By ISAAC olusesi
IN Nigeria, creating a Regional Centre of Excellence (RECEX) in the South -West states as recently resolved by the state governors, will fire up high flows of transactions in the aerial, land and waterways in the region with very elaborate covariance or community of interests that binds the states in the region.
At their last meetings in Ado-Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti State, a week ago, the governors further agreed to constitute a derivative Regional Technical Working Group (RETWOG) on South-West integrated infrastructural development. These trends directly imply the existence of complimentary of developmental issues and policies on energy-power-water infrastructure, leisure and entertainment as well as forest and ecology, with endowments of resource inputs, production factors, demand factors and equalization or near equalization of incomes in the region.
The writer in Ado Ekiti noted that the governors at the forum understood responsiveness as crucially and decisively germane to determining the viability of the South-West regional integrated transactions, having already done a detailed resource mapping of the region. To what extent do the states in South-West have inter-locking roles? To what extent have they found each other responsive to the other’s needs? The questions, not conundrum, rather pointed out extant incentive grounds for the governors to fully integrate transactions in the region. And because responsiveness is the possibility of getting an adequate response, the governors also approved a composite Regional Integrated Commercial Agricultural Development (RICAD) programme for the South -West, while Lagos will champion a Structured Food Exchange Project (SFEP).
The RICAD, a responsive element in integration, will be a function, both of the capability of the components of the integration in the region and the level of demands expected to be made on them. Interestingly, South-West had long ago shifted from subsistence agriculture to enhanced economy, with astronomical growth of cities, towns and conurbations; and meteoric urbanization of rural populations as a significant basis for the stimulation of intra-regional transactions.
However, one thing that is likely to impede desirable level of transactions in the South-West regional integration thetendency to trigger hatred and suspicion among the component states, capable of inhibiting the anticipated volumes and tempo of flows of integrated transactions in the region. It is in the interest of the region, therefore, to legally empower RICAD for active cultivation of integration fostering processes, to dispense joint rewards and penalties for strengthening or weakening integration in the South-West region.
The RICAD, as a regional integration intervention, should have legal teeth to effect efficient and effective integration in the region; bite ‘cornering’ practices; channel other intra-regional projects in order to minimize wastes and remove extortionist practices; encourage flow of resources; and make revenue flow a lasting avenue for strong and prosperous South-West integration.
Generally, RICAD should conflate efforts to translate any deleterious scenario to a useful weapon of greater unity and prosperity in the South-West. A region’s peoples’ mind, befuddled with sectional thoughts, has its own legacy of conflict and disharmony.
Statism, with its high propensity for hallucination, solidarity, paternalism and parochialism, is an innate feeling of pride and arrogance in any regional integrated adventure as South-West’s. State nationalism, better called state differences, could be an incentive for disharmony and conflict, harbingering an intra-regional clash, usually an intransigent reaction by, for instance, the natives of Ogbomoso in Oyo State who not long ago, restricted job performance of the indigenes of the State of Osun in the service of Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso.
The last, “Let Osun indigenes leave our university; go back to your state” show, publicly meted on Osun indigenes in LAUTECH by the Ogbomosos was conceptually a relationship factor between the level of education of a people, job employment and job performance. But critically, it was more a decisive weaponry, strategically evolved by a component in regional integration, to harness disharmony and conflict. The effrontery of the Ogbomosos was a leap-frog approach to catapult the anointed co-natives with low utilization capacity to positions of responsibility in the university, ironically owned by both Osun and Oyo.
In the regional integration dive in South-West, Nigeria, no one state should be elevated over the other. There must be modus operandi to prop strong integration and unity. The South-West states in the integration should put up a more progressive outlook to make them less confrontational, less arrogant, less myopic, less antagonistic and less chilling; but more cosmopolitan and more civilized in attitude and relationship.
An arrogant state carries arrogant look; and an arrogant outlook breeds chilling antagonism in all regional matters, including integrated transactions. However, when states carry out transactions in the South-West region without antagonism and molestation on account of state differences, it results in regional cohesion which is a sine qua non for regional unity and prosperity. In the final analysis, such enviably chivalrous intra-regional relationships will also enhance cultivation of a self-reliant Nigeria, the better for all.
Olusesi writes from Osogbo, Osun State.