For months, as the security situation worsened and hardships deepened across the country, the attentive audience in Nigeria urged President Muhammadu Buhari repeatedly to speak up, to engage, and to lead.
Amidst the turmoil, Buhari appeared unmoved. The pleas turned into a clamour; still, he carried on as if he was reconciled to the situation as the new normal. Those who claim the ability to decode his “body language” said they saw resignation stamped all over his deportment and comportment. They said he was so overwhelmed that he must be wishing he could speed up time and end his tenure well ahead of schedule.
The more firmly grounded in the attentive audience were diffident at best. What would he say then that he had not said at one forum or another, and what difference had it made? How would another broadcast, the text of which was in all probability composed by bureaucrats and securocrats in the soulless language that is their trademark and likely to be rendered in like manner to a national audience alleviate their grinding misery?
In June 2021, as the nation celebrated Democracy Day, Buhari finally chose to engage. He did so in a manner that confounded those who thought he had given up, and those who thought he had nothing new to say. They expected a talking head surrounded by the artefacts of office to read, perfunctorily, a text put together by persons who play a tangential role at best in the scheme of things.
He chose the more engaging format of not one, but two back-to-back interviews with media professionals from the Nigerian Television Authority and ARISE Television.
If his outing was not exactly a command performance, it was certainly not the foul-up many were expecting. He held his own; he didn’t let his interlocutors back him into a corner; he was not in the least conciliatory.
He defended his most controversial public service appointments, saying they were based solely on merit and competence, with nary a taint of nepotism or parochialism.
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Thousands of farmers may have been bankrupted by herders who have turned farmlands into killing and grazing fields; entire villages may have been sacked by marauding herders asserting a fundamental right to tend their herds anywhere they pleased.
Buhari’s answer to this mayhem is a law enacted by the Northern Nigeria Government in the 1960s establishing grazing routes for cattle herds. The law applied only to that region, and expired with the Land Use Act, if not with that territory itself. Was that law from that bygone era now to be nationalized?
The interviews presented Buhari with an opportunity to refine or modify his views on a wide range of important national issues. Instead, he dug in, doubled down, without nuance and without any concession to those who hold different views, and even more crucially with no empathy for those who had been driven to the edge of ruin by the cattle herders who carried on as if they had a licence, his licence, to wage a campaign of terror and impunity against farming communities.
Buhari’s contempt for the national policy dialogue, especially as it concerns the National Question, would come to the fore a few days later, during the launch, in Zaria, of the Kudirat Abiola Sabon Gari Peace Foundation.
He declared, per Alhaji Mohammed Shehu, executive secretary of the Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, that advocates of restructuring and secession were “naïve and mischievously dangerous.” He told those calling for a national platform to discuss the crises roiling the country that he had no time for any “obscure conference.”
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It was disingenuous indeed to conflate restructuring with secessionism. It is worse. The entire speech, it is necessary to state, was an abuse of forum, and a gratuitous insult to the memory of Kudirat Abiola, who was slain in broad daylight by agents of the Federal Government while she was running an errand for pro-democracy elements campaigning for the validation of the June 12, 1993, presidential election won by her husband, MKO Abiola.
To disparage the cause for which she gave her life, at a forum established in her honour, is worse than unconscionable.
In the face of withering criticism, some of it redolent of the contempt with which he had denounced those calling for national restructuring, Buhari backed off somewhat, saying he would sign into law any Bill duly passed by the National Assembly to that effect.
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That was not a concession, but a dodge, and a transparent one at that.
When they insisted that only the National Assembly could change or amend the Constitution, Buhari and his cohorts unwittingly dropped all pretences. The Constitution they are invoking is a disputed and contested document. Its integrity is dubious at best. It has not served Nigerians well. It was designed by a small group that represented the military authorities of that era and the entrenched interests of the part of the country that is their power base, and then foisted on the nation with the fraudulent prefatory clause, “We the People.”
To make that document the basis of going forward or even remaining on the same spot is to put the entire nation and the political process in a straightjacket. The amendments Buhari signed into law at the end of his tenure do not constitute a significant departure from the present arrangement. They merely tinker around the edges
Building on the mistakes of the drafters of the 1979 Constitution who thought that what the Second Republic needed was a strong Centre, and on decades of the garrison rule of the military, the authors of the 1999 Constitution replaced the Federal Principle on which the country was founded with one grounded in uniformity, with every constituent unit marching at the same pace and to the same tune.
Under the 1963 Constitution, each of the three regions, later four, had its own constitution and institutions that reflected its needs, priorities and aspirations. On issues delegated to the regions, the region’s constitution was the final authority unless and only to the extent that it was inconsistent with the Constitution of Nigeria.
A new constitution will have to return to that arrangement.
All through his political career, President Bola Tinubu has been an apostle of a return to “true federalism.” It was an article of faith in his campaign manifesto. Given the formidable challenges facing his administration, it might seem that restructuring can wait. It is not something that can be accomplished overnight.
But the atmosphere for serious reform has never been more propitious. Tinubu and the Tenth National Assembly must exploit it to the fullest.
In a reconfigured Nigeria, each of the federating units will determine the balance of power between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch. It may opt for a weak executive and a strong legislature or, vice versa, a strong executive and a weak legislature.
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Each state will determine how long governors can hold office, and whether legislators serve full-time or part-time. It will fix their compensation, taking into account its financial resources. Only those who are prepared to serve under the stipulated terms and conditions will offer themselves for public office. Their goal must be to serve, not to get rich through public service.
Each state will determine how many local governments it requires for effective delivery of services at that level, and the pay and conditions of service.
Each state will establish and equip its own police force. Those who object to this arrangement on the ground that state police will be used to persecute political opponents have a point, but are federal police not being used to a considerable extent for that purpose? What makes federal abuse more acceptable than state abuse?
It should be enough to enact and enforce laws against abuse of police powers at all levels.
Powers not expressly delegated to the Federal Government will be vested in the states.
Who needs a Senate that gulps scarce resources but adds little value to legislation and governance? A Senate that serves as a cushy retirement home for careerists and grants them immunity from prosecution for well-documented misdeeds?
The choice before Nigeria is not whether Nigeria will restructure, but when. Unless it restructures, it will go the way of former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. Each day that passes without an advance toward restructuring can only hasten that eventuality.
