[caption id="attachment_57296" align="alignright" width="600"] Odia Ofeimun[/caption] By Odia Ofeimun In an earlier version, the title of this discussion was ‘Regionalism and National Regeneration’. After altercations on the pages of newspapers about restructuring of the Nigerian polity, it occurred to me that the core issue is about how to take a stand between one and the other. I changed the title to ‘Regionalism or National Regeneration’ to highlight the proposition that regionalism is just one of many ways of restructuring and does not necessarily lead to national regeneration. Properly speaking, regionalism, too easily, becomes a trap that looks good on the surface only when we begin from what I shall describe as predatory federalism which derives from the politics of Nigeria’s lopsided architecture – with the North being three times larger than the south in terms of geographical size but, instead of being more productive, ritually depends on affirmative action support from the south. Regionalism, as a pursuit, may therefore be viewed as a form of regress to a laager by those seeking to dismantle the unjust system or aiming to assert the permanence of overlord-ship. It becomes merely a way of setting up fighting positions for this or that fraction of the country in the manner that the regionalization of Yugoslavia and, further, the rotation of offices between her six regions - Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia - led to its dissolution and the emergence of a seventh country, Croatia, from her ashes. A regionalism of this variety merely falls in line with proposals for changing Nigeria’s political geography from the supposed unwieldiness of the current 36 states structure back to the original two protectorates, three or four regions or the new fangled six zones. Definitively, it is against the struggle for the creation of more states, and the long-running demand for ethnic self-governance by Nigeria’s aggrieved minorities and disadvantaged majorities. The question that arises, and the core issue in this segment of the discussion, is the extent to which regionalism is a fit and proper goal of restructuring! To what extent does it meet the principle that a federal government should not become a mere handmaiden of any particular region nor function in a way that stops the progress, or destroys, instead of complementing, the advantages, of its constituent parts. Or what is the point of belonging to a union in which losses outweigh gains to the point of being virtually punitive and self-immolating? In the Nigerian circumstance, it calls for a movement away from the old El-Rufai doctrine which argued, at the height of the de-Federalizing angst under President Olusegun Obasanjo, that Lagosians, wishing to, should not be treated like special citizens. By the same token, it is a distancing away from the older Buhari doctrine which preferred to use Federal might to pay for a metro-line not to be established in Lagos, rather than see it as a means of advance for the country of which it is a part. Such doctrines which project the imprimatur of regionalism as brazen national ethic, can be seen in the vehement opposition by defenders of northern security against mass education, (free education) on the grounds that the parts of the country already with more children at school would benefit more. This led to literal carnage and destruction of the educational sector across Nigeria and dovetailed with the movement of strategic military installations to the North including an attempt, later rectified, to site the Naval headquarters far from the sea or any waterway. Such fiascos of processes and policies goaded by regionalism have led to charges of internal colonialism in many quarters. The crying issue is that a region, or a combination of regions that has hijacked federal power can indeed behave like or worse than a colonizing power by taking away taxing powers from constituent units as Nigeria’s Federal Government has done since the Nigerian civil war. The ugly reality, of one region exercising such hegemony over the federal government at such a cost, implicates raw and uncouth competition, quite unbecoming of a true federation. It remains a cloying depressant of faith in what is generally described as the Nigerian project. The question is how do we stem it: how do we eliminate the possibility of one part of the Federation holding the rest to ransom on the basis of size or other endowments? How may freedom of movement and association be accommodated in such a federation such that a citizen from one state or region can enjoy social welfare services across the country in accordance with a federal code or budget? These are the issues that restructuring must deal with beyond any form of regionalism. Or what is a federation for? In the light of the narrative of the struggle to site Nigeria’s capital city in Lokoja, Calabar, Zungeru, Kaduna, Lagos and, now, Abuja, it is very uncontroversial to note that the competition between various regions of Nigeria for the control of the whole has been the main albatross around any scheme to move the country in any direction. Regionalism has been the launch pad and instigator of raw competition. As a leaf borrowed from Lugard’s era, it has been a case of the regions forming a culture of unwholesome competition with a mental and material infrastructure that has turned what could have been a healthy interaction into a very unsavoury case of mutual self-annihilation. It began with the colonial officials who were determined that never the twain, North and South, shall meet. The antipathy that they built into interactions led to the encrustation of regionalism as a normal binge. As readers of Margery Perham, Lugard’s biographer, can attest, proposals made by Charles Temple, Governor of the North, for an eight-region structure for the country and the one by E.D Morel, editor of the Daily Mail for a four region Federation, were thrown out by Frederick Lugard. Pure imperial mischief. The culture of One North versus the South was cemented with a universalized indirect rule system, a more or less generalized Hausa language and a slowed-down educational system for the North. Richmond Palmer, the old Resident of Kastina, before he took over control of the North in 1924 was the organizer of the Conference of northern residents who ensured that when all the emirates were given the combined status of a trade union against other Nigerians. His parochial bent formed the basis of northern exclusiveness that eventually got southerners frozen out of the Northern civil service in the famous policy of Northernization that enshrined xenophobia as official credo. An era came, after independence, in which it became normal policy for the northern political parties, radical and conservative alike, to join in ensuring that if the North could not catch up in education, industrialization, and general development, the South had to be prevented from moving too fast. Arguments for southern advantages to be reduced or hacked were actively canvassed by northern elites without any self-consciousness. It took on a very visceral turn in the mid-sixties after the NPC for the North and the NCNC for the East, began to execute a pre-independence agreement to share out Nigeria between themselves. The East was granted leeway to take over strategic jobs across the Federal bureaucracy and public service while, in a manner to which Easterners were initially indifferent, the North took over the commanding heights of the economy and politics - including railway extensions, the Hydro-electric dam, military installations, and iron and steel industry. In the area of education, less energy and ingenuity, was being put into lifting the North to catch up than ensuring that the Southern lead was reduced, halted or neutered. It generated the half-serious joke about Northerners being sent to school merely to learn how to fight southerners rather than helping the North to develop. Since the struggle was about how to share rather than develop the country, Northern control had the effect of under-developing Nigeria without really improving the North. The sharpening of the divide between North and South induced the south to develop its own form of split-regionalism. From a two country format of competition between the North and South, to a three-cornered struggle, after the geographically smaller South was split into two in 1939, the basis was set for the consequent three-way competition with one hegemonic North over East and West. It was realpolitik with the East, in later electoral politics, seeking to take over the West in order to confront the North with a southern solidarity; the West, seeking to unite all the minority ethnic groups in the North and South for the creation of states of their own; and the North, seeking to break the possibility of East and West cooperating to turn the Middle Belt into a proper and viable region in its own right. The nature of the regionalism that ensued, with a veto on the side of the less educationally primed for modernity, became a decided imperial trap. It called for a nationalist dismantling. But Nigerian elites were induced to work within imperial traps by the kind of competition already in vogue which criminalized ethnicity without allowing the development of a scheme of protection for the aggrieved and disadvantaged. When the militariat, the so called men on horseback, seized power from 1966, they made the banning of ethnic unions so important that we were all supposed to forget that they were recruited on the basis of ethnic and regional quotas. In some way, the beneficiaries of regional quotas that took them to Federal stardom, made it look as if they had no ethnic laagers behind them. This yielded the false dichotomy between nationalist northerners and tribalistic southerners. All quite a ruse. Interestingly, the myth of one country was maintained by colonial fiat and the heady campaigns of nationalists smarting with reckless optimism. Indeed, natives, for reasons of black solidarity, on the principles that we are all Africans, joined the colonizers in making the presumption that the country had become united with immediate effect by merely being amalgamated. The fact that the country was brought into existence as a geographical fact, by force of British arms, a semblance of English common law and the English language, was turned into a means of flogging those seeking to defend their homelands, their ethnic groups and nationalities, from undue exploitation, repression or enslavement. Idealistic nationalism - to emphasize it further - made the expression of ethnic identity an anti-nation phenomenon without providing the basis for a truly cultural citizenship across the country. This made it a matter of such gravity when Ahmadu Bello told NnamdiAzikiwe haggled over the question of understanding differences rather than forgetting differences. In effect, a geographical expression was being unduly valorized without a fair drive to re-create the country as a cultural expression. Those who sought to protect their nationalities from undue exploitation or repression were viewed as tribalists without anyone defining the model of nationality that would cover all citizens. Thus, from the beginning, national politics became a struggle between those who wished to take over the whole country for ruler-ship by their ethnic nationalities and those wishing to protect their ethnic nationalities from undue savaging and exploitation and repression. It took a while; but the wishes and ambitions of the various fractions of the country soon began to be tested against the principle that Nigeria could only be fairly governed by having a centre which is not controlled by one part of the country at the expense of others. More positively, it became a national goal to have a plateau of opportunities that granted common rights to all Nigerian citizens irrespective of where they live or their place of origin. The gradual movement towards these basic principles began at the All-Nigeria Conference at Ibadan in 1950. For the first time since the amalgamation in 1914, the North and South, were able to meet formally to contribute to how they may be governed. Without a formal census, population figures between North and South were put at fifty-fifty, and later upped by two percent in favour of the North. This set the basis for sharing wealth and offices across the Federation. This also set the grounds for competition that was formalized within the diabolical foresight of the colonizer’s refusal to allow the North to be split before or after the amalgamation. One unintended benefit in the competition is that it enabled each region to bargain for and gain control of its resources and thus was secured for each region a fifty percent share of the resources it originated before giving up shares to the central government. This sharing formula, as it turned out, could not deal with the fact that each of the three, and later, four regions was dominated by one hegemonic ethnic group over so many aggrieved, smaller nationalities agitating for regions of their own. An over-view of the patterns and non-patterns that it has given rise to may well be supplied. Especially, in view of the fact that regionalism has continued to supervene so endemically in Nigerian affairs, it helps to recall that, for the smaller ethnic groups across Nigeria, the anti-colonial struggle became not only a matter of freedom from British colonialism but freedom from the colonialism of the majority ethnic groups. The leaders of the majority groups generally looked with disdain and often with repression upon the leaders of the minorities. As the Minorities Commission of 1958 was told by sundry groups, the minorities resented the fact that their languages and cultures were being marginalized, their traditions trivialized, and their civic rights reduced to the level of second class citizens. In Taking Nigeria Seriously, I have noted the case of the southern Kaduna minorities whose collective identities were being traduced as they were being renamed, and misnamed in a nomenclatural venture that was obviously aimed at imposing new identities on them. It was internal colonialism, pure and simple, so many decades before the term was re-invented and made popular by Ken Saro Wiwa, the Ogoni leader. Indeed, the resistance to the creation of regions or states for minority ethnic groups had become such a national industry, promoted by British chicanery, and laundered by internal colonialists of all shades. Its pros and cons took centre stage in Nigerian politics’ but one remarkable dimension of it is that the regionalism that was in vogue had the North as truly hegemonic with a virtual veto over the rest of the federation. Since you had to take over the North in order to exercise the veto over the whole country, all the parties of the North, the ruling Northern People’s Congress, NPC, and the radical opposition party, the Northern Elements Progressive Union, NEPU, were simply ‘Northern’ while seeking to rule the whole country. The United Middle Belt Congress, UMBC, took a cue as a defender of all the minorities of the North. The COR State Movement in the South East, and the Midwest State Movement, and their more national ally on the minority question, the Action Group, mounted demands for creation of more states along largely ethnic lines and in a manner that heightened the politics of social welfare. As early as 1955 the Western House of Assembly voted for a Midwest to be created out of the West as an earnest of the Action Group’s honesty of purpose. Whether it was done as mere propaganda or not, it was a vote that would be used later in 1963 to achieve the actual creation of the state. And, the state, when it had to be, was created merely within a spanking strategy deployed by the ruling national coalition to deal with the party, the Action Group, that had turned state creation into a song and dance. Once created, however, it built up its own logic. As the Action Group leader had predicted in his biography, AWO, published at independence in 1960, nothing could halt further agitations for the creation of states once one more region was created. Not even the jail terms and exile that took AG agitators out of circulation after independence could squelch the demands. In fact, the untoward and unconstitutional methods deployed against the agitators for states in the North and in the West hastened the breakdown of the First Republic in 1966. Rather than kill off agitations, state creation came back on top of the agenda after the nature of the coups and counter coups of that year. The following year, 1967, to stem the imminent secession of the Eastern Region, and virtually as a salvo in the civil war that soon ensued, the military regime had to create twelve states. The floodgate was opened and with it, a state creation bingo emerged that has since become a roller-coaster. But for the wrong reason. To get the picture right, it does need restating that the struggle to have more states created began largely as a bid to tone down regionalism and set the minorities in each region free to be self-governing within the Nigerian federation. The great thing about it is that the agitators were also the ones demanding free education, free health and full employment to help create a level playing field, to nationalize culture, and remove parochialism from inter-group relations So that a child from Calabar can go to Sokoto and have free education and the child from Kano can be educated free in the Delta or wherever else. It simply deserves to be stated and re-stated that the so-called tribalists who were agitating for the creation of states on the basis of ethnic homogeneity have also been the champions of the most nationalistic, universalistic and cover-all policies in Nigeria’s history. Their opponents have been largely patriots of parochial regional behemoths who would oppose education for all and sideline merit and high standards in favour of quota and rotation of offices. Somehow, due to the power of the agitators, every dictator or coup leader had to have state creation as an additive to every agenda for national reconstruction. So to say, the difficulty of creating states in democratic dispensations, arising from strong constitutional strictures and the opposition to ethnicity by open and closet unitarians of radical and conservative hue, made it quite a task that only dictators and coup leaders could perform. The fear, and misunderstanding of ethnicity by a military that pursued national unity but was mired in a recruitment process based on regional and ethnic quota, ensured the presumptive promotion of several other distracted criteria for state creation. The principle of even development was inserted but within the formal avoidance of the ethnic imperative. State creation was soon cavalierly dispensed as a means of doing favours to whichever part of the geo-polity caught the fancy of the man on horseback. It became a cover for empowering friends and even spouses with new states. It was not based on any inter-subjective criteria. This made it quite a great source of antipathy, a real source of antipathy, beyond the mischief of Lugard and his colonial and native successors treating North and South as if they were separate countries. In order to help clarity, it is important not to forget how it happened: At Independence in 1960, there were three regions in Nigeria each dominated by a majority nationality group over sundry minorities. There was one large North over East and West, a lopsided architecture. In 1963, one region was created out of the West. In 1967, General Yakubu Gowon created six states for the South, six for the North, one for the Yoruba, one for the Igbo; thus creating a parity of number, if not balance. The Murtala/Obasanjo regime removed the parity by creating 10 states for the North and nine for the South. In 1987 Babangida created Katsina in the far North and AkwaIbom in the Southeast retaining the lack of parity 11:10 in favour of the North. Between the East and the West, a 5:5 balance existed although the Yoruba had 3 to 2 Igbo states. In 1991, 30 states were created. North 16, South 14. With Abuja being treated partially as a state, the North had 17 to 14 Southern States. In 1996 General Abacha added six states: North 20 South 17. The East had 9 and the West 8. So, four states in 1963, twelve in 1967, 19 in 1976, 21 in 1987, 30 in 1991 and 36 in 1996. The case of the local governments need not delay us too much: In 1970, as the war was ending, the local governments were 299 across the country. In 1979, they were increased to 301. An increase of the number to 480 in 1981 was cancelled by General Muhammadu Buhari, in his first coming as a military dictator in 1984 and reverted to 301. In 1987, with the creation of 21 states local governments were increased to 499, and to 589 with the creation of 30 states in 1991. In 1997, 774 local governments were created. In due course, Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory ended up with six local governments. Of interest is that by the creation of 36 states in 1997, the northern states had 421 local governments, the old Midwest had 44 local governments, one less than Kano with 45, and the six Yoruba states had 137 local governments. The old Eastern Region got 175 local governments out of which the minority states of the Niger Delta were given 80 and the Igbo speaking states 95 local governments. Something rather peculiar is that Lagos with a population of 9,013,534 was granted 20 local governments and Kano with 9,383,682 got 45 local governments. Kaduna with a presumed population of 6,066,582 has only 23 local governments; the same as Benue with a population of 4,219,244, Rivers with 5,185,400 and Sokoto with 3,696,999. This raises questions about the criteria used in the process of demarcating the local government areas. The hidden polemic of course is that the more local governments you have the more you get from the revenue allocation outside a proper fare of federalism. Understandably, just as the criteria for the creation of states entered a zone that lacked inter-subjective logic, the story is incomplete until it is realized that the local government system, financed directly from Federal coffers, became a rather whimsical means of simply carting federal largesse into preferred states. As more local governments have meant more money for state governments, so also have more state governments implied more largesse for former regions. This is why it has mattered so much how many more states to create in the North or South, in the West or East, in order not to unbalance a crudely lopsided system. More than this, from the standpoint of appraising the regionalism that has overtaken the creation of states, the more powers taken over by the federal government from the states, the more have states from the same old regions banded together in order to deploy the federal government in their own interests. Or better to say that since the use and misuse of federal power had become the means of determining who got what when and how, the struggle to hijack the federal government for regional pursuits became the core Nigerian game. It boiled down to struggles to enhance the power of the old regions as a means of overcoming national power. This is really what regionalism means, what it implicates. In a way, this led to the establishment in the Northern states of a common services commission, and the consistent holding of meetings of Governors of the North at all times through military and civilian administrations. It yielded a superstructure of Arewa elders and other civil society organizations which provided the model if not the instigation for the spread of rude regionalism across the country. The Southwest, so much beholding to Awolowo’s political estate, had no formalized approach but soon revamped the zone into a firm defensive regionalism as represented by Odua Investments. It has been given more impetus since the June 12 struggle, and since Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s successful resistance to impunity under Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency. Unlike the days of waiting for the sovereign national conference, stronger regionalist counsel has since filtered into the picture. The resistance to a national conference, sovereign or otherwise, has not prevented the Houses of Assembly and meetings of Governors across the south from brain-storming over the kind of constitutional arrangement under which they wish to be governed. The integration of the Southwest, the South South, and the South East, and other southern Nigerian caucuses has been given fillip in the face of an Arewa strategy turned into a predatory, beggar-my-neighbour policy [caption id="attachment_43867" align="alignright" width="400"] Lord Lugard[/caption] 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. [caption id="attachment_57004" align="alignright" width="620"] Obafemi Awolowo[/caption] 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. [caption id="attachment_49641" align="alignright" width="600"] A cattle herdsman [/caption] The case of the Fulani in different parts of the country, laying claim to a common identity and occupational standing as a basis for citizenship and freedom of movement calls for a special tact. Their demand to have the right to criss-cross state and regional boundaries as all Nigerians should have it, is uncontroversial. To insist on not belonging to a determinate state and having no formal accommodation of property laws across the states, is controversial. Although it is beyond the frame of this discussion, as it is more fully discussed elsewhere, the implication for regionalism of having an ethnic group, in the midst of many, seeking vehement cross-boundary capacity while others are being scattered and disordered away from settled contiguity, raises serious questions. It amounts to a deliberate dis-establishment of some nationalities as has happened since herdsmen upgraded from sticks to Kalashnikovs, virtually announcing the irrelevance of constituted authority. One rational solution, generally proposed, is for herdsmen to build ranches in states with which they share cultural empathy. This would allow for a grand industry centred on meat processing and dairy products, the making of leather-ware, handbags and shoes, and sundry confectioneries. The assumption is that only in an area where the herdsmen have cultural empathy would they be able to sustain such an industry. To remove the itinerant factor that has yielded a grating effect leading to inter-ethnic and inter-religious violence, is an answer that needs to be engaged. In the same way that a Fulani cultural geography can be contemplated, an Ekiti rationale could be imagined for the Ekiti in the North to be in the same state with the Ekiti in the South; the Osun in the North to be in the same state with the Osun in the South. The North/South divide can then be squelched for good and be effectively removed from the illogics of Nigerian politics. In the same manner, it is to be expected that the Nupe and Gbagyi persuasion, as geography and culture, can be figured before thinking of a regionalist framework that can accommodate them. Before regionalism overwhelms the picture, it is important that the long repressed necessity for ethnically homogenous people to be in the same state be given a formal threshing across the country. It calls for meticulous re-demarcation of local governments and state boundaries. By the way, I have used the examples of Nupe and Gbagyi because these are states that are yet to be created and which would be forever muzzled into silence unless there is a conscious effort to resist the ethnocide buried not just in unitarism across the country but within the regionalist framework. At any rate, before presuming to know more than what the people want for themselves, one good ground for dissenting from regionalism is provided by the case of the Gbagyi people. They have been so badly done in by majority group gerrymandering from colonial times that there ought to be a national movement to free them from internal colonialism. As it happened, the Gbagyi defeated a British imperial expedition and thereafter had their putative capital Gusoro marked for punitive pacification/demolition. All modern amenities including schools were denied the people for a long time. The establishment of Kaduna as a capital had taken a swipe of their territory and seven decades later, the movement of the national capital to the centre of the country, Abuja, took another swipe off their territory. They have been scattered across five states although, being contiguous, they ought all to be in one state of their own. Who is so threatened by the putative solidarity of the Gbagyi that they don’t want to see them together in a state of their own? The same question can be asked for the Idoma, the Kanuri, and even for supposedly homogenous majority groups like the Igbo, the Yoruba and the Hausa. After seven decades of supposedly detribalized fun-fooling with creation of unviable states, it was time to properly delineate ethnic boundaries so that even ethnicity-based regionalism, as the Yoruba champions have been rooting for, does not amount to a cavalier dissolution of cohesion of its constituent units – the Ekiti, Ondo, Osun, Egba, Ijebu and Oyo. Nor is it such a sanguine pose to discount the cultural distinctiveness of the Ogoja, the Tivi, and Idoma, the Urhobo, the Kanuri and the Igbo West of the Niger. Regionalism that frustrates the self-expression and self-governance of these groups, and more, may ascribe a scientific and universalistic criteria to itself but it will be just another wispy venture, changing for the sake of change. Otherwise, state creation that accommodates such groups within a positive self-expression will always prove superior to regionalism that discounts them. This is saying, in essence, that until a proper delineation of the ethnic boundaries has been done, and states created for viability, all talk about regionalism is putting the cart before the horse. Talking about delineation of cultural boundaries, it is unseemly to let people who have no respect for the cultural distinctiveness of other Nigerians be allowed to decide for them how to celebrate their identities. This is not merely about humouring some maverick statistical prescription for state creation and regionalism; it should be made a matter of principle; that is, where the smallness of an ethnic fraction suggests no more than a local government within a state, appropriate safeguards for minding the cultural integrity of the group should be devised. The implication is to have all Nigerians live in freedom irrespective of the smallness of their group. Surely, for Nigeria to be free, all the ethnic groups and nationalities within the country must be free, not living under duress or internal colonialism even if deodorized as regionalism. The hallowed truth is that regionalism is as indifferent to ethnic self-governance as unitarism is. This was why Governor Odumegwu Ojukwu of Eastern Nigeria won at Aburi a fight he was bound to lose at home against minority elements across Nigeria who did not accept regionalism that gave autonomy and resource control to the Eastern, Western, Northern, and Midwestern regions but did not consider that many minority ethnic groups were smarting under baneful regionalism. Across the decades, many loud-mouthed, closet unitarists masquerading as regionalists have continued like Ojukwu, to assume that once they have taken care of their own through regionalism they do not need to bother with the identity of others. Goodluck to their indifference! Fortunately for the rest of us, they can only exercise their tact with our connivance or cooperation. And, not to realize that every solution implicates all of us at the same time is actually one albatross around the neck of the current agitation for restructuring. For that matter, once resource control is within the reach of every created state or region, the exercise of hegemony over the country by one region or a combination of states will become less disruptive of self-governance by all nationalities in the country. The truth, which bears repeating again and again, is that the overcoming of resource control, through the undue beefing up of the Exclusive Legislative List by Federal Might, has been the factor at the base of the unviability of states. Whereas all states are obliged to make contributions to the maintenance of the federal system as a mandatory factor in the commonwealth, it was time to decide to free all comers, all states, from the veto exercised by those insisting on killing the Niger Delta instead of having a masterplan for restitution of what has been literally stolen from the area. Now that the era of oil is ending what shall we tell those who suffered biocide and all forms of civic and environmental degradation, to keep the rest of the country in lordly ease and largesse? If Nigeria will starve or combust without dependence on the wealth of the Niger Delta, then it must be a matter to be tackled without the arrogance that has so far been displayed by the internal colonialists in charge of the federal governments since the war. Let us face it: that arrogance is evident in the ugly face of the exercise of hegemony over the whole South South that has enabled the establishment, supposedly for the benefit of the oil producing states, of Federal quangos like OMPADEC , ritually given less than a fifth of their due funding for the purpose of correcting what revenue allocation was meant to, but never addressed. The N6.04 billion due to OMPADEC suffered truncation to the point of non-payment but the creation of a Petroleum Trust Fund, enjoying a grant of N134 billion for ameliorating conditions, mainly in the North, that should have been left to normal revenue allocation/fiscal schemes, was achieved. The successor quango to OMPADEC, called Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, has had no better format than its predecessor. It has fallen into a majority group trick for giving the impression of taking care of wards, oil producers, that ought to, but were not allowed access to their due share of revenues. Or, allowed into the sanctum of oil-moguls and oil-bloc emperors. Putting in these terms makes one forget that it is simply wrong, in fact, evil, to dash other people’s hometowns and seaward environments to people who have no empathy for the areas. How can a country make injustice so alive and brag about it? Otherwise, there is no reason why the poverty of the North should not have been put on the table and discussed in the same way that a proper Niger Delta Masterplan should have been roaded long ago in a formal bid to ensure that no part of Nigeria is left behind. It seems a form of brigandage was asserted as a statutory right which enabled regionalism to climb on the bonnet of progress across the country, raising militancy of one kind or another, that has remained the lowest common denominator of responses to heinous unfairness. Only too well known, for that matter, is that the Land Use Decree and the Petroleum Act remain the instruments that an unjust Federation has used to repress the regions, taking what belongs to them, without giving anything in return but punitive and grand designs at further pacification. Consequently, a schizoid culture has subsisted across our history, aimed, not at the ideal of allowing every citizen that has a unique gift to be encouraged to develop and enhance its use, but merely, decidedly, making Nigeria poorer by wrecking the advantages that one side or the other may possess. It is a case of making Nigeria poorer without making anyone else better; as if what makes a state or ethnic group unique must be destroyed in order for others to catch up or feel comfortable. The term that best accommodates all the issues involved is resource control. It is a way of appreciating what is unique about every part of Nigeria in the sense in which the position of Lagos as a national harbour and former capital, deserves to be continually upgraded as a national strategy. groundnut pyramids, when it comes back, ought to be granted leverages as national assets. Talking about a national asset does not imply control by the federal government. It is to draw attention to the rationale for all of us to provide protection and coverage for them in the scheme of things. The core concern is that the state that bears a good or a gift should mind it but make requisite contributions to the federal state. I take this as uncontroversial. Every local government and every state should hold all wealth within its authority and coverage for itself on behalf of the federation, pay taxes and learn to realize that the competition between states within the country is secondary to the competition betweeen Nigerian and many foreign countries including those that are only too willing to lend us money to buy from them on terms that are, properly speaking, simply too imperialistic for discussion.