MONDAY COLUMN
By Kabiru A. Yusuf
kabiruyusuf@dailytrust.com

200 years after the European scramble for Africa, 45 years after independence and 13 years after the cancellation of the June 12 election, proponents of “true federalism” have at least half a chance to make their dream come true. The main push is coming from the Yoruba, who already occupy a region and have the numbers and the economic backbone to strike out on their own. Other regions and ethnic groups are not that well-positioned, but they nevertheless seem attracted by the siren songs of regionalism where each group, they say, can develop at its own pace.
You would have thought that there would be loud cries of amen from the Northern region to this proposal. After all a huge chunk of the north, from Sokoto to Ilorin, Borno to Adamawa, used to belong to the same flourishing empire, which had a coherent ideology and functioning political structures. Some of these institutions, and certainly their cultural underpinnings, have survived colonial rule, and as the debate on the Shariah legal system demonstrated, are coexisting uneasily in the post-colonial state. A regional structure would give its people freedom to develop as they wish and not at the dictate of Western paradigm that seems to be the accepted model of other parts of Nigeria.
Indeed there are Islam-only activists in the region who for years have been campaigning for just such a break, but in the face of a consensus by the elites, they are keeping their heads down. But what explains the opposition of the northern political elites to calls for collapsing the 36 states into six, eight or twelve regions? The first problem is the perception that the proposal is not made in good faith, but is another ploy by the elites from the South to deny the north its due.
When Nigeria had, first, three, then four regions, in the 60s, some of the same voices now demanding for a return to federalism made their names by attacking an “omnibus north” on the pages of Lagos newspapers. In those innocent days after independence, southern politicians, with their law and philosophy degrees from western universities, thought that in spite of the advantages of numbers, they could get the better of their poorly trained northern counterparts. But they forgot that leadership is not just about education, but it is also about character and so a Grade-two teacher from Katsina College could do much better than alumni of Lincoln Inn.
So when the barrage of propaganda and campaigning by helicopter failed to deliver the goods, the south began to demand for ‘power-shift’, which is Nigeria’s contribution to the lexicon of democracy. It means that since the south cannot legitimately win power through the ballot box, the presidency of the country should be conceded to it so that its people (who have been highly mobilized through propaganda) could feel a sense of belonging to the federation. Now faced with the prospects of a northerner winning the presidency in 2007, our ever-shifting brothers are changing tack. They want the country to be broken into bigger regions, with a weaker centre, which by the logic of modern politics will eventually become no centre at all.
From the northern point of view, the advocacy for regional autonomy has less to do with a desire for economic or cultural independence, but is all about the fear of so called “northern hegemony”, which ironically is to translate into an effort to impose “hegemony” on the north. One other problem is that the north has for centuries been multi-cultural; that within it, as in the wider Nigeria, tribes and tongues do differ, though the majority speak Hausa as a ligua-franca and adhere to Islam as a religion. Unfortunately the revival of Islam that followed the Iranian revolution in the 80s has sharpened religious sensibilities in the region, with the substantial Christian minority often at daggers drawn with their Muslim neighbours.
I suspect it is not only in the north that when the chips are down people must face the reality, that while it is difficult to live together; it is perhaps even more difficult for communities to be broken and rearranged into regions. Decades after the creation of States in all parts of Nigeria, including the western part of it, the sharing of assets has not been concluded. Imagine the scenario of a more through-going restructuring where for example Kaduna town is included in a Middle belt region, Ilorin is made part of the West and Port-Harcourt part of the Eastern region.
But advocates of such restructuring from the South seem to think that the main concern of the north is the potential loss of revenue from the Federation Account that is kept active by oil exports. That is why inevitably in the mind of most commentators restructuring goes together with “resource control”, again a peculiar Nigerian terminology, which means that the Southern minorities should keep proceeds from oil exports since most of it comes from their localities.
The sudden loss of oil revenue will indeed have a huge impact on most states in Nigeria. That explains the rare cooperation between governors in the north and south-west in challenging the resource control suit brought to the Supreme Court by the oil-producing states. The lifestyle of our elites has been funded by this oil windfall, so governors from non-oil producing states should be expected to defend the status quo because it makes life easier. But it is clear that we cannot continue to live at the expense of tomorrow and if it would take the loss of oil revenue to bring us back to our senses, so be it.
So as the Political reform conference resumes this week, two meetings of governors from the north and south have highlighted the main issue it will grapple with. The southern governors in their “Lagos Summit 2005” over the weekend, while insisting on national unity, “urges members of the conference to also ensure that true federalism is entrenched in all facets of our constitutional law and practice”. The northern governors, who had met in Kaduna last Friday, asked the delegates they nominated to the conference, to remain within the agenda set out in President Obasanjo’s speech while opening the conference. According to the NGF “the present states structure should be retained and the current presidential system of government should equally be retained”.
I learnt on good authority that some of the northern governors, including Makarfi, who is now chairman of the group, had earlier favoured the parliamentary system of government, which many of the old-timers that are representing the states at the conference hark back to with nostalgia. But after Obasanjo’s ringing endorsement of the presidential system, it seems the governors have accepted it as a no-go area. Whatever it is I thought Makarfi’s welcome address to his colleagues captures my sense of the mood in the north pretty well.
He said “northern respect for and belief in Nigeria remains unshakeable and we will continue to do all that we can for the continued wellbeing of the country but not at the perpetual expense of our people”. In other words nobody should assume that we pay any price for the unity of Nigeria and if the north makes a concession out of respect and regard for the feeling of compatriots, this should not be used against it.
Perhaps it is too much to expect gratitude and good fellow feeling , but if one good turn does not deserve another, we risk eroding the very basis of our living together. As for those who imagine that when they succeed in creating their little Kingdom by the sea they will be free of the “Nigerian factor”, I say look again. The virus may be closer to you than you think. It was St Augustine, I think, who said “more tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones”. In other words, sometimes it is risky to fervently wish for a particular outcome, because God may grant your prayer and then your trouble is about to begin!