Our search for the perfect country

The search for the perfect Nigeria is intriguing, exhilarating and, truth be told, frustrating. We were at it before the British colonialists wisely departed for home and left us alone to see if we could make a right royal sense of eating yam pottage without soiling our babbanriga. Let me give you a brief tour of our search for the physically perfect Nigeria, our Nigeria.

Our nationalists believed that the perfect Nigeria would be a federation, a system of government in which the components of the state come together under a workable arrangement in which each component is allowed to exercise and enjoy a measure of autonomy with its territory. The British agreed and gave us three regions. But before they left, we thought they could improve their structural handwork by breaking the three regions into smaller regions. They refused to oblige.

Then came General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. He believed the perfect Nigeria should be a unitary system of government, an antidote to regionalism. Coming from a constituency in which the vertical command structure is the norm, the general felt he could apply the same formula to the physical and the administrative structures of the country. This, he believed, would please the majority of the people. Who wants a multiplicity of governments when one would do just fine? And so, under him, the public services were unified and Nigeria became a unitary system of government.

Then came General Yakubu Gowon. He preferred the wisdom of the federal system. He took us right back there. However, he thought that the four regions no longer made for a perfect Nigeria. He did what the British refused to do: he broke the country into 12 states.

We did not think we had found the perfect country yet. We agitated; we continued the search for the perfect country. Gowon’s successor, General Murtala Muhammed, thought he had the answer. He gave us a 19-state federal structure. But since Gowon whetted our appetite for more states, we have since latched on to it as the only formula we know for the perfect country. 

General Ibrahim Babangida saw the political wisdom of towing that path. First, he gave us two more states; four years later, he gave us nine more. General Sani Abacha walked the same path. He gave us six more. Still, with the 36-structure, the search continues.

In 2006, President Obasanjo gathered politicians, technocrats and academicians and tasked them with bringing up a new formula or formulas for the perfect country. The report of his political reform conference is sitting pretty on the shelves of the senate. We were never told what formula the conference came up with in our arduous search for the perfect country. Wasted effort; wasted money.

The search continued under President Goodluck Jonathan. He too gathered another group of accomplished Nigerians and asked them to tell him what he should do to take our country to the Never-Great-Land of a perfect country. The redoubtable men and women who answered his call, carried out their assignment in earnest and gave the president their report and informed recommendations. Somehow, the political will to begin the process of effecting the recommendations was found missing. That report too is sitting on the shelves of the senate, the legacy of Jonathan’s failed attempt to make the country possibly better than he found it.

The search continues. We have since chanced on a new formula called restructuring. It is not just the new political buzz word; its also proponents believe, rather vehemently, that Nigeria would either survive or perish if we restructure or fail to do so. As a people, extreme positions come to us easily. The politicians are the leading vocal minority in promoting this new formula for building a perfect country. Is it not funny that they who have the constitutional powers to make whatever structural or administrative changes they deem necessary to make our Nigeria a perfect Nigeria appear to pass the buck else where? Who do they think would take on the task?  

Is restructuring the be-all formula for the perfect country? A loud yes; a loud no. Still, it seems to me that the future of restructuring is blurred because whatever might be its merits, it has been hijacked by naked political considerations rather than the national interest. Its proponents are given to political grandstanding. 

Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect country. That should not discourage us. Our search for the perfect country opens us and our country to the possibilities of making small but fundamental changes to how we are governed and how we wish to be governed. Let us not agitate for restructuring for the sake of scoring political points. Let us do so because even some cosmetic changes in our administrative restructuring would help to point us to the right direction. 

The downside of this is that we may agitate all we want; we may threaten loudly all we want but nothing doing unless and until we recognise that we have done enough talking. We need to act by tasking those who have the primary responsibility for making laws for the good governance of the country to recognise that the anomaly of a hybrid political systems hobbles our forward movement.