32 | the world today | october & november 2017

Nigeria

On January 15, 1966, a military coup d’état undermined the fragile harmony of a newly independent Nigeria that had been freed from the clutches of Britain only five years earlier. Codenamed Operation Damisa, the Hausa word for leopard, it was the first military intervention in the affairs of the young nation and it derailed the country’s democracy. A counter-coup followed and then a civil war.

The brains behind the coup were two bel-ligerent young majors, Kaduna Nzeogwu and Emmanuel Ifeajuna, who was the 1954 Commonwealth Games high jump gold medallist. Both were Igbos from the south of the country.

The casualties of the coup were high-pro-file individuals including, but not limited to, northerners such as Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister of independent Nige-ria, Ahmadu Bello, the first and only pre-mier of the Northern Nigeria region, and Brigadier Zakaria Maimalari, the highest-ranking soldier of northern origin. In its aftermath, another Igbo, army commander General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, who inex-plicably escaped being killed that night in January, became head of state.

Aguiyi-Ironsi served only six months in office before being murdered in the coun-ter-coup. But he left one lasting legacy. At the time of his appointment, the prevail-ing view was that the coup had been waged by southern Igbos against their northern compatriots. To show impartiality, the new head of state came up with the well inten-tioned but ill-timed Unification Decree aimed at creating a unitary state. It abol-ished federalism and the new regime sought to unify the civil service and transfer power from the regions to the centre. Army offic-ers were redeployed to areas outside their regions of origin.

The federal purseUntil the time of the coup, Nigeria had been run under a regional structure, with mili-tary governors for the Northern, Eastern, Western and Midwestern regions. There were regional identities but no national identity, with bigotry and nepotism clog-ging the channels of progress. That was what Aguiyi-Ironsi sought to correct.

However, in the long run a unitary state has brought more problems than solutions. Nigeria is just as fractious as it was 50 years ago. A Nigerian sees himself as a Christian or Muslim first, then a southerner or north-erner next. The administrative bottlenecks that were present in the civil service then

Change is Nigeria’s only hopeDevolving power will strengthen the whole, argues Eromo Egbejule

A Nigerian government official in his office in the town of Bosso on Lake Chad

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34 | the world today | october & november 2017

Nigeria

and longstanding advocate of restructur-ing, argues.

Speaking to academics at the University of Nigeria in July, he cited education and roads. ‘The federal government can imme-diately start the process of transferring fed-eral roads to the state governments along with the resources it expends on them. In future, if the federal government identifi es the need for a new road that would serve the national interest, it can support the aff ected states to build the road and leave maintenance to the states, which can col-lect tolls from road users for that purpose.’

No magic wandIt is important to note that restructur-ing is not a magic wand that will instantly fix the country’s problems. As some-one who has visited 34 of Nigeria’s 36 states and lived in four of them as well as Abuja, I witness on a daily basis the wran-gling in each state. In Borno state, the major tribes, the Kanuri and the Bura, look at each other derogatorily; Plateau state has been a hotbed of crises as the Hausa-Fulani settlers clash with the indigenes, especially the Berom people.

There is also no guarantee that politicians at sub-national level, the governors, coun-cillors and state politicians, will not con-tinue misappropriating government funds − especially when there is access to more money. But a new structure with more focus at this level means that the elector-ate will attach more importance to voting for candidates to these offi ces, in stark con-trast to the present fi xation on electing only presidents and governors.

The 1999 constitution that was enacted during Abdulsalami Abubakar’s 11-month stint in offi ce and is still in force was based on the notion that Nigeria would remain one indissoluble entity. However, Nigeria has never been homogenous and should not pretend it is. A referendum in future on splitting off parts of the country cannot be ruled out. This can be prevented only by concerted eff orts to amend the constitu-tion to refl ect a united Nigeria, one where its diverse ethnicities can articulate their own development to cumulatively benefi t the country. There is too much injustice and inequality embedded in the current system not to try to restructure Nigeria.

Eromo Egbejule is a Lagos-based journalist covering arts & culture, con� ict and politics across West Africa. He tweets as @EromoEgbejule

are doubly worse now, and most worrisome is that the entire population of more than 180 million is supported by a single com-modity, crude oil.

The lopsided nature of things has led to several protest movements within Nigeria: for resource control in the oil-rich Niger Delta since the 1960s; for secession in the Southeast, where the breakaway state of Biafra emerged in 1967, only to be crushed in a three-year civil war; and more recently, youths in the volatile Northwest have served eviction notices on Igbo settlers.

As it stands, the viability of each of Nigeria’s 36 states is linked to the monthly allocations that they get from the federal purse and the good standing of the gover-nors with the president. Beginning in 2004, elder statesman Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was then Lagos governor, was locked in a battle of wits with the then president, Olusegun Obasanjo. The latter withheld the city-state’s allocations for 14 months after Tinubu split Lagos’ local government councils into local council development areas. Obasanjo considered the process unconstitutional but was also concerned because the states’ allocations are based on the number of councils they have.

Ten years on, Lagos has weaned itself off fi nancial support from the centre and is now Africa’s seventh largest economy − even if it does enjoy the advantage of having Nigeria’s most functional port. Its annual internally generated revenue dwarfs that of more than 20 of the country’s other states combined. This path to becoming a self-sustaining economic corridor is one that other states should follow.

Jumping on the bandwagonThe strain on the federal government means it has to use funds meant for infra-structure to pay for state bailouts. That the status quo continues is not due to a lack of eff ort to change things. Conferences were convened in 2005 and 2014 to begin con-stitutional reforms, yet each time reports ended up in dusty fi les in the federal capi-tal, Abuja.

Something changed in mid-August, how-ever, when a video emerged of Nnamdi Kanu, a British-Nigerian demagogue, inspecting a guard of honour of the ‘Biafran security service’ outside his family home in Umuahia, in Southeastern Nigeria. Kanu, who is a leader of a separatist organization, appeared with all the faux paraphernalia of a non-existent offi ce.

Despite the ludicrous and at times

tragic way he has pursued his goal, Kanu has steered the national conver-sation towards a redefi nition of the sta-tus quo. Now every politician within reach of a microphone has jumped on the bandwagon to call for reform of Nigeria’s constitution. In the build-up to the 2019 elections, the buzzword is ‘restructuring’; the ruling All Progressives Congress has set up a committee to dis-cuss it, headed by Kaduna governor Nasir El-Rufai.

What Nigeria needs is healthy compe-tition among its states. These should gen-erate their own revenue using their own resources and pay taxes to the central gov-ernment so that each is forced to develop its own infrastructure, handle policing and security at the local level. Foreign, defence and monetary policy could be handled by the president and his advisers. A ready example is that of the UAE, another oil-exporting country, where the constituent emirates wholly control their resources but contribute to the federal account.

How would this work in Nigeria? States in the Niger Delta will use their crude oil revenues to boost the region and further develop its maritime space and vast aqua-culture potentials. The rest of the South will focus on agriculture and industrial devel-opment, improving on existing accelerator programmes for apprentices. The North-ern zones will focus on utilizing their exten-sive resources in agriculture and mining.

In his 1959 book, The Theory of Public Finance, Richard Musgrave, the German-American economist, argued in favour of a type of fi scal federalism that would suit Nigeria. To address the inequality in the distribution of wealth among the states and achieve economic stability and effi cient allocation of resources, a federal govern-ment ought to play the lead role in redis-tributing resources while the states should handle the allocation of those resources.

This is what Australia practises, by using funds from the goods and services tax paid by all states to help the states with a lower capacity to generate revenue.

Perhaps restructuring can also be the solution to Nigeria’s intractable shortage of power. States can provide electricity by licensing independent power producers to meet local needs, without contributing to the national grid. They can also collaborate with the private sector to overhaul infra-structure. Some of these reforms do not even require constitutional amendment as Atiku Abubakar, the former vice-president

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