The state that produced a Professor Itse Sagay, who had literally won the case on television and on the pages of the newspapers,  did not seek his advice even on an informal basis about a case that every newspaper chooses to describe as the resource control  case!  After the case was lost and won, the issue fell into the realm of  political football as the AG had anticipated. But nobody was  deceived. It was obvious that Federal victory would be targeted at denying the oil producing states of the fat largesse they could  have if a day came when their agitation would achieve 50% on the basis of derivation. Or, put in another way, if  the verdict of the  court took away off-shore revenue from the littoral states, it would be easier for the FG to grant 50 percent on the basis of  derivation. 

By the time the matter was forced onto the agenda of the Political Reform Conference, it had become clear that the issues were  not just between an abstract Federal Government and the Governors of the South South. The concerted position of the northern  delegations was decidedly united against the advocacy for resource control. This proved, if any proof was needed, that the battle  was always between the people of the South South and a Northern Power implicated in the control of Federal Might. At the  Political Reform Conference,  a basis emerged for distinguishing between a North North position, distinct from a Middle Belt stand.   An  adamant  North North echelon, made up of radicals and conservatives alike, simply outed itself. They have since been backed  by the Arewa Forum which is organically sworn to the defence of Nigeria’s lopsided architecture. 

They have counseled the retention of 13%  or even a reduction to 10 percent on the basis of derivation.  They all seem to be  motivated by what may be seen as asking the right question but gadding about in wrong bluff. The right question is: where would  the allocation for my local government come from after restructuring shall have been effected in favour of resource control and  true federalism?  The wrong bluff is to insist that the North North owns the oil wells as much if not more than the natives of the  Niger Delta. The tragic turn in this is that they are unable to answer the right question unless on the basis of  maintaining the  moribund set-up that Ken Saro Wiwa has described as internal colonialism. The bluff comes from the consensus that Nigeria can  only be kept as a going concern if it is a divided house in which one side permanently colonizes the other. Rubbing insult upon injury,  the more unconscionable actually brag about adding one more century of wrong to the century of wrong-doing that began in 1914.

One Governor, Abdullahi Adamu of Nassarawa State, has without jingoism, reduced the matter to concrete statistics. He has  calculated that, if resource control succeeds, the oil producing states would take more than 23 billion from the Federation Account  while many other states would be taking away only about 800 million Naira. Actually, what bothers those of them who can look at  Nigeria’s history without blinkers, is a return to the old Northern region where the talakawa, the peasantry in particular, was  repressed, oppressed and exploited irremediably to maintain the ruling classes in accustomed comfort.  In spite of Aminu Kano and  his NEPU, the talakawa literally saw hell until the North North found a scheme for controlling the Federal Government and taking  over the oil-wells in the Niger Delta.

The class war which threatened the North in those days was grandly ameliorated by using a love of unity on the part of other  Nigerians to consummate this hijack of Nigeria’s mono-cultural economy. The pains of the Northern talakawa were transferred to  the natives of the South South many of whose leaders, rather than stand on their two legs, fecklessly persuaded themselves into  believing that it was the way to escape the perceived indifference or threat from Yoruba and Igbo stratachies.  The consequence is  that a colonial-type attitude towards the Niger Delta has fruited into a love of military pacification as the first line of response to  nationalities who insist on any form of autonomy within the Nigerian Federation. This thoroughly jingoistic turn of opinion has  yielded quite a mercenary definition of citizenship. It deserves to be documented for posterity.

It is enough for now simply to marvel at how supposed defenders of Nigerian unity have been working for the dissolution of a  national spirit. The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Na’abba,  has joined  Governors Ibrahim Shekarau,  Ahmed Makarfi,  Bukar Abba Ibrahim, of Kano, Kaduna and Yobe  states respectively, in jostling for kudos for the savvy with  which they have all defended their  historical privileges against the sustenance of a national spirit. They cannot see how moribund  their positions are because it is not always given to beneficiaries from injustice to willingly forego the sumptuousness that goes with  it. So, they see it as a matter of mere political skills, flavoured with carrots and sticks, so long as they manage to corner what  belongs to others. Part of the carrot was to promise to give the South South ‘their’ Resource Control, so that Arewa can have the  Presidency in 2007.  This has had the effect of reminding the rest of the country that the  basis for a common nationality was  destroyed in the past by too long a Northern hold on power. 

Arguably,  Northern control of Federal Might merely yielded a country in which only a Northern agenda could become the national  agenda. Many Southerners have viewed it simply in terms of the North producing eight of eleven leaders who have ruled for 36 of  Nigeria’s 45 years of independence. But statistics cannot dredge the manner in which the 36 years managed to put in place a  Federal establishment  that rigorously produces and reproduces division along ethnic and regional lines as the only basis for  development. It is called federal character but it has only unitarism as a goal. It has ritually instigated sectionalism, ethnic  chauvinism and the rise of ethnic nationalism. As a parochial  hijack of Federal Might, it is tied to the victory that was won by the  Northern flank of British colonial officialdom over their Southern counterparts even before 1914.

What has been more goring are the arguments that the jingoists of Northern Power have deployed to defend the military assaults  and counter-insurgency drives. Radical opinion in the North North, without decorum or respect for science or logic have been  advancing the jingo that oil in the Delta was created by sediments washed down from the North for generations  by the River  Niger.

Interestingly, they have not claimed that other West Africans who live on the banks of the River Niger, right down from the Fouta  Jallon, should be given a share of the oil money derived from the Niger Delta. But all those whose ancestors were responsible for  the silting and sedimentation that made oil possible have been well alerted to their bounty. The other argument is that the British  colonizer handed over Nigeria as a composite unit to all Nigerians not to only one section. Therefore, all wealth inside Nigeria  cannot be owned by those in whose regions any particular resources are found. This latter argument fails to add that the wealth can  only be commonly owned and shared if the people of the Niger Delta are therefore free to live as full citizens in Zamfara, Sokoto,  Kano, or Jigawa, without being mauled by riots against non-indigenes or   knocked out of school admissions, or government  employment, by a bureaucracy functioning under an animal called Federal character. The sectionalist logic merely seeks to have  access to what belongs to others while the North holds on to whatever it has. So, for instance, the North has one hundred percent  ownership of solid minerals but it would rather share what belongs elsewhere under some spurious nationalist cover.

In order to make this evident swindle appear legitimate, it is argued that in a democracy, the majority must carry the day. Meaning  that the region with the largest population should have a veto to determine what others with less population can have access to.  What  seems to be forgotten in this perverse love of democracy is that there has never been any reliable census in Nigeria’s  history. From 1946 and since the 1950 Ibadan conference, the population of Nigeria has been based on a rule of thumb imposed by  colonial officials who obviously worked on the very arcane logic that as you move from coastal forested regions towards the Sahel,  population density increases. Without a census, a fifty-fifty allocation of population between North and South was induced by  official fiat. It was soon revised against the South after a couple of years. All future censuses were thereafter turned into cases of  working towards an already known answer.

Since the population figures formed the basis for sharing revenue, for admission into schools, and recruitment into the military, the  police and the civil service as well as, today, sharing contracts and doing privatization and even liberalization, censuses became civil  wars by other means. Every state tries to have a go at getting population figures only for the purpose of loot-sharing, not really for  planning purposes. Even school population figures, which can sometimes be used to gauge overall population, get boosted to  enhance access to the loot at the centre.  A whole industry has since emerged for committing genocide with calculators and  computers  against those whose population may rise to the chagrin of the maintainers of the status quo. Otherwise, it is no  overstatement to say that Nigeria’s population is less than two-thirds of its declared norm, It is arguably less than that in many parts  of the country.

In the Fourth republic,  the minders of Federal Might appear set to ensure that more confusion reigns in the census business by  pretending that when you eliminate questions of ethnic identity in deference to national unity, it will eliminate the rationale for fraud.  This logic is exceptionable. It will help census figures to be trusted only by those who have already used computers to wipe out or  rob their fellow Nigerians. Which, in my view, is why any Nigerian in government who can vouch for the emergent census figures  may be called a swindler even without looking at the proof. The disturbing aspect is that the invidious population figures have been  used for sharing resources for nearly a century. Using fictitious figures to share a country’s wealth cannot be a nation-building  measure. It led to Awolowo’s assertion that “in a country where the accuracy of the census figures is so much in acrimonious  dispute, it is gross provocation to urge that population should be used as a basis of sharing what belongs to others who are fewer in  number”.

Much more aggravating and cavalier is the argument that insists on land size as a determinant of what a state can get from the  Federation Account. A large land size ought to produce large wealth; and if it does not, it should be accepted as fallow until it can  be properly reclaimed for use. To make other regions pay for a large land size that yields little or nothing and to find fellow nationals  who agree to be victims of such a principle is part of the tragedy of our history. It is a tragedy that has been so brazenly normalized.  Such that: only victims raise eyebrows when an Emir, Governor or radical publicist in the North North argues for spoiling what  belongs to others because they cannot get a larger share of it.  What they are saying in effect is that if the South gets better it must  make the North get worse so what makes the South get worse must be sustained by the North’s control of Federal Might. What  kind of nation builders are these whose misbegotten ethic assumes that progress must be based on destroying some parts of the  country so that the other side can feel good?

Resource control and history

One issue that opponents of Resource Control are being made to confront is that Nigerian Federalism was structured, once upon a  time, upon three then four self-governing regions. In the last decade of colonial rule, and in the First Republic, each region was  dominated by a majority ethnic group lording it over a number of minority ethnic groups. The minorities felt marginalized and  distanced from their due entitlements. So, they began the agitation for regions of their own to be created as secure geographies  within which they could defend their citizenship. It turned out that they who demanded that states be created for them were merely  humoured so that the majority ethnic groups could take the plums. State creation became part of inter-majority competition for the  so-called national cake. With each round of state creation, the majority groups had more states created for them and they used  Federal Might to invoke equality of states as an over-weighted  principle for revenue allocation.

So many unviable states were created, unviable because each newly created state set out to have exactly the same kind of  infrastructure as the older states. In order to meet the needs of the majority ethnic groups , Federal character was fraudulently  defined not  in terms of ethnicity or nationalities but in terms of the number of states created even on the basis of a dictator’s  whimsy. By some kind of diabolical social science,  pluralism in Nigeria was defined as the result of dividing even people of the  same ethnic group into different states. Those who continue to insist on using these hand-made states as federating units or who are  now demanding that new states be created for them so that they can equal the number already created for their ethnic competitors,  are aware that it is  a monumental game of fraud.  But if every body is in the fraud, and there is no stopping it,  why should any  nationality deny itself the game?. 

Thus, in order to meet the undue demands of the many economically unviable states created by military fiat, the minders of  Federal  Might have had, always, to tamper with the revenue allocation formula.  Revenue made from the minority ethnic areas is made  available on a platter to the new states created out of the ethnic majority-dominated  domains. Whereas revenue allocation based on  derivation was at 50%  when the ethnic majority-dominated regions were in vogue, it was soon changed. I cannot put it better than  I did in November 1999 in  a Key note Address at the Conference on the Peoples of the Niger Delta and the 1999 Constitution:  “From 100 percent in 1946, the Philipson Commission recommended 50 percent for derivation in 1951; Hicks-Philipson   recommended 50 percent; 100 percent was actually disbursed in 1953 when the Western Region pushed for it; in 1958, however,  the Raisman Commission set derivation at 50 percent; in 1960, it was 50 percent; by 1970, the regime of General Yakubu Gowon,  at a time when the civil war and the creation of states ‘had laid the regions prostrate’, reduced derivation share to 45 percent. The  entire off shore take of the oil bearing states was reduced by 20 percent. In 1975, derivation fell to 20 percent. The Obasanjo  Yaradua Administration in 1975 fixed it at 25  percent after the service of the Technical Committee on Revenue Allocation headed  by Professor Ojetunji Aboyade. Shehu Shagari reduced it to 5 percent in 1981. Under Buhari, it crashed to 1.5. percent. General  Ibrahim Babangida raised it to 3 percent…..it took the rise of the Saro Wiwa phenomenon for consideration to be given to a 13  percent rise on the principle of derivation as proposed in the 1995 and now the 1999 constitution”.

It may well be stressed that the progressive reduction in the amounts available to the oil producing states was accompanied by a  very cavalier indifference by both Government and the oil companies to the devastation that oil prospecting was wreaking in the  Niger Delta. Each time the people rose against the environmental despoliation and virtual biocide in the Delta, the Federal  Government sent in soldiers to contain the agitators. Oil companies were authorized to fund special Para-military units and to  exercise police powers to deal with the supposed owners of the land. More money has been spent on counter insurgency measures  than what would have been needed to correct what the people were protesting against. As the fate of the Ogoni, Choba, Odi and  several other areas have proved so well , a people could be literally quarantined for effective military pacification or containment  without the rest of the country protesting with the vehemence of fellow citizens. The silence from across the country, barring a few  noises, made it appear as if  the depredations of the Federal government and the oil companies that it licensed for business, were  actually part of a  programme to liquidate the people,  wipe out all the human beings in the area, so that oil could be bunkered away  without the protests of those who suffer untold disasters from spillage and  perennial gas flaring.

As the whole world now knows, the Niger Delta remains about the worst case of gas flaring for all oil-producing countries in the  world - with polluted rivers, ruined farmlands and poisoned atmosphere inviting acid rain and seeding the areas with nameless  diseases that  threaten the living and the yet unborn. All these have been generally compounded by the lack of social amenities in  the areas. Until very lately, too many areas had no schools, no roads, no hospitals, no norm of communication with the rest of the  world. That is,  until the agitations began. Anyone who has been to the Delta knows that it is more expensive to travel twenty  kilometers in the area  than to do 100 kilos in many other parts of the country. The people have to bear the costs on the basis of  non-existent incomes, with fishing havens and farm lands at the mercy of  oil prospecting and only a few indigenes managing to  sneak into the oil industry. 

Initially, oil companies defended their indifference on the ground that it was the business of the Federal Government to do what  needed to be done. No social responsibilities?  No complementary services? On the other hand, there was the quite laughable  excuse offered by Government agents that it was too expensive to build roads through the creeks. Of course they were right  because it costs fifteen times more to build a kilometer of road in Bayelsa than in the North North.  And that was reason enough to  neglect the area?  So it seemed until the youths of the Niger Delta saw flyovers in parts of the country where there were no rivers.   As fable has it, it was General Abacha who took the youths of the Delta to Abuja for the million-man march and inadvertently  opened their eyes to the glitter that oil money had built in the place. Thereafter, the youths swore never to accept the role of third  class citizens reserved for them by the guzzlers of oil money in that capital city. True, it was a city being built into a slum from  scratch in spite of the glitter that it boasted. The youths decided that it was time to end the habit of suffering and dying for others to  shine. Their resolve met the imperviousness of the minders of Federal Might who resorted to military pacification rather than face  the demands being made. Today the demands have framed a viable culture of its own.

Although the Governors of the South South were initially intimidated by PDP politics,  although they were lawyering for their  political party instead of  standing up for their own people, it was only a matter of time before they were branded as traitors unless  they stood up to be properly counted.  Before long they had to face the issue, long advertised by Ken Saro Wiwa,  that the oil  question in the Niger Delta is trivialized when it is reduced to a matter of mere percentages from revenue allocation. The truth of  the matter is that it is about ownership.

Equity. The restiveness of the youths has truly put the matter on the front burner in these terms. Equity is rested not upon a mere  mark up of what the people of the Niger Delta should get in percentiles but in ownership of the oil wells, helping to determine who  will prospect for oil, how to allocate oil blocks, and who should buy and sell, and paying taxes to the Federal Government as all  income earners should. This is what resource control should mean. The thinking is also that the NNPC and the oil companies   should be where the oil wells are. In the Niger Delta. The  NNPC  may still remain a National Corporation.  But its role would be  to serve as a cross-boundary link between oil producing states, between them and the rest of the country and, then, externalities. 

Whether it is  states or ethnic groups that are treated as units of the Federation, the assumption is that those who live in the areas  where oil or minerals are found, are to be deemed capable of holding the wealth in trust for the rest of the country. The principle is  that every federating unit must be empowered to acquire the skills and the manpower to be self-governing in this sense. It is the  business of the rest of the country to help them exercise their rights without let or hindrance.

Unfortunately, this is the bend in the creek that Governors of the South South, and many politicians in the Niger Delta appeared  unwilling to confront for a long time. They did not want to be seen by their Northern overlords as greedy. Like many leaders in the  South south, they were, quite opportunistically, prepared to take a tenth of the loaf in the face of the measly one percent  that  General  Buhari had allowed.

At a time when all the people of the Niger Delta were insisting on autonomy within the Federation, the more opportunistic were  satisfied with half-way houses that would lead no where near the goal. They considered it enough to have crumbs in deviationary  Federal commissions, such as OMPADEC and what came to be called the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). These  amounted to adding a song to 13 percent derivation for minors to dance to. It was sweet to the ears of those who believed that all  you needed to do in the Delta was buy off the leaders and the trouble would be over or postponed. They looked at those bidding for  equity in the Niger Delta as being unrealistic. Many identified with Ken Saro Wiwa in his struggle but not as far as the Ogoni Bill of   Rights or the follow-up  by the Ijaw nationality, the Kaiama Declaration.

Too many of the so-called community leaders were too spoilt as children of Nigeria’s contractocracy, too much hostage to the  culture of ten percenting and too willing to join the mainstream of the choppers at Abuja to stand by any principle. And so they  found themselves implicated in spite of themselves in schemes which divided the Delta by setting one people against another to  make pacification easy. But, then, the gas flaring did not stop. The oil spillages continued relentlessly. The miserly percentiles from  revenue allocation  continued to be disbursed as before and were constantly threatened with reduction. All these continued to pump   the restiveness of the youths of the Delta who, in terms of deprived futures, had more to lose than the big loot-sharers.

It is obviously in response to the restiveness of the youths of the Niger Delta that many spokespersons of the North-North have  been smarting against Resource Control, offering arguments that are well overboard but enough to turn conversations into horrid  confrontations. One such  confrontation has arisen from Senator Idris Kuta’s and Governor Shekarau’s demand that the Governors  of the Niger Delta  should account for the billions they have so far received from the Federation Account before demanding an  increase in revenue allocation.  Let us concede, for the sake of argument, and forgetting where the Federal Government spends the  bulk of national income, that the oil-producing states  have bagged  more money from revenue allocation than all other states put  together.  Or that they  have spent their  allocations unwisely and without regard for the suffering of the masses. It is actually a  case of “your corruption is bigger than ours’.

Commonsensically, the charge stems from a classic principle known to all Federations which says that it is unhealthy for  one part  to be so much  better off than the others. However, nothing in the book of Federalism, civics, or  liberal philosophy says that one  citizen or federating unit  may not be richer than the other. So even if we all agree that it is wrong to allow one part of the country  to hold so much more  power that it becomes a wielder of a veto, it is not the same thing as saying that states must lose their due  and become pariahs in a system that their own resources sustain. What the situation demands is, first of all, an open admission that  the Northern veto which the British colonizers imposed on the South through brazen gerrymandering, has proved to be too rude to  be capable of yielding a truly civic ethic. Its rudeness and its way of glorying in impunity has made it difficult to device a civilized  means of sharing revenue. Because it assumes that other nationals are doomed to be cowed slaves of unjust overlords, it has no  room for civility. Thus it dares those at the receiving end of injustice to prove that they are citizens and  human beings.

What cannot be gainsaid is that, in a well appointed Federation, it is not the business of some busybody or prefect at the Federal  level to determine how any unit of the Federation handles its affairs or its  expenditure. Once the people have elected their  Governor, they should be deemed capable of putting that Governor in check and to recall punish or impeach him or her as the  occasion demands. If the Governor becomes corrupt, there are, or there are supposed to be, regional and national institutions for  taking care of any malfeasance. If the electorate is being imposed upon by a means or method that is not justifiable in a democratic  society, there should be institutions for dealing with it. Ultimately, it is indiscrete and insulting for the Governor of one state, outside  any formalized peer group assessment, to demand that other Governors must render accounts before they can be allowed to get the  allocations for their states. Whatever the Governors of the South South choose to do with the money allocated to their states is not  the business of the Federal Government or of anyone outside the formal processes for checking and balancing powers in the  Federation. Or, when did the Governors of the North North become prefects over the Governors of the South South? Why should  they act as veto holders who have more power than whole ethnic groups, nationalities, states and regions outside their domain?   Nothing spells internal colonialism better.

This is not to argue that the Governors of the South South should not be held accountable for the modes and the manner in which  they have spent the revenue allocated to their states since 1999. I am not for treating the Governors whether in the South south or  the North North with kid gloves on the question of accountability. Arguably, in the south south, office holders may have been acting  like wastrels, plain mobsters and rudderless barnstormers. But to say this is actually to describe the very system of which the North  North Governors are also prime movers. Given the heinous national circumstance in which they  all emerged, it is a surprise that  they are only as they are. Whimsical and  un-programmatic are words that have been applied to the showy manner in which they all  throw money at problems. With particular reference to the Governors of the South South, it is arguable, quite objectively, that if they  wanted to, they could have made education free as Sam Egwu has done in Ebonyi state. They had more money to do so. They  could still have been able to erect the roads bridges and public buildings that all of them present as the only rationale for  government. 

Much more, if they wanted to train engineers and scientists and business managers to take over the oil and gas industry completely,   they also have had the resources to make a great start. In five years, they could have built up the gravitas of real world changers  whom the Governors of the North North should truly envy, rather than merely deride. Unfortunately, they are also products of a  political dispensation that has made a virtue, a song and dance, of abandoning real planning in pursuit of so called liberalization and  deregulation. Their governmental activism has been capped by a gory power-urge that is more concerned about how to rule Nigeria  for 60 years rather than how to make sure that there will be normal people to rule in sixty years. Thus, in modern Nigeria, in the  North North, the South South, as well as in other parts of the country, too much money is being spent on taking and keeping power  and in ways that should have sent most of the leaders to jail in a normal system.

Quintessentially, the leaders of the North North have no moral basis for seeking to determine how the people of the South South  may run their affairs. The North North Governors belong to and are products of Nigeria’s most insidious heritage of unaccountable  power. No leaders of the North North in the last century have been in a position to demand of leaders in the South south an account  of how they expend allocations in their domain. The history of Nigeria is too much the story of how Northern leaders have refused  to lift the masses in the North,  too much a biography of tyranny over the poor whose induced backwardness is used as a basis for  ‘literally’ extracting affirmative action from other parts of the country. Like their predecessors, the current batch of leaders  generally may hide under a religious cloak which has nothing to do with Islam but deploys secular voodoo in the name of  Islam to  hoodwink the masses. The sensation that was the People’s Redemption Party and the sensation that is the current Governor of  Jigawa state  in his bid to promote information technology across his state may be seen as no more than delayed redress of a  historical malaise. The truth is that decades after the scuttled experiment of the PRP, the situation, across the board, is still being  poorly tackled.

Now, who does not know that it is part of the mythology of Northern Nigerian politics to deny that since 1914 the North has  consistently received more than its fair share, so much more than its contribution to national wealth!  It made it quite laughable to  hear  supposedly university trained people claiming that it was groundnut money that was used to raise the oil industry to its status  as Nigeria’s monoculture. It is so blatantly false that those who say so ought to be deemed unfit to hold public office. But it is in  order to be able to spew such falsehoods and get away with it that Arewa leaders have done ever so little to make education truly  universal in the North North.

At any rate, such falsehoods can only be made to look normal in a country where the Department of statistics has been destroyed  beyond recouping. So long as the generality of the people can be kept poor and ignorant, they can always be sold the lie that some  southerners are swindling them out of a past legacy. It’s like selling garbage as civic education. It becomes  part of a way of hiding  the real difference between the North and the south which is that the Northern elite could not universalize education. It is that  simple. For so long, Northern leaders have pussyfooted over educational reforms, and in some cases have wilfully  “prevented” the  masses from having it. They  are unable to brave the heat that Awolowo took as he was taunted while he was sending riot police  into the provinces of the Western Region to enforce support for free education and free health services.

Eminently complacent about keeping the North backward, they cannot understand why the South should want to move forward at a  fast pace. Hence so called national policies have been enacted which use the least developed states as a measure of what the  country deserves. And so, they disobey the Islamic injunction which enjoins all true Muslims to advance the course of education.  When bad times refuse to go away, they look for scapegoats outside their domain, as a way of getting more Federal largesse to  carry on with the pretence of an educational revolution.  The consequence is that five years into the Fourth Republic you still hear  excuses as to why the educational system in the North cannot do what free education did for the Western Region as long ago as  1955.  I would say that if any group of leaders in Nigeria need to be asked to account for how they have spent the money from the  Federation Account, Northern leaders are the hottest candidates. Hyping the control of Federal Might by Northern Power, they  have infected every part of Nigeria  with an arrogant ineptitude that leaves nothing un-afflicted. Specific to education,  they have  put too much of their creativity into seeking to destroy the advantages that education has given to others.

Resource Control into True Fedralism

Let it be conceded that advocates of resource control have approached the question of true Federalism in a way that has put many  Nigerians in a quandary. It is certainly not enough to make pious offers of being a brother’s keeper after resource control shall have  become the norm. Or to try to assuage the fears of bluffing northern jingoists by assuring them that every state in the Federation  has minerals that could be developed so that no one needs to take and take what belongs to others. Such pious gaming amounts  to  humouring veto wielders who think they are above fellow citizens. But domestic colonialists should not be humoured in such ways.  The truth must be faced on all sides: that the chickens of the unconscionable state creation exercises of the past have come to  roost. The many unviable states created across the Federation have simply reached that bend in the creeks where they must be  made to face reality.  It is understandable that  potential losers of the largesse derived from the exploitation of fellow Nigerians,  should kick.

 But it is wrong to help them imagine that they only need to invoke their ethnic or flip their regional security cards and shout  marginalization and they get what is not their due. The time has come to insist that all Nigerians belong to one country but that no  one is thereby authorized to take what belongs to others. If the excuse of common citizenship has to be invoked to take what  belongs in another part of the Federation, the terms need to be spelt out so clearly that nobody is left in doubt as to what the stakes  are at any particular time.

One fruitful approach is  to couple Resource Control and True Federalism with more rigour than is commonly applied. On this  score, it may be noted that rigour has suffered with many advocates of true Federalism, especially in the South West, in recent  times. Rather unfortunately, they have taken to a regressive commitment to confederal principles to the neglect of federalism. In  particular,  their commitment to resource control, although couched in the most politically correct language, overplays the necessity  for each nationality to stick to its grove. 

A little short of ‘to your tents O Isreal’, their position, it must be admitted, has been very much wrong-footed and distracted by  the  ruling  political party in the home front. The ruling party is over-conscious of being a minority in power and so acts with too much  diffidence on serious national questions. But advocates of true federalism are unwontedly becoming like their adversaries. Intrepid   and doughty alright, they seem unable to ask and answer with clarity the key question: how do we create a just system that will  serve the Yoruba well even if a Yoruba man were not the President of  Nigeria?  Or to put it differently, it is a case of their not  being able to ask or answer the question without resorting to confederal and regionalist propositions.

 Thus they fail to look at resource control from the standpoint of  the need to include the concerns of the larger political economy  which, if unattended to, will bring the Federation back to square one.  Even after restructuring. Or, let’s simply say that it is not  enough for each zone, region, state or nationality to take care of its own affairs. The platforms threshed out for interaction between  people from the different parts of the country must be addressed in an objective non-parochial manner.

Even if each zone or region were to declare itself a separate country, the logic of being neighbours would require that each be  concerned about what happens beyond the borders. One area where such concern cannot be merely perfunctory is in the area of  macro-economic management. To illustrate what I am driving at here, I would like to recall what one of the members at the confab,  the doyen of the industrialists, Chief Adebowale, said about how all of Nigeria’s industries from Kano to Lagos have been closing  down in droves without reprieve. Chief Adebowale’s concerns are not usually echoed as resource control concerns. But that is part  of the tragedy of our times. Otherwise, arguments for resource control need, for instance, to cover the necessity to defend  industries that are within the borders of a given state. Who does not know that the mis-management of the national currency is at  the heart of the matter.

The national currency, the very measure and store of value in the economy, cannot be left to flail in the wind without rational  anchor. Nor, as the Yoruba Agenda agrees, does it make sense to suggest in the name of resource control that every state should  have its own currency.  What may be done within the ambit of resource control, however, is for foreign exchange earned in dollars  by the country to be shared to the states in dollars.  Every state would then have access to foreign exchange on terms that cover all  disbursements from the Federation Account. But it would also then follow that the larger freedom which each state has over its  own foreign exchange will be brought under a code of economic management that would not allow regionalism or even resource  control to go haywire.

The necessity to protect the selfsame currency from being traduced by profligates at the centre and by over-parochial regionalists,  calls for a rationalized (communalized) system of management. Part of the rationalization of the system is to acknowledge that if  factories close down in Kano and Calabar, the ensuing doldrums  can lead to the closing down of other businesses in Lagos and  Sokoto and vice versa. To extend the argument, it would have to be admitted that when children do not go to school in Sokoto and  Kano, it will eventually cramp the life-styles of children born in far off places like Lagos and Calabar. The tone of national life  cannot be buoyant if economic and cultural factors in parts of the country are  hit by un-remedied doldrums.

This is the point at which true Federalism comes into the picture. Actually, while some see it as a matter of letting each state or  region do its own thing, it is also quite a demander of studied platforms for mutual interaction between different parts of the  Federation. As all Nigerians must know by now, interactions in a Federation become an impossibility theorem unless individuals are  treated as citizens wherever they go within the Federation. In the face of sectionalists who masquerade as nationalists and accuse  others of being tribalists, it has been difficult to fathom a way of dealing with the problem. In my view, only one Nigerian leader  ever got it right by giving it serious thought. That leader was Obafemi Awolowo. You  may hate his tribe or his tribalism, and detest  his nationalism or his socialism. But if the purpose is to arrive at a lasting rather than a transient solution, you still have to go back to  his life-long advocacies.

The advocacies do not allow for regionalism and its offshoots like rotational Presidency and the zoning that goes with it. He  demanded merit. He wished that the Presidential system should work with elements of Parliamentarianism. It fitted his conception  of a Federal order in which ethnic groups must be protected  because of the necessity to provide ample room for freedom and  creativity. Tyranny he believed followed from not allowing people who believe they share the same identity from flocking together if  they so wish.

Although he was often vilified for calling Nigerian a mere geographical expression, he persisted because unless there was an  alchemy for wiping out ethnic groups, you had to recognize their existence before you could remove the distortions that led to  tribalism. He knew better than all his contemporaries what had to be done to move a mere geographical expression to what we may  call a cultural expression, a nation of nationalities: no multi-ethnic nation can be built on the basis of unitarist principles. Only  federalism allowing for the self-governance of people of common identity can do it.

 However, while seeking autonomy and secure geographies for ethnic self-realization within the Federation, he provided the means  for building beyond ethnicity and the parochialism that their recognition may generate. He posited the necessity for different ethnic  groups to be linked by a criss-cross of common welfare programmes. thus creating an educated awareness of shared needs, goals  and dreams. The first rule according to this awareness principle is that a certain basic minima must be assured to every child born  to a Nigerian. A justiciable provision in the constitution must guarantee this. Education, health and employment are the three  imperatives which he wished the Nigerian state would put within this justiciable bracket. Any Nigerian who has no job would be  owed unemployment benefits. Old age pensions would be paid to senior citizens. Those who have no education could go to court to  demand it. Same with the sick who have no access to medi-care. Thus beginning with a shared sense of common welfare, the  movement towards a shared sense of  nationality could arise and shine.

It can be figured that in the context of common welfare, revenue allocation for a state or region will be in accordance with the  number of people at school, the number passing through health facilities, in employment or out of employment. This means that if a  Nigerian from one state crosses the border into another state to live,  that individual Nigerian  merely transfers to the new abode the  cover that the Federation Account provides. By the same token, states and regions may be allowed to vary the salaries and  unemployment benefits that they pay.  But no state would have a choice as to whether a child should be at school or not. Twelve  years of schooling paid for by the state must be deemed compulsory and justiciable under a system of common welfare.

Adult education should be mandatory because it is written into the constitution that those who haven’t the equivalent of school  certificate education are not citizens. Or at least that is what  it means in the 1999 Constitution to say that those without school  certificate can vote but they cannot be voted for. Those with school certificates must be allowed obvious benefices  and incentives.  But these are matters of detail. What  counts is that all Nigerians be equipped to participate at all levels in governing themselves.  Those who chose to preach the parochial ethic of ethnic chauvinism can then have their regional bastions without denying the rest  of us the right to relate as human persons uncluttered by the doctrine of  ruining others for self aggrandizement.

Organization an efficient state 

Awolowo believed that only an efficient system with a well motivated and goal-directed bureaucracy could give such a Federal  set-up a human face. The human face comes from taking the human person as the measure of all policy making. If every citizen is  entitled to a job and those who have no jobs must get unemployment benefits, then every Nigerian or resident in Nigeria, every  public or private corporation ought to be seen as a potential contributor through appropriate taxation to the maintenance of social  goods. It would have to take a social security number for a citizen to benefit from a service. So it ought to follow that wherever an  individual resides or earns a living must be linked to a common services agency so that those who must be covered by the services  can have it promptly and efficiently.  Nigerians who choose, thereafter, to become beggars would have to do so by choice, not out  of need.  Surely, if such a system is to work well, Nigeria would need not only an efficient bureaucracy but a reporting system quite  in character with the freedom of information regime that the National Assembly is still pussy-footing about.

A prime necessity for the system to work is that the bureaucracy must work. It must be one that can  truly count and number, not  the ad hoc variety that is being encouraged all over the country at the moment. Arguably, a good bureaucracy is not an easy fare to  come by.  But it is certainly more difficult and more dangerous for goal-achievement to stick to the current contraptions. What is  needed is a bureaucracy that is capable of conducting a proper census and able to determine how many coupons based on a proper  identity scheme are due to a state or region. By the way, I do not imply that there will be no fraud in such a system. No system is  too impermeable for fraudsters. But where every Nigerian is given a cover against illiteracy hunger and ill-health, those who seek to  rig and distort statistics, as most state and regional governments have been doing for decades, must be seen and treated as public  enemies. The penalties should be stiff.

Otherwise, the purpose is not to make felons out of normal citizens but to give them a sense of larger opportunities. With every  Nigerian guaranteed survival at an individual as well as group level, all civic claims can be summarized within a common notion of  national survival, not federal character. Opponents of true federalism who would not like to hear of such a comprehensive welfare  coverage, can be seen of course for what they are. In search of backyards to colonize,  they cannot bear to think that the poor  people around them will become normal citizens, no longer to be pushed around with impunity.

Evidently, a society that wishes to operate the kind of true federalism just described  cannot insist that only publicly owned or only  privately-run industries would be allowed in the market. The world is too complex to make a theology out of private enterprise or  public enterprise. In this regard, the rubbish of forced-draft communism in the Soviet Union is kindred and buddy to the privatization  and liberalization that the world Bank and IMF and their principals are today imposing on poor third world countries. Against the  fallacy of either system, the truth remains that, to move a poor country to a buoyant state, you must plan around the market.

And by the way, since no market is perfect, all that theology about leaving business in the hands of business is so much poppycock.  There was never a capitalist country that developed by leaving business to business unless it had colonies to swindle. Or unless, like  the United States, it could intimidate others to liberalize while dolling out subsidies to business and practicing very brazen  protectionism. Awolowo did not buy their pig in the poke because he knew the score and could run a capitalist society with equal  dexterity as a socialist one. How else could he have ensured the miracles of the old Western Region. He applied the same wisdom  to ensure that the Nigerian pound was not devalued during the civil war.

Even when the British pound  to which it was tied was very foolishly, according to Margaret Thatcher, devalued and Britain was  forced to “go to the IMF like a poor third World country”. Let me quickly acknowledge that there exists an alternative tradition for  demonizing Awolowo because his efficient management of the Nigerian economy led to Federal victory during the civil war. The  pity is that, given the nature of domestic colonialism, Awolowo has never been properly defended because the beneficiaries of his  efficient management would not have been able to continue with their penchant for taking what does not belong to them if his  standards of real efficiency were maintained. At any rate,  the civil war  became a matter of merely taking over the oil wells by  using the mantra of keeping Nigeria one. Otherwise, anyone who genuinely believes that Nigeria deserves to survive as a country,  beyond the mess of sharing oil money, cannot fail to follow Awolowo’s footsteps in national economic management.

His footsteps, I dare say, are the only ones beckoning those who must save Nigeria from chaos and folly. They are large footsteps  which alert us to the perturbing reality left behind by the Margaret Thatchers of this world who ensured that Britain would never  again have to go to the IMF like a poor Third world country.  This was achieved by making sure that poor third world countries like  Nigeria were forced into debt peonage. After the oil-glut years following the Arab Isreali war and the revanchism of OPEC, the  leaders of the countries which failed to borrow the petro-dollars that were lying fallow across Western banking institutions, were  harassed and threatened until they swallowed the bait. Lucky that President Olusegun Obasanjo, who took the first jumbo loan in  his first coming as a dictator in 1978, is around now to play the statesman with the begging bowl. What will truly confirm the debt  forgiveness that he has netted is not the absence of debt-servicing, although this may be considered a boon, but the leverage  allowed by the former creditors for countries like Nigeria to enact economic policies that require new factories to open where so  many have closed down, enable our educational system to revive and match the great Western Academies that were once no  better than our best, and allow our scientists to be truly scientists again without having to expatriate to be themselves. The ‘debt  forgiveness’ will be truly confirmed when structural adjustment gives way to structural engagement and civil servants are re-trained  to do a good day’s job, not merely farm out their duties to consultants and contractors.

Let me conclude by noting that a Nigeria that is well-run would reveal a cultural geography that is not as complex  as the one  drawn by the enemies of true Federalism. In the envisaged dispensation, federal character will not be based on artificial pluralism of  the kind that allowed states to be created by a rule of thumb or according to the whimsy of a dictator.  The consequent  enthronement of merit, even if it may take time to fructify, will remove the fears that gutted the old Federalism and made it  imperative for the marginalized or potentially marginalized to engage in ethnic unionization and the founding of ethnic militias for  self-protection. No question about it: until the umbilical cord that ties a person to an ethnic group is no longer seen as the basis for  employment and citizenship, there is no running away from ethnic unionization. If federating units  have resource control and are not  hindered by threats of  internal colonialism, they are more likely to acquire the  confidence that can prevent identity questions from  overriding  the need for cross-ethnic identifications. The welfare programmes, by implication, become a means of equalizing  conditions and removing the bite of envy. The salience of ethnicity as a determining factor in civic matters is supposed to come  crashing down where issues of common welfare are in the frontyard.

 With a system of commonly shared welfare schemes, and consequently, a reduced level of conflicts, it can be  assumed that  Nigeria will  no longer look too big to be managed. Or too torn against itself  to ward off doomsday scenarios of break up. On the  contrary it will be seen clearly, as was seen by the early pan-Africanists, that like all African countries, Nigeria as well as the  nationalities that make up the country, will become more effective by becoming part of an even larger Federation. Only on the basis  of such a larger Federation, as the Economic community of West African states (ECOWAS) could become, can the full potential of  a country like Nigeria be realized. Happily, among West African States, Nigeria does have a unique experience of incubating a  theory of true Federalism which can be put at the service of such a larger Federation.  But what price a true federalism frustrated  by internal colonialists who fuel the homicidal banter of a Nigerian break-up! Admittedly, the point could also be raised that a larger  Federation will make nonsense of the social welfare schemes that have been suggested as ways out of Nigeria’s malaise.

In the case of the welfare schemes, I would argue that to so think is to submit to the ethic of planlessness which some people  expect all third world countries to embrace so that all the thinking and planning can be done for them by World Bank consultants.  Nor would I stick my neck out and say that such welfare schemes are supportable in an economy where about 500 billion Naira  every year may be lost in the oil industry, and a 100 billion Naira may be lost in one telecommunication deal without the system  collapsing. Or where attempted privatizations may cost the nation about 200 billion Naira and the process may still be called  “reforms”. I would suggest however that in the current template of globalization, a larger Federation is thinkable, if only because   Nigeria does not appear  big enough to survive beside huge behemoths like the European Union, China, India and the United States.  What must not be forgotten is that Europe colonized Africa when it was a divided continent. A united Europe could do it more  craftily and programmatically. The pursuit of a larger Federation is therefore quite a matter of prudential strategy.

A larger Federation, such as we must have, cannot however be based on the kind of internal colonialism that mauls the Nigerian  space at the moment. What is required is more like the democratic bent of the EU, and the United states. Only such a disposition  can enable other self-governing states to take a position within a larger Federation without needing to over-revise themselves. A  federation, such as we now have, in which one part of the country feels that it must constantly prey upon other parts cannot allow  for the sense of freedom that will make any new member of an enlarged Federation comfortable.

Even members of Ecowas, as they are, should feel worried to be going into a Union of any kind upon a bedrock of lopsided  architecture such as we have in Nigeria today. Although it can be safely argued that Nigeria is not headed for dissolution in spite of  the prognosis provided by the United States intelligence Council, it should worry every self respecting Nigerian that a wonky power  structure capable of yielding untamable crisis is being defended by a part of Nigeria as a permanent basis for unity. In the face of  such self-beefing sectionalists and internal colonialists,  a larger, more viable platform for transforming and uplifting Africa above  the poverty and cussedness of the moment, may be too difficult to contemplate. But that makes a good reason to struggle for   resource control and true federalism  - as a building block and a  way of looking ahead.