Phantasmagoric federalism

In one of his recent tweets, the presidential candidate of the Young Progressives Party in the 2019 elections and former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr Kingsley Moghalu, painted a rather phantasmagoric picture of federalism in Nigeria. “My vision of Nigeria is of the Southeast as Singapore, the North like Dubai, the South-South like Norway, and the Southwest like Germany. A new truly federal Constitution with a regional structure for our country can create the incentives for this to become reality in 40 yrs (sic)”, he tweeted last week.

It is quite a remarkable thing that Moghalu and, unfortunately, millions of other Nigerians believe that all it takes to turn Nigeria into an Eldorado is a “new truly federal Constitution with a regional structure for our country”. It is dangerously remarkable for a man who not long ago sought to lead the whole of Nigeria, and one who perhaps still believes himself to be in the mix at the next electoral turn.

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How can it be that Nigeria, a country of 200 million imaginative people, can have no imagination than a perennial search for some new federal structure? Where, precisely on this planet, does a “true federalism” exist? The simple and short answer is that there is none. Although some more than others, all federations have their ‘defects’, if for nothing else because they are human systems. And Nigeria’s is not the worst.

More significantly, constitutions do not make a “true federation”, it is people who do. As the joke we often love to tell ourselves goes, if you bring the Japanese or Germans to Nigeria, it won’t be long before you had another Japan or Germany, regardless of whether or not our current structure is a ‘false’ or ‘untrue’ federalism. And it won’t be long either before Japan or Germany, as they are now, turn into another Nigeria if we here moved there.

The lesson, then, is simple. Any country which burns almost all its political, economic and social energies into tearing each other down as much as we do will simply fail to make the most of whatever structure they have, however ‘perfect’ it may be. But we have not only been tearing each other down for the past 75 years, we seem to find pleasure or release, and even virtue, in doing so.

But perhaps Moghalu’s real point is that ‘true federalism’ within a regional structure will turn our various regions or geopolitical zones into Singapore, Germany, Norway, and Dubai, all by themselves. This is the ‘fiscal federalism’ argument in the whole debate around restructuring Nigeria, by which is usually meant that each region or state will generate and spend its own funds and thus grow in its own pace. Like Moghalu, I will like to see this vision realised for Nigeria, but the thinking that federal regions in a newly restructured Nigeria can achieve this vision all on their own is phantasmagoric nonsense.

In all federations, the central government not only drives economic innovation and growth across the country, but also develops and nurtures critical resources or sectors of the overall economy, regardless of where they are located in the federating units. Of course, the offshoots of the growth and innovation are often spurred at the regional, state or local levels, but this is an argument for the point being made here, not against. And federations do this by taking from one pot into another.

It is federal Germany which has worked hard to bring parity in living conditions across the western and eastern parts of the now united country. The United States federal government played a key role in creating and nurturing California’s Silicon Valley. It still pumps billions of dollars annually in agricultural subsidies to sustain cotton farmers in a handful of Southern states. U.S federal money fund most of the infrastructural development and expansion throughout the country, even if this happens through private companies or in collaboration with the states, as is often the case.

Federating units play crucial roles in generating their own revenues and spurring economic growth at their own levels, but the reality is that no federating units can supplant federal might economically in any federation. So while you can make Germany out of the Southwest or Singapore out of the Southeast, as Moghalu envisions, you don’t really need any new federal structure or a new regional constitution to do that. You can do so right now, even within the current constitutional arrangement, so long as you have the capacity and resourcefulness to do so. But you’ll still need substantial federal support to do so, however materially endowed any Nigerian region may feel itself to be.

But it is more likely that Dr Moghalu’s real point is the one he made in the second tweet: “The SE has a small land mass. Innovation hub. South Korea could be another comparison. SS has oil like Norway. SW has strong education system. Lagos/Ogun is a strong industrial axis. Core North is dominantly Muslim. Middle Belt with its agriculture be like Netherlands”, he said. The mental confusion, or more pointedly, the ignorance in this vision is apparent enough, but quite telling for a Nigerian presidential candidate.

The idea that the ‘Core North’ has nothing but ‘their Islamic religion’, and depends on the South, which presumably has everything, for its survival is one of the oldest arguments in Nigerian politics, and certainly the most dominant in debates about Nigerian federalism. Still, it is a completely barren idea.