Regionalism or National Regeneration

What may be denied, but remains insistent, is that the regionalism being sought has the unwholesome implication of pumping competition between constituent units without offering an exit point. In a lot of ways, it is competition without any redeeming features. It merely re-sets the basis for the return of the old three-cornered regional struggle as heightened by the civil war which was pure waste and carnage, over who should command the humungous oil revenue coming from the minority ethnic regions of what is now described as the South South. Its haughty legacy is the military command of national affairs that has unitarized the country under a moribund Northern agenda that is beginning to display its core ethnic talons. The paradox is that, in the age of oil wealth shared according to predatory regionalism, the need for exploitation of the peasantry as in the first Republic and the use of dandoka police to extract feudal largesse from the people, has been reduced. It has yielded the paradox of much glitter for the North, pre-figuring more livable towns but with social welfare policies so thoroughly crooked and blinkered that the common people are considered mere fodder for getting more money from the centre for a self-aggrandizing political elite who give poor education to poor people’s children while sending their own abroad or to private schools.

The extant regionalism while it has buoyed the North into seeking control of Federal institutions and organizations that are bound to be badly run because based on parochial principles of regional quota and capture, it has promoted in the South an ethic of opposition to federal overcoming of the economy especially as it relates to the states in matters of revenue sharing. The promotion of private enterprise as a form of resistance to misuse of Federal Power has been an incipient part of this opposition. It has been rather slapdash in its impact because the control of Federal Might has tended to be translated into a means of feudalizing the same private sector. The worst and the most heinous impact has come from the robber barons approach to the management of the nation’s oil industry which enables any brigand in power to declare another’s person’s hometown as an oil block that can then be given as largesse to any crony at home or abroad to do stuff with including sale to any other brigand from outer space. Add to this the devastating aspect, the rupturing of the weighted sharing of revenue on the principle of derivation based on a victory won in 1954 and consolidated with the 1963 Republican Constitution.

By the way, that republican constitution was rushed, dont let us forget, to prevent Obafemi Awolowo and his crowd of champions of state creation, turned into treasonable felons, from going as far as the privy council to appeal their right to freedom. As it happened, the assault on the principles of derivation had become part of the war on the creation of states. Once the military took command of national affairs, the war on the weighted sharing of revenue based on derivation became part of the obstacles to the enforced unitarization of the country by first the pro-East Army and then the revenge coup makers of the same year. The war that followed provided the pretext for demoting derivation from the 50% agreement of the 1963 Republican constitution. Although, it was supposed to be a temporary measure to help the war effort, it stayed. By 1970, Gowon reduced it to 45%. In 1975 it fell to 20%. The Obasanjo/Yaradua administration in 1975 fixed it at 25%. Shehu Shagari reduced it to 5% in 1981. After Ambrose Alli, Governor of Bendel state went to court on the matter, a minima of 13 percent was conceded but never delivered. Under Buhari, in his first coming as Head of state, it crashed to 1.5%. General Ibrahim Babangida raised it to 3%. before agitation and the Saro Wiwa phenomenon brought it back to the ambit of judicial intervention that had put it at 13 percent. The reality is that with Federal control of oil revenues and with more states benefitting from the denial of 50 percent to the oil producing states, the struggle for true federalism appeared to be more and more a matter for the minorities of the South South sticking out their necks. For hacking. The good thing is that the old agittors for true federalism in the West have not relented since the publication of Obafemi Awolowo’s Path to Nigerian freedom in 1947.

With Federal control of oil revenues and mineral resources, it has become the case that any person, region or combination of states, that can hijack federal power automatically takes the place of the former colonial master without being answerable to the constituent units of the Federation. In effect, the agitation for more states has become no longer just a matter of minority ethnic groups seeking to defend their interests within a format of self-governance against majority groups but a plea by all comers to get an ever greater share of the so called national cake – oil money – in the name of even development, equity and whatever shenanigans may be added to justify the robbery that it constitutes. The agitation for more states by the minorities, hijacked by the majorities to create more states for themselves, has shifted the criteria from strategic ethnic considerations to the merely contingent, or farcical and absurd . No criteria really seems to matter anymore beyond the whim of the reigning dictator or the fishy sectionalist jobbery of those seeking a loot-sharing empire. The only certainty is that the old divide between North and South, and then between the old North, West and East, continues to be played out in manipulative forms that sustain old hegemonies.

What no one has been able to remove is the implacable struggle of the minority ethnic groups in the Niger Delta, as if on behalf of aggrieved minority nationalities and disadvantaged majorities across the country. It has been a struggle to reverse the unitarized Federalism that enables the rest of the Federation to share in the proceeds of oil without taking responsibility for the environmental degradation and the blighting of the future that oil exploration and exploitation occasion. An aspect was added by Ken SaroWiwa, who became the prime protagonist of the minority cause after the civil war. Using Obafemi Awolowo’s advocacy of Federalism as standard, he set the mood for altering the British contraption that rammed several ethnic groups together without a care about their cultural, social and economic rights. Describing it as internal colonialism, he reasserted the unexpired campaign for ethnic boundaries to be respected in the creation of states or regions. Not even his judicial murder by hanging, with eight of his Ogoni kinsmen, could stop the agitations. His hanging inflamed and emboldened Niger Delta groups and prefigured the resort by many ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta to armed resistance in the face of destructive oil exploitation. It upped the ante in what became a popular resistance to the might of the Federal Government and the multinational oil corporations rampaging for oil in the Niger Delta. Considering that oil accounts for more than ninety percent of national income, the survival of the Federal Government as a viable entity has tended to be seen as lying with the successful pacification of, or at least resolution of the crisis in, the Niger Delta.

The ethnic push which the Niger Delta crisis re-constituted was worsened when the Presidential election of June 12 1993 won by Chief MKO Abiola, a Yoruba of the Southwest, was annulled by the dominant Northern catchment in the Federal Military Government led by the dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida. This widened the basis of the ethnic backlash against the lopsided Federalism that many believed made the annulment possible. Given that Abiola’s mandate .had been given by a nation-wide constituency, it merely proved the long-held view that the Federal Government was the handmaiden of a Northern clique of hegemonists who did not want North and South reconciled for development. Interestingly, even those who did not share Awolowo’s notion of a Federalism based on ethnic groups and nationalities, began to sway in that direction. It was in order to stem the tide of this ethnic march, with prospects of a blow-out of vast proportions, that the Northern clique that had effected the annulment of Chief MKO Abiola’s mandate, literally hired General Olusegun Obasanjo, removing him from prison to douse the ethno-regional flames; under oath that he would return power to the North at the end of his term. His eight years in power, made nary a difference to the lie of the ground until he handed over to his successor, Umaru Yar’adua who, unfortunately died and left his Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, from Bayelsa in the Niger Delta, to become the President. This, as it turned out, was the colossally unexpected. It re-kindled regionalism, in the old frame of the North against the South but within an informal recourse to the six geo-political zones that was mooted by General Sani Abacha’s confab: Northwest, North East, South East, South South, South West, Middle Belt. A stark picture of identity-problems immediately surfaced which may well be sketched under six types of regionalism that are mauling Nigeria at the moment.

The most celebrated may be described as predatory regionalism, easily identified with the Northwest, which seeks to overcome central authority in the Federation in order to determine what others can make of whatever advantages they may possess. It instigates a second type, defensive regionalism, a more South-western phenomenon, which seeks to enhance its power as a means of resisting the capacity of the predator to overawe it. The third type is reactive regionalism which seeks to arrive at its due by demanding benefits akin to the ones others have derived from their predatory and defensive ploys. The fourth type is assertive regionalism usually designed to protect its more bountiful lot from being poached by others directly or through deployment of a hijacked Federal authority. The fifth type is insurgent regionalism based on organized armed resistance to perceived deprivation or poaching by other types. It may be distinguished from the sixth type, resurgent regionalism which attaches itself to the cover of predatory, or other types of regionalism in order to pursue its own arrival at regional status. What needs to be stressed here is that the six geo-political zones touted since Abacha’s constitutional conference, but yet to be formalized, fall into each of these categories although they may behave with a mix of the characteristics of one or the other. The short of it is that some of the zones have properly arrived at regional status while being under the apron string of some other geo-political unit. What counts is that each of Nigeria’s old regions or new geo-political zones applies the strategies of one or other types or is more of one type than another.

Although the most obvious strategy of mobilization, across the board, is the attempt to re-create the old three-cornered regional scuffles of the pre-independence and First Republic era, it does need to be acknowledged that the many successful attempts under the military to create new states have so damaged the old slogans that they are not easy to recoup. The Arewa Elders Forum simply cannot mop up the authority of the old Northern People’s Congress just as Afenifere cannot match the emotive power of Egbe Omo Oduduwa or the Action Group; nor is Ohaneze Ndigbo as good on the ground as the Ibo state Union or the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons. Yet the pursuit of many restructurers would seem to be a matter of bringing the old regions back as a way of corking a snook at the hegemony personified by Arewa Power. One predictable fallout of this reality is that the champions of regionalism along the old lines are seeking to weaken the states already created instead of egging them on to seek true justice. Wanting to revert to their old status as part of a regional laager, they forget that so many of the states were so hard fought and hard won that they simply cannot be retrenched from memory. The amount of development that they have occasioned, or made possible on their own, is not something that any rational person wants to dismiss or trade away in the name of returning to the old regions that simply could not have development go round even at their best. This is not to say that the old regionalism can be treated as dead. A sentimental dredge can still be derived from it. Or, sometimes, it seems to make some fleeting sense to suggest that states should be knocked back together because larger regions will not only be more viable but offer a more bullish basis for resisting federal power – irrespective of who may have hijacked it. It is as if the size of the work force, the school population and the general population, would reduce or become less demanding, and that therefore the responsibilities of each region would be much less, once states are rammed together and regionalization takes place. The benefits of large-scale economies is sometimes brought in to launder regionalism. It is not a completely flawed argument except that it assumes that it assumes a con-federal system of Yugoslav dimensions, rather than cooperative true federalism. It implies that all problems would be solved by returning the states, to their old regional habitat, or to the new format of six geo-political zones. The supposed implication is to reduce the challenge of having a heavy bureaucracy, with 36 Governors, and multiples of 36 commissioners for education, health, transport, trade, lands, housing, culture etc. High expenditures cannot be escaped in such circumstance. But the argument is flawed:

The question is: why should all the Governors be on a high of unwholesome pensions and mile-long motorcades that their commissioners and even advisers compete with, as a measure of the way to run a viable state? Why, in the first place, should there be so many ministries? Surely, if those who must be in charge of Ministries in the already created states are granted the leeway of old provincial commissioners, who will ride their own vehicles as did the Ministers in the first republic, and live in their own houses, the closeness of government to the grassroots will be easier to achieve. Organizationally, the old regionalism of the Ibadan, Kaduna, Enugu and Benin city variety, can today be judged by how many obscure parts of the federation have been positively affected, in developmental terms, by the creation of new states. Nor is it merely a matter of bringing government closer to the grassroots. There is the very realistic issue of management: that between a regional government and current state governments, the model of effectiveness on the side of the states is superior to that of the regional behemoths. This, I dare say, will become even more so, once resource control is granted to all constituent parts of the Federation.

On this score, it may well be noted that many of the regions being proposed are actually so large as to be huge countries in themselves when compared to so many states across Africa and the world. Even without the ethnic differences that generated the cry for the creation of states, many of them, for administrative efficacy, needed to be broken up into provinces with the format of constituent units as in any federal society. The idea that such federalization will call for a heavy bureaucracy simply does not follow. This is because the overstaffing that abounds in the bureaucracies at the moment are curable maladies which call for down-sizing in favour of other sectors of the economy. The reckless practice of merely throwing money at problems, beefing up huge complements of staff in different stages of under-employment, need not remain the norm.

The strongest factor against regionalism in this regard, supporting existing states and the necessity to create more states, is that, the envisaged states will have resource control. Today only the Federal Government with 68 items in the Exclusive Legislattive List have resource control. Which is why some people fight so hard to hijack the Federal Government. Surely, with enhanced taxing powers they will be saved from the beggarly disposition of existing states vis-a-vis the federal government. Once the Concurrent List and Residual List are sorted, given back their groove, there would actually be more work to do, needing more hands. This is the first and primary definition of restructuring in terms of the return of resource control to the constituent units of the federation. Unlike the present dispensation in which the federal government has appropriated all the juicy tax powers on the basis of the Exclusive Legislative List, the return of many items to the Concurrent List and Redsidual List, will elevate all states and local governments to virtual production centres. The residual list which is exclusive to the states needs to be scrupulously delineated for effect. They will all benefit from the drastic reduction of the powers with which the Federal Government currently crushes the viability of state governments. With resource control and more tax powers returned to the states, it can be imagined that they will cease to be mere loot-sharing or distribution channels as they have been under the crushing weight of Federal Might. Local governments, will once again become proper means for state governments to realize objectives spelt out for them by the constitution. Between the local governments and the state governments, the ambition should be focussed on producing up to sixty percent, not the current 20 percent of goods that are consumed in the state. By the same token, they ought to have the right to 60 percent of the proceeds of their production, leaving 40 percent to the Federal Government which must have responsibility for ensuring that a Federal coupon goes to every child that crosses a state boundary into another for free education and free health as the case may be.

Given a redressed sense of public finance which does not assume the profligacy in government circles, there should be expected a drastic reduction, a positive lowering, in the cost of governance. It makes it possible to consider the creation of up to fifty four states in all – as projected by the 2014 National conference. With more states – truly respectful of ethnic boundaries – enjoying self-governance on a formalized low-cost basis, but sharing common services across the country, the fear of oppression will be reduced. Common economic pursuits, as in the Arewa example and O’dua Investments, even for states that are not contiguous can be imagined as between Lagos and Kebbi that are in different geo-political zones. The choice to cooperate in economic production, could be decided on a case by case basis unconstrained by constitutional imperatives.