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Blueprint to the Nigerian Revolution By Douglas Akunia
Before I start on the point of this piece, I have to express my deep sympathy for the bereaved families and the wounded in the attacks on London. I, again like I did after 9/11, hope that some good will eventually come out of all this madness provided that honest debate and discussions are allowed to go on regarding what is the root cause of all this followed by good, fair and just policies from the affected governments. I will leave it at that till another time. I also would join most Nigerians in congratulating the Obasanjo financial team on the hard work they did to get the 'promise' from the Paris club to forgive part of the Nigerian debt. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done on this. I hope that in the final negotiations, that the Nigerian negotiators will only accept as conditionality what is to Nigeria's benefit like the monitoring of how the dividend is applied in Nigeria without dictates and not subject Nigeria to further unfavorable conditions or entrapments by IMF as that is only a tool of control of the country by the capitalist, neoliberalist global dictatorship. Now back to issue here.
Earlier in the year, an American non-government agency, the United States National Intelligence Council predicted that Nigeria may break up in 15 years creating instability in the entire West African region. This report was dismissed by some Nigerians as suspicious and should be ignored. Arguments were made that it along with the closure of Embassies in Lagos were designed to show that Nigeria was not stable enough to get a permanent seat at the UN security council or to pressure Nigeria to hand over Charles Taylor which President Obasanjo has rightly refused to do despite pressure from the US congress because it was an agreement reached with the American blessing to stop the war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some tried to link it to Nigeria' s quest for debt reduction. Right or wrong, one can understand that all these highlight the mistrust people now have of the American government underscored by the pew study showing that even communist China is now more favored than America around the world. I thought that the report had to do with the fact America did not want Nigeria, with it's oil to become a failed state because it will be a haven for terrorist where they will be forced to take action which they might not be ready for. Also the immigration problem that will come about will be enormous for the west.
However one takes the report by this intelligent council, it will be a gross mistake to ignore it. We have to accept the message regardless of the messenger. Like Gen Buhari (Fmr) said then, the report was accurate and that the Nigerian elites have to be blamed. The report is merely stating the obvious, which is what some of us have been saying for years. There is a huge disenchantment and dissatisfaction with Nigeria by Nigerians. There is too much suffering (with smiling). Too many people go hungry everyday. The middle class is gone, the rich gets richer (of course usually by crooked ways) while the poor gets poorer. People are marginalized and the elites with money run every thing. There is too much corruption, Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Everyone wants to get rich quick just so they can join the powerful because the culture is now so messed up that that is the only way one gets respect. Everyone wants to be called a chief.
The culture of hard work and honesty is gone even though we have more churches per capita than probably any country in the world. The pursuit of luxury and privilege usually without the hard work is dizzying. A look at who owns most of the oil blocks and who gets most of the contracts and a look at a list of the richest people in Nigeria will show cronyism and nepotism at work. Look at what part of the country is developed and which part is ignored. There is a huge disparity in infrastructure between the north and south. The conditions of the roads in the South East and South South zones are deplorable. Even Lagos that used to be the pride of Africa is now so ignored by the federal government that it now looks like a big ghetto or slum. To make it worse, the federal government withheld their local government funds despite court rulings. The schools are failing and in some cases falling apart literally. Some people think that they own the country and believe that only they have the right run it.
Because of all this, people have been calling for restructuring of the country and some even calling for secession and others calling for outright dissolution. Some people like Alhaji Dokubo and the youths of the Niger Delta region have threatened to use violent means to reach their goal of equity and fairness. Only the rich and the powerful along with the northern elites and those with the aspirations, chance and hope of getting there want to maintain the status quo.
In my opinion, Nigeria needs a serious restructuring and a new beginning. We have to look at some other countries only to see what they have done and see how they suit our situation. It is wrong and a bad idea however to just copy other people's system or constitution because it never works for anyone and has never worked for us. The Philippines for example are now calling for a new constitution, one that will change from American style democracy to one that will fit their own reality better, they are calling for a federal system with a weaker center and a parliamentary system. Same as Iraq even though there is a lot of foreign interference in their own case. The Philippines also has corruption problem.
First we have to look at America and their revolution and the French revolution as well. We also have to look at Malaysia and Ghana and at our own history especially during Mohammmed and Buhari eras. I don't care that they were military regimes because those were only when there was discipline with minimal corruption and things worked showing that we can actually do it. The French situation was the most similar to what we have now. Borne out of the enlightenment era in Europe at the time led by French thinkers. The so-called enlightenment apostles like Voltaire who attacked the church and absolutism, thus the separation of church and state, Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie advocated social utility and attacked tradition; the baron de Montesquieu made English constitutionalism fashionable, an idea from the English Magna Carta of the 13th century, and the marquis de Condorcet who preached his faith in progress. Most direct in his influence on Revolutionary thought was J. J. Rousseau, especially through his dogma of popular sovereignty, also from the Magna Carta.
Economic reform, advocated by the physiocrats and attempted (1774-76) by A. R. J. Turgot, was thwarted by the unwillingness of privileged groups to sacrifice any privileges and by the king's failure to support strong measures according to the encyclopedia. First they created the culture that produced an enlightened populace especially middle class in France and Europe in general. The French revolution, which followed from this era and has been hailed as the first and a model for revolutions in the world simply took power from their elites (king Louis XIV) and put it in the peoples' hands. The culture of the enlightenment era also resulted in the industrial revolution.
In much the same way, the American Revolution was borne out of the enlightenment, to revolt from the English crown and drive for independence from England. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson who were two of the leaders of the movement had spent a lot of time in France and can be associated with the enlightenment philosophers mentioned above. They brought their enlightened and worldly views to the conference while the homegrown delegates tried to preserve their own reality. An example, the home grown delegates wanted to acknowledge God the creator while the enlightened thinkers had taken God out of governments, the two forces argued it out and reached what became their declaration of independence. For example, in the declaration of independence, the French philosophy, 'life, liberty and pursuit of pleasure was replaced with ' life, liberty and pursuit of happiness' to make it not so un Godly as in Secular France. The point is that the genius of the American founding fathers is that what they came up with reflected their times, in this case the enlightenment era as it would fit their own reality.
The other cases that I will like us to look are Malaysia and Ghana, both of which the BBC did a study of. Both countries got independence in the same year, 1957 from Britain. According to BBC, British colonial records show that in the early 1950s, Ghana and Malaysia were on an economic par - equally poor and equally dependent on the export of raw materials. Today, Ghanaians get by on an average of about $300 per year, while Malaysians earn over $3,000.
Ghana is still exporting raw products like cocoa and gold, Malaysia makes its own cars and boasts skyscrapers that rival anything in New York or London. In fact, Malaysia has the tallest building in the world. The BBC tried to find out why Malaysia had advanced far better than Ghana. Malaysia - which imported its first palm oil trees from Nigeria in the 1950s - has not only become the largest palm oil producer in the world, but has also developed a high-tech industry which makes sophisticated chemicals and food additives from the raw berries according to the BBC. What they came up with was stability in government with strong leadership.
The main architect of the economic boom years for Malaysia - the 1970s and 80s - was the recently retired Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad. According to him, "Political stability is extremely important, without political stability there can be no economic development. People are not going to put money into a place where there is no certainty". There was purpose, vision and direction that was all internal in the leadership. The Malaysian state had established a solid framework of laws that allowed entrepreneurs to flourish. The comparison with Ghana could not be more stark. In 1966, just nine years after independence, there was the first of a series of military coups, which plunged the country into two decades of instability, according to the BBC. Even today, Ghana is better than Nigeria even without oil because of the Rawlings revolution, which tried to bring strong leadership with discipline, vision, purpose and direction without regard for what foreign powers had to say just like Malaysia.
So what do we do? What should be done? Is a revolution needed to fix the situation? A revolution could mean various things including violent mass movement, military interventions to topple the government or worse, civil war. I am not advocating Rawlings or Nzeogwu or Buhari type of revolution. A coup is a revolution and there has never been any that Nigerians did not welcome and celebrate but the problem is that their agenda, whether noble or not is not by the people and they tend to become dictatorial to maintain power. I hope and pray that it doesn't come down to another civil war because we will not survive it. What I am talking about here is starting with a peaceful revolution. The type that has actually been in progress for a while. It started after the attempted military coup by Orkar, which failed.
The call for something like the Sovereign National Conference has been going on in Nigeria since the 1990's. The one that private citizen Obasanjo supported back then but as president opposes along with the elites especially the northern elites either because as the president he is part of the elites or because he doesn't want to offend them since they put him in power. He instead settled for a compromise which he called a dialogue, the National Political Reform Conference (NPRC) or confab. Some delegates ended up walking out and called it a failure while some like Umaru Dikko thought it was a huge success. I think it was successful for a different reason. People got to talk and brought their issues to the front pages. The problem with the confab in my opinion was not that they did not reach agreement on resource control or the tenure of the president.
Obasanjo can accept the 17% suggested and present it to the house for approval. It is an increase from 1, 1.5 or 2% of the past and 13 % we have now but short of the 25% to 50% the south south zone wanted. He could then have also made a proposal to the house to set aside extra 8% for a ten year development plan for the areas that produce oil and that brings it up to the 25%. The federal Government will have direct control of the fund, using only local people to clean the place up, create alternative means of livelihood of even relocate the affected people and build the infrastructure needed for the development of the area. This will develop the affected areas while creating jobs for the people helping the economy to grow.
The problem with the confab was that it was a government's and not peoples' conference. Most delegates were government appointed and given areas to discourse with 'no go areas'. It was top down and not the way it should be and the outcome was not what the people can defend as their own. Problem was that the elites were protecting their selfish interests, and this includes the states governors. That is why I support the SNC as the best option for the people and by the people.
A lot has been written or talked about in this regard. There have been discussions among Nigerians at home and abroad since the beginning of this period about how to fix the Nigerian problem. I have read several interesting articles by some of these Nigerians and there have been some good and even brilliant ideas. Some have been calling for real fiscal and political federal system, autonomous regions (confederation) and even dissolution, Some are even very sophisticated but there are some that have some flawed logic or selfish reasoning. There are silly ones like the ones calling for American government or the congress to intervene in Nigeria. There are a couple that make exact same points that I am trying to make here but I am adding a few more things. I think that everyone that takes time to write or even read these articles or even discuss Nigerian problem honestly has the interest of Nigeria at heart and is encouraged.
First, in a type of referendum, we have to decide if we want to stay together as one country, say the majority like me say yes, then it will be considered given. Then, next will be what kind of structure, confederation, a federal system, unitary system, how much power at the federal level. What will be the federating units, current states, zones, original regions or what? I think the wants a federal system with the zones as the federating units. What system of government do we need, democracy, communism, monarchy or military? I will say democracy and I think I am in the majority on this because it will fit our composition the best and not because someone imposes it and we have to have our own style of democracy. The people have to decide. There will be no 'no go areas' as in Obasanjo's confab because nothing is already given. The Nigerian people, both home and abroad, elites and the common men, the enlightened and others will have to work out the constitution which will not be imposed by anyone, not by foreign powers nor by the elites and not by the government. This is the only way to form a constitution and a country that will be ours and will be defended patriotically as ours by the people because they came up with it.
When it comes down to the constitution, I have a few things to suggest but unlike some of the things I read, I have no selfish interests to protect except a country that will work for everyone. First is that we need a parliamentary system of government. The reason is that it is cheaper to operate and it fits us better. Some people have advocated for this but the elites and the governors oppose it just to protect their powers and ambitions. Also from what I have read, most people want a rotational presidency. Rotational presidency will bring about mediocrity in the leadership. Parliamentary system will also take care of that. The president only needs to be strong and respected. The president will not just be ceremonial, the power rests with him. The president will be elected from the zone whose turn it is assuming we go with the six zones.
Say it is the turn of the North Central, all the parties will present candidates from that zone and the people vote. The president, who is the head of state will have a one six-year term and will appoint a prime minister to head his government. The prime minister could be from any part of the country and will have certain qualifications and be subject to confirmation by the house for a two-year term and a maximum of three terms. For example, the North central president can appoint the best person that they can find from anywhere in the country, like somebody with qualities and qualifications of Mrs Ngozi Iweala as prime minister. The prime minister forms a government, appoints the other ministers and runs the government ministries and parastatals. The president will entrust the prime minister to manage the fiscal policy of the country but can fire them and dissolve the government when they are not performing, or for some reason the people call for them to go. The house can also move to dissolve the government if the people demand it for any reason but by at least a 2/3 majority. The presidency will include council of chiefs from all over the country and the chief of defense staff and this is very important because it will get the military represented and involved. The president should stay above politics.
Whether the rotation goes around the zones or between North and South is really a non-issue because we can decide that it be say, South East, then North West, then South South and then North Central etc. I will suggest that we have one house of parliament, thirty or so from each of the recognized six zones that we have today to make sure every tribe and area is well represented. The other constitutional issue I want to touch on is the contentious issue of derivation and resource control because a lot has been debated on this. I have read and heard a lot on this, some good, some flawed and some selfish. Everyone has to sit down and negotiate on this issue. Nothing here is given. Some have called for a return to the 1950's and 1960's. Somebody said that what we have now is illegal because it was by decree of the military.
We all have to remember that 100% and 50% we had in the 50's and 60's were negotiated in forming the independent federation. The regions came together and brought along with them their resources and agreed on how much to give to the federal government. What we have now is not a federal system like back then regardless of what it is called. The military decrees and constitutions also created the states and the zones including the South South zone that we have now and made all resources that of the federal government. The federal government also sponsored the exploration of oil. That does not mean that we can ignore the consequence to the areas affected. The south south has to also recognize that it is not the same as the Niger delta area. So everyone should sit down and negotiate reasonably.
If the people recognize and accept the six zones to replace the 3 or 4 regions that originally formed the union in the federal structure, I suggest that each zone gets 20% or so from the resource discovered in their zone, whatever the resource is, because that will encourage other zones to get back to other resources in their zone. In addition, I suggest that the federal government set aside additional 5% from it's own share to compensate any area not zone that has any mineral that devastates the area like oil does. Someone also mentioned that the United Nations had decided that each state had the right to the resources on their territory. The state as used by the UN is country like Nigeria and not Abia state for example. The North has to sit down and negotiate on this because they have the most to loose and right now they are not contributing much.
Another issue is that the zones become federating units with almost autonomous powers in handling their own affairs as it fits them so they can develop at their own pace. They can create as many states as they see fit with each state creating as many local governments as they want. The resources will have to be shared according to the population of each zone and not how many local governments one has. Lagos Islands of Lagos, Ikoyi and Victoria Island along with Apapa and Port Harcourt should remain federal capital territories along with Abuja as was proposed by Murtalal Muhammed. The federal government will handle security, military and immigration and customs while the zones handle their own local laws and their economies. The federal government has to however make sure human rights and freedom of religion are protected everywhere. The experts can work out other details of who handles what. The federal government should be weaker than it is now while the zones get more power. Another issue is that of citizenship or residency.
I suggest that according to our customs and traditions, everyone is from his or her father's ancestral home. However, residency is determined by where one is born or where one has lived for five years or more and not both, for purpose of elections and rights. One chooses which one it is and will be eligible to vote and be voted for there except as the president which will be based on origin. One can only contest for the president in his or her own place of origin. The constitution must also preserve and protect Nigeria's sovereignty and territorial integrity like the Philippines forbid all foreign troops on its soil or like the Pakistan's that also forbids foreign troops as well intelligent agents from operating on its soil. All agreements entered by our government must be of mutual benefit and respects our sovereignty. The government should encourage independent think tanks to study and help formulate policies. If the people write the constitution, then dissolution or secession will be voted on by everyone, preferably by a 2/3 majority. Abolition of godfatherism should be enshrined in the constitution as well.
These are some of my suggestions and I am sure that there are many others by other people. One of the brilliant articles I read mentioned that a revolution would be meaningless if there is no agenda or something to achieve already by the people. I agree with that but I say that we already have an agenda. If this works out then it becomes for us something that we are fighting for like the rose or velvet revolutions of the former Soviet Republics and Syria. Only thing here is that this should be devoid of foreign interference.
Like Malaysia, the key here is that we need a strong leadership with vision, focus and purpose not dictatorial or autocratic and we need stability in government and there will be stability if there is a good, strong and fair constitution by the people in place, one that the people will defend and there will be no need for military interventions.
I don't know the agenda of PRONACO's SNC but it sounds like what I am talking about. It is a good beginning and I hope that it involves all the people as promised.
Like in the French and the American experiences, we the people have the cause and ideas, we should come together and put them together and then we take it from there. In looking at others, we take the what we need as it fits us and leave out the rest just like the Igbos in America always say in libations or breaking of kola nuts. Like in the American revolution, the people with the world views will put their ideas on the table and the people that know the realities will debate and iron out what will work for us and what will not. I know that there will be resistance from the ossified in the country and that's where like in those other countries the revolution comes about. We take it to the streets and march and bring every thing to a stand still until we get their attention. If it is not done that way, no one will like the alternative because everyone will lose and the American report will come true. Nigeria is our country so let's build it and make it work. After studying the cases mentioned above, I think we can do it.
I hope that this article is widely read by many people so that the ideas get around, maybe someone with influence in Nigeria can actually use it and make the same arguments for it to come to fruition.
Douglas Akunia California, USA
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