Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

JUNE 18, 2003

Last week the DailyIindependent led its June 12^th edition with a story which must rate as the most important political news of recent, bar the controversy surrounding the controversial emergence of Senator Adolphus Wabara as Senate President. “Obasanjo”, said the paper in banner headline, “moves to restructure Nigeria.” The paper then reported that the president unveiled his blueprint for the political restructuring of Nigeria before a meeting of the National Working Committee of the ruling PDP on Tuesday June 10.

According to the paper, President Obasanjo plans to replace the current three-tier structure with a four-tier one which has a zonal level, consisting of six zones, in between the centre and the state level. The second innovation is the appointment, instead of the election of leaders at the local government level which remains at the bottom of the new structure as the fourth level. The other innovations are that the centre would devolve powers to the zonal and state levels, while the zones will each have a council headed by the governors in the zones on a yearly rotational basis. The zones will also have a Regional Consultative Assembly composed of the legislators within the zone.

The Daily Independent did not carry details of the powers that Obasanjo thinks should go to the zones and the states, presumably because those details were either not available to the paper or it didn’t have enough space to highlight them. Whatever the case, the details will obviously unfold as Obasanjo takes his plans to a 150-man National Conference which the newspaper said he is planning to organize for the very near future, - three months on the outside, according to the paper’s sources in the PDP

If the Independent’s speculation prove accurate, it would put an end to the controversy that has surrounded the calls for a sovereign national conference (SNC) as one of the longest running political stories in at least the last ten years. Advocates of the SNC have been unrelenting in their demands just like those opposed to it have been unyielding in their opposition. The most prominent member of the opposition to the SNC has been the president himself, no less. Over two years ago, he told a gathering in Ibadan at which the erstwhile Oyo State governor, Alhaji Lam Adeshina, had demanded for an SNC, that the governor was more or less talking rubbish.

“There cannot be two sovereigns in a nation”, he said, according to The Guardian of February 2, 2001. “The only thing I can do is to give it back to the people who have surrendered it to me. So those who are calling for an SNC, I don’t know what they are talking about. Of course you (can) have a national conference, but SNC, I do not, I repeat, I do not, subscribe to it.”

Those words showed that he was not opposed to a national conference, at least in principle, so long as it was not sovereign. Yet several months after speculations became rife that he would indeed initiate one, nothing happened. Instead, his minister of information, Professor Jerry Gana, unveiled a plan for zonal conferences whose reports were to be collated and passed to a National Assembly Constitutional Review Committee as the input from the presidency.

Not surprisingly, the SNC advocates saw this approach as diversionary. Prominent among the cynics and skeptics was The Guardian, which eventually showed its exasperation at the president’s dillydallying on the issue. “The President”, it said on April 3, 2003, “has shown remarkable inconsistency in dealing with the subject of a national conference. He blows hot and cold all the time.”

The Guardian’s frustration with the president for refusing so far to initiate the national conference inspite of saying he does not object to it, is understandable. Still the paper was wrong to charge the president with inconsistency on the matter. The fact is that he has been remarkably consistent in his opposition to a Sovereign National Conference and if he has avoided organising even one without the sovereign status, I suspect it has been because he probably has a sneaky feeling that once it gets underway the advocates of SNC would attempt to hijack it to make it sovereign.

If indeed he has harbored such suspicions about SNC advocates, the Independent‘s story in question, suggests that he has either overcome those suspicions or he now feels strong enough to take a chance in the wake of the dubious outcome of the April/May general elections which has transformed the ruling PDP into a behemoth.

Needless to say President Obasanjo has not been the only prominent reluctant convertee to the idea of a national conference, assuming of course, that he, indeed, is about to organize one. Among other prominent convertees is former military president ,General Ibrahim Babangida. Last year he told a distinguished audience at the prestigious National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies Kuru, Jos, that if the country needed a national conference for people to participate in the managing the affairs of the country, “so be it.”

This writer would like to admit here and now that he too has since joined the swelling rank of convertees to the idea. I do so, however, not because I am convinced that it would solve our problems. No, I do so simply because it is perhaps the only way to prove that its advocates are probably wrong.

I remain unconvinced about a national conference as a solution to our problems as a nation because, as I have said repeatedly in these pages, our problems are much more attitudinal than structural, and therefore a thousand national conferences which focus on our structural deficiencies, are not going to solve our problems of nation building.

To be sure, removing the structural problems of the country is necessary for the peace, stability and progress of the country. The fact is that what we have, for all practical purposes, is a unitary state masquerading as a federation. We did have a genuine federation back in the sixties, but since the soldiers intervened in politics in 1966, things have never been the same again. From 1967 when the then head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, created 12 states out of the existing four, power flowed no longer from the regions to the centre. Instead, it flowed in reverse from the centre to the periphery. The implication of this for the autonomy of the new states is pretty obvious.

It is equally obvious that a structure like Nigeria’s “federation” whose units are too weak because there are too many of them cannot endure. The obvious solution then is to aggregate the states into more viable units. This, unfortunately, is easier said than done for the simple reason that politics, especially for our political class, in khaki or mufti, is about divide and rule. This is why, in spite of the demonstrated un-viability of our 36-state structure and the even more unviable 720 local-governments structure, our politicians continue to insist on more of both.

Necessary as a structural reform is for Nigeria to become a viable entity, the reform cannot be achieved without a transformation of the attitude of divide and rule among the political class. And, it is this attitude which has led to a misdiagnosis of the country’s problems by those who dominate and control the intellectual instruments in this country. These people seem to have successfully sold to most Nigerians the idea that the primary source of the nation’s problem is its political domination by the so-called core-North. In this respect, Sina Odugbemi, a columnist in The Comet was, no doubt, speaking for most non-Northerners when he said in his column on February 11, 2001 that “Many, if not most of the radical proposals for restructuring the federation, are a reaction to the domination by the core-North. People have been provoked and badly scared”.

The so-called core-North is not only seen as merely dominating the country. Worse, it is also seen as being a parasite. This view was illustrated by a Guardian editorial on October 7, 1992, in which it said “Political domination has been compounded by want of balance in economic life. Those who take the most are those who contribute the least to the common pool. Those who supply the most to the common pool are those who take the least”.

The Guardian did not name names but it was apparent that what it meant was that people from the region which produced no oil, as the main source of government’s revenue – the North obviously – took the most from that revenue by virtue of their region’s domination of the country’s politics. Apparently, The Guardian forgot that agriculture ,in which the North is dominant, contributed over 40% of the nation’s GDP as against oil’s 20%, and that in, in any case, oil wealth has had little or no meaning to most ordinary Nigerians, whether they are Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Nupe, Itsekiri, Urhobo or whatever.

There are of course Southerners who do not see things entirely the way people like Odugbemi and newspapers like The Guardian see things. As long as over a dozen years ago, the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, drew heavy flak for bucking the widespread trend of blaming everything on the so-called core-North. “Yes”, he insisted in his Sunday Times column of August 12, 1990, after several Yoruba readers of the paper called him all manner of names for going against their stereo-type of the Northern parasite, “the Yoruba have been the main beneficiaries of the petro-dollar of the Niger Delta and its environs”.

Much more recently, Chief Edwin Clark, a former minister in General Gowon’s government and himself a prominent South-South leader, made similar remarks about the “majority ethnic groups, particularly the Yorubas and the Igbos” taking over the land and oil of the Delta people. Even more specific in this respect was Midebo Bayagbon, once a columnist in the Vanguard, who argued in the paper’s edition of April 17 2002 in the wake of the Supreme Court judgement on the “Resource Control” case which the oil states lost, that “We are gradually realising that the main oppressors of the Niger delta are the Yorubas, from Awolowo to Obasanjo, from the land use decree denying us our share of the offshore oil.”

Nigerians from the North may have dominated the country’s politics, just like Nigerians from the South may have dominated the country’s economics and its intellectual instruments, but the country’s problems cannot be solved by building its structure on ethnicity. The idea that a group must bear the guilt for the mistakes or crimes of one or even a clique of its members is simply unjust and wrong-headed. The problem of Nigeria is not of tribe but of class. It is not a question of Hausa versus Yoruba, the Igbo versus the Efik, the Nupe versus the Gwari, or whatever. It is essentially a question of the rich and privileged Nigerian of whatever tribe (or religion) versus the poor and underprivileged Nigerian.

This is precisely why a national conference, sovereign or otherwise, of ethnic nationalities can only produce a road map to nowhere. In this respect it is encouraging that Obasanjo’s blueprint will, according to the Independent, be based, not on ethnic groups, as such, as some of his former key ministers like Dr.Olu Ogunleye, have been advocating, but on civil society, labour, traditional rulers and other interest groups. “Agunloye it was, who, as one of Obasanjo’s leading lieutenants in PDP’s “conquest” of the South-West, told The Comet that “We will strive to reengineer the Yoruba nation and the entire nation (Nigeria) so that nations like the Yoruba can work within Nigeria.”

However, even though Obasanjo would be right not to base his national conference on ethnicity, I remain skeptical about a national conference as a solution to our problems of nation-building because such a conference would invariably focus on our structural weakness rather than the more important problem of the political class’s negative attitude of divide and rule. Besides, even on the issue of structure itself, unless the ultimate objective of Obasanjo’s blueprint is to phase out the states and replace them with six zones as regions, and unless he rethinks his idea of appointive rather than elective local governments, then the national conference he reportedly plans to call in the next three months would even be a worse than a road map to nowhere; it will be a retrogressive step.

I pray and hope that I am wrong.