Then there came Nero [II]

By their nature, some of the likely conference issues will, no doubt, prove ‘no-go’ even if they are formally declared not so, and one of the most emotive of these is the issue of resource control. Resources within the borders of Nigeria are a collective national patrimony belonging to the nation and the people within […]

By their nature, some of the likely conference issues will, no doubt, prove ‘no-go’ even if they are formally declared not so, and one of the most emotive of these is the issue of resource control. Resources within the borders of Nigeria are a collective national patrimony belonging to the nation and the people within it. What conferred this right of ownership in Nigerians was the decision to form this nation and, especially, the struggle that made this possible. In the end, the real motive behind all the calls for a so-called sovereign national conference is the issue of money, and that may explain why it all started as a struggle for resource control. And resource control has often been stated as an absolute right.
But if people in the South-South had wanted to control and own the resources within the area they inhabited, they should have resisted British onslaught and its colonial occupation like Ethiopia did Italy, for instance; or they should have fought for their independence on their own platform. In both cases they wouldn’t have had to have anything to do with Nigeria. They would have become Ogoni Republic, as Dr Bala Usman once said. But they didn’t, and the struggle that brought back to Chief Dappa Biriye those treaties on the strength of which Niger Delta chiefs signed away the Niger Delta to the British was waged by Nigerian nationalists, students and trade unionists. And that was why the people of the delta found themselves in Nigeria.
The same principle on which people in the South-South, for instance, base their claim to and demand for land and indigeneship in the North is the same principle that entitles people in the North and South to the oil in the East; for, without it, there is no basis for common nationhood.
The best that can be done about resource control is to perfect a revenue allocation formula, which, for the moment, is lopsided in favour of the federal centre and against the principle of derivation as obtained in the First Republic; reinstate the ill-advisedly scrapped onshore-offshore dichotomy;
While the past probably doesn’t have the right to decide the destiny of the future in perpetuity, it is clear that whoever wishes to change the current reality needs to be either strong enough to overthrow it or be persuasive enough to convince all Nigerians to peacefully accept a new orthodoxy. But the real problem is that you cannot control what isn’t yours.
But how should Nigeria look? In view of the fact that the current state-structure has failed and can never be made to work, there is an urgent need to redesign the country; but certainly not in the image of the so-called geopolitical zones. The South-South Zone, for instance, doesn’t make sense in geography or history; nor in ethnic homogeneity, cultural affinity or even plain lexical grammar; for, what is the south of south? Unless it happens to be the express desire of all the peoples in that zone to be put in that hotchpotch of territory, its creation as an administrative unit will create more problems that it will ever solve.
For viability and history, the best option for restructuring the country is to go back to the regions, and perhaps make allowance only for the creation of a Middle Belt in the North. Creating this belt will be quite an unfortunate and a very sad development for togetherness, but elites have succeeded in creating insoluble problems where none existed before. And if excising and merging parts of Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Taraba, Nasarawa and Kogi states with minor adjustments here and there will bring peace to the North, it will be well worth it. And so, with five new regions Nigeria will have the chance to begin anew —and there is really no defensible reason for separating the North East from the North West, except that Dr Alex Ekwueme once dreamt about it.
But in the end, it is not just creating the right state-structure, federalism depends on there being constitutionally-guaranteed divisions of power among federating units and the centre; and in order to ensure accountability, at both the centre and states, there being real, definitive and effective power-sharing among the three arms of governance. For Nigeria in particular, this requires a relatively weak centre and, in order to obviate corruption, a totally decentralised presidency.
As to the people’s constitution the best that could be said about it was that there was the 1963 constitution which was the product of not one but a series of constitutional and, in view of their predating the creation of the Nigerian nation-state, sovereign national conferences. Beginning in the 1920’s but especially at the 1951 Ibadan Conference, representatives of the Nigerian people met after wide-ranging consultations from the grassroots right up to the national level and agreed on the constitution the country would have.
The problem of making an acceptable for Nigeria would seem to have been solved in 1951 and 1954 when the representatives of the people of Nigeria wrote their own constitution and decided that federalism would be their preferred system of governance. And if the military had not struck—a strike that they even call a revolution in some quarters—the issue of resource control would not have arisen at all; because it would today have stood at 50 per cent derivation on onshore oil wells. Both these two problems are purely constitutional issues, and they could be solved constitutionally without putting an unstable and restive polity at further risk.
If the goal today is really a people’s constitution—and the people’s constitution is not just a document made in their name, it must reflect their history aspirations—there is nothing better than going back to the 1963 constitution; and the mere fact of doing this will not only satisfy the demand for a people’s document, it will, in addition, serve to return the country to a system that is better, cheaper, more democratically representative and much more suited to the national temperament—the parliamentary system that soldiers mistakenly held responsible for all the immediate post-independence malaise.
It was precisely because of military incursion in governance that the nation has been unable to gain experience or been able to mature in the street wisdom of nation-building, with its nationhood still a miserable work-in-progress and itself not yet a proper nation: and it subsists only because this primitive non-nationhood imposed on it is quite beneficial to the nation’s cult of elitism. Though tribe and tongue have differed, brotherhood has still not arrived; and it is still rule of the tribe.
But what is difficult to understand is the oft-repeated charge of bad governance, which in absolute terms may be accurate but not in the context of relative national terms. Without sounding parochial, but taking our experience of Nigeria’s leaders as guide, it is not out of place now to say that whatever else anyone might say about the Hausa-Fulani, only a person from their cultural setting—and this has no tribal or ethnic connotations—will rule Nigeria and be able to embrace all as his own. Just as Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, General Yakubu Gowon, General Murtala Mohammed, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Muhammadu Buhari, General Ibrahim Babangida and General Abdulsalami Abubakar did. You didn’t hear any Arewa Agenda being part of their programme, contrasted against Ironsi’s hasty unitary Igbo-cliquish enterprise, Obasanjo’s command democracy and subtle Yorubanisation, and Jonathan’s sheep-in-sheep’s clothing, open, devil-may-care, exclusive East-South-South cake-sharing bonanza. This certainly is not the antics of someone trying to convoke an all-inclusive national conference. It is the log and the mote—and what the eye chooses not to see.
But in spite of all the foregoing, this nation must accept that there is nothing really wrong with sitting down to talk about anything—and everything—as long as there is good faith and it is done from patriotic motives. And if it is done in accord with historical, legal, moral utilitarian and nationalistic arguments, those who have made the clamour for resource control a lifelong pursuit will come out of it battered and bruised—and clearly worse off than without it.
Northern Elders, in the habit of agonising over the likelihood of conference degenerating into a free-for-all pandemonium, had better save themselves the bother of thinking that it is their duty to safeguard the national idea, guard against the after effects of the ‘mistake of 1914,’ or strategise for the future of the polity, which is the cause of their anxiety but which is mistaken for a fear of Northern destiny after any possible breakup. They shouldn’t allow anyone to blackmail them and if—but only if—the right conditions for the convocation of a truly people’s sovereign national conference are met, they should go there and overcome.
But that may change nothing, because the real issue is not resource control or restructuring or reform of the constitution; the real issue is corruption which is the basis of all our woes—and unless real, effective and uncompromising effort is put and sustained to combat it, a hundred sovereign national conferences will not make Nigeria better. They may only ensure that it breaks into as many pieces as there are antagonistic elite groups in the country today.