Atiku Abubakar’s formula for a ‘true federation’

The long running strident calls for “restructuring” the country, aka “true federalism,” received a big boost last week from two sources, one predictable and the other perhaps inadvertent.

The inadvertent one was President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement in his media dialogue last month that as far as he was concerned the report of the 2014 National Conference organized by his predecessor, President Goodluck Jonathan, is only good for the archives. He said this in response to a question about what he thought of renewed calls for the implementation of the report’s recommendations. To begin with, he said, he’d been against convening the conference because its motive was suspect and its timing wrong. Nothing, he said, has happened since then to make him change his mind.

The regular reader of this column will not be surprised that I couldn’t agree more with the president. For four years President Jonathan rejected all calls for the conference. That he saw the light only when last year’s elections were around the corner and his prospects of re-election didn’t look so bright was bound to raise suspicions that the man was merely engaged in diverting attention from his record of poor performance. To make matters worse, there was gross imbalance in the religious and geo-political composition of the conference which he himself acknowledged and publicly promised to rectify. He never did.

Worst of all, he himself in effect consigned the report to the dustbin when he rejected calls to implement even those recommendations that did not require any constitutional amendments, thus confirming suspicions about his motive in convening the conference.

However, from the furore that Buhari’s dismissal of the conference report has generated, it is obvious that at least its ardent proponents consider it the only cure for all of Nigeria’s ills, not least of all the country’s presumed badly structured federalism.

Penultimate Tuesday, former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, added his weighty voice to those of proponents of “true federalism.” He was speaking as chairman at the occasion of the public presentation of the book, “We Are All Biafrans” by Chido Onumah. As he said, he had been a long-time advocate of restructuring Nigeria.

“The call for restructuring,” he said at the beginning of his remarks, “is even more relevant today in light of the governance and economic challenges facing us.  And the rising tide of agitations, some militant and violent, require a reset in our relationships as a united nation.”

Although he believed Nigeria “must remain a united country” he said, that unity must not be taken for granted lest we risk jeopardising it. He  then offered a six-point prescription for a healthy Nigerian federation.

First, he said, Nigeria needs “a smaller, leaner federal government with reduced responsibilities.” The country, he said, should also be one “in which more resources and powers are devolved to states and local governments than is presently the case.” Few people would disagree with this. On the contrary most would probably say that the country needs a smaller, leaner government not only at the federal level but at all levels.

As part of his first cure the former vice-president also said, “a true federal system will allow the federating states to keep their resources while the federal government retains the power of taxation and regulatory authority over standards.” The problem here is that we lost our innocence as a “true federation” fifty years ago in 1966 when our first military head of state, Major-General JTU Aguiyi Ironsi enacted the ill-advised and ill-fated Unification Decree.

Its abrogation and subsequent replacement by the state creation decree in 1967 by the second military head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, was supposed to remove fears of domination that was created by the Unification Decree. It never did, as has been obvious from the fact that there has been no end to demands for even more states, demands that have been louder than the contradictory calls for collapsing the existing 36 states into six geo-political zones.

It is because the centre created the current states instead of prior regions ceding powers to the centre as in a “true federation” that Vice-President Abubakar’s view that the federating states should keep all their resources is somewhat problematic. It is like saying Adam and Eve should revert to their innocent state after they eaten the apple.

At any rate even when we had a true federation between Independence in 1960 and the first military intervention in 1966, revenue allocation was never based on 100% derivation. Events since then would seem to suggest the wisest way out is a formula that balances the equity of emphasis on derivation with the need for balanced economic growth in a nation of uneven natural endowment.

Vice-President Abubakar’s second cure is that the component states and localities should be allowed to “determine their development priorities and wage structures.” Nothing in our constitution stops the states from doing so except the dependence complex from our long military rule which our politicians seem to suffer from. By now we should all know states are coordinates, not subordinates, of the central government.

Similarly, nothing in our constitution stops our governments at all levels from pursing the former vice-president’s third, fourth and fifth cures, namely, “a tax-centred revenue base”, “enhanced (and) diversified economic activities and productivity to enlarge tax base”, and putting an end to the indigene/settler dichotomy. The only obstacles to pursuing all these worthy objectives seem to be our over-dependence on unworked for oil wealth and a mentality encouraged by our politicians of believing the other man’s gain is necessarily your loss.

As for the vice-president’s sixth cure, it is true that state police to augment the federal police can improve security, including fighting terrorism, in the country. As he said, “posting a police officer from Ganye to Eket may help promote culture sharing and integration, but it does little to prevent or fight crime” since “crime is better fought by those who know the terrain and speak the local language.”

But while in a “true federation” states should have their own police, the problem, one would never tire of pointing out, is that ours is not a true federation. Besides, we seem to have conveniently forgotten that it was the abuse of local police in the old regions which led to the clamour for replacing them with the Nigerian Police. Anyone who thinks that that fear is no more should imagine a state police in the hands of a Governor Fayose with his well-known penchant for arbitrary use of power.

All in all, except for his suggestion of a state police and a small and lean government, former vice-president Abubakar’s formula for a “true federation” is not as radical as it sounds at first hearing. And because of that it is not likely to satisfy its ardent advocates most of who think the only true federation is one made of a country’s ethnic groups as its units, never mind the fact that nothing could be more reactionary than such a federation.

A country’s greatness is a reflection of the strength of ties its leaders build across languages, cultures and faiths. As such, a country governed by ethnic and religious champions such as we have will never be great because, by definition and as we have seen in practice, such champions are incapable of seeing beyond the confines of their ethnicity and religion.

I have said it before and would do so again and again: Nigeria’s main problem is not its structure with all its flaws. Its main problem is corrupt and decadent leadership. This is the main lesson of our journey from the federalism of the First Republic through the unitary state of the military era to the present statism and recent calls to revert back to a modified version of our old regionalism.