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.