Restructure Nigeria To Save It

By Reuben Abati  

No one should be surprised by the loud and widespread support that has attended the latest call by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar that Nigeria needs to be restructured. In his words, “our current structure and the practices it has encouraged have been a major impediment to the economic and political development of our country. In short, it has not served Nigeria well, and at the risk of reproach it has not served my part of the country, the North, well. The call for restructuring is even more relevant today in the light of the governance and economic challenges facing us…Nigeria must remain a united country…I also believe that a united country, which I think most Nigerians desire, should never be taken for granted or taken as evidence that Nigerians are content with the current structure of the Federation. Making that mistake might set us on the path of losing the country we love…”

*Dr. Reuben Abati 

In those words, the former Vice President and now APC chieftain simply summarized what is already well known and has helped to draw attention afresh to what has been talked about over time but which Nigeria at the expense of its citizens and its own corporate existence is yet to address frontally and forthrightly. Indeed, Nigeria as presently structured and managed is not working. To save the country, the country must be restructured, not only politically but also in terms of the relationship between the federating units and the values that hold the union together.

Nations evolve on the basis of a creative rethinking of their processes and experiences. When the Americans came up with a Presidential/Congressional system of government in 1787, and wrote a Constitution to express their aspirations and expectations, they wanted to address the cleavages within the union and build a united country. In Nigeria, we inherited a skewed federal arrangement from the colonial masters, failed to improve on this, and ended up with the wages of that defect in the form of political crises and eventual civil war.

We have experienced years of military rule during which an enduring culture of praetorianism and dictatorship was established and when eventually we returned to civilian rule, we simply copied and pasted the American Presidential style of government. We have also borrowed the slogan of federalism, but in reality what we have is a unitary type of federalism, a unitary state, completely de-federalized. This is ironic considering the fact that one of the reasons for the collapse of the Aguiyi-Ironsi administration is commonly accepted to be his introduction of Decree No 34 of May 25, 1966, which in effect, transformed Nigeria into a unitary state.

Nigeria is in urgent need of a “re-set”, a rethinking, a redesign. The view that this is necessary has been in the public domain for more than 20 years, but successive administrations either toyed with it, politicized it, or they got round to it at end of term, so late that they gave a succeeding administration the opportunity to conveniently ignore it. The latest of such efforts was in 2014 when the Jonathan administration organized a National Political Conference, where far-reaching recommendations were made to ensure a restructuring of Nigeria. Sadly, the Report of that Conference, endorsed and supported by the Nigerian people, is hidden somewhere in government closets, gathering dust.