Buhari, Nigeria’s Breakup Is Possible

By Sina Adedipe

This comes in reaction to the statements credited to President Muhammadu Buhari in the Nigerian Tribune of last week Friday in a story on Page 8 with the headline: Nigeria’s Break-Up Not Possible, Unthinkable. It was the report of the meeting he had the previous day with members of the Council of South-East Traditional Rulers at the State House, Abuja. But, sad to say, the President never said anything that could stop Igbo people from wanting to break away to establish their own country.

*Buhari 

Earlier in the year, political leaders from the South-East were at Aso Villa to discuss the problems of their people and zone with the President. Like the Yoruba of the South-West and the ethnic groups in the South-South such as the Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio, Itsekiri, Urhobo and others, what the Igbo of the South-East want is the restructuring of the country. To this end, they are demanding for the number of states in the country to be reduced into six or eight regions or a return to the 12-state structure of 1967-1976 and changing from the presidential to the parliamentary system of the First Republic, so that, instead of a strong and overbearing central government, the regions or states would be largely autonomous and in charge of their economic resources, and only paying agreed taxes to the Federal Government, which will take care of matters like currency, postal services, security and foreign affairs.

For their part, the Igbo also want another state created in the South-East to make them have six as has been the case since 1996 with the South-West, South-South, North-Central and North-East. The North-West, to which Buhari belongs, has seven states. From the report in the Tribune, the President did not address any of these issues as all he told the Igbo monarchs was that he would extend the new railway system his government is planning to construct to their zone and that he had shown interest in the Igbo by appointing four of their people as ministers of five of the most important ministries, but which he did not identify.

For me, it is wrong for President Buhari to believe that God brought the ethnic groups in Nigeria together in 1914 for a purpose and that because of that the country cannot break up. Nigeria was not created by the Lord, but by the British government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, the 24th in office who served from 1908 to 1916. The people brought together by God and who cannot break away are those in each tribe in the country, the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, etc., who have the same ancestors, were placed in the same area, speak the same language and have the same culture.

Atiku’s Prognosis And The Prospects Of A Restructured Nigeria

By Olusola Sanni

I must confess I am not one of those who were excited by the call for restructuring the Nigerian federal system by former vice president, Atiku Abubakar. Anyone who knows the former vice president too well will understand that he is a passionate promoter of what has become a cliché of true federalism in Nigeria.

*Atiku and Buhari 

As a student of politics, I cannot pretend to be oblivious of the fact that federalism is more a system of government of itself, than in itself. By this I mean that a system of government can be unitary (or anything) in structure and remain federal in purpose, likewise it is possible for a structure of government to be federal in outlook and unitary in purpose.

Nigeria has had a long walk to its current state of governmental system and it can safely be said that the debate about how the Nigerian state should be structured is as old as the country itself. Right from the 1954 Constitutional Conference to the 2014 conference, Nigeria has spent the last sixty years asking the same question of how best it can be governed.

It may appear that perhaps something is intrinsically wrong with the political system in Nigeria, otherwise why should it take a people so long a time to find a solution to an easy puzzle and yet cannot crack it. Or, it may be that our Sisyphean experience is in the nature of federalism itself. In order words, no federal arrangement of government is ever perfect, and thus every federal system of government continually seeks perfection.

Therefore, we can say that while fiscal federalism was the bone of contention between resource-rich states and Abuja during the Obasanjo/Atiku dispensation, same way is conflicting judicial pronouncements currently the bone of contention between Washington and the state of North Carolina in the United States of America over LGBT rights. That means that even the world’s bastion of democracy and federation, USA, is still asking the same question of how best to be governed after more than 200 years of its being.