WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
info@medaner.com | justme4justice@yahoo.com
The United States of Nigeria. What a national name and what a suggestion! It is a fact that quite a number of Nigerians are overly concerned and hope to see the country transform to the Nigeria of their dreams. Definitely, the president of the African Development Bank Group, Dr Akinwumi Adesina is one of those optimistic Nigerians. His proposition for a radical change in the nomenclature of the country from the regular Federal Republic of Nigeria to the United States of Nigeria, candidly reflects his and many other’s desire to see a united nation flourishing economically and socially on the strength of unity and togetherness.
He made the call in a lecture he delivered as the recipient of the 2024 Obafemi Awolowo Prize for Leadership, titled, ‘Making a New Nigeria: Welfarist Policies and People-Centred Development. He was focusing on the possibility of changing the national and individual mindsets of the interactions between the centre, Abuja and the states, hoping to create a new order where attention and developmental focus would be on the states rather than the centre.
Really, is the change Nigeria needs in a change of name? Would good governance suddenly become a culture of the states with a change in nomenclature? Is it possible we will begin to see better accountability and zero tolerance for corruption because we change our name? Would Nigerians across regions, tribes and states suddenly accept to be united because the country’s name now has ‘united’ to it? Will the state administrators suddenly agree to free the local administrations to flourish, enough to transform the rural settlements to beacons of development and engine room of national growth and expansion? I doubt if the governors would at any time now or in the future, regardless of name , allow either the state judiciaries or the state legislatures to function independently enough to deliver real growth and development to the states.
I have an issue with the theoretical call for the devolution of more powers to the states. The Nigerian states as currently constituted, are they not viable entities by the provisions of the constitution? Are they not empowered enough with economic or fiscal powers to function as federated units? It is obvious that solutions to Nigeria problems are beyond classroom theories, and imaginative conjectures of political directions that work elsewhere. We are a peculiar entity, with unique realities that require unique solutions pathways.
Nigeria is a federated union. The states are entities that are to a very large extent independent. Independent to the extent that they legislate their respective pathways to development, access regular income from the commonwealth and generate their IGRs for the states’ internal usages. Only in the last 25 years since the country returned to democracy in 1999, that the 36 states have altogether received from the consolidated FAAC, an average sum of forty five trillion naira (#45 trillion) averaging #1.25 trillion per state. This is exclusive of their internally generated revenues over the same period and outside other regular inbound revenues to the states; including security votes, occasional bailouts, and the 13 % derivatives to oil producing states.
The states are strong enough as constituted to transform themselves and entrench strong and high living standards for their citizens. The resources are always there; beckoning to be tapped and expended judiciously, yet all to no avail. The solid minerals would instead become elements of insecurity as the leadership device means to corner it for personal usage. State resources get siphoned into private purses and poverty increases by the day. The local government arm has been completely turned into a non-effectual component of governance; a mere pipe for accessing monthly shareable money from the centre. We have on record, the state government diversion of approximately #40 trillion of Local government allocations across the 744 local governments in the past 24 years. We are not addressing the state governors’ insistence that local government cannot be independent, that the money must be paid to the state government account and the governors are to decide what the money is used for, yet we are asking for more power for the governors.
I cannot stop imagining what will happen if states become absolutely near autonomy with absolute access to state domiciled resources and wealth; will there be improved development at the state level? Of course not! Except if we want to deceive ourselves; we will only see a greater conglomeration of the political cultures at the state levels, organising the manipulation and sharing of the state resources as ever and at a more sophisticated scale. We are a corrupt nation; corruption is not a property of the centre, but an ingredient that is filtered to the centre by politicians coming from across the states to interact with the centre. They are significant players. Political corruption is endemic, and regardless of the system at play, would always be an enemy to contend with.
Since 1999, a number of governors have been invited by EFCC after leaving offices and charged to court for misappropriation of state funds. Quite a very insignificant number of them were convicted, not because they were innocent, but because the system has a way of letting them off the hook. We now have across the country a population of past governors who are literally richer or at worst compared to their states in wealth. Where did they get the wealth from? State funds meant for state development that were diverted into their pockets.
Yet, we expect that at the instance of a nomenclature alteration, these men would become regional and state saints who would suddenly begin to do things right for their people! We should stop daydreaming; the only thing that should be expected is these men metamorphosing into demigods in their respective states, and with more power at their disposal, re-enact at a much greater level, the same problems we are currently facing. A leopard cannot change its skin, as the saying goes. We already have seen great deals of tribal segregations in most states; it will get worse eventually and we would see more of larger tribes suppressing and dominating the smaller ones. Exactly what we are experiencing now will multiply itself and playoff in almost all states barring only but few.
The states currently are limited by two related challenges; poor leaderships and corruption. Get the leadership pick right and root out corruption from the state systems, and we will begin to see developments springing up from the grassroots, efficient and effective resources being harvested for common good and a robust state being built on flourishing leadership and as well as every unit involved.
It is when this is done that we will all recognise that the states are fiscally independent enough to fathom pathways to internal development that compete with what are observable in other climes. They can generate as much as they develop the capacity to do from within, and they can develop as much capacity as the leadership can. That is exactly what is happening in Lagos state now; and that is the change we need. Not a change in name that will recycle the old systems and perhaps, worsen the lots of the states.
Have we not learned enough that the only way to salvage Nigeria is to address the need for a holistic attitudinal change for all citizens, both at the corridor of power and on the streets? For as long as we continue to see the country as a national cake, and every individual and every unit devising ways to get a cut, by crook, we will remain a nation impoverished by itself and incapable of real growth and development.
We have gotten to the point where it is near impossible to pick out a non- corrupt element around the corridor of power in the country. Imagine, the ‘Obidients’ and the Labour Party becoming a warehouse and cankerworm of corruption only less than a year after the party rode high on a different mantra. Across the country, in the legislature and at party level, they are competing to exceed others in corruption.
Eventually, the change we desire will come, but it will never be by a name change. It will come from a conscious recognition of the need for an individual and a national reorientation, most especially as regards what our regional and national goals are. An arrival at a collective sense of involvement and the pursuit of common interests that address and lead to safety and national prosperity.
