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