It has been shocking to discover that many Nigerians were actually expecting a free and fair election from an unjust system. It is even more perplexing to notice that a vast majority of these same Nigerians are currently holding onto the belief that the results of the just concluded ‘selections’ in Nigeria will be annulled by a court in Nigeria. The truth is that recent events have shown that many Nigerians do not understand Nigeria.
For many years, we have continued to highlight the structural deficiencies of the Nigerian state and why Nigerians should jettison their hopes of fixing the mess called Nigeria simply by changing leadership at the centre. Prior to the last election, many Nigerians were warned to shift their attention from changing the President of the country to calling for the restructuring of the country as a geographic entity. These calls unsurprisingly fell on deaf ears, and today, Nigerians are back to square one from where they began to build their illusive castles.
The reality of the matter is that Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the self-styled ‘Jagaban,’ is the new sheriff in town. Among all the candidates who contested against him in the last election, he was the one that understood the country the most in terms of exploiting the loopholes in the mess called Nigeria. The first thing Nigerians must do for themselves is to get used to the reality of having him as their president regardless of how criminally wired his mindset may be.
Going forward, the best deal Nigerians can strike for themselves at the moment is to mount pressure on Tinubu to take proper steps to address the imbalance that has been the bane of the ethnic tension and economic downturn in the country. The coming of Tinubu should be enough reason for Nigerians to demand that the country be restructured under a new constitution that will actually ensure that power indeed returns to the people.
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It is safe to assume that a consensus has been reached that the present structure of Nigeria is not working and will not work. It is a structure that was imposed on the country by desperate military men whose interest was self-preservation in power and not the general well-being of ordinary Nigerians. To get the country working again, the present system must be uprooted for a new structure that will reflect Nigeria’s diversity and cultural realities.
Tinubu has always been a strong advocate of restructuring. His previous actions and utterances have reflected the burning desire and zeal to retool Nigeria. However, for political expediency and apparent desperation to get into Aso Rock at all cost, he settled for a Kashim Settima as a running-mate. Shettima had a few months ago foreclosed restructuring and dubbed it unrealistic and madness on the part of the agitators, especially from the Southern region of the country. It remains to be seen when Tinubu’s mindset will be in the face of the new development.
Any sincere Nigerian who understands the configuration of the country will agree that the system in Nigeria is too centralised with too much power and resources remaining within the federal might. This imbalance is what has given rise to relative state weakness, forming heavy clogs on the wheels of progress that are supposed to take Nigeria to the next level of development.
The word restructuring is yet to have attained a universal meaning among Nigerians. Simply put, there are variants of restructuring among Nigerians, and this solely depends on whoever is arguing. The nucleus of the argument on restructuring, no matter how one chooses to look at it, is that devolution of more power to states must happen.
For the South-West where Tinubu hails from, there have been the fiercest proponents of the restructuring of Nigeria according to regions and of a return of Nigeria to the 1963 constitution. It would be recalled that under the 1963 constitution, also called the Republican constitution, the old regions existed as semi-autonomous orbiting entities with a surfeit of power to decide their future as regards education, healthcare, basic facilities, customs, identity, etc.
For people from the South-South geopolitical zone, the term ‘restructuring,’ has an added dimension of resource control. For them, restructuring basically means allowing them to control and exploit their own resources and consequently contributing taxes to the federal government.
In the South-East, restructuring basically entails opening avenues for state and local governments to access more autonomy within the confines of the current constitutional order. For some others in the region, it is about breaking Nigeria’s subnational state system and returning to colonial organisation along four regions, and even up to the complete dissolution of Nigeria as a sovereign state!
What Tinubu will need to do is aggregate and implement a restructuring template that will reflect the realities of the various zones in the country. This is very achievable if there is a willpower.
The truth is that many are concerned that with Obi’s loss at the presidential polls, the prospects for genuine change have gone with him. However, Tinubu may be better placed to facilitate the ‘restructuring,’ they crave. In his previous political life as Governor of Lagos State, Tinubu demonstrated willingness to challenge the status quo of Nigeria’s pseudo-federal system and did so with some success.
The painful truth everyone should accept is that despite Atiku’s and Obi’s rhetoric, of the three presidential frontrunners, it has been Tinubu who has perhaps done the most to actively challenge the political and fiscal dominance of the national government in an entrenched legal battle with (then) President Obasanjo when he was Governor of Lagos State.
Many Nigerians still recall that in 2003, Tinubu created an additional 37 local government councils (LGCs) in Lagos State, adding to the 20 that already existed. Tinubu’s administration argued that this was necessary to better govern Lagos’ 5.8 million residents. (In comparison, Kano State had a population of 5.7 million and 44 local governments.)
Obasanjo, however, rebuffed the move as unconstitutional and demanded that Lagos revert to the original 20. As part of the monthly federal allocation of petroleum revenue, state governments are meant to receive 25% of oil income, while LGCs receive 20%. When Tinubu maintained the new 37 LGCs (some of which went on to hold elections to fill councillor seats), the federal government withheld Lagos’ LGC monthly allocations for a year.
This heritage is enshrined in the 1999 Constitution that governs Nigeria’s (current) Fourth Republic. In fact, many would describe Nigeria as a unitary system with a federal façade. Most of Nigeria’s state and local governments have little financial independence outside of their monthly federal allocation from oil revenue. This translates to a lack of political autonomy to pursue state/local led policy agendas and development. Therefore, in this context, ‘restructuring’ would renegotiate the boundaries of national and subnational power, such that state and local governments can set their own policy priorities and mobilise revenue to those ends, outside of the purview of the national government.
Tinubu will need to understand that Nigeria will never work with an undue concentration of power at the federal level. For example, many of the 68 items on the Exclusive Federal List do not have any business being there, and they should be transferred to the Residual List. This would be in harmony with the 1963 Constitution – again, an instance of reaching back to revive something old yet more likely to give us a better Nigeria. That prior constitution granted vast powers to the regions, enabling them to carry out their immense responsibilities as they saw fit. By virtue of the fact that regional governments were closer to the people, they had a better feel for the material and intangible priorities of their populations. We must return to this ideal. Some items which should be left for the states to handle, such as police, prisons, stamp duties, regulation of tourist traffic, registration of business names, incorporation of companies, traffic on federal truck roads passing through states, trade, commerce and census are now on the exclusive list for the federal government.
In conclusion, Nigerians must make Tinubu understand that unless the economy is revived and fiscal challenges are addressed boldly, resources to develop the country will not be there. No bird can fly if its wings are tied. He has a moral obligation to restructure the county and save her from imminent collapse.
