To zone or not to zone? That is not the question

Nigerian politics is stupefying. However hard you try to get your head around it, there is a good chance you might still come unstuck. Let’s first be clear about this. Politics is stupefying everywhere, and necessarily so. The articulation of often very different and contradictory interests, worldviews, political beliefs, and ways and means for millions […]

Nigerian politics is stupefying. However hard you try to get your head around it, there is a good chance you might still come unstuck. Let’s first be clear about this. Politics is stupefying everywhere, and necessarily so. The articulation of often very different and contradictory interests, worldviews, political beliefs, and ways and means for millions of people sharing the same political space cannot but be difficult and confounding. And it is—politics is not easy everywhere.

But the reason why our politics confounds more than it clarifies is different from what obtains in most democracies, and even non-democracies. Our politics is structurally designed to produce outcomes that are emotionally appealing, but progressively useless. The vehicles of democratic government—political parties, governments, legislatures, constitutions, thinktanks, citizens, free expression and free press, and so on—are here as much anywhere else. These same vehicles produce the desired, or at least acceptable, outcomes in many places. In our case, however, they all appear to be desired to produce outcomes that do not fit the purpose, to put it mildly.

Consider our national legislature, a co-equal branch of government according to our constitution. The reader may also have observed that most of the bills that have come out of chambers of the National Assembly in recent years have tended to be of a very particular kind: ‘a bill for an act to establish XYZ commissions, colleges, schools, institutes, agencies, etc, in States A, B or C’—all at the expense of the same government which already has many of these things that are not working optimally.

But the real gist is that while we can criticise the National Assembly for lacking the creativity to generate the sort of radical and far-reaching legislations that can move Nigeria forward, they are at least trying to do something. State legislatures, across all the 36 states, are not even trying to do anything at all. Indeed, what really is the point of state assemblies in the Nigerian system? Yet, most other institutions of governance or society are not much better.

Take political parties, which have three primary functions in our kind of system: to compete for power and form governments, to generate the ideas and policies that help move society in a particular direction, and to recruit society’s future leaders. No political party in Nigeria has demonstrated this capacity in any serious form since 1999. But our tragedy is that the media, thinktanks, universities, and civil society organisations are not much better than the political parties or governments. This is why change of government or leadership tend to produce much the same outcomes everywhere, save for few exceptional cases.

All the vehicles of progress are stymied by structural deficiencies that they cannot grow out of to serve society optimally. Why so? I can think of only one reason. The content of politics and of our institutional setting is really hollow. The issues that dominate our politics are emotionally appealing, but as problem-solving mechanisms, they are almost wholly useless. Anyone who now reads Nigerian newspapers in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s will not fail to see the striking similarities between issues that dominated the frontpages then and those that do now.

We have been stuck in the same spot with the same issues over the past six decades and more. This, for me, is one reason our vehicles of progress, the same vehicles that have delivered outstanding dividends elsewhere, have been unable to take us to the promised land sixty-one years into self-government. Perhaps it is because we are all burning energy and time—individually and collectively—over the wrong issues. Perhaps if we can change the issues we do politics about, then we might have a chance of making real progress, which, again, we are all in agreement that we want.

It is within this argumentative space—of issues that are emotionally attractive but of limited value for social progress—that I locate the whole debate about zoning and rotational presidency. We have been debating this issue for over sixty years. Those who opposed zoning yesterday have turned round to promote it today with equal fervor; and we have even implemented it here and there during those decades. And yet, it has not solved any of our national problems, even as we remain fixated on it. Psychologists have a name for this circuitous motion without movement: self-harm.

While the debate about zoning is not new in Nigeria, as should be clear by now, there are two new and potentially dangerous dimensions to its current incarnation. First, a few weeks ago, the Southern Governors Forum (SGF) issued a statement that the presidency of Nigeria must shift to the South in 2023. The arrogance in the statement is blinding, but that much has already been discussed. The Northern Governors Forum (NGF), true to type, has denounced the position of the southern governors as unconstitutional, as if that was ever in doubt. But the key point is that this is the very first time that elected governors of Nigeria’s 36 states would take positions that are diametrically opposed to each other on the issue of rotational presidency, and at a time when elections are already under way.

But there is still a second—less recognised but potentially more dangerous—dimension in the current zoning debate. The position of the SGF is not just about zoning but forms part of an increasingly hardline politics of attrition that the SGF has been playing in recent years, and which frames all issues in Nigerian politics as directly oppositional between the North and South: anti-open grazing laws, VAT, and now zoning. On each of these issues, the southern states are not necessarily situated similarly with each other, neither is the SGF’s position always oppositional to all the northern states.

But political posturing by the SGF on each of these issues is creating a clear message that there is no compromise or give-or-take between the North and South politically and economically, and that whatever is good for the northern states, must of necessity be bad for the southern states. This is simply not true, and as we march towards the 2023 elections, this absolutist and uncompromising brand of politics by the SGF is extremely dangerous and must be condemned by all.

First, it will create an official line of division politically and economically between the North and South since the SGF is a body of elected representatives with the authority to speak on behalf of their populations. Secondly, this hardline attitude by the SGF will box the northern governors into a corner and in no time, they too will begin to take hardline positions on issues, making any form of compromise, the very stuff of democratic politics, difficult to reach on any given issue. In an election climate in Nigeria, this is a recipe for violence.

Third, democratic politics is about political competition, by political parties and candidates alike. The whole point of the constitutional position that any presidential candidate must win the most votes cast, even by one, and then win 25 per cent of all votes in two-thirds of the states is just  to ensure that the eventual winner has made enough efforts to win the cooperation of majority of Nigerians. A type of zoning in which SGF and NGF take opposing positions make this impossible to attain, and removes the incentives for candidates to try and make themselves electable to our diverse voters. It removes political competition at the level of party or candidate from the presidential election slate, and consequently renders it undemocratic. Not more needs be said.