Nigeria, Too Many Troubles To Overcome
Written by Niyi Bello, Akure
Sunday Magazine
Nigerian Guardian
NIGERIA is an unusual country, not in its large socio-economic, ethnic and religious diversity and its vast human and material resources, but in its capability, over the years, to get back from the brink anytime the vehicle of state is driven to the edge of the precipice.
The country seems to have more than the nine lives of the proverbial cat and like the Phoenix, the Greek mythical bird that rises from its own ashes, has so far survived the crises, most, if not all of which are self-inflicted.
General Ibrahim Babangida, as a Military President was once quoted as saying that the country’s economic template was not in the mould of others around the world and that many times, he had wondered how the economy kept running, despite so many departures from the accepted norms.
On the political scene, there is always the feeling of “we-will-get-over-it” among a leadership populated by more tribal chieftains that statesmen who, because of the seemingly endless flow of petrodollars that lubricates the massive wheel of corruption, believe that they can get away with virtually everything.
The mass of the mainly impoverished population with a decimated middle class cut the picture of the docility of a sheep being led to the slaughter-house and despite being classified as one of the largest assemblage of poverty-stricken people on the globe, held on tenaciously to the optimism of the leadership, like Moses the raven in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
After the carnage of the early years of independence and the trauma of a 30-month civil war, the country still rose as one and when in the aftermath of the 1993 election annulment crisis, the political class got its act together to assuage the feelings of the Southwest, by ceding the presidency to the zone, life continued as usual.
In the nation’s subconscious however, the fragile nature of the country’s unity, which became evident in the very instrument of statehood formation in 1914, the history of rivalry among the ethnic nationalities like a genie, continue to stalk the land as the country trudged on the road to nationhood.
Under that façade of unity that was emplaced more by the unitary structure of military dictatorship, there were always distrusts and suspicions among the ruling class and this, like the putrid stench of corruption oozing down the social ladder, permeates the cracked wall of national structure.
On April 22, 1990, it took the Gideon Orkar coup for a handful of Middle-Belt officers to bring to the fore, the seething anger of a section of the country against another, when the mutineers announced that five states in the North had been excised from the country.
Within 24 hours, the rebellion was crushed and the country was once again glued together. But if the military had managed to “decree unity”, the liberal system of democratic governance has exposed the weaknesses of the nation such that the built-in mechanism of survival is being threatened by a nation that has stretched its luck too far.
With the return to civil rule in 1999 and the hopes that the opportunity offered for fine-tuning the process of participatory democracy that had been truncated thrice earlier, there was great expectation that the country would, through the new template of popular governance, smoothen the rough edges of nationhood.
However, this expectation is gradually giving way to despondency and rather than further strengthen the foundation of unity as envisaged, the system appears to be under constant assaults from elements that are determined to bring down the entire super-structure.
Even the progresses the country has recorded on the political turf, which should have been built upon, are gradually being frittered away. An instance is the June 12, 1993 presidential election that was won by a Muslim-Muslim ticket of late Chief M.K.O Abiola and Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, where Abiola, a Yoruba from the Southwest was said to have defeated his rival, Alhaji Bashir Tofa in his Kano home base.
The gains of an election that could have been used to strengthen the nation’s fragile fabric by relegating religion and ethnicity to the background was wasted by a self-serving ruling class, both military and civilian, through appealing to these same base sentiments that the ordinary Nigerian had rejected. Religious balancing is currently playing a major role in the preparation for next year’s election as it did to similar ones after the 1993 experience.
The events within Nigeria are already drawing attention from the international community, which may have an unprecedented crisis in its hands if the country should succumb under the burden of the multi-faceted crisis.
Some six years ago, a controversial report from the United States predicted that Nigeria could become a failed state in 2015, but many compatriots described it as coming from doomsday prophets who never saw the potentials in the country as envisaged in the government’s Vision 20:2020, which aims to put the largest concentration of blacks in the world among the top 20 global economies.
And in February 2011, a group of five US Military experts from the Centre for Strategy and Technology, Air University, Maxwell Base in Alabama, in a future scenario-building analysis for countries within the sphere of American economic interests, stated in a report that Nigeria could break-up in 2030.
According to the 196-page report, which is said to have the capacity of influencing US position on global affairs, Nigeria’s “history of tribal and religious conflicts, endemic corruption at all levels of government, poor national planning, uneven development, social disorder, rampant criminality, violent insurgency, and terminal weak governance provides an environment that could portend imminent collapse and failure.”
The authors, however, said the report was “not a specific prediction of the future or a depiction of a state of affairs that will and must occur, a discussion of how the trends occurring in Nigeria since its birth as a nation in 1960 could, under the right conditions, lead to its failure,” adding that the scenario in the country was “mirroring in some ways the events in Lebanon in 1975 and Somalia in 1991.”
Although the US envoy in Nigeria, Terrence McCulley absolved his government from the reports, saying they did not reflect the official position, the matter refused to abate and in December 2012, in its Global Trends Reports of that year, Washington DC-based National Intelligence Council stated that 15 countries across the globe, eleven of them in black Africa, would be categorized as failed states by 2030.
While many still believe in the resilience of the Nigerian spirit to survive the present onslaught, facts on ground and the manner that the crises are being handled by those charged with the administration of state are creating the fears that the country may indeed be on the path of fulfilling the predictions of the Americans.
The northern part of the country, which for many years had been known for religious unrests, has added armed militancy to its notoriety with ethnic cleansing in the Plateau axis that has reversed the fortune of the once beautiful and accommodating city of Jos.
In most states in the north, particularly in the Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, which for more than one year have been under emergency rule, a brutal religious group with an unclear ideology, the Boko Haram, has been maiming and killing innocent people in the most blood-curdling manner.
Even Abuja, the serene Federal Capital, is not protected from the attacks of this mindless insurgency, as several people have been killed, while statements on their desire to balkanize the country have been made through deafening loudness of bombings of international targets, security formations, and populated areas.
While the dreaded sect has lately intensified its attacks calling to question the capability or as some people would say, the desirability, of the Federal Government to stop an orgy that has consumed an estimated 3,000 lives, a new dimension in nomadic marauders killing innocent people and destroying farmlands and villages across the middle-belt in the climax of the age-long struggle for land resources, has also added to the insecurity.
Although armed militancy has been reduced in the Niger Delta region by an Amnesty Programme that is greasing the palms of erstwhile restive youths, rather than addressing the problem of infrastructure deficit and ecological degradation, a new list of emergency billionaires are being created among the ex-militants, who have allegedly abandoned pilfering gallons of crude to a more lucrative business of stealing ship-loads and selling at the international market.
Government sources disclosed that as much as 20 percent of Nigeria’s crude production, running into billions of dollars, end up being stolen through illegal bunkering on the high seas, an illicit trade that is being sustained by a corrupt system and which has reduced government earnings to an all-time low, such that states now get lesser what they used to as they go cap-in-hand to Abuja on monthly basis.
In other states in the South, kidnapping for ransom, one of the fallouts of the armed militancy of the Delta and a sign of the social degradation and loss of values among the people, has been brought to the front burner.
There is such a massive infrastructure decay that is evident of the failure of government to provide the necessary facilities to even run a society, while existing ones, like the National Airline, have been moribund for years with no hope of resuscitation.
Although the country’s economy was recently rebased to bring out the resilience of the system to survive many odds and emerge as the strongest in Africa even with obvious failure of government, the effect is hardly felt among a population that has one of the shortest life expectancy, 17th lowest on the globe and highest rate of unemployment in the Third World.
Up to the first eight years of the present democratic dispensation, there was little borrowing by states and during the period at the national level, debts owed both the London and Paris clubs of creditors were settled and others written off. But now, more are being procured and states are mortgaging the future, of their citizens even while the rot in almost all sectors of the society continues.
The bottom line is that Nigeria as presently constituted and structured can hardly survive the political labyrinth that she has found herself and that is why so much expectation is being placed on the ongoing national conference to rectify some of the identified lapses in the polity.
Despite the high hopes that the conference has to once again provide a platform for the country to review the journey so far, prepare a road map for the future and organise the polity in such a way to realise the dreams, it seems that the 492 wise men and women, drawn from across the country, have become victims of the same problems they are gathered to resolve.
Quality times are being spent on frivolities and in almost all the instances; delegates are further burrowing into their ethnic trenches to the extent that national issues that should be tackled with the mindset of statesmen are being viewed through the narrow prisms of tribalism.
Rather than focus on things that unite Nigeria and strengthen them to further cement the union, the delegates so far, have been dissipating energy on things that are causing division, raising fears that the country may come out more divided than before it went for the confab.
It is however not too late for the delegates to invoke the country’s built-in resilience and make sure that the predictions of the Americans do not come to pass. It is an opportunity of a lifetime.
National Conference: Last Chance To Save Nigeria’s Ship Of State?
Armsfree Ajanaku
BEYOND the lacerations inflicted by the terrorists on the country, there is the general unease about Nigeria’s inability to get things right and begin the travel on the road to stability and prosperity. Over the years, in the global arena, Nigeria cuts the picture of a country of too many lost opportunities, a poster child for how not to run the lives of millions. Blighted by mind boggling elite corruption, oil dependent, and playing host to a growing population of millions of poverty stricken country men and women, Nigeria is everyday becoming a source of constant trepidation for a world at odds about what to do, if suddenly the tinder box goes off.
One of the many diagnosis of Nigeria’s historic national crises points to the artificiality of the country’s foundation. This line of reasoning underscores the timeworn talk about the British colonial legacy, which clobbered together hundreds of ethnic nationalities, arbitrarily upending their sovereignties and forcefully making them reluctant parts of an African tower of Babel. The diagnosis holds that every other manifestation of the Nigerian quagmire takes its roots from this foundational incongruity.
For critics of the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria therefore, the argument, which is advanced with a convincing degree of certainty is that that 1914 is the source of the bumbling chaos that is now Nigeria.
The collective agonies of the intellectual adversaries of the amalgamation is further expressed in the assertion that by arbitrarily bringing together a vast array of histories, cultures and destinies, the colonial overlords effectively succeeded in creating a vast war zone, where different worldviews were certain to slug it out in a cut throat competition for resources.
Effectively, in this contrived “geographical expression,” might is the only right, resulting in a national space of too many extreme resentments against the decades-long institutionalization of injustice.
Consequently, the post 1914 State in the Nigerian context emerged as an instrument of oppression, not as an agency for development and the nurturing of the destinies of its constituent units. Also, the state took on a character of an entity exclusively designed to fend for and protect the elite who have access to political and economic power, as well as the national till. For the weak and marginalized in society, the only recourse had to do with conversing with extra-terrestrial forces, for divine intervention, and a better life.
Bad as this diagnosis seems however, a number of Nigerian statesmen, activists and politicians have insisted that reversing the disturbing state of affairs would involve a concerted effort to restructure the very foundations of the country. The prescription has been that it is only when the wobbly beginning is addressed that the nation can start the journey to true rebirth.
This position and subsequent calls for a Grand National conversation to redesign the architecture of the nation intensified in the 1990s, when the nation reeled under the vice-like and autocratic grip of the military. While the governing elite sneered at such a discussion, proponents continued to harp on it as the only alternative to rescue Nigeria.
Expectations that the advent of civil rule in 1999 would eventually address those fundamental issues derailing or stunting national development were dashed. Hustling and jostling politicians showed scant interest in redesigning the polity, until 2005 when former President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the National Political Reforms Conference. That conference ended on a quarrelsome note, with the Niger Delta delegates taking a walk over a push for percentage increase in derivation funds accruable to oil producing states. Allegations that the conference was set up, with a sinister agenda to surreptitiously push for tenure elongation for the administration also tainted the conference. In the end, the recommendations from the deliberation were placed before the National Assembly, which simply ignored them, as it never supported the conference in the first place.
Since October 1, 2013 when President Goodluck Jonathan announced plans for the convocation of a National Conference, there has been a legion of optimists who have insisted that the conference presents Nigeria the final opportunity to rescue an amalgamation that is increasingly on the path to derailment. The voices of the optimists have generally prevailed over those who took potshots at the conference, insisting that it was part of a partisan agenda aimed at securing a second term in office for President Jonathan in 2015. The naysayers, especially in the camp of the opposition had branded the exercise a waste of precious time and resources, but a number of politicians from the fold of the disagreeing opposition are now actively participating. Furthermore, opposition’s scathing views about the conference have simmered and there is an increasing consensus that the conference presents a veritable opportunity for putting Nigeria back on track.
However, since it began sitting in March, there have been questions about the nature and quality of deliberations as well as the exact issues that are being discussed to put Nigeria on the road to stability and prosperity. The conference has also been extended by six weeks. After the slight logjam over the voting pattern for reaching decisions, delegates have now settled down to work at the level of the committees. It is from some of these committees that the typical Nigerian vibes and altercations have been emanating. The age long resource control debate has been carried on along the broad North/South political divide with tempers rising. And after all the heat and arguments, Committee on Devolution of Power recommended that status quo be maintained for derivation principle and resource control.
Effectively, absence of a middle ground on the issue and the death of resource control at the committee level means sections of the country which anchored their continued belief in the Nigerian project on resource control would continue their restiveness. Already, reactions bordering on resentments have begun to trail the committee’s decision.
For instance, the Ijaw Youth Council has been reportedly urging the southern delegates at the Conference, particularly those from the Niger Delta to insist on resource control during the debate in plenary and not to deviate from the position of the region on resource control. It expressed dismay over the contributions of Niger Delta delegates who were thought to have spoken against the agenda of resource control.
On other issues that relate with the very structure of the Nigerian federation, including revenue allocation, state police and local government reforms, there doesn’t seem to be enough motivation from the delegates to go the whole hog in repositioning the Nigerian federation. Even the actual modalities for implementing the decisions of the conference have not been reached by delegates. It would be recalled that the Senator Femi Okuroumu advisory panel left the task for the conference itself to determine, recommending that “the National Conference itself shall have the responsibility of setting out the said legal procedures and options for integrating its decisions and outcomes of its deliberations into the Constitution and the Laws of the nation.”
In this context, there are those who are waiting for how exactly things will pan out. Public opinion does not seem to favour taking the outcomes to the National Assembly. Many Nigerian interest groups are calling for a referendum on the outcome of the deliberations. It is to navigate these knotty questions that the President in his wisdom appointed the octogenarian former Chief Justice, Idris Kutigi as Chairman of the conference. The experience and sagacity of the old man, which was well demonstrated during the logjam over decision-making percentage and the constitution of the committees, has so far helped the conference to remain on course. However, all these exertions would amount to nothing if far-reaching decisions are not taken to salvage Nigeria from its current drift. Nigeria is dire need of a rescue plan; all eyes are on this conference for that road map.
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| Map showing where school girls were abducted. |
Sunday Magazine
Nigerian Guardian
NIGERIA is an unusual country, not in its large socio-economic, ethnic and religious diversity and its vast human and material resources, but in its capability, over the years, to get back from the brink anytime the vehicle of state is driven to the edge of the precipice.
The country seems to have more than the nine lives of the proverbial cat and like the Phoenix, the Greek mythical bird that rises from its own ashes, has so far survived the crises, most, if not all of which are self-inflicted.
General Ibrahim Babangida, as a Military President was once quoted as saying that the country’s economic template was not in the mould of others around the world and that many times, he had wondered how the economy kept running, despite so many departures from the accepted norms.
On the political scene, there is always the feeling of “we-will-get-over-it” among a leadership populated by more tribal chieftains that statesmen who, because of the seemingly endless flow of petrodollars that lubricates the massive wheel of corruption, believe that they can get away with virtually everything.
The mass of the mainly impoverished population with a decimated middle class cut the picture of the docility of a sheep being led to the slaughter-house and despite being classified as one of the largest assemblage of poverty-stricken people on the globe, held on tenaciously to the optimism of the leadership, like Moses the raven in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
After the carnage of the early years of independence and the trauma of a 30-month civil war, the country still rose as one and when in the aftermath of the 1993 election annulment crisis, the political class got its act together to assuage the feelings of the Southwest, by ceding the presidency to the zone, life continued as usual.
In the nation’s subconscious however, the fragile nature of the country’s unity, which became evident in the very instrument of statehood formation in 1914, the history of rivalry among the ethnic nationalities like a genie, continue to stalk the land as the country trudged on the road to nationhood.
Under that façade of unity that was emplaced more by the unitary structure of military dictatorship, there were always distrusts and suspicions among the ruling class and this, like the putrid stench of corruption oozing down the social ladder, permeates the cracked wall of national structure.
On April 22, 1990, it took the Gideon Orkar coup for a handful of Middle-Belt officers to bring to the fore, the seething anger of a section of the country against another, when the mutineers announced that five states in the North had been excised from the country.
Within 24 hours, the rebellion was crushed and the country was once again glued together. But if the military had managed to “decree unity”, the liberal system of democratic governance has exposed the weaknesses of the nation such that the built-in mechanism of survival is being threatened by a nation that has stretched its luck too far.
With the return to civil rule in 1999 and the hopes that the opportunity offered for fine-tuning the process of participatory democracy that had been truncated thrice earlier, there was great expectation that the country would, through the new template of popular governance, smoothen the rough edges of nationhood.
However, this expectation is gradually giving way to despondency and rather than further strengthen the foundation of unity as envisaged, the system appears to be under constant assaults from elements that are determined to bring down the entire super-structure.
Even the progresses the country has recorded on the political turf, which should have been built upon, are gradually being frittered away. An instance is the June 12, 1993 presidential election that was won by a Muslim-Muslim ticket of late Chief M.K.O Abiola and Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, where Abiola, a Yoruba from the Southwest was said to have defeated his rival, Alhaji Bashir Tofa in his Kano home base.
The gains of an election that could have been used to strengthen the nation’s fragile fabric by relegating religion and ethnicity to the background was wasted by a self-serving ruling class, both military and civilian, through appealing to these same base sentiments that the ordinary Nigerian had rejected. Religious balancing is currently playing a major role in the preparation for next year’s election as it did to similar ones after the 1993 experience.
The events within Nigeria are already drawing attention from the international community, which may have an unprecedented crisis in its hands if the country should succumb under the burden of the multi-faceted crisis.
Some six years ago, a controversial report from the United States predicted that Nigeria could become a failed state in 2015, but many compatriots described it as coming from doomsday prophets who never saw the potentials in the country as envisaged in the government’s Vision 20:2020, which aims to put the largest concentration of blacks in the world among the top 20 global economies.
And in February 2011, a group of five US Military experts from the Centre for Strategy and Technology, Air University, Maxwell Base in Alabama, in a future scenario-building analysis for countries within the sphere of American economic interests, stated in a report that Nigeria could break-up in 2030.
According to the 196-page report, which is said to have the capacity of influencing US position on global affairs, Nigeria’s “history of tribal and religious conflicts, endemic corruption at all levels of government, poor national planning, uneven development, social disorder, rampant criminality, violent insurgency, and terminal weak governance provides an environment that could portend imminent collapse and failure.”
The authors, however, said the report was “not a specific prediction of the future or a depiction of a state of affairs that will and must occur, a discussion of how the trends occurring in Nigeria since its birth as a nation in 1960 could, under the right conditions, lead to its failure,” adding that the scenario in the country was “mirroring in some ways the events in Lebanon in 1975 and Somalia in 1991.”
Although the US envoy in Nigeria, Terrence McCulley absolved his government from the reports, saying they did not reflect the official position, the matter refused to abate and in December 2012, in its Global Trends Reports of that year, Washington DC-based National Intelligence Council stated that 15 countries across the globe, eleven of them in black Africa, would be categorized as failed states by 2030.
While many still believe in the resilience of the Nigerian spirit to survive the present onslaught, facts on ground and the manner that the crises are being handled by those charged with the administration of state are creating the fears that the country may indeed be on the path of fulfilling the predictions of the Americans.
The northern part of the country, which for many years had been known for religious unrests, has added armed militancy to its notoriety with ethnic cleansing in the Plateau axis that has reversed the fortune of the once beautiful and accommodating city of Jos.
In most states in the north, particularly in the Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, which for more than one year have been under emergency rule, a brutal religious group with an unclear ideology, the Boko Haram, has been maiming and killing innocent people in the most blood-curdling manner.
Even Abuja, the serene Federal Capital, is not protected from the attacks of this mindless insurgency, as several people have been killed, while statements on their desire to balkanize the country have been made through deafening loudness of bombings of international targets, security formations, and populated areas.
While the dreaded sect has lately intensified its attacks calling to question the capability or as some people would say, the desirability, of the Federal Government to stop an orgy that has consumed an estimated 3,000 lives, a new dimension in nomadic marauders killing innocent people and destroying farmlands and villages across the middle-belt in the climax of the age-long struggle for land resources, has also added to the insecurity.
Although armed militancy has been reduced in the Niger Delta region by an Amnesty Programme that is greasing the palms of erstwhile restive youths, rather than addressing the problem of infrastructure deficit and ecological degradation, a new list of emergency billionaires are being created among the ex-militants, who have allegedly abandoned pilfering gallons of crude to a more lucrative business of stealing ship-loads and selling at the international market.
Government sources disclosed that as much as 20 percent of Nigeria’s crude production, running into billions of dollars, end up being stolen through illegal bunkering on the high seas, an illicit trade that is being sustained by a corrupt system and which has reduced government earnings to an all-time low, such that states now get lesser what they used to as they go cap-in-hand to Abuja on monthly basis.
In other states in the South, kidnapping for ransom, one of the fallouts of the armed militancy of the Delta and a sign of the social degradation and loss of values among the people, has been brought to the front burner.
There is such a massive infrastructure decay that is evident of the failure of government to provide the necessary facilities to even run a society, while existing ones, like the National Airline, have been moribund for years with no hope of resuscitation.
Although the country’s economy was recently rebased to bring out the resilience of the system to survive many odds and emerge as the strongest in Africa even with obvious failure of government, the effect is hardly felt among a population that has one of the shortest life expectancy, 17th lowest on the globe and highest rate of unemployment in the Third World.
Up to the first eight years of the present democratic dispensation, there was little borrowing by states and during the period at the national level, debts owed both the London and Paris clubs of creditors were settled and others written off. But now, more are being procured and states are mortgaging the future, of their citizens even while the rot in almost all sectors of the society continues.
The bottom line is that Nigeria as presently constituted and structured can hardly survive the political labyrinth that she has found herself and that is why so much expectation is being placed on the ongoing national conference to rectify some of the identified lapses in the polity.
Despite the high hopes that the conference has to once again provide a platform for the country to review the journey so far, prepare a road map for the future and organise the polity in such a way to realise the dreams, it seems that the 492 wise men and women, drawn from across the country, have become victims of the same problems they are gathered to resolve.
Quality times are being spent on frivolities and in almost all the instances; delegates are further burrowing into their ethnic trenches to the extent that national issues that should be tackled with the mindset of statesmen are being viewed through the narrow prisms of tribalism.
Rather than focus on things that unite Nigeria and strengthen them to further cement the union, the delegates so far, have been dissipating energy on things that are causing division, raising fears that the country may come out more divided than before it went for the confab.
It is however not too late for the delegates to invoke the country’s built-in resilience and make sure that the predictions of the Americans do not come to pass. It is an opportunity of a lifetime.
National Conference: Last Chance To Save Nigeria’s Ship Of State?
Armsfree Ajanaku
BEYOND the lacerations inflicted by the terrorists on the country, there is the general unease about Nigeria’s inability to get things right and begin the travel on the road to stability and prosperity. Over the years, in the global arena, Nigeria cuts the picture of a country of too many lost opportunities, a poster child for how not to run the lives of millions. Blighted by mind boggling elite corruption, oil dependent, and playing host to a growing population of millions of poverty stricken country men and women, Nigeria is everyday becoming a source of constant trepidation for a world at odds about what to do, if suddenly the tinder box goes off.
One of the many diagnosis of Nigeria’s historic national crises points to the artificiality of the country’s foundation. This line of reasoning underscores the timeworn talk about the British colonial legacy, which clobbered together hundreds of ethnic nationalities, arbitrarily upending their sovereignties and forcefully making them reluctant parts of an African tower of Babel. The diagnosis holds that every other manifestation of the Nigerian quagmire takes its roots from this foundational incongruity.
For critics of the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria therefore, the argument, which is advanced with a convincing degree of certainty is that that 1914 is the source of the bumbling chaos that is now Nigeria.
The collective agonies of the intellectual adversaries of the amalgamation is further expressed in the assertion that by arbitrarily bringing together a vast array of histories, cultures and destinies, the colonial overlords effectively succeeded in creating a vast war zone, where different worldviews were certain to slug it out in a cut throat competition for resources.
Effectively, in this contrived “geographical expression,” might is the only right, resulting in a national space of too many extreme resentments against the decades-long institutionalization of injustice.
Consequently, the post 1914 State in the Nigerian context emerged as an instrument of oppression, not as an agency for development and the nurturing of the destinies of its constituent units. Also, the state took on a character of an entity exclusively designed to fend for and protect the elite who have access to political and economic power, as well as the national till. For the weak and marginalized in society, the only recourse had to do with conversing with extra-terrestrial forces, for divine intervention, and a better life.
Bad as this diagnosis seems however, a number of Nigerian statesmen, activists and politicians have insisted that reversing the disturbing state of affairs would involve a concerted effort to restructure the very foundations of the country. The prescription has been that it is only when the wobbly beginning is addressed that the nation can start the journey to true rebirth.
This position and subsequent calls for a Grand National conversation to redesign the architecture of the nation intensified in the 1990s, when the nation reeled under the vice-like and autocratic grip of the military. While the governing elite sneered at such a discussion, proponents continued to harp on it as the only alternative to rescue Nigeria.
Expectations that the advent of civil rule in 1999 would eventually address those fundamental issues derailing or stunting national development were dashed. Hustling and jostling politicians showed scant interest in redesigning the polity, until 2005 when former President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the National Political Reforms Conference. That conference ended on a quarrelsome note, with the Niger Delta delegates taking a walk over a push for percentage increase in derivation funds accruable to oil producing states. Allegations that the conference was set up, with a sinister agenda to surreptitiously push for tenure elongation for the administration also tainted the conference. In the end, the recommendations from the deliberation were placed before the National Assembly, which simply ignored them, as it never supported the conference in the first place.
Since October 1, 2013 when President Goodluck Jonathan announced plans for the convocation of a National Conference, there has been a legion of optimists who have insisted that the conference presents Nigeria the final opportunity to rescue an amalgamation that is increasingly on the path to derailment. The voices of the optimists have generally prevailed over those who took potshots at the conference, insisting that it was part of a partisan agenda aimed at securing a second term in office for President Jonathan in 2015. The naysayers, especially in the camp of the opposition had branded the exercise a waste of precious time and resources, but a number of politicians from the fold of the disagreeing opposition are now actively participating. Furthermore, opposition’s scathing views about the conference have simmered and there is an increasing consensus that the conference presents a veritable opportunity for putting Nigeria back on track.
However, since it began sitting in March, there have been questions about the nature and quality of deliberations as well as the exact issues that are being discussed to put Nigeria on the road to stability and prosperity. The conference has also been extended by six weeks. After the slight logjam over the voting pattern for reaching decisions, delegates have now settled down to work at the level of the committees. It is from some of these committees that the typical Nigerian vibes and altercations have been emanating. The age long resource control debate has been carried on along the broad North/South political divide with tempers rising. And after all the heat and arguments, Committee on Devolution of Power recommended that status quo be maintained for derivation principle and resource control.
Effectively, absence of a middle ground on the issue and the death of resource control at the committee level means sections of the country which anchored their continued belief in the Nigerian project on resource control would continue their restiveness. Already, reactions bordering on resentments have begun to trail the committee’s decision.
For instance, the Ijaw Youth Council has been reportedly urging the southern delegates at the Conference, particularly those from the Niger Delta to insist on resource control during the debate in plenary and not to deviate from the position of the region on resource control. It expressed dismay over the contributions of Niger Delta delegates who were thought to have spoken against the agenda of resource control.
On other issues that relate with the very structure of the Nigerian federation, including revenue allocation, state police and local government reforms, there doesn’t seem to be enough motivation from the delegates to go the whole hog in repositioning the Nigerian federation. Even the actual modalities for implementing the decisions of the conference have not been reached by delegates. It would be recalled that the Senator Femi Okuroumu advisory panel left the task for the conference itself to determine, recommending that “the National Conference itself shall have the responsibility of setting out the said legal procedures and options for integrating its decisions and outcomes of its deliberations into the Constitution and the Laws of the nation.”
In this context, there are those who are waiting for how exactly things will pan out. Public opinion does not seem to favour taking the outcomes to the National Assembly. Many Nigerian interest groups are calling for a referendum on the outcome of the deliberations. It is to navigate these knotty questions that the President in his wisdom appointed the octogenarian former Chief Justice, Idris Kutigi as Chairman of the conference. The experience and sagacity of the old man, which was well demonstrated during the logjam over decision-making percentage and the constitution of the committees, has so far helped the conference to remain on course. However, all these exertions would amount to nothing if far-reaching decisions are not taken to salvage Nigeria from its current drift. Nigeria is dire need of a rescue plan; all eyes are on this conference for that road map.
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