NIGERIA: The challenge of half a century2010-05-14 12:16:00
Nigeria’s jubilee anniversary coming up on 1st October this year has elicited deliberations on the challenges facing a country that seems to have performed below expectations. Max Amuchie.
Nigeria’s jubilee anniversary coming up on 1st October this year has elicited deliberations on the challenges facing a country that seems to have performed below expectations.
Half a century is a land mark age in the life of a person, an organization, institution or a country. That is why as Nigeria clocks 50 years as an independent nation this year, various organizations are putting in place programmes and projects to mark the 50th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence. Though the actual date is October 1, events marking the epoch anniversary have commenced in varying forms and shapes. One of such events took place in Calabar, the Cross River State capital last weekend. The Institute of Strategic Management, Nigeria (ISMN) held its sixth annual conference and general meeting at Monty Suites, Calabar. The theme was ‘The challenge of Nigeria at 50’.
It was an event that attracted eminent Nigerians from different parts of the country. After the opening speech of the president of the institute, Leo Ajiborisha, Mathew Hassan Kukah, vicar-general of the Catholic Archdiocese of Kaduna, took the floor. His topic was ‘Nigeria at 50: Challenges and prospects.’ He began by analyzing the various challenges Nigeria as a nation has had to contend with in the last 50 years. He identified them as educational decay, institutional decay, political decay, economic decay and infrastructural decay.
The rest, he said, are cultural decay, bureaucratic decay, moral decay, electoral failure and political decay. He talked about the difficulty in organizing free and fair elections in Nigeria, saying that the failure of the last election should not be blamed only on Maurice Iwu, the outgoing chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). He said some other civil society organizations have been unable to organize credible elections, adding that the pervasiveness of corruption in the country is what makes it difficult to hold credible elections. After 50 years of independence, Kukah said the challenge before Nigeria at the moment was to embrace a democratic culture, end poverty and ignorance and entrench a culture of science.The others are freeing religion from politics, putting Nigerians to work, entrenching a culture of rule of law, freedom of information and media security and ending the culture of impunity.
In his contribution entitled ‘Towards a balanced federal republic’, a politician and lawyer, Joe Nwodo, noted that “Everybody agrees that in order to harness our prodigious human and natural resources we require a stable and appropriate form of governmental organisation which will enable us to bring out the best in our people.” He said in the First Republic the balance of power revolved round the regions which were very powerful in relation to a weak Federal Government.
He continued: “Today the centre of gravity has shifted from the states to an over powerful Federal Government of Nigeria. Notwithstanding this total swing of the national power pendulum, Nigerians are still earnestly searching for a balanced Federal Republic of Nigeria.” Nwodo noted that the struggle for a balanced national political structure is as old as Nigeria itself. “Among those who shaped the struggle are first and foremost, the British colonisers of Nigeria. Their efforts were followed by those of our founding fathers. They took over the unbalanced colonial federal structure planted by the British. They added one more region known as Midwest Region (or Bendel State) to the three other British created regions. The most decisive influence on our federal structure did not however come from our founding fathers. It came from the Nigerian Army which not only overthrew the Federal Government in 1967 but also succeeded in overhauling the national political structure.
Between 1967 and 1996 the Nigerian Army as the Federal Military Government of Nigeria created additional 32 states so that Nigeria became a federation with thirty-six states. “By the time the Army ended up with this 36-state federal structure the character of the Federal Republic of Nigeria had become substantially transformed from a de jure Federal Republic of Nigeria to a de facto unitary state. This transformation from a federation of three to four unbalanced regions and the subsequent explosion into an unbalanced federation of 36 states took place in three distinctive periods”.
He identified the periods as the period of ‘informal federation’ 1900-1914; the period of ‘formal federation’ first phase 1946-1960, and the period of ‘formal federation’ second phase 1967 to date. According to Nwodo, “there is a general consensus that a balanced federal system of government is necessary in order to ensure unity of national purpose and harmony in the national political system so that the country can move forward. From our historical survey, it is clear that several parameters have been tried in order to ensure a balanced Federal Republic of Nigeria. “Equally important are the efforts which have been made to ensure a fair balance in the distribution of states among the major ethnic groups inter se and between them and the minority ethnic groups. Other efforts have been concentrated in order to ensure that there is a fair balance in the distribution of powers between the federal and state governments.”
One such effort, he said is the doctrine of federal character, which he called “a peculiar Nigerian innovation … applied to our national institutions to ensure there is no predominance of persons from a few states or a few ethnic or other sectional groups in control of any Nigerian government institutions or any of its agencies.” But Nwodo said the most important parameter in balancing any federation is in the area of finance, the division of national revenue between the federal government and the state governments. He said: “Despite many efforts to balance the division of our national revenue between the federal government and the state governments, the latter still lack the financial capability to stand on their own particularly in the current era of the 36-state structure.”
He said the creation of 36 states has engendered an unbalanced territorial structure for the federation, which has resulted in the enlargement of the powers of the Federal Government to the detriment of the states. “What is most offensive about this increase in the powers of the Federal Government is that it runs counter to normal division of functions in a Federation, whereby local matters are left to the states while common and national matters are left for the centre. The situation is compounded by the fact that even if we were to divest the Federal Government of these powers we cannot return them to the present 36 states. They are too weak to effectively exercise these powers”, he argued.
The solution, according to Nwodo lies in dismantling the 36-state structure and returning to the six new geo-political regions. He noted that “the balance of power in our federation requires the constant balancing of the conflicting objectives of national unity, ethnic autonomy and national stability.”
Speaking on ‘Challenges of Nigeria at 50: Civil society perspective’, Otive Igbuzor, former country representative of ActionAid International, identified five forms of freedom, namely political freedom, economic freedom, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective security. Mahmud Othman, director of public communication, Leventis Group, Lagos, took the audience down memory lane on what Nigeria looked like on October 1, 1960 when Nigeria gained independence and the dream of the founding fathers of the nation, dreams which have not been achieved 50 years after independence.
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