Imperative of sovereign national conference

RESTRUCTURING is a term which has become more and more widely canvassed in different parts of Nigeria in the past few years. The concept has been made nebulous by politicians who ascribe different meanings to it. Resource control, geographic restructuring and power devolution have been taunted by various groups.

Several months ago when the calls for restructuring of the country became strident, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was quoted to have said that what Nigeria needed was restructuring of people’s minds, not of the country. I expected to read further clarifications from him as to how to go about mind restructuring, but most surprisingly, nothing has been forthcoming until now. His refrain before the 2019 elections was for Nigerians not to “reinforce failure” by re-electing the incumbent government which, according to him, has been “ineffective and incompetent.” With the conclusion of the 2019 elections, this position is now history.

When Obasanjo speaks, people tend to listen to him perhaps because he is one person who has influenced the trajectory of Nigeria’s development, for good or for ill, in the past 40 years. I personally wonder about how much of mind-restructuring he was able to accomplish in his nearly 12 years as chief helmsman, first as military head of state between 1976 and 1979 and more recently as a democratically elected president.

Deputy Senate President: Who does the cap fit from South-West?

This writer happened to have been one of the pioneering beneficiaries of Obafemi Awolowo’s Free Primary Education program into which I was enrolled in January 1955. Our generation witnessed the significant development in the then Western Region including the first television station in the whole of Africa! The other regions also made remarkable progress in education and infrastructure. This march of progress, which was made possible largely by the country’s true federal structure, was terminated by the military coup of January 1966 followed by the civil war. Nigeria’s growth became stunted due, basically, to the unitary system of government imposed on the country by the military. This itself is not surprising since the military merely extended the barracks command structure – the only system it understands – to cover the governance of the whole country!

The constitution handed down by the military, which we now glorify as democracy, has been aptly described as “militocracy” in the sense that it is merely a slightly modified version of the unitary system. Nigeria is now comprised of 36 states which depend mainly on monthly handouts and tokenism from Abuja for their survival and development.

The Federal Government, with its huge allocation, is loaded with responsibilities which should rightly belong to the states and local governments. Examples include the ministries of agriculture, water resources, industry, solid minerals, housing, etc. This writer has lived in Ekiti State for the past 18 years and the only visible federal projects are the agricultural silos (which are yet to be put into use) and the federal secretariat. The former has been erected for nearly 10 years with no activity nor indeed any hope that grains will ever get stored there.

Epileptic power supply is the major obstacle to Nigeria’s industrial development.  It is significant that in the past three decades, a large number of industrial ventures have relocated to neighbouring countries on account of this. Auto assembly plants, paper mills, steel rolling mills and companies manufacturing important items such as shoes, textiles, batteries, roofing sheets, wire and nails which were thriving in the 70’s are today virtually non-existent, contributing significantly to the high unemployment figures! Decentralising power generation and distribution is a must if Nigeria is to witness any meaningful industrial development.

Singapore, a one-city state whose population is less than that of an average state in Nigeria, generates and distributes power so efficiently that it has not experienced any serious power outage for more than 30 years!

The Federal Ministry of Education is overburdened with several universities, polytechnics, colleges of education and even secondary (unity) schools. This is a major reason why education has been on a downward slide in the past few decades. The Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), a federal agency, superintends the funding of primary school infrastructure all over the country. This function should rightly belong to local governments whose officials, as presently constituted, merely draw huge salaries without any visible impact on governance. The United States, whose constitution we pretend to have copied, does not have a single Federal University. These are responsibilities of state governments and private concerns. According to the most recent rankings, 16 of the World’s Best 20 universities are located in the U. S. A. and are all either private or state-owned!

A major feature of the present federal structure which is difficult to justify, especially in view of the parlous state of Nigeria’s economy, is the bicameral legislature. Every bill that is passed in the House of Representatives must again be presented to the Senate for the same purpose. All functions of the House of Representatives are duplicated in the Senate! A single legislative chamber will serve the same purpose while saving billions of naira annually which can be diverted to infrastructure development. The lucrative nature of Nigerian politics has been a huge contributory factor to electoral violence and corruption.

The security situation (herdsmen killings, kidnapping and armed robbery) which Nigeria has been experiencing in recent times has been exacerbated by the fact that the whole country (of close to 200 million people) operates under just one federal police command. The problems could have been more easily confronted through the creation of state police departments, whose staff would have much deeper understanding of the terrain of each state.

A unitary structure is antithetical to our size and sheer diversity in terms of ethnicity, language and religion. Even the United States in spite of its linguistic homogeneity runs a truly federal structure. True federalism will encourage healthy competition amongst states, as it did amongst regions in the first republic, thereby engendering rapid development of the whole country.

The apprehension of a certain section of the country about restructuring is understandable since Nigeria’s economy depends preponderantly on crude oil production. With substantial devolution of powers, however, each state can work assiduously at developing its own resources such that within a short period, full resource control can take effect. With the 2019 elections now concluded, this writer believes it is time to re-visit the concept of restructuring. A sovereign national conference becomes imperative if Nigeria is to be extricated from the doldrums into which it has been plunged by the 1999 military-imposed constitution. The passage of such conference decisions into law is bound to hit stumbling blocks where such decisions are perceived to jeopardise the interests of the sitting president or the lawmakers. It is inconceivable that the senators and representatives, who are arguably the major beneficiaries of the present democratic dispensation, will enact laws in favour of unicameral legislature or drastic reduction in their emoluments. Also, a law for single-tenure presidency would have been resisted by a president in his first term in office.

With our present structure, even a saint in Aso Rock cannot make significant positive impact on Nigeria’s development. My final poser to former President Obasanjo and like-thinkers is “Which one is easier: to restructure peoples’ minds to fit into an already laid down political structure or to create a political structure that will work harmoniously with a people’s mindset?” The answer, to me, seems pretty obvious!

Ajaja, a former rector of the Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti, can be reached on wumaja@yahoo.com. 

The post Imperative of sovereign national conference appeared first on Tribune Online.