|
Separate Quest For Equity From Agitation For More States By Benedict Okereke
I have been to all the continents of the world and in no where was it stated that people of different tribes and creeds cannot coexist in one country. In fact, in some countries, ethnic and religious pluralities gave fillip to synergistic competition among the groups which in turn fuelled rapid socio-economic growth.
But chaos and arrested development reigned in any country that is seen to perpetuate any semblance of inequity toward a group or groups of its citizens, more so, if the inequity was seen to be of a creation by the State. An example: the Kurds posed a strong military resistance against the British colonial masters. It is widely believed that in a tit for tat measure at the end of the British colonial expedition in the Middle East, the out-going British colonial administrator simply refused to pencil down the area of Kurdistan for sovereignty as agreed to by the Allies after the first World War. In Iraq where the Kurds are mostly located and had since suffered from inequity and citizenship crisis, the country’s bloody history is nauseating. For the Kurds the Iraqi map thus belongs to the group of those colonial maps that made little sense but bred conflict.
Closer home, throughout the thirty three years Felix Houphouèt-Boigny reigned as president, the Ivory Coast was an all South’s affair with the Southerners’ boastful ‘je suis Ivorien Cent per Cent’ (I am Ivorien 100%). The boasts were seen as taunts aimed at Northern Ivoriens then suffering from the burden of an ill-defined citizenship structure that curtailed their political, and to some extent, economic development aspirations. Today the Ivory Coast is nominally one country but practically divided into two. A group of youngsters from the North took up arms a few years ago to challenge the unequal opportunities that existed in their country. Such rebellion was unthinkable before Houphouèt’s death in 1993. And today most of the El Dorado Houphouèt built in his native Central and in Southern Ivory Coast are yawning for maintenance.
The lessons: (i) the road to political stability – a sin qua non for unity and development - for any nation is constructed on the principle of equity. (ii) Any nation’s political class must be capable of timely intervention to expunge any form of inequity from its political process; otherwise it is rearing anarchy.
It is the wish of this writer that Nigeria not be allowed to travel the route of anarchy, but the drive by a group to take total control of the distribution of Nigeria’s revenues derived mainly from oil and gas seems to be fast rendering ‘Business Nigeria’ degenerate.
Nigeria has two major political problems (fault lines) - discernible by even a college sophomore. They are the strife and indignation arising from: (1) the inadequate level of compensation oil bearing states receive; (2) the inadequate number of states in the Southeast area. What once passed for Nigeria’s other fault line – June 12 – was to some degree, mended with the emergence of Olusegun Obasanjo as Nigeria’s president in 1999. Any constitution amendment that does not at the same time tackle the two political questions enumerated above is rueful. Good electoral laws are desirable and can reduce vote stealing but are hardly effective in the midst of political brouhaha. The nation’s political leadership class cannot afford to feign ignorance of this for now.
Nigeria is not practising fiscal federalism – the hallmark of a true federation. Federal doles mainly sustain the federating units of 36 states and Abuja. State of origin (rather than place of birth as is practised in other nations) defines a Nigerian and his provenience. A Nigerian is constrained to largely depend on the opportunities available to his state of origin for relevance in national politics. And to some degree, economic relevance.
But realities on the ground depict that the population of people of Southeast origin greatly outnumbers (in some cases more than twice) the population of people originating from many of the other six-states or seven-states areas in Nigeria. It therefore negates the principle of equity having this huge population in and out of the Southeast compete from the lower rungs of the ladder (the meagre five states in the area) for political and scarce economic resources appertaining to the Nigerian state.
That the Southeast has lost trillions of Naira in the last decade through the negation of its right to commensurate number of states has been articulated by its leaders. The Southeast was ‘assigned’ 5 states and 95 Local Government Areas (LGA’s) compared to the 7 states and 188 LGA’s ‘assigned’ to the Northwest by military dictators. Therefore, reducing to a minority status with insignificant political clout one of the tripods that played a critical role in wrestling political power from the colonialists is, to say the least, an irritant that may not be tolerated for long. Denying the instruments of full political participation and economic development to any group can be interpreted as causing serious bodily harm to its people. The Nigerian civil war is supposed to have ended some 39 years ago.
Politicians, the Ohaneze Ndigbo, traditional rulers, student groups, youth groups, the clergy, these have over the years been harping on the imperatives for another state in the Southeast. But there seem to be an ignoble tendency by some to place this demand on the same platform with the later-day seemingly, orchestrated demands for new states from all over the federation outside the Southeast.
Attempts were also made in the recent past to ‘demonize’ the Southeast’s quest by some with mostly hidden motives, who described these demands as asking for new fiefdoms for some selfish politicians in the area. Some still contend that the huge overhead costs of running the existing states most of which are not viable in the absence of federal allocations run counter to the idea of creating more states. Some even cite the current economic crunch and dwindling oil revenues as negating factors. The seeming scramble by interest groups in the Southeast for the location of the new state – a phenomenon synonymous with democracy which must not be seen as a symbol of disunity in the area – must not be seen as a minus factor. Records of previous state creation exercises exist to point to the location of the new state. There are others that also argue that the area of the Southeast is small for another state but failed to realise that political considerations - and not land mass - give rise to confederating units in a true federation. For example, compared to other larger states, the land mass of many of the states in the Northeast United States of America are so tiny that their spaces cannot even contain their names’ abbreviations in a normal map of the US.
In any case, none of these negative views have attenuated or can mitigate the Southeast’s genuine request for extra state the purpose for which is to enthrone equity in Nigeria. Finding any excuse to mix up the Southeast’s request with the flurry of agitation for more states coming from out of the area amounts to scheming to continuously negate the people of the area of development funds, and subjecting them to continuous political servitude.
A lot of research has been done and solutions proffered on how to heal Nigeria’s fault lines. But what is generally seen as an apparent inclination of the State to confront whatever flares up from these fault lines with the use of the big stick constitute Nigeria’s drawbacks. Shortly before the latest military adventure in the Niger Delta, Dorcas Onigbinde of the Koffi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (September 2008) wrote: “The government must engage these regions and their representatives in finding ways to share oil wealth, specifically addressing how much will be divided among landowners, the Nigerian government and multinational cooperations.” She continued: “More peaceful means must be found to address the crisis in the region and the government should take non-violent and repressive approach in doing so.” www.kaipt.org/_upload/general/CND_2008.pdf
For not returning Nigeria to fiscal federalism, the demand of the Southeast for at least another state in its area - a request that aims to institutionalise equity in political participation and distribution of resources among the federating units in Nigeria - must be met without further delay. According to Godwin Onuoha: “If Nigeria must transcend the status of a precarious and unfinished patchwork in perpetuity, the main challenge will lie in its ability to capture the dynamics of ethno-nationalistic claims and provoke on a broader scale a process that will lead to an equitable and democratic basis for the resolution of the ‘Ndi Igbo’ question”. www.codesria.org/Links/conferences/general_assembly12/papers/Godwin.Onuoha.pdf It has to be emphasised here that greed and the use of big sticks have never been known to resolve political problems, they rather multiply them.
The past two years have brought a huge consolidation of the political machinery long constructed to perpetuate citizens’ inequality in Nigeria.
But in all, the tragicomic aspect of ‘Nigeria sail’ is that those that have a lot more to lose than others if the Nigerian boat hits the rock are those seen to be bent on steering it toward the iceberg.
The litigious 2007 elections threw up ‘elected leaders’ in the Southeast a lot of whom are still constrained to go to the courts to actualise their purported electoral victories. For these ‘elected leaders’ it is either speak with tongue in cheek or speak out and risk getting labelled antiestablishment. But on the streets of the Southeast the prevailing state of indignation arising from unequal opportunities foisted on its people by the State can be spotted by a glance. The risk is that when the people here are continued to be made to see deceit and injustice as the corner-stone of Nigeria’s nationhood they may eventually get pushed to the wall. A scenario similar to the one above was painted in the past by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi in ‘Issues In Restructuring Corporate Nigeria’ www.waado.org/nigerdelta/Essays/BalaUsman/Sanusi_Restructuring.html where he stated: “the nation is sitting on a time bomb” for Igbo marginalization. He continued: “The rest of the country (Nigeria) forced them (the Igbo) to remain in Nigeria and has continued to deny them equity” He ended: “if this issue is not addressed immediately, no conference will solve Nigeria’s problems’. And I hasten to add that no constitution review shall solve Nigeria’ problems if the issue of inequity is not addressed in the process.
Above all, Nigeria, and not just the Southeast is the greater looser when a large section of its population is forced to contribute grudgingly to nation building. It is like building on quick sand. No nation ever develops on the premise of unequal opportunities weighing against a large population of its citizens. Inequity breeds political instability that breeds the fear of tomorrow, which in turn engenders sleaze, unpatriotic acts and wanton corruption among the political class and the populace.
Conclusion Article 8 of the 1999 constitution is anti state creation, but no article in that same constitution abhors peaceful measures to secure Nigeria’s much-vaunted unity - and development. It is against Nigeria’s corporate interest to make a near divinity of this constitution for the sole purpose of perpetuating an unjust federal structure. If Nigerians are to choose between the 1999 constitution and the nation’s integrity, I believe they will choose the latter. When anyone who is well equipped to know about Nigeria’s fault lines, and is placed in a position to play a critical role in healing them turns around to urge for the continued experimentation on the associated flawed constitution, you smell the rule of law giving way to the rule of deceit and/or bribery.
The constitution concentrated a lot of powers on the central government, in tandem, the nation’s apex leadership and the National Assembly need to exploit such powers and build a nation-wide consensus for a meaningful resolution of the palavers of resource sharing in the Niger Delta and state creation in the Southeast area. |