|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The problem of the 21st century is government. Indeed, it is a problem as old as Aristotle and Ibn Khaldun. How can men order their affairs so that they may live in liberty, order and justice? What are the purposes and duties of government? And how can societies evolve a system of administration that secures their liberties while ensuring the Good Life for all their citizenry?
British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill once famously declared that democracy is the worst system of government – except for the others. The political philosopher Michael Oakeshott described democracy as ‘a part of the great conversation of mankind’. It is an eternal conversation in which every citizen worth his or her salt has a duty to participate. Since there are no perfect governments on earth, and, least of all, perfect democracies, it is incumbent on all of us to keep alive the eternal flame of discourse on how to better secure the liberties and advance the common welfare of all our people in an atmosphere of freedom and peace.
It is in this spirit that this column casts its lot with those who are currently demanding for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation. That demand is not a particularly new one. The cry for ‘true federalism’ was at one time thought to be a swansong for idle minds. I for one do not believe that there is any such thing as ‘true federalism’. The father of modern federalist theory, Sir Kenneth Wheare, Chichelle Professor of Government at Oxford, was of the opinion that the idea and practice of federalism sprouts from the historical experience and political conditions of each country. Every people develops the kind of federalismthat conforms to its own experience, temperament and popular spirit.
But the cry for restructuring is resurfacing once again with a vengeance. More recently, prominent figures such as former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka have added their voices to it. I wholly support that clarion call.
History shows that the momentum for political change does not occur of its own accord. One of the Newtonian Laws of Motion states that a body continues in a state of rest until an equal and opposite force begins to act on it. Constitutional moments occur during times of crisis and rarely in times of normality. This is in the nature of things. But it is a foolish statesman that waits for an implosion to occur before they begin to think of the reforms necessary to save the nation from perdition. In our own case, several reasons necessitate placing the question of political reform at the forefront of the public policy agenda.
First, the APC-led Buhari administration came to power under the banner of change. They may well have operated with a rather restrictive vision of change. Most Nigerians welcome some of the positive changes that have been put in place, particularly in anti-corruption, in improving the way government works and in terms of greater prudence in our public finances. But many of us know that some of these changes amount to skirting the surface while the deep-rooted problems remain. We expect more from our government than what we are seeing currently. President Buhari did not help matters when he nonchalantly remarked that the outcome of the political reform confab will be allowed to gather dust in the archives. And this, despite the billions that we spent on that exercise.
Secondly, everybody knows that the 1999 constitution that is currently in force has little moral or constitutional legitimacy. It is not based on the sovereign will of “we, the people”. It was a document crafted by unknown persons in the smoke-filled chambers of General Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship. For all we know, they may have been agents of Lucifer himself. It is certainly not our constitution, either in letter or in spirit. Not only is it written in poor and uninspiring syntax; it is redolent with juridical mischief calculated to disempower millions of our people and with enough loopholes to enable lawyers to buy jet planes. That cursed document must be replaced by a new constitutional compact that genuinely reflects the popular will and the spirit of all our people equally.
Thirdly, we face a real moment of crisis in the practice of federalism in our country. Our dependence on oil has proven to be a disaster. As a result of the collapse of world petroleum prices, we have lost more than 70 percent of government revenues in the space of a single year. In September 2015, the federal government had to fund a massive bailout to the State Governments. In less than a year, the problem has resurfaced. Many of our states are technically bankrupt. Salary arrears have continued to mount and the federal government is once again forced to fund another bailout. Of our state governments were corporations, a good number would have gone under receivership already. Clearly, the states are not working. Ditto for local governments. Most of the 774 local governments exist all but in name. The State Governors have unilaterally usurped the power and finances of the lower tier of government, rendering ineffectual to all intents and purposes.
Fourthly, Nigerians are deeply dissatisfied with over-centralisation of government at the federal centre. This political culture is largely the outcome of military rule, with its tradition of unified command. The military governors were appointees of the Head of State and owed loyalty to him personally and not to their States. This has led to a pernicious culture of over-centralisation, in which the federal might looms large over everything. In Europe the notion of subsidiarity is central to their understanding of democracy and local autonomy. This underlines the principle that what can be managed at the local level is best kept at that level. And it is only those things that are best managed at the federal centre that should be arrogated to that higher tier of government. When a federation becomes over-centralised, the struggle to control the centre becomes a titanic zero-sum game, where the winner takes all and the loser faces nothing but a bleak future. It is such conditions that lead people to take arms against the state.
Fifthly, I believe that our contemporary social crisis is symptomatic of what the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington characterised as the phenomenon of political decay. Political decay manifests in such problems as nihilistic violence, cultism, armed robbery, in brutal insurgencies such as Boko Haram and in irredentist movements such as the Niger Delta Avengers. Political decay is also manifested in the crisis that afflicts the party system, in which neither the APC nor the monstrous PDP appear to be cast in any particularly good light. Political decay arises from the failure of the system to properly aggregate the demands and pressures from the social environment and to transmute them into viable policy outcomes that address the needs of the populace while resolving social conflict in an authoritative manner that prevents violent upheaval. In our own case, the institutions of public administration remain weak; corruption is endemic; and the economic system and its institutions do not provide a framework that creates jobs and economic opportunities particularly for the teeming army of unemployed youths.
Sixthly, we in Nigeria are yet to fully address the National Question. The voices calling for reform insist that we need a new moral and constitutional compact that reflects the interests and sensibilities of all the nationalities that make up our great country. Nigeria remains a country where anything goes. I suspect that there are more than 10 million aliens who have infiltrated our borders and have become citizens overnight. We are the only country where someone can walk across the border on foot from Niger, Mali, Chad, Benin and Cameroon and they become automatic citizens. Since the days of Bonaparte, such things will not happen in Europe. I suspect it is some of these aliens who are engaging in all sorts of violent murders that go by the name of ‘rampaging herdsmen’. We need to sit together and agree on who is a bonafide Nigerian citizen and what rights we all have as citizens of this great country.
Seventh, our current system has within it a massive democratic deficit that is atrociously evil and unjust. Why should Kano have 44 local governments and Lagos only 20? Why should Bayelsa, with about the same population as Katsina have barely a third of its monthly federal allocation under the FAAC? Why must nearly all industry and finance be concentrated in Lagos, where there is geo-spatially no room for further expansion? Who deliberately killed the seaports of Calabar and Port Harcourt so that others will thrive? Why can’t we have centres of economic prosperity throughout all our regions instead of concentrating virtually everything in a city-state that is infernally over-congested? And I, who love the venerable Obafemi Awolowo and the Yoruba people, who can tell me that my questions are based on ethnic prejudice?
And talking about democratic deficits, what about our traditional rulers, an unelected bunch that are given 10 percent of all local government funds in a good number of our northern states? At a time of dwindling revenues, can we afford such expensive anachronisms as traditional rulers? Isn’t it about time we privatised them as Gandhi and Nehru did in India?
This brings me to the eighth point, and that is about the cost of government. The current federal structure is the most expensive system of government that I know of. Our parliamentarians earn, on average, three times what their counterparts earn in the United States. State governors earn hundreds of millions in so-called security votes that they never have to account for. Is it not about time we had a unicameral part-time legislature like we had at federal and regional levels during the first republic? How can we curb the enormous and undue powers of the State Governors who sometimes behave like medieval autocrats, muzzling the state assemblies, the judiciary, the civil service and everything on their path?
Tenth, we need reform for the sake of national renewal. Every generation, the immortal Fanon once observed, has its mission to fulfil. Of course, we can choose to betray our mission or fulfil it. I believe that the mission of the current generation of Nigerian leadership is reinvent government as a servant of the people and not its master. We need a system that works – that delivers the Good Life for all Nigerians.
There are, of course, genuine fears that the debate on restructuring may open up a Pandora’s Box of demands that may capsize the ship of state itself. I think these fears are misplaced. We need a debate within rules. One of the fundamental rules shall be that the existence of Nigeria as a sovereign, indivisible nation is non-negotiable. Secondly, our open democratic system in which the state and religion are kept apart is also non-negotiable. The principles of the rule of law, justice, equality and human rights are also non-negotiable. All else must be placed on the table.
Some of us who insist on restructuring are not doing so out of any concealed bad faith. A good number of us are genuine patriots who have no ethnic, religious or sectional agendas or biases whatsoever. What we feel is a deep love for Nigeria – anxious that our country will not continue to wallow in despair, mediocrity and poverty, but will fulfil its manifest and God-ordained destiny as a light unto the nations. We have absolutely no hope of fulfilling such a world-historic destiny unless our country is restructured and reconfigured as a system that works and offers opportunities and hope for our children and those after them.
Obadiah Mailafia
