There is no better illustration of the political programme of waste and senseless consumption than the creation of 36 states and 774 local governments out of the four pre-coup regions under a federal system inherited by the first military government.
- Initiate action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit;
- Restructure government for a leaner, more efficient and adequately compensated public service;
- Balance across regions by the creation of 6 new Regional Economic Development Agencies (REDAs) to act as champions of sub-regional competitiveness;
- Put in place a N300 billion regional growth fund (average of N50bn in each geo-political region) to be managed by the REDAs, encourage private sector enterprise and support to help places currently reliant on the public sector —FROM Buhari/APC MANIFESTO
Last week, we posited that military dictators in control of Nigeria between 1966 and 1999 responded to the rising flow of revenue from petroleum the way a toddler would respond to gifts from Santa Claus: excitement without an awareness of life beyond gift-giving at Christmas. Civilians brought to power through elections supervised by military dictators all continued the adoption of an expenditure culture that took the disconnected the polity from productive economy. From extravagant compensation of political officers and public servants to proliferation of government ministries and agencies, military dictators chose the style of lottery winners to spend national revenue with little attention to economic development of the country for citizens’ welfare. Civilian governments birthed by military dictators through dubious elections also mimicked their military mentors in sustaining a political economy driven principally by the country’s non-renewable money spinner.
There is no better illustration of the political programme of waste and senseless consumption than the creation of 36 states and 774 local governments out of the four pre-coup regions under a federal system inherited by the first military government. Many folk commentators are already saying that President Buhari has been elected to come and deal with the nemesis of military distortion of Nigeria’s federal system and the creation of a wasteful centralist governance and over 100 sub-national administrative bureaucracies that function more as sites for distribution of pork or benefits of power than as units for development to enrich citizens’ lives. On the positive side, some opinion leaders believe that, given the mythology about Buhari’s strength of character and sincerity of purpose, the president stands a good chance of changing the country well enough to atone for the failure of military intervention in the polity.
Instructively, General Buhari’s election manifesto acknowledging that the 1999 Constitution needs to be revisited and renewed, with the hope of entrenching “true Federalism and the Federal spirit” signals the determination of his administration to go back to the drawing board on how to make Nigeria achieve its full potential. Making the entrenchment (or re-entrenchment?) of true federalism the first item in his 90-item menu of initiatives indicates the readiness on the part of the president and his ruling party to move from using the revenue from petroleum or any other finite resource for that matter to service facile unity and use such finite resources to nurture a country that can advance through economic development and unity of purpose.
At the time that President Buhari starts his administration, the states and local governments created to use the revenue from petroleum are not only unable to pay workers’ salaries and pensions on time, they are also crying out loud about their lack of capacity to pay N18,000 minimum wage. This is despite the fact that individuals on executive and legislative lines of duty across the nation receive outsize salaries and allowances; fly jets or helicopters to visit their constituencies; and are provided with policemen and women who lack access to modern healthcare and have to use prayer warriors in place of gynaecologists and paediatricians for their dependants. The more money flows into the country’s purse from oil, the more inequality festers in all manifestations. The tension generated by inequality has become obvious to rulers to the extent that they hire image makers to frame public discourse along the narrative of national unity for its own sake, rather than for any political, economic, or cultural purpose, the rationale for all modern democracies.
To advance the cause of national unity, development, and stability, none of the 90 items in Buhari’s manifesto should be adjudged superior to the other. Removing the flaws in the structure of government and constitution, already acknowledged in Buhari’s manifesto, is as crucial for peace, stability, development, and unity as the fight against corruption at the hands of a venal elite. As unenviable as the challenges before President Buhari in a country that has been degraded for decades by poor policies that include deliberate dismantling of Nigeria’s federal system may be, the bitter truth for Buhari to face is that past mistakes need to be rectified not excused. The current constitution is a graphic illustration of such mistakes.
It is instructive that President Buhari has vowed to engage all militant groups that threaten the survival of united Nigeria: Boko Haram and Indigenous People of Biafra, for example. But the president must not lose sight of the fact that not all nationalities or regions complaining about marginalisation and inefficient and ineffective governance are interested in seceding from Nigeria. Many nationalities and regions are calling for restoration of federalism, rather than mobilising for disintegration. As the president focuses on ending Boko Haram terrorism and recovering the country’s stolen funds from thieves of state, he should give attention to establishing an inclusive process of re-crafting a federal constitution.
Such process must not be mechanical as efforts in the past by both military and civilian rulers had been, even if establishing a constitutional review process has to take more time than the quick-fix that had characterised all the national conferences in the past. President Buhari needs to mobilise all regions to participate in the process of creating a people’s constitution through their duly elected representatives for the purpose of identifying needed changes to the polity and the fiscal culture. None of the national conferences in the past should be taken as having completed the thinking needed to restructure the country for peace, stability, and development while none of the ideas in previous conferences should be dismissed without proper consideration by those elected by their communities to participate in constitutional review. Citizens should be given a free hand to decide whether they want regional cluster of states that create development through fiscal autonomy or another federal bureaucracy (called in Buhari’s manifesto Regional Economic Development Agencies (REDA)) that is to administer development.
It will be simple-minded and over-sanguine to continue to look for revenue to continue the tradition of waste and extravagancy that led Nigeria to its current backwardness in spite of huge revenue from oil in the past. President Buhari should avoid one dimensionality in his diagnosis of the country’s problem. Corruption is certainly a cause of underdevelopment, so is the use of revenue to create and sustain fiefdoms for politicians an important factor in the country’s underdevelopment. Citizens appear to have seen through all the stratagems in the last fifty years to deceive and distract them from coming to terms with the determination of a band of rulers-military or civilian-to exploit and dominate them. This is the right moment to demilitarise the polity, and Buhari is in the best position to do this, having been a major player in the era of what Abubakar Umar once called the mistakes of military rule.
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