Reflections with Olu Obafemi SMS only:08033341157, [email protected]
SINCE the inception of the Buhari government, about the most vexed issue in the country remains the issue of the urgency to restructure the country, manifest mostly in the equally nebulous concept of ‘true federalism.’ Recently, ethnic nations/ nationalities, prominent politicians and reform-conscious compatriots have called on the ‘new’ government, as it pursues the agenda of change (however conceived and understood nowadays) to consider the issue of national restructuring as the first and most important agenda for it or for any government for that matter in Nigeria today.
Thus, no matter how hard the government tries to impress the nation with its commitment to change, best evinced in its messianic pursuit of the anti-corruption crusade and the termination of the Boko Haram terrorism and other raging matters of state security, majority national constituents believe in, and are stridently demanding for, state restructuring or the enthronement of ‘true federalism’. The hottest approach being thrust on the plate of government is the Report of the 2014 National Confab carried out by the Jonathan administration which many take a solid material for national reconstruction and a solution for carving a united government for Nigeria, put simplistically but which President Buhari does not at the moment give serious attention to.
There has always been a basis for a genuinely conceived federation in Nigeria before and since independence and the emergence of a Federal Republic in 1963. The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as Amended in 2011) at Chapter 2, states that ‘The Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be a State based on the principles of democracy and social justice.’ It further declared, and this bears quoting extensively with regards to the issue of federalism, that;
The sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom… government derives its powers and authority; the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government; and the participation by the people in their government shall be ensured in accordance with the provisions of this constitution. The composition of the government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of the affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few sates or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that governance or any of its agencies.
We remark here that, though federation was adopted by the founding fathers of Nigeria in recognition of its imperativeness for a society like Nigeria, mutual hostility, distrust and unhealthy competition subtended among these ethno-national constituent groups in Nigeria. Ethno-national rivalry was fuelled by the political leaders through the instrumentality of the press which was owned and deployed by them as well as manned and managed by their cohorts. Hence, Nigeria’s federalism was marked and tainted by political and media duplicity, complicity and sophistry, right from the colonial to the nationalist aegis of the nation’s political evolution. Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1968) advanced the imperativeness of federating in a multi-ethnic entity like Nigeria thus;
in every civilized federations of the world, there must be the federal principle which refers to the method of dividing powers so that general and regional or state governments are within a sphere , co-ordinate and independent of one another.’
This establishes, recognizes and emphasizes the independence and inter-dependence of the central and regional /state governments. This may former justify the re-proposition of regional or zonal principles of federalism as recently espoused by Chief Emeka Anyaoku and a few others.
As it were, this principle of regional government not being inferior to the central government was not wholly and adequately internalized by the leading politicians of the First Republic and their media. It is important, however, to note that the regions developed correspondingly with the centre to the extent that the regions generated resources independently to execute infrastructural and developmental projects, as we found in the regional governments of the Western Region under the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello in the North and Dr. Azikiwe and later Michael Okpara in the East. The principle of non-inferiority of the regional governments to the government at the centre was amply internalized by Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of Northern Region when, he as the leader of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), left the running of the central government in Lagos to Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in order to consolidate his policy of regional development in the Northern region.
With regard to our experience of federalism as a nation, Ogunmola (2013), as adapted by Memo (2014) aptly states as follows;
Despite the acknowledged diverse nature of the country and the adoption of federalism by the country since 1954, the past and present leaders of Nigeria continue to run the country as a unitary state with too much power concentrated at the center and no resemblance of autonomy or the component regions/states or any respect for the people that made up the federation in the first place.
Ogunmola further finds this state of affairs to have resulted in the country remaining more as a unitary state for all practical purposes than as a federation. The unitarization bent of the country has been, disputably blamed by Ogunmola on the media barons during the aegis of nationalist struggle and the immediate post-independence Nigeria.
To continue next week