Fear of real change By Emeka Omeihe

president-nigeria-muhammadu-buhari

It is obvious all is not well with this country at the moment. Increasingly, it is getting clearer that fundamental modifications in the structure of the Nigerian state are inevitable to stave off systemic dysfunctions that are at the root of the cycle of crises that have been buffeting this federal contraption.

Resurging tempo of centrifugalism; a plethora of challenges at the economic level leading in the main, to inability by governments to pay salaries, loss of jobs at the private sector with the banks taking the lead and deteriorating living conditions especially of the poor, are clear evidence that we need to get back to the drawing board to get our bearing right. Though this thinking is not entirely new, for some inexplicable reasons, it has failed to receive the support of some vested interests.

And for that reason also, whatever gains this country would have harnessed through restructuring have continued to elude us. But hard as we try to shy away from it, its imperative continues daily to stare us on the face. That was the uncanny dialectics at play last week when President Buhari told State House workers that it was disgraceful that two thirds of the states of the federation cannot pay salaries to their workers.

Hear him: “27 out of the 36 states cannot pay salaries. This is a disgrace to Nigeria”. The same contradiction was equally manifest in his comments on the resurging militancy in the Niger Delta region. Again, he had this to say: “Unfortunately, the Niger Delta with their myriads of organizations that are competing over which one can do more damage to the country and the oil wells and oil companies. For how long are we going to do this?”

The two issues are very fundamental. So also is the question of how long shall we continue to be in this pass?Answer to why states cannot pay salaries can be located in the structure of the federation while the militancy in the Niger Delta will continue as long as people of the area see the organization of the Nigerian state as inequitable and incapable of guaranteeing even development in the area. These are the issues to contend with. And how can we go about addressing them without tinkering with the way this country is structured both on political and economic lines?

Ironically, president Buhari who seeks answers to the posers is opposed to discussions on restructuring the polity. In his recent interview to mark his one year in office, he had in reaction to a question said he had neither read the 2014 National Conference report on how to move the nation forward nor called for a brief on it. He went further to say unequivocally that he would want the ‘report to go into the so-called archives’.

So when just after a month he came up with the issue of how long we shall continue to live with the inability of states to pay salaries and the militancy in the Niger Delta, he was inadvertently cornered by the contradictions of the unresolved issues of our federal order. Incidentally, much of the solutions to these nagging national challenges were the major concerns of that conference report.

So if Buhari is serious in finding durable answers to the two challenges, he has to reconcile himself with his averment to consign the conference report to the dustbin of history. In spite of differences in the management styles of state governors andsleaze in public places, the current situation where the states depend solely on hand-outs from the federal government for survival is at the root of their predicament.

That has been the raison d’etre for calls for fiscal federalism and devolution of powers. The idea here is to whittle down the overwhelming powers of the centre and the concomitant bitter competition for its control that is at the centre of the simmering fission within the polity. States cannot pay salaries because most of them cannot survive on their own as presently constituted. They do not have the capacity to fund themselves because of a convoluted order that has rendered them mere appendages of the centre where life literally begins and ends. States cannot pay when they depend solely on oil revenue which the central government disburses at intervals. They cannot pay when a disproportionate chunk of what should go to their kitty is appropriated by a centre that espouses federal tenets but in reality unitary. And where they manage to pay salaries, other services suffer irretrievably.

For states to do that and be in a position to discharge their statutory duties very effectively would require the restructuring of the fundamentals of our federal order.It is obviously a political action that seeks to unleash the creative energies and potentials of the component units for rapid development along their designed paths.

With such action, the discontent that aggravates militancy due to the yawning disparity between the huge resources found at the backyard of the Niger Delta people and their abysmal poor level of development would have been adequately staved off. With it also, complaints bordering on the skewed allocation of oil wells to people almost exclusively outside the zone which the Ijaw Youths Congress has seriously complained about will be redressed.

Similarly, the inequities that reinforce competition to control the centre and take advantage of its disproportionate resources would have been put at bay. So the answers to the question posed by the president can really be found in restructuring which has been seriously addressed in the document he has curiously relegated to rust in the archives even after the nation had spent stupendously to put it together.

Had he read it or called for briefs on it, he may have found to his chagrin that in that document lie answers to the poser on why states cannot pay salaries. Ditto the reasons for resurging militancy in the Niger Delta and similar primordial tendencies that have reared up their ugly heads. Perhaps, he may also come to terms with the reality that as long as we trifle with the matter of instituting a true federal order, so long will these challenges be a recurring decimal.

So when Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara state sought to make a distinction between economic restructuring and its political variant, he was merely referring to two sides of the same coin. He said in a recent interview that restructuring in the past had been based on political exigencies and that is why its economic impact has not been felt. Now, he would want it to be along economic lines. But even when based on political exigencies, its overall benefits are usually felt within the economic realm. For, the difference between politics and economy in this instance is just a very thin one.

Ahmed however, struck the right chord when he viewed restructuring as the process of reviewing the way we have been doing things and if that has not taken us to the promised land, we seek new ways of getting there. That is the real issue and not this rabid obsession with insinuations that it is a way of dismembering the country. On the contrary, continued opposition to restructuring may facilitate disintegration more quickly as has been shown by resurgent agitations for self-determination and national sabotage.

It is also evident in the increasing resort to holdingthe nation together through coercive apparatus of the state. But then, for how long shall we continue to hold this country together through the force of arms? Is it not a huge contradiction that 56 years after independence, we still rely overwhelmingly on gunboat diplomacy or the actual deployment of same to compel loyalty for the government?

It also smacks of educated guess to contend as some have attempted that restructuring and the fight against corruption cannot go together. They can and do go together. For us to fight corruption decisively, we must get at the root of it. And the way to it is by understanding and addressing those negative attitudinal dispositions that starve civic structures of their attendant moral bearing thereby reinforcing corruption. In them, we will find why our society does not frown at people who steal from the coffers of the government, without qualms.  Only then, shall we be able to effect real, lasting change.

NATION

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