, has been dominated by the PDP since 1999 with no other party having a single representative in the state Assembly. But look at the political sagacity in the West. Some people think Lagos is monolithic; it is not. In their state Assembly, you have PDP lawmakers there. Lagos has been AD, ACN and APC since 1999. Ondo State has been AD, PDP, LP and APC. In Osun State, PDP also ruled there. The highly respected Prince from Okuku, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, was there. Baba Bisi Akande was there and now APC is in the saddle. Go to Ekiti, PDP ruled there as well as APC and AD. Go to Oyo, it is the same thing. Look at that political blending and the harvesting of the goodwill from the major political parties by the South-West. But go to Enugu, it is not there. There will now turn around and want a party they have never patronised before since 1999 to now feature them as presidential candidate because they now see that the next president is likely to come from the South. Where is it ever done? This is why they now want to use emotion and blackmail to get it. It is never done that way. Harold Lasswell said politics is the science of who gets what, where, when and how? That is politics. It is about strategy. So, southerners should know that it is also the strategy of the North to dilute the strength of the main man that they really fear, Tinubu, to fight and weaken him. They think that will serve their purpose.

 

What do you make of the zoning game over presidential candidature for 2023? PDP zones its national chairman to the North, meaning the presidential candidate will come from the South, despite the argument from pro-North southerners who think the party should not pick a candidate from the South because of its 16 years in power, southern presidents spent about 13…

That kind of argument is a lack of political strategy statement that can only come from people who have no political knowledge and political skills. Is it about party that we calculate such things in Nigeria? Is it not about who is ruling? Did you not see how the PDP governors and PDP apparatchik in the North, when it was obvious Buhari would win in 2015, mobilised for Buhari? Did you not see how the filth columnists in the PDP worked for Buhari? When it comes to the leadership of the country, the North is one. When people are tactless and don’t have any strategy, they only make highfalutin language. The president of Nigeria can appoint 2,700 persons without going to the Senate and will use that to distribute political allegiance across the country. That is apart from the 17,000 people he can also appoint into boards. Have they forgotten that? The president can use this to either win favour or punish people.

If the chairmanship of any political party goes to the North, you can be sure that the presidency will come to the South. But assuming but not conceding that the presidency of the PDP goes to the North, then it will have succeeded is shooting itself in the foot. It will just be like singing the nunc dimittis for the PDP in the South-East which has always given it block votes, except if the South-East has not political honour and can easily be swayed by filthy lucre and will vote for any person who emerges from the PDP in the North. In 1999, somebody from the South ruled for eight years and in 2007 someone from the North ruled for three years and another southerner ruled for five years. That is how it is calculated. It is not about party. Now, by 2023, somebody from the North will have ruled for eight years. So, after him, are we saying it should go to the North again for another eight years? Only tactless people can argue than it should remain in the North in 2023, after Buhari. This is the time for the South to be reasonable because the North is just one when it comes to power. The North has the Arewa House where they discuss how the whole of the powers of Nigeria will be in their hands. They have it either in the civil service, military, police or in the Foreign Service.

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