The lesson here is that federalism is exactly what you make of it. Your democracy is what you make of it. The USA did not come to ask us before some of its states vote for their District Attorneys or their DPOs (Sheriffs). It works for them, and so they did it. Nigeria must begin to think of serious elite consensus. All these divisive arguments quoting from expired textbooks will not take us anywhere. In India, they practice asymmetric Federalism whereby some states have more powers than others. Imagine if we suggested that here! We cannot seek more powers for already power-drunk, inefficient and wasteful governors just because a textbook said so. Whatever powers we grant them must come with checks and balances. I would want to see them handle state policing for the simple reason that they will then have to use the security votes which none of them presently accounts for. Many of them are seeing the trap now and are keeping mum on the subject of state policing.
More importantly, we should be thinking of how to truly empower our local governments by sending our best brains there to work for our people. States do not need more money. Local governments – the very grassroots of Nigeria – need more money. State governors and assemblies may be able to create more local governments, but the rest of us must ensure that financing for local governments is not based on the sheer whim of undemocratic governors. The next phase of growth for Nigeria actually resides at the local level. So, if our own federalism must have three federating units, I say why not? This also throws up the question of how states evolve. States which evolved as jokes, out of reaction to tribal differences, or as favours for girlfriends are not states in the same sense as the initial 13 British Colonies of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas which formed the American union. These territories were basically countries unto themselves before the union. If we must give immense sovereign powers back to ‘states’, it should not be our states as constituted today. Not even the regions. There were no Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa nations with clear territories as well. What we had were thousands of nations and villages. Our evolution as a country by dint of an amalgamation by our colonial overlords cannot be compared with the meeting of equals that wrote the American constitution. It was by fiat. And that fiat has the force of law. What that means is that we need to be careful in claiming rights as the Americans did. For example, the concept of ‘senate’ is tied to feudalism, via land ownership. Senators are meant to be barons of sorts, representing their states irrespective of size. In Nigeria we are making barons out of street urchins and agberos. We are making sovereign states out of hurriedly created contraptions which caught the fancy of our military. So, it is wrong to push for more powers for states just because we can. We need to think for Nigeria and her future. We need to think outside the box.
As I wrote this article, I ran into a short story that reminds me of Nigeria more closely, on WhatsApp. It goes:
The demon and the horse
Please follow the sequence: –
– A horse was tied to a tree;
– A demon came and released him;
– The horse entered the garden of neighbouring peasants and started eating everything;
– The wife of the owner of the vegetable garden, when she saw this, took a rifle and killed the horse;
– The owner of the horse saw the dead horse, he became angry, he also took his rifle and shot the farmer’s wife;
– On returning home, the farmer found his wife dead and killed the owner of the horse;
– The children of the owner of the horse, seeing their dead father, burned the farm of the farmer;
– The peasant, in retaliation, killed them all;
– They asked the devil what he had done, and he replied: I did not do anything. I just released the poor horse who was hungry.
The above tells more of our reality today. The British could be the demon. They could claim to have merged us without meaning harm. But in reality, we were basically slaves to the Brits at the time of colonization. To those who like to complain about that reality I say we also took slaves from among ourselves and did all sorts of injustices, black on black. Let’s get serious here. You can see from the above story that all sorts of injustices have been meted out against ourselves since the union. The point is where do we stop? Tomorrow morning, some big man in some ministry will take some billions because one man from the other religion or tribe took some money 40 years ago. A man will be murdered by rival tribesmen on his farm somewhere in the forests of Nigeria because his forefather’s kinsman killed someone from the other tribe. The cult members whose friends were beheaded on the streets of Ajah are gearing up for their own counter massacre. Life here is in a flux. Only the truly wise can halt the tide of injustice and violence. Mere rhetoric, no matter how flowery, will not do.
I have always felt and known that what we need are not more guys ‘blowing grammar’ on the floor of the national or state assemblies. If Adeyeye was his true self, he ought to have been declaring his full pay, but Nigeria is one helluva country where the people’s employees lord it over their employers. They ask what is our business with their pay? Who will halt the drift to the abyss really? Certainly not popular oratory. If it was oratory, the talk from the likes of Dino, Shehu Sani and Ben Bruce will have turned Nigeria to El Dorado by now..
Anyhow, please see below the 68 items and tell me how many you can yank off to the states as well as local governments. Do not stretch them though. And also think of operability and what value the reclassification may unleash especially at the State and LG level. If you cannot see this value, best leave the items where they are. As for the governors, for me and my house, most of them stand discredited for now. We don’t need more powers for them, but we need more attention at the LG level.
The ‘68’items on our Exclusive List
- Accounts of the Government of the Federation, and of offices, courts, and authorities thereof, including audit of those accounts.
- Arms, ammunition and explosives.
- Aviation, including airports, safety of aircraft and carriage of passengers and goods by air.
- Awards of national titles of honour, decorations and other dignities.
- Bankruptcy and insolvency
- Banks, banking, bills of exchange and promissory notes.
- Borrowing of moneys within or outside Nigeria for the purposes of the Federation or of any State.
- Census, including the establishment and maintenance of machinery for continuous and universal registration of births and deaths throughout Nigeria.
- Citizenship, naturalization and aliens.
- Commercial and industrial monopolies, combines and trusts.
Construction, alteration and maintenance of such roads as may be declared by the National Assembly to be Federal trunk roads.
We shall see the remaining items next week. Please scrutinize and let’s see how many can be devolved to states. For me, most of the items are Federal issues.
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