The Nation Newspaper

Category: Ropo Sekoni

Federalism and taxation

Tax payers wishing to reduce their tax burden in a federal system should not need the intervention of the central government

Most countries have a wide array of taxes, each of which is applicable in clearly defined circumstances. The proliferation may however be more noticeable in federalist countries like Nigeria. By virtue of powers conferred by the 1999 Constitution, taxes and levies in Nigeria are charged at three levels, i.e. Federal, State, and Local. This follows a demarcation of functions among the three tiers and the distribution of legislative powers between the Federal and State Legislatures—Ade Ipaye in 2010.

The recent announcement by the Minister of Finance about the federal government’s intention to “streamline and harmonise taxation across the country” could not have come at a worse time. As is expected in a democracy, it is right for tax payers to ask for tax reforms that can lessen the burden of tax payers, be they individual or corporate. But for the federal government to be thinking of a major tax reform across the country after the leader of the federal government has called for a national conference to discuss the nature of Nigeria’s multiethnic federalism is to put the cart before the horse.

Harmonisation of tax in a federal system is anathema, particularly to those who care about public finance for development, more so in a federal system that cannot develop solely on the strength of on revenue from non-renewable resources. A multiple form of taxation is an essential characteristic of federal form of governance all over the world. Over the years, Nigeria’s federal system has been watered down by decrees issued by military dictators to emphasize harmonisation, rather than accepting that a federal system must have diversity, to enforce homogenisation instead of appreciating heterogeneity. Efforts to harmonise tax across a federation is like attempting to “reform the irreformable,” to borrow some phrase from the Minister of Finance.

Those who believe that the president is not sufficiently serious about the national conference cannot but smile to hear that his minister of finance and coordinating minister for the economy is enthusiastic about harmonising taxation at a time that the president has asked the country to dialogue about what kind of future it wants. Is the intention of the federal government to harmonise the country’s tax systems another attempt to pre-empt the national conference, just as the intention of the president to submit recommendations from the conference to a national assembly that is clearly hobbled by the desire to keep Nigeria federal in name and unitary in structure?

It is not expected that tax payers all over the world would readily resist multiple taxation. Thus, the recent call by The Tax Payers’ Association of Nigeria (TAPAN) is in order in a democratic system. It is a different matter whether avoiding multiple taxation is realistic in a federal democracy. Tax payers wishing to reduce their tax burden in a federal system should not need the intervention of the central government, as much as they need to negotiate with state governments. Any central government that promises to harmonise taxation in a federal system is either playing to the gallery or being deliberately unrealistic. For any central government to be in a position to harmonize tax across a federal political space, it will need to amend the current constitution to the effect of removing taxation from the concurrent legislative list. To attempt to do that is to call for an end to the federal system.

Tax payers do have a right to expect that at all levels there is a correlation between tax paid and public service given by the government. But in a federal system, where most public goods and services are provided and delivered at the subnational level, tax payers should cry to the states in which they pay taxes for transparency, accountability, and equity. Crying to the federal government to harmonize tax collection is to undermine the country’s dwindling federal system and to encourage the central government to deny states and local governments of their right to raise revenue and responsibility to fund improvement of the quality of life of citizens in specific states.

Even though efforts to water down the federal character of Nigeria has been on for over forty years under the inspiration of military dictatorships, it is now too late in the day for an elected government that has in fact announced convocation of a national conference to put energy into harmonising taxation in the country. This is a function that should be left to the national conference to decide. It is common knowledge that fiscal federalism requires more funds at the subnational level in a federal system, if regular and prompt good services are to be provided by the government for citizens and business communities at the subnational level. It is also true that the relationship between the citizen and the central government in today’s Nigeria is more of alienation than dis-alienation, for several reasons.

One, the central government is overfunded and under monitored by citizens. In fact, public expenditure by the central government appears ‘un-monitorable’ in Nigeria, largely on account of the distance between the central government and the average citizen. Second, the central government relies for most of its expenditures on revenue from non-renewable resource— petroleum. This situation gives the central government a feeling that it is those in power at a given time that are principal stakeholders in the process of governance and that citizens are onlookers. For example, it is easier for people of Lagos State to demand for improvement in provision of public service in Lagos than it is for citizens to influence the federal government to make the country’s most important motorway, the Lagos-Ibadan-Benin safe for movement of persons and goods. L. Enrique Garcia’s claim that there is evidence to suggest that “greater natural resource revenue, by disconnecting spending decisions from the need to levy taxes on the population, contribute to a less efficient use of the extra resources in public service provision” applies to Nigeria as much as it does to Latin America.

It is hoped that today’s piece will stimulate rigorous debates among tax specialists and federalists on the controversial topic of harmonising tax across the country in a federation. Such debates will help those planning to represent their communities at the national conference to provide realistic recommendations on how to address the issue of ‘multiple taxation’ in a country that appears poised for further federalisation, judging by the tone of presentations of most regions to the national conference advisory committee so far.

November 3, 2013
Baba Omojola: the social democrat with a culture

BabaMojola inserted himself in the efforts of youth, especially undergraduates to spread the message of social justice in different parts of the country

Baba Omojola, as he was known in the progressive circles that he helped to nurture for over fifty years in Nigeria in particular and across Africa or the African world in general, is a man being remembered prematurely, given his level of intellectual, spiritual, and cultural energy that even at 75 defied the law of diminishing returns. None of his admirers and co-workers in the vineyard of the struggle for federalism and social democracy in Nigeria ever expected to be in a position of remembering him in the past tense so soon, certainly not with the radiating and infectious energy he evinced only eight weeks ago at the celebration of his 75th birthday anniversary. With the calling of death, remember BabaMojola we must today, but with a heavy heart.

He was a man of rare talent and understanding of the role of culture in development and the place of social democracy in the development of any nation that wants to be remembered as a nation of human progress that is devoid of class prejudice and injustice. More than any other activist for social and economic justice and cultural democracy, BabaMojola fought for the cause of justice with unflinching belief in the power of example, which was most graphically illustrated by his humility and simplicity.

Baba, as he was fondly referred to by his younger associates, had some magnetic power to draw younger believers in the cause of freedom and justice for all to his person, ideas, and ideals. In the progressive circles from the 1970s till the 1990s, many young radical intellectuals often confused Comrade Baba Omojola with Comrade Ola Oni. I, for one, often in the late 1970s used to refer to Baba as the Ola Oni of Lagos and to Ola Oni as the BabaMojola of Ibadan. So close were these two public intellectuals in terms of sincerity of purpose and commitment to the building of a Nigeria with a capacity to dispense social and economic justice to all its citizens that it was not difficult for new initiates to confuse the two.

At a time that it was fashionable for scholars to flaunt their academic credentials and wear the names of the universities from which they acquired training on their faces, Baba was unmistakable in his unassuming nature. It was not necessary for him to advertise that he attended the London School of Economics where he left behind him an academic reputation that was rare even in the history of the institution. It was not necessary for Baba to impress his audience with the jargons of his two kindred disciplines: econometrics and statistics. As an activist for social democracy, he knew that horizontal communication was what is needed to preach the message of progress and justice in a country with less than 50% literacy rate. But he never lost touch with the complexity of the discourse of change from a pre-Bendal postcolonial state to a social democratic one while also showing commitment to inter-ethnic harmony and cooperation across religious and cultural divides in the Nigerian multiethnic state-nation.This disposition was most illustrative in his interaction with youths across the country.

For example in the 1970s and 1980s, BabaMojola inserted himself in the efforts of youth, especially undergraduates to spread the message of social justice in different parts of the country. He was in the 1970s a major organiser of progressive youths in northern Nigeria. In this process, he helped to nurture progressive-minded undergraduates in the Progressive Youth Movement of Nigeria (NYMN), particularly in Kano and Kaduna in the 1970s. He also assisted NYMN in publication of Struggle, a radical journal published in the Kano-Kaduna axis. Baba was not content with spreading the message of social democracy to undergraduates, he also ensured that he assisted to link new graduates with working-class organisations and struggles. Similarly, in the 1980s, BabaMojola, along with late Alao Aka-Bashorun, gave intellectual and financial assistance to facilitate publication of Forward, a workers’ journal published in Lagos, which served as the cradle of ideological growth for many of today’s progressive political thinkers and activists now in their middle age.

I became re-connected with Baba Mojola in the mid-1990s after Babangida’s annulment of the 1993 presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola. It was during his participation in NADECO at home and my own participation with NALICON and NADECO-abroad that I got to see the cultural side of Baba Mojola. As a mentor for several organisations committed to restoration of democracy and federalism in Nigeria during the Abacha reign of terror, BabaMojola was an inspiration to many of us in the struggle in the Diaspora for de-militarisation and re-federalization of Nigeria. I was privileged to work with Baba to mobilise the Yoruba diaspora in the West African sub-region to support the activities and demands of NADECO.

Still as committed as ever to the struggle for social democracy in Nigeria without any trace of dogmatism, Baba prepared several papers and inspirational talks in accessible Yoruba that we took to several Yoruba communities in Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. He provided examples to all of us involved in the Diaspora Project on how to communicate effectively with our audience via verbal, gestural, and kinesic images. His address to a Yoruba community town-hall meeting in Akuedo in Abidjan, laced with proverbs relevant to the struggle for democracy and federalism in Nigeria remains memorable till today. Baba inspired many oldish Yoruba men and women whose lingua franca was French to renew their interest in reading Yoruba. So powerful and resonant was the voice in his small frame that audience hailed him for coming to address them in a place so far from home and a from a country that has basically forgotten them.

BabaMojola left many legacies: courageous and self-sacrificing struggle for justice and national development; consistent commitment till the end to the cause of a Nigeria that can sustain democracy and its unity through a constitution that is devoid of traces of domination and exploitation of one group by another; a public and private persona that was not diminished by any trace of ethnocentrism; a non-doctrinaire acceptance of the compatibility of Yoruba nationalism and development of a social democraticethos in a united Nigeria; and an unshaking belief in a simple lifestyle that makes infinite acquisition non-essential to a life of fulfillment and self-satisfaction.

To paraphrase an Ifa verse BabaMojola gave me in Atlanta during a peace meeting organized for Yoruba leaders after the election of Alliance for Democracy’s presidential candidate at Di Rovans in 1998, ‘BabaMojola, like the primordial community lover in Ife, had added the struggle for the progress of others and his communities: the Yoruba Nation, Nigeria, and the African world to his own responsibility throughout his life and never gave up until he could no longer do so, Edumare, afunni ma siregun’ (the one that gives with unfettered generosity and without conditionalities), will also, while you rest in perfect peace, give your wife and children all they need to have a more stress-free and fuller life than yours.

October 27, 2013
What quick way to abort a National Conference!

That the definition of the political reality of Nigeria by the North is starkly different from that of the South indicates that the division in the country is very deep.

President Jonathan’s most recent statement on the national conference he proposed about two weeks ago has almost thrown the idea back in the ocean of doubt that had characterised the efforts of those who tried the idea before him. More importantly, the president has himself applauded Senator Bola Tinubu as an infallible analyst of Nigerian party politics and as the prophet whose assessment of Jonathan’s presidency must not be missed. The worrisome part of Jonathan’s assurances to his visitors on the occasion of the just concluded Muslim festival is his taking back with the left hand what he offered with the right hand just two weeks ago.

While several commentators on the announcement of a committee to work out modalities for a national conference “to provide a platform that will reinforce the ties that bind the country’s many ethnic nationalities and ensure that Nigeria’s immense diversity continues to be a source of strength and greatness,” have, despite their awareness of the problems with governance of the country in the last four years, been pleading that the message be separated from the messenger, President Jonathan himself assured Nigerians on the last day of this year’s Eid-El-Kabir that it is more appropriate to conflate the message and the messenger. What an easy way for a ruling president to confirm the prescience of his opposition leader!

But the emphasis today is not on President Jonathan’s attempt to pre-empt a committee he set up only fifteen days ago nor to castigate him for quickly confirming Senator Tinubu’s fears. He will not be the first president in recent times to make nonsense of his advisers. President Olusegun Obasanjo said when he was swearing in his Special Advisers a few years ago that he did not appoint them because he wanted to take their advice and that they should always remember that he was under no obligation to take their advice. The advisers still accepted to be sworn in, even when the person who appointed them told them upfront that the game was over. President Jonathan does not have the brusqueness of Obasanjo, but by announcing his intention to send the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly as part of items for amendment, he too has shown that he is ready to do the job of the committee whenever he chooses to do so. The purpose of today’s piece is to let the president and his advisers know that opting to send the outcomes of the national conference to the legislators that have been talking about amending the 1999 Constitution for over two years is a quick way to abort the conference before its due date.

It is necessary to discuss the implications of following President Jonathan’s new route to “providing a platform to reinforce the ties that bind the country’s many ethnic nationalities and ensure that Nigeria’s immense diversity continues to be a source of strength and greatness.” To believe that the national assembly, as presently structured, can transform conference outcomes to amendments during the life of the current assembly is unrealistic. The assembly has not been able to agree on items that grew up within its chambers in over two years; it is not likely to be able to digest new constitutional provisions arrived at by a conference that may not include members of the national assembly.

In addition, the national assembly itself is part of the problem that a national conference is to address, particularly the lop-sided nature of the House of Representatives in favour of the North, the site of the longest and loudest opposition to calls for sovereign national conference or a constitutional conference to craft a people’s constitution. This approach is, as I said in a recent book: Federalism and the Yoruba Character, similar to attempting to cure drunkenness with more drunkenness. Nigerians have since its inception challenged the accurateness of the census upon which the proportional representation that created the current national assembly was made. Leaving the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly to ratify is making the conference to be dead on arrival, as people say in popular language.

Given the vitriolic nature of opposition from the North to calls for sovereign national conference or constitutional conference, expecting the current national assembly to ratify any recommendations from Jonathan’s national conference is over-sanguine. For example, some northern governors have been reported to refuse to send people from his state to any conference. Some leaders from the North have started singing war songs, to counter calls for national conference.Pundits from the North have argued that our constitution is not the problem and that it is the people that use the constitution that need to be upgraded. Just as President Jonathan was assuring his visitors that the final destination of the conference outcomes is the national assembly, the spokesman for the most authoritative socio-cultural organisation from the North Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) said unapologetically: “The ACF does not believe that the problem with Nigeria is the structure of the country or the pattern of governance….For now, we do not have any position to present to them [the Advisory Committee] because we did not ask for a conference in the first place.”

On the contrary, Ohaeneze Ndigbo has agreed to meet on Saturday to produce a position for the Committee’s visit to the former Eastern Region while Chief Reuben Fasoranti’sAfenifere and the Afenifere-Renewal Group have completed position papers to take to the Committee’s first meeting in the former Western Region in Akure. That Nigeria is a divided country does not need the expertise of rocket scientists to decipher. Two of the three regions that agreed to go into one Nigeria at independence in 1960 are ready to send delegates to attend the preliminary fact-finding meeting of the Committee set up by President Jonathan with spokespersons for federating units, the unity of which the proposed conference is designed to reinforce while the third region has already announced a boycott.

Offering to send the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly on the same day that ACF indicated its intention not to be bothered by any zonal meeting in Jos or Minna, can possibly be interpreted to mean an attempt to assure the North that there is nothing to worry about. Everybody in the country knows that without any cooperation from northern members in the national assembly, there can be no two-thirds to alter one sentence in the current constitution, even after years of conference deliberations. That the definition of the political reality of Nigeria by the North is starkly different from that of the South indicates that the division in the country is very deep. And this situation should worry anyone that cares about Nigeria. The claim that President Jonathan has not suggested any No-Go areas is countered by his most recent decision to use the national assembly, a body that has, like the country’s 774 local governments, grown out of decades of political re-designing of Nigeria by military dictators. Given the new confusion created by the president’s latest decision, it is advisable for president Jonathan to let his advisory committee members give him some advice on how to proceed. Pre-empting the committee in any way is likely to dampen the spirit of the millions of Nigerians who want a platform to provide ideas that can reinforce the ties that bind Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities together over the years and ensure that the country’s immense diversity becomes a source of strength and greatness for the parts and the whole of the ‘Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

October 20, 2013
Education and democracy: training the future generation 5

the more industrialized a country becomes, the more emphasis it needs to put on nature, scope, and quality of vocational and technical training

Vocational and technical education is an area that requires more attention than it normally gets in our pre-industrial or pro-industrial society. On the average, federal and state governments have done fairly well with establishment of polytechnics. With over a total of 40 public polytechnics (without counting a few private ones), the area that requires more emphasis is philosophy, policy, and implementation with respect to vocational and technical training. Emphasis will be on how to re-conceptualize vocational and technical education in relation to the current level of growth in our country, as well as in relation to our aspiration for future growth, more so when there is regular supply of electricity across the country and the need for technical work increases through cottage-style manufacturing.

It is an axiom that the more industrialized a country becomes, the more emphasis it needs to put on nature, scope, and quality of vocational and technical training it needs to make available to citizens and employers of labour. Once there is regular supply of electricity, our demand for persons with vocational and technical training will increase phenomenally, as several companies and individuals will be in a better position to take new and more risks than now in initiating projects that require artisans, craftsmen and women, technicians, and other persons with training to respond to technical needs of producers and manufacturers.

The acceptance that persons with Higher National Diploma can transfer their credits to universities to enroll for graduate programmes without having to obtain undergraduate degrees is a liberal or progressive attitude to take, in order to transcend the traditional dichotomy between university education and the training offered by polytechnics or colleges of technology. But there are other important issues that need new thinking on the relationship between academic and technical or vocational training. Presupposing that vocational training is inferior in any way to academic training is dangerous for any society that is aspiring to become industrialized or stay as an industrialized country. We cannot on one hand accept lower scores in J.A.M.B. or W.A.E.C. examinations and on the other hand continue to say that technical education is not inferior to academic training.

We need to insist on equal entry qualifications for candidates wishing to enter the university or the polytechnic, more so if we are going to allow products of polytechnics to enroll for master’s degree courses after obtaining H.N.D. from polytechnics or colleges of technology. Similarly, our system should ensure that those who enroll in colleges of education and later hope to use their N.C.E. certificate to enroll for undergraduate training in the university have the same entry qualification to enter college of education as their counterparts wishing to enter the university.This is one effective and credible way to integrate polytechnic and university education. In other words, this would lead to having an educational system that accepts equality between H.N.D. and B.A./B.Sc. with the former leaning more towards practical or procedural knowledge while the latter leans towards theoretical or conceptual knowledge while both lead to some form of knowledge needed for increasing productivity.

It is in respect of technical training, offered formally by technical schools across the country and informally by practicing technical workers who take on apprentices, that our country requires new thinking urgently. Apart from having too few technical colleges for a country aspiring to become an industrial one, the relationship between training in technical colleges, undergoing semi-formal apprenticeship or training under companies, and informal apprenticeship needs more thinking.While on the average about 52% of persons under the age of 22 train as technical workers in Germany, less than 5% of the same age group have any formal technical training in Nigeria. It is not an exaggeration that about 50% of citizens under the age of 22 in Nigeria are self-trained Okada drivers. Largely, Nigerians wishing to become mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. in Nigeria acquire their training through informal apprenticeship that is virtually unregulated by government or agency in terms of standards or quality assurance.

Moreover, most of such apprentices in Nigeria do not have secondary education to give them some conceptual background that can enrich their learning and skills. The result of lack of literacy on the part of technical workers in the country is that many middle-class Nigerians in urban areas prefer to give jobs requiring technical skills to other West Africans, preferably those from Francophone countries close to Nigeria: Benin, Togo. Technicians from such countries are not only more efficient than their Nigerian counterparts, they are also more capable of explaining the cause of problems they have been hired to solve to their employers.

The consequence of low levels of skills on the part of technicians in our country is that people in this category are very poorly paid by those who hire them, as most of those people see the average technician astrial-and-errorworkers. In addition, many of such workers prefer to drive Okada, which they believe to be more profitable than practicing their skills as mechanics or plumbers. In terms of income, only persons with academic degrees or vocational training from polytechnics have the opportunity of a middle-class income, when they are able to get jobs.

One way to increase the skill level of Nigerians in technical and vocational fields is to make education free and compulsory for the first twelve years of schooling, after which citizens can choose academic or vocational/technical career paths. This policy option will make academic and vocational education part of tertiary education, thus removing the stigma that it is only citizens who are not eligible to enter universities or polytechnics that become technicians and who do not deserve to be paid as much as those with university education. This will encourage citizens to follow their passion in choosing career paths without feeling inferior for choosing to become a plumber and not a philosopher. Our country needs good plumbers as much as it needs good philosophers, if it is to create a modern economy in a democratic setting.

Democracy emboldens citizens to participate in their governance, to ask questions of, and offer suggestions to those who govern them. But citizens without proper training—academic or vocational— are not likely to get or keep the jobs that can make them feel independent and capable enough to assert their citizenship rights. The old system of education that puts people with university degrees on top of the social ladder is a relic of colonial model of education. We now need a modern postcolonial model of classifying skills and knowledge in relation to determination of remuneration and other benefits. Encouraging every citizen to choose whatever career he or she can excel in without stigmatizing him or her for not going to academic institutions is the way to go in our new world that requires an agile workforce.

October 13, 2013
Jonathan’s national conference: time to re-engineer Nigeria?

The 2015 election is not as important as getting the country’s architecture of governance right

Today’s column comes with sincere apologies to my readers who must be expecting to read the fifth instalment of the piece on Education and Democracy: training the future generation. The long-awaited countenancing of citizens’ strident calls for sovereign national conference or constitutional conference by President Jonathan has created a more urgent topic for today. My readers in the last four years already know that the issue of re-structuring or restoring federalism in the country is a pet subject of mine, about which I had written ad nauseam in the last four years. Before the matter gets cold, I feel compelled to add my voice to efforts to address some of the confusion already created by the suddenness of President Jonathan’s conversion to the cause of a national conference as a means of solving problems militating against the country’s peace and development.

Unsurprisingly, President Jonathan’s sudden announcement of his acknowledgement that a national conference is imperative to making Nigeria’s unity sustainable has created doubt, anxiety, and joy for various segments of the polity. But the question of the moment should be more about the message than the messenger. Already, citizens are asking where President Jonathan has been in the last four years, during which he has assured Nigerians that there is nothing wrong with the country’s constitution and that what is needed to move the country forward is a good measure of patriotism on the part of the citizens. Taking this position amounts to worrying unduly about the messenger at the expense of the message. Such Pauline conversion as the nation witnessed a few days ago when the president gave the country an unexpected Independence Anniversary gift may have more advantages than disadvantages in the long run.

Another focus on the messenger is the subtle reference to the president’s choice of chairman for the committee to work out modalities for holding the conference. There are worries that President Jonathan has appointed Dr. Femi Okurounmu, a Yoruba public intellectual and politician who has been calling without let for a sovereign national conference for almost twenty years. Bloggers are already raising issues with the sense in making a committed Yoruba federalist to lead the group to plan a conference that may not have the last say, because it is not given the status of a sovereign national conference.

Some bloggers are even saying that Jonathan’s picking the chair of his proposed national conference from one of several Yoruba socio-cultural groups smacks of a divide and rule approach on the president’s part. Even if there is any merit in the claim that Jonathan’s choice of chair from a group that has been openly supportive of his political agenda for the job of creating a roadmap for a national conference that hundreds of self-determination groups have been demanding for over a decade, whatever fear this may engender is not enough to counter the significance of the message: acceptance to hold a national conference to discuss the future of Nigeria.

Some pundits are even saying that Jonathan’s choice of Okurounmu is designed to push Yoruba voters to Jonathan’s side in 2015, as an expression of Yoruba gratitude to him for agreeing to do what Obasanjo had failed to do with sincerity. It is important for such bloggers to note that a national conference to discuss ways of strengthening the country’s federalism and unity is not any more beneficial to the Yoruba than it is to the Igbo, Ijaw, Edo, Urhobo, Bachama,Idoma, Hausa,Tiv, etc. Moreover, restoration of federalism is not enough to move the Yoruba in any political direction. What can do that is the manifesto of political parties contesting for Yoruba votes. Committed federalists from the Yoruba region need not be bothered that Jonathan may seek to use his support of the call for NC for political advantage. Most politicians would do so, but success depends more on the needs of voters. Jonathan has not even accepted what the Yoruba have been asking for: sovereign national conference. Thus, the Yoruba have no reason to show him any more gratitude than other nationalities.

Furthermore, some bloggers are already insinuating that President Jonathan’s backing of a national conference this late in his presidency is designed to steal the thunder of opposition parties, particularly the APC that has included devolution and establishment of state police in its eight-point manifesto. If this is so, it is not unusual for politicians. Many of the leaders of the APC in Western Nigeria are, like Okurounmu, unapologetic believers in the concept of fiscal federalism and re-structuring. Even the current interim chair of APC, Chief Adebisi Akande, wrote a book on the imperative of re-structuring the country during his tenure as governor of Osun State. If anything, the conference should give ample opportunities to all opposition parties that are committed to federalism to build cases for devolution of power from the centre to the federating units.

The claim that calling for NC so close to the 2015 presidential election may be self-serving for the president is also overblown. In fact, the timing may be an advantage for all concerned. The 2015 election is not as important as getting the country’s architecture of governance right. We have had four presidential elections since 1999, yet the country’s problems have festered with each election, not only because of the quality of political leaders but principally because of a flawed political structure. It is better to solve the problem of a designed-to-fail structure once and for all, before going into another election. And twelve months should be adequate for doing this. For example, the United States of America wrote its constitution within four months at the Philadelphia Convention, to which Oronto Douglas has likened the conference that is to be prepared by Senator Okurounmu.

It should not matter to genuine federalists what Jonathan or any particular political or cultural group closely connected with establishment of the conference may set out to gain for sponsoring a much awaited national conference. What matters most is what Nigeria as a whole can gain from a heart-to-heart talk among the country’s nationalities that should be called to discuss how to make Nigeria work for all its federating units. The re-design of the country since 1966 into a unitary model of governance by military autocracies has hobbled the country for almost half a century. So much damage has been done to the quality of life of its citizens for too long that nobody should worry about the messenger at this time. The genie is out of the bottle. It is the turn of federalists to ensure that all voices about how to achieve functional federalism and sustainable democracy in our multiethnic state-nation are put on the conference table for the world to see.

Several beneficiaries from the status quo have already started to make the job of the planning committee difficult by calling for a conference of representatives of professional associations. If such a conference is organised, it will certainly not be the conference that most Nigerians desire. Doctors, lawyers, journalists, accountants, academics, plumbers and drivers do not constitute the federating units. It is the nationalities to which such professionals belong that can logically be referred to as the country’s federating units. If each nationality chooses to send only professionals to represent them at the conference, so be it.

But by any stretch of imagination, professionals are not synonymous with nationalities. Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, or Ijaw professionals, like their politicians, are subsets of the nationalities that produce them. When the British came to fight for land and sign treaties that preceded the creation of Nigeria, they did not sign such treaties with professionals; they signed them with obas, obongs, emirs, and chiefs—faces of specific nationalities. Dr. Okurounmu should resist being drawn into a class war or conflict in planning a conference that is billed to address citizens’ grievances about the way Nigeria has been reo-organised since 1966. Nigeria is not a country of professionals; it is a country constituted by nationalities: Edo, Fulani, Hausa, Idoma, Igbo, Ijaw, Igala, Ebira,Itshekiri, Urhobo, Isoko, Angas, Kanuri, Yoruba, etc.

October 6, 2013
Education and democracy: training the future generation (4)

Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue

In a six-part essay, today’s piece is still on primary and secondary education, for obvious reasons. Without a solid background in these two levels of schooling, all efforts to advance and achieve competitiveness in a knowledge-driven universe will come to naught, regardless of how prestigious tertiary education institutions appear to be. I, therefore, crave indulgence from readers who may be tired about reading my opinion on how to prepare Nigeria for the new world that is staring it in the face.

We said, among other things, last week, that reforming education in our country will involve new strategies to ensure highly motivated learners/teachers, conducive learning conditions; qualified teachers; dedicated school administrators; etc. There is the tendency to think (the way most federal politicians and their administrators do) that promising to throw money at these challenges may be enough to keep citizens inspired to learn. Some may even argue that spending up to 24% of the country’s annual budget on education as recommended by UNESCO, instead of the paltry 4% that is usually allocated to the education sector will transform the nation’s education landscape. Given the parlous state of governance over the years, giving 24% of the nation’s budget to education is not likely to create a sufficient condition for improving the quality of education. Doing just that is likely to fuel the culture of corruption within the circles of politicians and bureaucrats put in charge of the sector.

What must happen before the right percentage of annual budget is allocated to education is to have the right ideological framework for governing the country at all levels: federal, state, and local. Put simply, there is a need for political parties and their leaders to provide leadership in creating development vision and mission that can inspire and mobilise citizens. Such vision must include measurable and visible milestones that citizens can identify with. Using the mantra of unity and transformation to inspire citizens is too vague and devoid of measurable milestones for citizens to identify with. Leaders of other nations have in recent times created visions that have helped to transform their countries. South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, India, Mexico, and even United Arab Emirates have all created national goals that have kept both their governors and citizens moving towards progress, not only in education but in other sectors.

Nigeria had even done something like that in the past. According to LadipoAdamolekun, BisiAdesola, and Chief BisiAkande in Legacy of Educational Excellence, the Universal Free Education Programme of Western Nigeria in the years before Nigeria’s independence and civil war would not have succeeded if there was no synergy between the government and the civil service that served it and without the mobilisation of the citizens done by the Action Group in the 1950s. With an ideological mission that set out to improve freedom and quality of life of citizens in the Western Region, the Action Group used the motto of “Freedom for all, Life moreAbundant” to mobilise citizens to support all its developmental projects including education. This explained why it was possible for Western Nigeria to create the Partnership Model for education provision almost half a century before it became popular in many countries today. The Partnership Model in Western Nigeria then recognised the government as the agency with superintending responsibility for education and of citizens, communities, and religious institutions as partners in a vineyard that was directed by politicians and administrators at both state and local government levels. Local governments, under the nose of parents with children in the schools, managed the schools while the state government provided financial support through revenue from taxation. The success in provision of primary and secondary education in Western Nigeria later turned into failure under the auspices of military dictatorships, as Adamolekun pointedly observed : “The unitary and centralised command structures of the military contrasted with the ‘true’ federalist arrangements within which the Western Nigerian ‘success story’ was incubated and implemented.”

The institutional decay and educational decline that started with increased unitary governance under the military and that appears to have become an abiding aspect of federal governance in the post-military era have created a situation where states and local governments no longer have the powers to raise taxes to fund their own development. By depending on handouts from the federal government, many states and local governments have also sought and obtained support from the federal government in their direct and indirect efforts to alienate citizens. The result of decades of institutional decay and a national journey without destination under post-military rule is the failure that abounds in all levels of education, particularly in the most seminal level: primary/secondary education.

Apart from periodic panelbeating of the education sector, far-reaching reforms of this sector cannot be achieved without a national dialogue that allows each part of the country to spell out what it hopes to achieve for its citizens in a highly competitive global market. Throwing money periodically and grudgingly at tertiary education and after long periods of strikes may not lead to meaningful education reform. We may not know what type of education to give citizens and how to do so effectively until we know where we want our nation to be in the future and what capacities we want our citizens to have.

As Adamolekun has aptly observed, our citizens have been demobilised for over three decades. The demobilisation has arisen from an ethos of increased unitary rule and the disjuncture between government and citizens created by a system of funding through allocation of funds from a central purse constituted by rents collected from extractive industries and the spoils system that this has engendered during and after military rule. Local governments and states need to be autonomous enough to raise funds for their own development. This is not in the sense intended by lawmakers (now engaged in some form of constitutional amendment) to allow local governments to spend money donated to them by the federal government without any oversight by the states that compose them; it is in the sense of giving states and local governments autonomy to raise the taxes they need from citizens, the real owners of the country and its parts, and to collaboratively engage citizens in creating a functional education system from primary to postgraduate training.

In other words, the ethos of nation building that was evident in Western Nigeria in the 1950s and that is evident in most federal states in the world today needs to be retrieved by those who make it their calling to rule Nigeria and its parts. Just as Chief Akande once observed, “At present, Nigeria has no educational system with adequate philosophical objectives as a backbone. It can be seen therefore that the major purpose of most Nigerian educational institutions is administration of an examination orientation.” Primary and secondary education has to be reformed urgently and given a goal that is larger than running elaborate examination boards. Creating good philosophers and plumbers (used here as metaphors for effective academic and vocational training) depends on agreeing on what kind of Nigeria and Nigerians the country and its parts desire to produce to ensure sustainable unity and development. Doing this requires paying more attention to primary/secondary education.

To be continued

September 29, 2013
Education and democracy: training the future generation (3)

The federal government and its agencies are too far from local communities where education is provided.

We sent our two children to Ghana, not because we are rich but because we believe that Ghana has a more reliable education system that Nigeria. Our education system in Nigeria has become largely a factory for manufacturing credentials, rather than laboratories or classrooms for disseminating and acquiring knowledge and skills. My wife and I went to school in this country in the early 1970s, after the civil war. I still remember that emphasis then was on mastering what we were taught in school, not primarily on the credentials that schools gave at the end of our courses. We were sure good credentials would come after mastering the subjects. Even as students, we created our own informal clubs in the boarding house or in the neighbourhood to demonstrate how much each student knew about whatever subject we chose to discuss. That hardly happens today; parents and their children show more concern for the academic grades to take to the university, and thus corrupt even the process of determining outcomes of learning. Comment from a couple who retired into business after thirty years in the civil service.

Last week’s piece concluded as follows: “Like everything else, organising provision of education to respond to the fear that allowing states and regions more freedom to determine how to refine their culture and advance their development is not likely to achieve anything more than the organisation of the Nigeria Police Force has done: inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is indeed safer to believe that encouraging all parts of Nigeria to develop ways of providing quality education to citizens without excluding any group or class directly or indirectly has a higher chance of enhancing the country’s unity than holding parts of the country down from embarking on creative steps to solve the problem of education provision for citizens.”

The major challenge regarding the country’s education is how to ensure quality and equity in education provision. Many people would argue that the federal government’s policies of free-tuition in federal universities and of free education for citizens for the first nine years of schooling under the system of Universal Basic Education appear to have solved that the problem of equity. The UBE’s offering of free education for nine years is not enough to make the country competitive. Most countries of the world including those that are hundreds of years ahead of Nigeria in terms of industrialisation and technology have free and compulsory education for citizens until they complete senior secondary or high school. Even some countries, such as Sweden, Finland, and Scotland, have policies of free-tuition for citizens in tertiary institutions.

To make Nigeria more competitive, it is necessary to make education free and compulsory for citizens until they complete secondary education and to create tuition-free adult education centres for citizens to attend after work or on weekends. For example, tuition-free adult education programmes were available in Western Nigeria in the years before the civil war, even at a time that the region had a free primary education. The policy was created to support sectarian or local community schools in creating a second chance for citizens who could not benefit from free primary education on account of age restriction.

The major problem crying for solution is how to transform education to the point that public school education can have quality. At present, public school education, the only education provided for citizens with severely limited resources but not necessarily without high intelligence quotient, is without any quality and thus without any effectiveness. This is why more than half of those who went through secondary school failed to pass the number of subjects required to move to the next level. While government leaders are not found wanting in terms of waxing eloquent about the power of knowledge and the need for the country to have a better education than it has had in the last twenty-five years, there appears a clear lack of focus on how to transform the education sector, particularly the primary/secondary schooling system that generally prepares citizens for academic and vocational skills capable of increasing competitiveness of citizens and the country.

It is on record that Nigeria spends less than 4% of its annual budget on education, despite the call by UNESCO for up to 24%, if the country is to be in a position to produce men and women of academic and vocational skills needed to compete in a world that is driven by new frontiers in science, technology, and management of complex organisations. Several decades of doing the same thing (throwing money sporadically and grudgingly at the education sector) ought to have proven that what is needed is moving away from the madness of doing the same thing and expecting different results. The country’s desperate problem in the education sector is, in the parlance of popular culture, calling for a desperate solution, one that requires thinking out of the box.

The relationship between the federal and state/local governments needs to change, if the country is to transform its education system. A situation in which the federal government holds and allocates funds to various aspects of education across the country through various agencies is calling for creative and bold thinking. Making education an essentially a local government matter is more likely to create the ingredients needed to create excellence in education provision: motivation, enthusiasm for new knowledge, depth of learning, conducive conditions of learning, effective teaching, and community involvement in provision of education and management of schools, etc.

The federal government and its agencies are too far from the local communities where education is provided. Local governments should impose taxes to run primary and secondary schools. Doing so will reinforce a social contract between the local government and citizens with respect to provision of an effective public school system. The federal government should have a system of giving matching grants to local governments for specific projects, such as creating of digital learning architecture, modern laboratories, etc. State governments should be free to raise funds through lottery to provide additional matching grants to local government authorities for measurable and verifiable education projects. The Western Region used proceeds from its lottery to provide additional funds for education in the 1950s, in addition to collecting taxes from citizens.

Using taxes collected from citizens to fund education that is managed by the local government authority creates a space for direct and indirect involvement of citizens. Because citizens are principal stakeholders after providing the funds used to run schools by paying their taxes, they will be emboldened to call school administrators to order, much more than our present system that runs education from funds that citizens cannot directly claim ownership over. Apart from creating a core curriculum to reflect a national ethos, local governments and states should have a central role to play in curriculum design. For example, apart from making the teaching of English (the country’s national language and window to the global market) compulsory for students in the first nine years of school, each state should decide on which language to use to teach students in the first six or nine years of education. The current situation, whereby about 30% of the population is illiterate; only half of those who completed twelve years of education qualify for further education; and lack of lifelong learning provision for citizens, only signposts a country that is unwilling to face its future with determination and courage to position majority of its citizens to make direly needed contributions to levers of development through knowledge.

September 22, 2013
Education and democracy: training the future generation 2

It is clear that the power of a properly educated and trained citizenry to increase the competitiveness of Nigeria in the comity of nations cannot be ignored without devastating consequences for the country and its citizens.

Following the conclusion to last week’s piece, today’s column will be devoted to fuelling public debate on how to address the failure of the education sector in the country. Today’s emphasis will be on ideological underpinnings of education in a ‘federal democracy.’ Efforts will be made to spell out what should be done to bring education back to the front burner, not only in terms of policy making but also in terms of school/college effectiveness.

Given the dismal statistics about low learning outcomes in WAEC and NECO, it is safe to assume that the foundation for higher education in the country has been compromised by the failure to create effective primary and secondary education culture in the country. The failure of the education sector is similar to that of the energy sector which provides electricity for less than 25% of the population less than 25% of the time. The decline in education should be worrisome enough for the federal government to declare an emergency in this sector. But lessons learned from declaring an emergency in the energy sector years back are too clear for the federal government to take a similar risk with education. The provision of electricity has been getting poorer since the declaration of an emergency in the sector. But no problem goes away by itself. There is a need for human intervention in any institution created by human beings.

The major problem facing the education sector is how to achieve and sustain quality and equity at the same time. For example, ongoing efforts by the federal government to achieve quality in secondary education has led to the abandonment in a democracy of the principle of equality of opportunity for all citizens. With about 100 Unity Secondary Schools across the country, the federal government has for decades believed it is possible to provide quality education that can bring about what W. E. B. DuBois once characterised as the Talented Tenth that moves society to higher achievements. Admission to Unity Schools has, as Femi Folorunso observed in a recent lecture in Lagos, generated suspicion and resentment on the part of southern Nigerians whose children with higher scores could not get into the same Unity School that children from the north with far less points than their southern counterparts easily got admitted to, on account of keeping Nigeria united.

As bad as that situation is for achievement of a union of affection in the country, another related problem is that it is generally only children of the middle class that get admitted to Unity Schools. Where the admission policy or process does not openly endorse discrimination, exclusion of children of the working class or under class have no access to even sitting for entrance examinations to most of the Unity Schools. Most of such children have been restricted by material poverty and lack of access to middle-class influence peddling to neighbourhood primary and secondary schools, most of which may not even appear on the register of schools in the federal ministry of education.

In addition, efforts at the private level to provide quality teaching in primary and secondary schools have resulted in mushrooming of private or fee-paying schools in the nooks and corners of the country. Again, it is parents with material resources that can afford to send their children to private schools. Thus, the children of majority of Nigerians are left to choose among neighbourhood primary and secondary schools funded through a combination of efforts by the federal, state, and local governments. If there is any noticeable quality being offered in the private schools, the exodus of children of middle-class background that go to Ghana every year for primary and secondary education, (not to talk of those who go to the U.S., U.K., and now U.A.E.) does not show any durable confidence in the education provided by most of the fee-paying schools in Nigeria.

To say that the country is at a cross-roads in terms of education provision is an understatement. With about an average of 40% success rates at the end of secondary education and a university system believed by many federal ministers as producing unemployable graduates, the country is in deep trouble that can affect its foundation, not necessarily in terms of disintegration that has become a popular bogey in the mouths of politicians and cultural leaders from the north and the Southsouth in recent years, but in terms of not transcending its present status of the world’s dumping ground for all goods from pasta to plasma television. Any further lowering of the competitiveness of the country will be enough to make the country import more than it can pay for, even now that oil is enjoying the benefit of a seller’s market. The situation will be worse for Nigeria when oil in the next decade or two becomes an item in the buyer’s market with the resultant falling of oil price.

It is clear that the power of a properly educated and trained citizenry to increase the competitiveness of Nigeria in the comity of nations cannot be ignored without devastating consequences for the country and its citizens. Like everything else, organising provision of education to respond to the fear that allowing states and regions more freedom to determine how to refine their culture and advance their development, is not likely to achieve anything more than the organisation of the Nigeria Police Force has done: inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is indeed safer to believe that encouraging all parts of Nigeria to develop ways of providing quality education to citizens without excluding any group or class directly or indirectly has a higher chance of enhancing the country’s unity than holding parts of the country down from getting imaginative about how to solve the problem of education provision for citizens.

What is needed is for the federal government to leave the running of schools to local governments, as Folorunso recommended in the lecture referred to earlier. This will allow states and local governments to collaborate on curriculum development and inspectorate system. The current system of allocating funds to states and local governments from the revenue from rents collected on oil and gas may need to stop, to allow local governments and states to collect taxes from citizens and in the process create a bond or contract between the two sides about how to solve the fundamental problem of training children that can keep Nigeria going beyond the decades of oil.

What the federal government needs to do is to work out in conjunction with the federating units a vision of what type of Nigeria we plan to create. The present mantra that Nigeria is being prepared to become the 20th largest economy is too vague to base an education development strategy on. Whatever number Nigeria occupies at present in the ranking of economies has not come from its efforts as much as it has from the oil in the womb of its soil. Now that it is becoming clearer by the day that the century of hydrocarbon may be coming to an end, the preparation for the century of knowledge as the source of wealth and employment requires that the current system of a big federal bureaucracy directing national education for the purpose of keeping the appearance of national unity will be unable to face the challenge of designing an effective education provision for all citizens. Since most citizens attend public primary and secondary schools, it is no use pretending that the problem of quality and equity will go away by either sending children abroad or allowing private vendors of education to operate with little or no monitoring from the governments with jurisdiction over their locations.

To be continued.

September 15, 2013
Education and democracy: training the future generation 1

A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to Farce or Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power of knowledge.- James Madison
There is but one method of rendering a republican form of government durable, and this is by disseminating the seeds of virtue and knowledge through every part of the state by means of proper places and modes of education and this can be done effectively only by the aid of the legislature.—Benjamin Rush
It is only when the minds of men have been properly and rigorously cultivated and garnished, that they can be safely entrusted with public affairs with a certainty and assuredness that they will make the best of their unique opportunity and assignment.-Obafemi Awolowo

Today’s piece is the first of a series on an issue that should be of serious concern to lovers of a united and progressive Nigeria: educating and training those who are to keep Nigeria going. The three quotations overleaf by two of United States of America’s founding fathers and one of Nigeria’s founding fathers capture the themes that circumscribe the articles on education and democracy in this column for the next few weeks.

Given the arguments— pros and cons— that attended to the recent strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), it should not require a great measure of brilliance on the part of the average Nigerian that the country is not giving enough attention to the most important ingredient that can sustain its unity and predispose it to sustainable democracy and development. When government spokespersons rest their argument against provision of credible higher education on lack of funds, the average citizen needs to get worried about what awaits his or her children in a country that is a part of a modern world driven by knowledge. The articles planned for the next few weeks are designed to express concerns about the way to provide proper education that can keep our country together as a democratic federation in a global political and economic ethos that is driven by freedom and innovation.

Some of the questions once asked by Bertrand Russell and John Dewey will be repeated in the series, with the hope of stimulating discussion on what true patriots of our country need to worry about as they prepare their younger ones for life beyond them in a country that appears to have been at the crossroads for too long with respect to how best to educate the citizenry in a highly competitive global environment. Put simply, the issue that education has a role in making democracy a workable system and that democracy has a role in making education profitable to the individual and the community in which he or she lives will be repeated in the discussion in the next few weeks on what the government and the citizen need to do to save the country’s democracy and federation.

Nigeria is not without its own thinkers and doers in the area of systematic promotion of the symbiosis between education and democracy. Chief ObafemiAwolowo and Chief AdekunleAjasin in particular had given deep thought to the role of education in nation building and in the making of a modern and progressive nation and citizenry. The initiation and funding of free primary public education in Western Nigeria in 1955 demonstrated and still demonstrates Chief Awolowo’s conviction that democracy might be a mirage if citizens (voters) are not educated. Using proceeds from taxes, initially paid grudgingly by citizens, as well as from proceeds from lottery in the 1950s to fund primary public education at a time when there was no trace of petroleum certainly underscores a rare commitment to education as a means of sustaining democracy and a way to prepare citizens for a meaningful life in the era of modernity.

Most of the citizens from the Western part of Nigeria in the generation of this writer are largely products of Awolowo’s free primary education provided by a combination of properly coordinated public and private or sectarian schools in the 1950s. In the assessment of nationals and foreigners in the field of higher education, there were few, if at all, complaints about the quality of education in Nigeria until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Education started to decline in Nigeria under military autocracy between 1983 and 1999. It should not surprise anyone if military dictators had no use for education for citizens, on account of the fact, that a highly educated citizenry could become too critical of authoritarianism. But there is no reason why an elected government should be afraid of giving proper education to citizens during a period of democratic rule. However, the quality of education in the last fourteen years of post-military rule has not improved considerably for citizens to believe that Nigerian military dictators are more averse to educated citizenry than elected civilians that succeeded them in 1999.

The parlous state of education in the country at present recalls the Yoruba proverb: Oro sunukunojusunukun la fi n wo o. This translates roughly in English to a desperate problem requires a desperate solution. Providing the right type of education to sustain Nigeria’s democracy, development, and federation certainly calls for creative thinking on the part of all stakeholders: parents, students, federal, state, and local governments, and most especially the legislative branch of government at all levels. Attempting to amend a constitution that is riddled with confusion in respect of creating an educational culture and system in the country without paying any attention to how to re-design education in the country is similar to looking away from dealing with how to create a realistic and efficient security system in the country.

Like the issue of law enforcement, educating and training the Nigerian child to the point that he or she can feel safe, self-confident, emboldened to express his or her opinions and live by the wish of the majority in a competitive global environment requires more than expressions of commitment to the promotion of a knowledge society in the country. It calls for fresh and deep thinking on how to create an educational system or systems that can support aspirations of Nigerians to thrive in the modern global market. Consigning education to the realm of buck passing and bashing the professoriate may not solve the problems that have contributed in large parts to Nigeria being 145th on the Global Competitive Index and being 146th on account of poor primary education in the country. It is the legislature at all levels and the civil society across state borders that must lead a new discussion on the way forward, while lovers of inclusive political and economic institutions in the country pay attention to the need for a new strategy on how to educate Nigeria’s citizens.

September 8, 2013
David Mark’s theory on constitution without citizenry

What Nigeria’s lawmakers elected on the platform of the 1999 Constitution need to do is to listen to citizens whose votes brought them to the national assembly.

David Mark’s recent pontification on the need to have a constitution that shuns people’s wishes is not new to politics in our country. The military ruled Nigeria for decades without a constitution. Even the 1999 Constitution that David Mark holds to heart as sacred enough not to need any referendum that involves those for whom the constitution is ostensibly written was crafted by former military colleagues of the Senate President. It is not Senator Mark’s militaristic notion of constitutions that should surprise citizens. It is his conviction as an elected senator by citizens that creating a constitutional process cannot be determined by citizens once there is a ‘constitution’ on ground, regardless of how citizens feel about the constitution.

The fear of citizens inherent in Senator Mark’s effort to avoid citizens in efforts to create acceptable constitutions can be likened to what Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of the United Arab Emirates, one of the youngest federations in the world, said about his vision for Dubai’s development: The real crisis is rather one of leadership, management and perennial egotism. This is the kind of crisis that is bound to happen when lust for power prevails over granting people the love and care they deserve, and when the interests and destiny of one individual (or a small group of individuals as in the case of Nigeria’s National Assembly) become more important than those of a whole nation.

Writing further about the transformation of Dubai within a federation, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said: Our distinctive development experience in the UAE is a good example of what can be done when God blesses a country with an unselfish leadership that strives for the good of its people and not its own. Good leadership puts the interests of the community as a whole before those of any specific group….There is a world of difference between a leadership that is based on love and respect, and one that is based on fear.

I am quoting Rashid Al Maktoum extensively to underscore that Senator Mark’s view that the process of making a constitution, captured in provisions of a constitution that citizens believe is an imposition on the country by military dictators, smacks not of respect for Nigerians but of fear of Nigerians by those that happen to occupy positions of legislative leadership. Insisting, as the Senate President has done, that the legalistic aspect of the 1999 Constitution is the matter at stake is to miss the point of the essence of constitutions. Constitutions become embodiment of laws that must be respected and obeyed only after they have been created by a process that has the blessing and consent of the people whose political behaviours constitutions are created to regulate.

What Nigeria’s lawmakers elected on the platform of the 1999 Constitution need to do is to listen to citizens whose votes brought them to the national assembly. Millions of citizens are saying that the 1999 Constitution was not created with their consent and that the desire of citizens to participate in the 1999 election to move the country from military autocracy to electoral democracy does not and should not constitute a sufficient condition for the post-military political leadership to assume that citizens accept that the only thing to do with the 1999 Constitution is to ‘panel beat’ the document in whatever manner lawmakers believe in, without involving citizens in the process.

What is implicit in Senator Mark’s theory about the current constitution not having a space for sovereign national conference is the conviction that Nigeria is about promoting statism, rather than creating a country or community of interests held by human beings. Statism refers to a notion that a country should be run as a bureaucracy, with emphasis on what those charged to run the bureaucracy prefer to do, rather than what citizens prefer to have. Our lawmakers need to realise that our country is in a process of democratisation and that real democracy is likely to be elusive until a people’s constitution is adopted to guide the country’s political culture. This should not be anything too difficult for our legislators to get in a country that went into election in 1999 without seeing a copy of the constitution that has now become untouchable to citizens.

Holding briefs for authors of the 1999 Constitution and promoting the constitution as a sacred document that is available only to elected lawmakers to review without any substantial input from citizens is a dangerous thing to do. Our lawmakers who have chosen to amend a constitution that citizens prefer to be replaced need to know that for a constitution to be acceptable and respectable to people, citizens must believe in the transparency of the process that leads to the making of the constitution. Citizens had gone to court to challenge the claim in and by the 1999 Constitution that it was authored by the people of Nigeria. Late Biodun Oki spent the last years of his life to prove in court that the 1999 Constitution is not a constitution created with the consent of the people.

Senator Mark’s worry: Where will the Sovereign National Conference be deriving its sovereigntyfrom, and under what framework? How will the conference be convoked and by whom and under what terms?” indicates the Senate President’s preference for statism as an approach to solving a fundamental political problem about the welfare and wellbeing of citizens of a country. These are questions that citizens should be given the opportunity to answer. Each constituency can prepare a handbook for its lawmaker to take to the national assembly on how to convoke a national conference. But this will be possible only in a context in which lawmakers see themselves as representatives of citizens, and not as their masters.

Nigerians calling for a sovereign national conference are doing so for an obvious reason: demilitarising the Nigerian polity by replacing a constitution imposed on the country by a group of military dictators with a constitution negotiated freely by citizens. Callers for a people’s constitution believe that the military must have had a hidden agenda behind the 1999 Constitution, more so that the constitution did not see the light of day until after the election of 1999. Lawmakers who subscribe to the tenets of democracy need not act in a way to suggest that they also accept the hidden agenda behind a constitution imposed on Nigerians by departing military dictators. Senator Mark’s recent quibbling about sovereignty and sovereign national conference gives the impression that the national assembly is averse to referendum, because it is afraid of coming to terms with the real feelings of millions of Nigerians about the current constitution. If Nigeria is going to get its economics and development right, it is, asDaronAcemoglu and James A. Robinson, authors of WhyNations Fail have observed, necessary to get its politics right. Getting our country’s politics right requires a transparent process of creating a constitution that is acceptable to the generality of the people. And lawmakers should act on the side of citizens on how to bring about a constitution that is acceptable primarily to citizens, and not just to lawmakers.

September 1, 2013