Bisi Akande: Military might have given the north an unfair advantage in revenue allocation

Bisi Akande, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), says military intervention in governance is to be blamed for the “lopsided” political structure in Nigeria.

He said while in power, the military created states and local governments “by fiat for selfish reasons rather than through any scientific political reasoning”, thus necessitating a restructuring of the country.

He said the military might have inequitably created more local governments per population per state in the north than in the south, thereby giving the north an “unfair advantage in revenue allocation from the national treasury”.

Akande said Nigerians were already viewing themselves as belonging to geo-political zones.

He therefore called for restructuring, which he described as “equitable rearrangement and redistribution of the existing states and local governments per population within the various ethnic nationalities”.

Akande spoke at APC-US second annual convention in Washington DC during the weekend.

“The North is a largely Hausa-speaking people traditionally mix-bred and assimilated with and governed by minority Fulani rulers through Islamic emirate system since two centuries ago,” he said.

“The North has been amalgamated with the South in-law and in fact since a century ago. And, presumably, the Fulani has been perceived to be manipulating the North to rule Nigeria since independence.

“Even if one does not like the minority Fulani rulers of the North for being hegemonic in characteristics, can one separate them from the original majority Hausa-speaking people of the same North? Unless one was ready for another civil war, could one ostracise the whole North in the political considerations of the country.”

He said it was within that context that he and some other Nigerians who were not ready to wait for another civil war to effect a geo-political restructuring of the country, decided to go ahead with the APC arrangement, “while our opponents are left behind to assume a loud coarse noise on mere sloganeering-restructuring- without any clear definition or a peaceful workable strategy.”

He said the south-west, on its own, had moved to create a Development Agenda Commission for Western Nigeria, (DAWN), to conduct research to generate pieces of advisory information for the benefit of the each of the south-western state governments on integrated development programmes.