Azubuike nogo areas December 28, 2006 | posted by Mobolaji Aluko (Archives)

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The Punch, Tuesday March 01, 2005

The "no-go areas" are exactly where to start the conference

azubuikeishiekwe@yahoo.com

I don't really believe in disguised blessings, but there's an aspect of the National Political Reform Conference that could prove to be an exception to the rule. If most people could, they would beat President Olusegun Obasanjo over the head to make a law backing the NPRC. His refusal to be moved by calls to give the conference legal muscle is considered to be one of its major flaws yet.

I felt so too. But not anymore. After listening to his inaugural speech on Tuesday, especially the long list of the don'ts, I'm convinced that we're better off without any law that might have cast that dreadful list in stone. Of course, I'm not suggesting that with or without a law Obasanjo cannot throw the whole thing out the back window. There's a sense, however, in which the existing confusion can become an opportunity.

Obasanjo told the conference that, "the oneness of Nigeria, federalism, federal character, presidentialism, multi-religiosity" and so forth and so on, were "settled" issues. Following closely on his heels, northern and southern governors held separate meetings at which they also reeled out their own lists of do's and don'ts.

Before that, the conference Chairman Justice Niki Tobi had threatened to quit if the issue of the restructuring of the country were ever brought up. So, the delegates have a long list of what they must not talk about, but know little or nothing about what they should talk about for three months and one billion naira.

Does that create a problem? Absolutely not. By a most pleasant twist of irony, it is all those things that the delegates have been told not to talk about that Nigerians want to hear about. If ever there was a need for proof that politicians are out of sync with voters, Obasanjo's list of the so-called settled issues is that final, damning proof. Politicians have presented to the delegates shopping lists that reflect their deepest fears“ fears of survival and security. They have not spared a thought for the needs and aspirations of voters whom they claim to represent and in whose behalf they claim to speak. That is why the delegates must adopt the so-called no-go areas as the heart of the conference agenda.

Why, for example, should anybody assume that we're happy with the so-called "oneness?" Is it "oneness" when little Abike cannot get admission to a school in a certain part of the country in spite of merit and performance, whereas the highest quota in the same school is reserved for yam heads supposedly from educationally disadvantaged states?

Is it "oneness" when a man who has spent all his life in a state and has paid his dues in taxes and levies, is told that he cannot rise up to a certain level in the civil service or is discriminated against on grounds of indigeneship? Is it "oneness" when a state discriminates against citizens from other parts of the country purely on the basis of religion or ethnicity? In any case, does contemporary political history from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia and from Ethiopia to Sudan suggest that "oneness" can ever be a settled matter?

Yet, if only politicians will stop playing the ostrich and start looking at the problem squarely in the face, they will find that in a truly federal system, it is not a crime for each state to make its own rules, or for them to seek to be different in some fundamental ways. If co-existence is thought to be worthwhile at all, then there should be some minimum conditions agreed upon by the parties, who must also be willing to pay the price. It is nonsense to talk about "oneness" while foreclosing debate on the conditions or to presume that the present mockery of federalism is the best we can ever have.

Who says? All authorities on federalism, from Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and from K. C. Wheare to Itse Sagay, agree that the minimum condition for any federation is autonomy for the component units. The degree of autonomy may differ, from say, the US where the states yielded power to the centre to, say, Spain or Belgium, where the initiative was taken by the centre to devolve more powers to the units; but reasonable autonomy must exist in word and in deed before any nation can lay claim to federalism.

If federalism exists here at all, then it must be only in the president's imagination. In a well-documented book on the national conference published by the CDHR in 2002, Femi Falana argued that federalism was simply a byword here. It does not exist in the maintenance of law and order as long as a so-called executive state governor requires presidential approval to ask the police to disperse a mob; it does not exist in a fiscal sense as long as the states depend entirely on the apron strings of an obese central government for their monthly crumbs; it does not exist in the judicial system as long as the cost of challenging federal infractions is damningly prohibitive in, say, the north, where only five divisions of the Federal High Court serve 19 states!

Obasanjo may find nothing wrong with a federal system that allows the president to unilaterally amend any law in the country to bring it up to speed with the constitution; but after the French wrested such imperial powers from King Louis XIV, not many modern nations have gone down that road. And presidentialism? What's sacrosanct about that? I'm not a fan of the parliamentary system, even though I must admit that it appears to have worked reasonably in Canada and India, two large, multi-ethnic nations that have a lot in common with us.

If the presidential system is creaky here, it's because we're practising it in its most cynical form. For example, where the American president has 18 cabinet ministers, his Nigerian counterpart has 39; where the US Senate and House of Representatives have a total 41 standing committees, their Nigerian counterpart have 121 (Senate 54; House 67). And where the American Presidency, the most sophisticated in the world, will spend $1.9million (N253million) to renovate the White House in 2005, Obasanjo asked the legislature for N239 million to dust Aso Rock. And someone says we must not discuss presidentialism?

As for the governors, their abhorrence of regionalism has nothing to do with its merits or demerits. It's simply a matter of fear of loss of prestige and influence over their present fiefdoms. Yet, it's precisely because the present crop of lawmakers has failed to address these fundamental issues that it became necessary to have a conference. If the delegates worry about what becomes of the report, they're damned; if they don't, they're damned.

Better to be damned putting their best foot forward than to be written off as lackeys of His Imperial Majesty, the Convener-in-Chief. They can no longer claim that they don't know where to start.

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