[caption id="attachment_49461" align="alignright" width="580"] Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò[/caption] By Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò It has been a while since last I contributed to the discussion of the idea of restructuring in Nigeria in the Nigerian press. [ [https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2016/08/11/time-call-question-biafra/] [https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2016/06/16/want-federalism-fight/] [https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2016/08/11/time-to-call-the-question-of-biafra/][https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2016/06/16/you-want-federalism-fight-for-it/]. Restructuring continues to sit atop the public discourse respecting how to move the country forward. What has become increasingly clear is that there is a lot of wisdom we can glean from the Yorùbá proverb that says: it is with the slivers in the folds of the wrap that we begin the business of eating òlèlè/móínmóín. In this series of articles, I take my cue from this wisdom. We need to begin with the small things that hold analogies with the big thing we desire to comprehend. My basic argument is that everyone has been so focused on restructuring as if it were limited to only the grosser political sphere, there is barely any recognition that restructuring in other areas of our collective lives that would be considered minor has not only been proceeding apace. It has been characterized by remarkable, indisputable success that has redounded to our collective well-being and individual welfare. In this first part, we focus on two areas of our collective lives that have witnessed restructuring—one with a positive outcome; the other with a negative result—but both providing solid analogies for how better to understand the idea of restructuring. These are the entertainment industry and the education sector, respectively. In the second and final part, we explore the rarely discussed conceptual conundrums that underlie the phenomenon of restructuring especially where it concerns the exigencies of federalism. Let us consider the entertainment industry. For those of us who grew up in the sixties of the last century, we are quite familiar with Hubert Ogunde, Kola Ogunmola, DuroLadipo, Moses Adejumo, Akin Ogungbe, and OyinAdejobi, to mention a few. They were the giants of Nigerian theatre of Yorùbá inflection despite having no formal training beyond their basic education. But it is not their greatness or their sterling contributions to the development of theatre and the evolution of Nigeria’s booming movie industry that rivet us. What calls for comment was the mode of operation that dominated the entertainment industry back then. Here is a list of titans in another neck of the entertainment woods: Sunny Ade, Ebenezer Obey, I.K. Dairo, Idowu Animashaun, Prince Adekunle, Dele Abiodun, Ojoge Daniel, to limit myself to Jùjú music. Certainly, all these artistes fronted collectives that were their bands and troupes. But, one and all, the leaders were the composers, the choreographers, conductors, and so on, all rolled into one. I am sure that many of their band/troupe members contributed original ideas and helped in diverse ways to produce the artifacts by which their respective groups came to be known. Still, the leader was everything. Now, no one would deny that the model worked and gave us the names we just reeled out above. Simultaneously, given what happened later, one can reasonably aver that that success was severely limited, that the model never really allowed for an economy of scale and, most importantly, many talented individuals with diverse capacities and abilities to shine in specific areas of their arts never had the chance to develop themselves and, by so doing, multiply the possibilities inherent in their respective industries and genres. What’s all this got to do with restructuring? A lot, as we shall see presently. No doubt, it is hard to argue that the system that produced the titans of the arts mentioned above was a failure. And that is not my point. But, if we assimilate the legends to the center and their associates to the constituent units in a federal system, such was the dominance of the titans that only few of their subordinates made it on their own. Those who did only managed to do so through conflict and very rarely did they make it for as long as that system persisted. Think here, for those in the know, of the divergent careers of LerePaimo and Bob Aladeniyi. This is not to ignore the fact that Sunny Ade started out with Moses Adejumo and Ebenezer Obey had a stint with Fatai Rolling Dollar. But it is noteworthy that they left their leaders early and can never really be said to have become likely stars in their original band or troupe. Fast forward to the eighties of the last century. Sunny Ade started crediting some of his bandmembers for co-writing songs with him. That is, he began to take seriously the importance of separating roles and allowing his band members to take due credit for their artistic personal contributions to the whole. From an orientation where the leader was an embodiment of the whole and the members were, practically, nothing except instruments of the leader, we began to witness the entry of one that took separation seriously and recognized the integrity of the parts/members and their autonomy. Songs were not just the leader’s, irrespective of what substantive contributions may have come from members—think of how solos are registered and attributed in jazz ensembles—some songs began to have more than one composer in Sunny Ade’s band, to continue with our example. The real breakthrough, though, came from the video industry. The pioneers here, too, started out trying to be everything, especially when it came to casting, producing, and acting. Over time, the technological imperatives started asserting themselves. Lighting on stage is not the same as lighting in the open or in a forest; the demands of the small screen and the constraints of the videocassette led to separation of functions; and expertise in discrete domains became inescapable. The result is that the video industry began to undermine the solo-leader-centred model of making art in the performing arts. From the previous model of the leader uniting everything in himself—they were mostly male—the new model was marked by a palpable decentralization. Consequently, all those whose contributions used to be tucked into the success of the leader began to not only be recognized but also to be paid for their respective contributions to the making of their artistic objects. Separation and specialization heralded an exponential growth in the entertainment industry. That is, the Nigerian entertainment industry restructured. No, there were no great debates. People just began to do their own thing and letting the market and those willing to risk funding them—the producers and marketers—decide their fortunes. Marquees began to emerge and the division of labour in arts and entertainment became highly sophisticated. From an era in which the leader did everything, we emerged into one in which we now have a panoply of different experts. We now have producers of sound and pictures, engineers, trainers, script writers and, a new category, script improvers, lyricists, songwriters, light designers, script editors, light technicians, sound editors, script editors, photographers, videographers; the list goes on. From an era when Art Alade was one of the few impresarios and comperes around, we now have an era in which MCs not only abound, they make good living on their presentation skills. I am leaving out the explosion in comedy which is even more noted for separation than the rest of the arts except for poetry. What does all this mean? With the freeing up of the creative energies of the federating units of the republic of arts and entertainment, such was the explosion in the productivity of the sector that it vaulted Nigeria’s economy into the biggest in Africa. We must not forget that this was done despite the execrable efforts of Ibrahim Babangida to turn the Performing Musicians’ Association of Nigeria (PMAN) into a federal parastatal! This is an example of restructuring that could even be dubbed anarchic. The stifling centralization of the arts and entertainment industry was subverted by a surreptitious but very effective restructuring that unleashed the energies of the federating units and prospered the world within and beyond Nigeria. But, as you may have noticed, I do not see any underside to the process of restructuring in the republic of the arts. The only underside to all this is the part that successive administrations ought to have taken care of: enacting and enforcing effective anti-piracy laws for the protection of intellectual property. This they have failed to do and the reason for that failure, too, may partly owe to the need for restructuring of the polity. This will be addressed in a later piece. Let us now consider the education sector.The sphere of education is the exact reverse of what took place in the entertainment industry. In the first case, the industry expanded outwards; in the second, the sector constricted to the point of collapse. In the education sphere, a thriving structure fell victim to the crudities of unimaginative military rulers and their intellectual aiders and abettors, especially in the universities. The outcome is what we have now: a rigid, centralized structure run by equally unimaginative, power-hungry intellectuals afflicted with terminal cases of jobbery and time-serving. They are incapable of shame at presiding over an education system that consistently fails its beneficiaries [victims?] and the humanity they are trained to serve within and beyond Nigeria. But I am getting ahead of myself. Again, I take us back to the sixties and seventies of the last century. There used to be what were called grant-aided schools founded by voluntary agencies. These were mostly mission and community-owned schools. The regional governments, then, were responsible for the salaries of the teachers in such schools. For the rest, the schools were funded from the fees paid by students and subventions from their sponsors. Then, there were federal and state-owned colleges. As well, local governments owned and ran teacher training and vocational and technical colleges. In short, a medley of schools and other training institutions owned by diverse agencies dotted the country’s landscape. Finally, there were schools owned by private proprietors who ran their schools as profit-making enterprises from primary to secondary levels. The Inspectorate was the glue that held everything together back then where government participation was concerned. Yes, government, through the respective ministries of education had, as part of the bureaucracy, solid inspectorate divisions staffed by competent professionals doing due diligence overseeing teacher competence, effective administration, and overall quality of instruction given in the schools. The inspectorate resident in the ministries of education was complemented by equivalents within the voluntary agencies that ran schools. The Anglican Church, too, had its own inspectorate charged with quality control within its parochial school system. The entire system was marked by decentralization and each region managed its own affairs and the federal ministry of education was concerned solely with federal institutions, period. Local governments were responsible, for the most part, for primary education. Each region had a coterie of technical/vocational schools, again established by governments and voluntary agencies, and colleges of technology and polytechnics were state affairs duly moderated and superintended by their respective ministries of education. Meanwhile, all secondary schools were superintended by their Boards of Governors, as they were styled then, made up of civic-minded citizens with differing levels of connection to the schools they served but motivated mostly by their interest in being associated with illustrious institutions turning out alumni/alumnae they could be proud of. It is important to point out that those who served on those boards bore fiduciary responsibilities for the institutions they superintended and state governments, too, were not the little gods that the military turned them into while military misrule lasted. Higher education was not exempted. The federal government ran two universities, Ibadan and Lagos, respectively, and the Yaba College of Technology and a handful of colleges of education and technical education. There was a Higher Education Division within the Federal Ministry of Education that served as a clearing house for issues pertaining to those institutions. For the rest, their Governing Councils held sway over them. The regional universities, too, were under their governing councils which answered to the regional political authorities. Contemporary discussions of the problems facing higher education in Nigeria often refer to this period as a sort of golden age. It seems as if many forget, especially many of my generation, that, thanks to this widespread decentralization of education and its governance across the country, it was an era marked by extreme competition amongst the many levels, institutions, regions, and models involved in the educational enterprise. The University of Nigeria, Nsukka, under the inspiration of its principal sponsors—Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kingsley Mbadiwe, NwaforOrizu, MbonuOjike, and others—borrowed from the American education system and pioneered the semester system, the Cumulative Grade Point Average right down to what the more stolid British-inflected University of Ibadan denizens derided as “grade inflation” with its grading system. The north, through Ahmadu Bello University, pioneered the School of Basic Studies as a pre-matriculation preparatory step to full enrollment for students who would otherwise not be eligible for straight admission to the university. That did not stop many of its graduates becoming titans in their respective fields. And for a glorious while in the seventies, ABU had the top Architecture and Pharmacy programmes in the country. The University of Ife was where the experiment in mother-tongue education at the primary level was pioneered to great acclaim. Its medical school introduced a two-part system under which all the students first earned a first degree in the basic health sciences, studying together and being trained as a team in simulation of how their real life professional engagements would unfold post-graduation before proceeding to their respective specialties. Ife’s Pharmacy school would later challenge ABU’s preeminence by incorporating the study of and research into indigenous herbal remedies into its instructional regime. The military came in and the destruction began. The centralizing proclivities coded into the military’s DNA, coupled with the pragmatic exigencies of issuing and obeying orders in circumstances where simple mistakes can mean death for many, led it to begin the process, even if unwitting, of dismantling the decentralized mode of operation that had served well the federal system it inherited post-coup in 1966. No, there was no inevitability to what followed. But it so happened that the military misrulers drew to themselves intellectuals and political operators more attuned to saying yes to the military’s little thought-out schemes. In the name of a bastard unity that was badly tested by a bloody civil war, our intellectuals in and out of universities and in the political sphere were willing to go along with insane levels of centralization in all areas the horrible consequences of which is palpable in the virtual collapse and bankruptcy of the education system that we are all witnessing today. First, it was the universities. Under the pretext of administrative convenience, the creation of new states in 1976 was the occasion for taking over regional universities. Certainly, federalizing them was not the only option or even the best one. Many other institutions, for example, the Odua Group of Companies, were left for the new states to figure out what to do with them. And the Interim Common Services Agency took care of northern outfits that used to be owned by the defunct Northern Region. Soon the behemoth that is the National Universities Commission (NUC) was crafted from the old Higher Education Division of the Federal Ministry of Education and it kept adding powers that have no legal legs to stand on in a proper federal system. It morphed from a clearing house with advisory responsibilities to the omnipotent and omniscient institution it pretends to be today pronouncing on how many buildings a proprietor must have before being granted a licence to operate a university to determining benchmarks for post-graduate degree curricula for all degree-awarding institutions in Nigeria. Not even communist China allows such a monster to run its higher education! Unfortunately, it is hard convincing people, despite evidence palpable to all, that the more power accrued to the NUC the lower the university system has sunk. It is the poster child for the defects of centralization run amok! The proliferation of unity schools deepened federal participation in retail education that is best left to local initiatives. The creation of the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) completed the unwarranted decimation of local control of and participation in the most basic of education retail: primary education. If there is one area where participation by all and sundry is to be encouraged, it is the education sphere. As long as the federating units—local government, states, missions and individuals—were agitated by the fate of their children and exercised by what kind of education their wards were receiving and in what physical spaces, and they knew that they had primary responsibility for the state of both, they were engaged with their schools, knew the teachers personally and were probably fellow congregants in the same churches or mosques and were more inclined to contribute willingly to the cost of running the schools. Successful schools turning out successful pupils was a source of pride both for the schools and the teachers who run them, the communities in which they are located, and the people who live in them. Beyond civic pride, the schools competed with one another and we who attended them proclaimed our loyalties and did all we could to fly their banners. This was truer of high schools where certain principals so put their personal stamp on their schools that we who attended such schools under their care and superintendence are all too happy to identify ourselves as their wards! Different schools birthed different traditions that formed their respective lore and they all took a thousand and one routes to attaining educational distinction for their graduates. The education was comprehensive. Sports competitions became the subject of lore and certain cohorts marked their eras by who were the champion athletes, the best goalkeepers, the most accomplished bowlers, netballers, and so on. I can go on. Manic centralization meant the levelling of differences, less participation by previously active constituencies, an apathy that reflected in the fact that people began to think that manna would always come from the federal heaven and all they need do is to be on the right side of the federal might. The creative diversity that used to mark the operation of all levels of education, especially the universities, fell victim to the puerile apparatchik mentalities of pretend geniuses that often helm an alphabet soup of federal parastatals: NUC, NUBTE, UBEC, JAMB, and so on. The irony is that the more centralization was foisted on the education sector, the more chaotic it became, and the less quality attended its products. Let us recapitulate. We have seen how centralization gave way to the equivalent of federalism, properly construed, in the entertainment industry and there was nothing not to like in the outcome. And how, in the sphere of education, federalism succumbed to the false promise of centralization and it has been, on balance, an ill wind that blows no one any good. From both, we discern a sort of bidirectional indication of how restructuring might unfold. At the heart of it all are constricting effects of overcentralization. In the case of education, we remark the apathy-inducing complications of separating constituencies from owning and contributing to the development of institutions that affect their lives and, more importantly, the lives of their children. [caption id="attachment_49461" align="alignright" width="580"] Olúfé?mi Táíwò[/caption] There are certain assumptions lurking beneath the phenomenon of restructuring that often are not identified much less factored into the equation of the discourse around it. We elicit those assumptions and explore them in this final part. Restructuring presupposes a structure the shape of which is meant to be altered at the end of the process. There is a further assumption that the structure involved is a composite one made up of two or more parts. Given this, one of the exigencies we must deal with concerns what ought to be the relationship between and among the different parts comprising the whole in question. The analogy we draw from the two complex areas is quite instructive. When the titans of the entertainment industry united what are otherwise separable and separate functions in themselves, yes, they attained great heights, but at the price of stifling creativity, forcing unhealthy relationships—enmity-inflected splits, disruptive legal disputes, etc.—and overall denying their audiences the full possibilities of heterogeneity and heterodoxy, even with the inevitable problems and difficulties—conflicts, for instance—that come in their wake. Let us now delve into the assumptions that are at the base of restructuring in the Nigerian case. What are the components of the political structure called Nigeria that require that modifications be made? We have a federal government, 36 state governments, and, at least, 775 local governments and only goodness knows how many more mimic units in their own rights. The armed forces run their own school system, for instance. Unfortunately, because no attention is paid to the assumptions that are at work in any federal system, much of the ongoing debate on restructuring focuses on only one—federal/state—of those multiple relationships and even too much of that focus turns on sharing the proverbial “national cake”. Meanwhile, it is a mark of how much the complexity of the idea of restructuring eludes us that for many, what preoccupies them is the sharing of the cake, it is rarely ever about producing it. This is easily explained. Because the greater part of our understanding of Nigeria’s wealth is in terms of natural resources and nature is reduced to geography, the issue turns on who should have the lion’s share of the proceeds of selling natural resources found in specific locations across the country. Derivation looms disproportionately large in the discussion because what is at issue is nature-derived cake. Our nature fetish makes the issue a lot simpler than it is. I often wonder why the argument for derivation is not made for Value Added Taxes (VAT). Is it because this cannot be “owned” by the states in which they are collected? There is something ironic about this situation. When it is natural, the location owns it; when it is produced, the people whose collective genius put together the system that is so productive don’t. Whereas, in a sense, relating to inert nature that we exploit may seem easy, dealing with constituencies that are responsible for creating the wealth that is subject to VAT and other taxes is sure to be more, if I may say so, taxing [all puns intended]. Taxpayers are neither inert nor a monolith. They are individuals organized, in many instances, in groups. The occurrence of organized groups does not in any way eliminate the presence of individuals or obviate the need to pay attention to their preferences in customizing the relationship between the state, the groups, and the individuals involved. Restructuring, properly conceived, must account for its constituent elements. For one thing, the very clear lines of geography that defined the original structure at independence and the open debates, pre-independence, on what the relationship should be between the federal centre and the three regions enabled a structure that recognized its constituent units and the boundaries—geographical, political, economic and even cultural—they shared. Within the component units, too, there were subdivisions marked by divisions and municipalities that themselves mimicked federal relations within their own boundaries. Finally, municipalities and villages had their own boundaries within which they exercised relatively autonomous powers. What was distinctive about this period was that Nigerians and their leaders debated what structure the country would have and, more importantly, what would be the relationships between the different units and their respective inhabitants. The outcomes of those debates were validated by popular elections. Notable was the insistence of one of the principal leaders who also became our foremost theorist of federalism, Obafemi Awolowo, that Nigeria must be further divided not so much for the purposes of development or administrative convenience, but respect for the integrity and autonomy of the constituting nations that make up the state called Nigeria. It was the basis of his insistence that the federation concocted by the British colonialists and which they practically blackmailed the leaders to embrace or else postpone the realization of independence was fatally flawed. One unit was bigger than the other two combined which meant that the other parts of the federation were forever vulnerable to the preferences of the dominant region. Second, there was more to being a people than region and all the regions, including the one everyone thought Awolowo favoured, were multinational characterized by the presence of a plurality of nationalities whose cultural heritages must not be sacrificed to the new contraption cobbled together by outsiders. On this score, Awolowo argued that all national groups were equal and their capacity for self-determination should be recognized. The best way to do so was to have a federal structure where the federating units were organized anchored on nationalities and mutual consent to live together with rules agreed respecting their mutual interactions and disposition of their resources, what their citizens owe one another, and so on. No, I do not wish to litigate the sorry history of how that argument was turned against him and only his “base”—Western Region—ended up being carved up for purely political reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with the principles he canvassed for creating a better structure for Nigeria. The important point was that the tradition of dividing the country, of restructuring without rhyme or reason, was thereby inaugurated. Then, again, the army came in! Since the first and subsequent coups in the country, restructuring has been continuous though it has remained on the no-rhyme, no-reason trajectory till now. It has all had to do, geographically, with whoever had the ear of the military ruler at any given time. Yes, the expansion to 19 states came closest to carving up the country along lines suggested by Awolowo. But that only lasted for so long. The present 36-state structure follows no discernible logic in its construction. Problem #1. As we noted above, geography is the littlest part of putting together a solid federal structure. Of greater importance is the medley of relations between the centre and the federating units; the inhabitants that make up the polity, the citizens, and the geographical spaces they inhabit and what resources inhere in those spaces, and so on. The conceptualizations of these relationships are the real meat and potatoes of any structure and they are the ones that have most fatally afflicted the discourse of restructuring as it continues to unfold in the Nigerian public space. Successive civilian administrations have persisted in playing ostrich when it comes to the inoperability of the bastard federal structure bequeathed by our country’s military. From a structure in which each constituent unit had its integrity and autonomy recognized and made the basis of negotiations over all the relationships we iterated previously, the military erased all integrity and autonomy and substituted states that are more like military divisions and less like quasi-republics that true federations embody. In the original structure, there was a recognition and celebration of difference. Each region was adjudged different from the others. Each had a sense of itself in terms of identity, fully apprised of its capacities and possessed of a vision of who its members are, and what life they consider is best for them within the ambience of a federation of units characterized by formal equality and recognition of one another’s identity, autonomy and integrity. The most significant problem is that, at present, we have units with no identity, no vision of who they are, almost sundered from their inherent possibilities, and severally incapable of claiming, much less, operationalizing, any autonomy. Now, each of the qualities just mentioned depends on the whims, caprices, and personalities of whoever happens to be governor at a given time and whether the party he represents controls the centre or is at variance with same. Nigerian states are now no more than wards in a large village that pretends to be a republic. Our intellectuals now are so petrified of acknowledging that federalism and conflict are inseparable that anyone who asks that states recover autonomy and fight to activate it is immediately accused of canvassing the break-up of the country. It is why we foolishly abide a one-size fits all in everything that is responsible for the collapse of all our major systems. We live under a nondescript constitution foisted on the polity by the military and abided by bankrupt politicians aided by their intellectual enablers which makes state governors act as if they are subordinate officers in military formations. Our “democratic” president pays “state visits” to states and public holidays are declared, reception parties are mobilized, and state economies shut down! Just as in military days, governors have “Oga on top” and are not, as they should be, in their respective states, the final authorities in tandem with their state assemblies. State “First Ladies” are ranked by their husbands’ “ranking” with the “Oga on top” in Aso Rock and are all too happy to be errand women for their own “Oga on top” also known as the First Lady. This should not surprise anybody. The return of civilian rule should have been marked by the equivalent of the kinds of constitutional conventions that heralded the original structure at independence. Instead of stepping into the levelling world of the military and the infinite substitutability of states for one another, we ought to have insisted on states striving to define themselves and together establishing the rules of engagement with one another in the context of a federal structure. This, too, would have forced states to deal with their own heterogeneities and craft appropriate modes of governance that do not trash pluralism across board. Appropriate lessons would have been drawn from antecedents within individual regions with relevant principles for bilateral and multilateral relations between and amongst states established, away from the purview of the federal government. There would have been clear demarcation of where states are coordinate with the federal and where the federal would be superior to the states. Right now, states are permanently subordinate to the federal. That is by no means even a bad federal system. Simply put, it is no federal system at all. Such is the unthinking that afflicts our approach to restructuring that hardly anyone in any state thinks of pulling their higher education institutions out of the orbit and authority of JAMB, NUC, NUBTE and their secondary and primary schools from the sway of UBEC or any of the other misbegotten pseudo-federal bureaucracies manufactured by the military because they were consistent with the streamlining and centralizing stratagems of military formations. Doubtless, military formation is an extremely bad model for the complexities of federal systems characterized by pluralism of diverse sorts. The cause of efficiency is not served when states cannot do much without federal approval and the purse strings are so firmly held at the federal level that the very idea of state autonomy is clearly meaningless. The situation is not helped by the restless run of apparatchik governors who are convinced that states are party divisions and they are mere ciphers for the president who is the head of their party whose whims they must conform to. Lost in the shuffle is any awareness of the loss of local initiative symbolized by the death of local government, especially in the demise of cities that usually are the engines of modern economies. Our cities are headless and small towns have no ambition to become bigger by creating better life prospects for those who might wish to move to them. We don’t build cities; cities happen, again, without rhyme or reason. Genuine restructuring must start from a philosophical orientation that has for its cornerstone the autonomy and integrity of the entities that make up the pluralism of the structure to be reordered. It must take seriously the independent energies and creativities of the federating units that would yield the kind of efflorescence that we identified in the first part dealing with the entertainment industry. It must enable the kind of heterogeneous flourishing that characterized the education industry that we discussed also in the first part of this series. Outside of for-profit institutions now curated by businesspersons, the stifling centralization of schools, via government ownership, has led to the death of local initiatives, funding by voluntary agencies, and community ownership which, in their diverse ways, expanded both access to and availability of decent, even superb schools in the past. I hope that this piece has reminded us of the fact that there is a lot more to restructuring than is at present being canvassed in the discourse around it. • Olu´fe?´mi Ta´i´wo` teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.