Professor Akin Mabogunje, 84, is a renowned geographer and an international expert in urban and regional planning. In this interview with BISI OLADELE, he explained the reasons he accepted the job of the Chairman, Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy, stressing that the special institution was out to address what he would advise President Muhammadu Buhari to do if he met him. Excerpts:
At your age, why are you into a venture that will take your energy and time?
I think I am stupid to have accepted it but the truth is, when I clocked 70, one of my sons who is based in the United States was pleading that he would really love to have me write my autobiography which, of course, I could not do on my 70th birthday. But on my 80th birthday, I chose to launch my autobiography and it shows different in areas of public life apart from the academics in which I have had to serve the government. And I was still serving the government on my 80th birthday but I then went to then President Goodluck Jonathan to say I still have four assignments I was doing for government but all of which I will like to hand down and suggest who can continue.
I was still in charge of the National Land Reform, which the late President Yar’Adua saddled me with. I was still in charge of the Lagos Mega City Development Authority which ex-President Obasanjo had saddled me with. And I was still in charge of Technical Committee on Housing and Urban Development. All of these I have done over the years but I think they had made me to go to Abuja almost on a weekly basis.
I think at 80, I thought I should relax and have less stress rushing to the airport every beginning of the week. So, when the young man came this time, and you know some of them whose initiative was to establish a private NGO on government and public policies, which is what I have been worried about and some people do know my view; it was not easy for me to say no. They recognised that at my age I couldn’t run around but I could advise them. It was that appeal to the situation of governance in my country that made me accept. How long I am able to go on is another matter but once we put the school on the sound footing, I will be happy, just the way I did with other public assignments, to bow out graciously.
What particular problem would you want this school to address in the Nigerian public service within the first five years?
First is to call Nigeria back to become a democratic country. Because there are things the military did and no democratic government will allow it to stay. What I am talking about is true federation. What do we mean? That the military had turned things upside down because their system of operation is a unified command. They make this country operate as if it was a unified country and that is not what a federal system is meant to be like. One of the very first things I will want the school to promote is that the present structure (presidential system) is unsustainable. I can see why we went for presidential system of government and I can explain that at some stage. The 36 states in the federation are not sustainable. The local government system is not sustainable. They were all built up because oil money came.
The Federal Government will rather sit on that oil money and trickle it down than allow the states that have the oil to enjoy their oil money like it happens in US. We all know a state in US called Texas and it has oil, agriculture, mining and a lot of solid minerals. And we have a state called Nevada which is virtually a desert. But Nevada will never ask Texas to share its revenue with others. Instead, it would use its own brain to see how to raise its own revenue to sustain herself. Of course, you saw what Nevada did. It must have decided that whatever is not allowed in the East coast states are allowed in Nevada. That’s why you see gambling, divorce through which it makes enough money to cater for its own needs.
But in Nigeria, states are gifts of military laws. They ask them no question about how they are going to maintain it, how to pay salaries etc. If you are my master and at the end of the month, what claim do you have on the loyalty of myself if you can’t pay my salary? This is happening because they believe oil money will be there forever. That’s not democracy. Democracy requires free citizens who will provide resources for their own governance. The state structure and local government will be one and the presidential system will be another because we can’t maintain it.
Now, let me explain it. The parliamentary system has one big default on the Nigerian point of view which is that, it allows us to elect somebody from any village and it’s the party that makes him Prime Minister. And that person may not have seen this country at all. He might just have been popular only in his village before he becomes our president without knowing how people are feeling in other parts of the country. But we needed a system that will allow whoever will rule us to appreciate our diversity at different socio-economic levels of development. But to go for the American system was not right. The French system is the mixture of both presidential and parliamentary systems. This idea of separation of powers is another confusion in the system because if that separation of power allows the president to choose his ministers who don’t have to be from the Legislature, you can think of all the consequences of that.
Mr President now brings somebody who did not campaign at all, called technocrat, as the minister. He now sits on billions of Naira in a ministry. And you invite him to the House to defend the budget. That’s why the legislators can ask the minister what is in the budget for them? That system in itself breeds corruption. Now, if you have a parliamentary system, there are ways people are disciplined within the system and there are advantages for you to be within that discipline. If you are within the discipline of your party in a semi- presidential system which is like a parliamentary arrangement now, you can be minister as we did in the First Republic.
And the Chief Whip of the party has a voice over you. You can also become an undersecretary just like the late Olubadan. With this, you have well disciplined political parties. If this was in place, we couldn’t have experienced what recently happened at the Senate and House of Representatives if we were running a semi-parliamentary system.
Talking about my second issue, all of what I explained above would make me say they have disempowered our people from governance. You know in the past, most communities, governance or the local government was the government of locality not of region. There was accessible interdependence because we all knew ourselves. Therefore, each government belonged to their localities. If the roads are bad the head of the local government will do something quickly. Again, because those we elect to run the local governments need resources they will have to generate it from us, meaning we have to pay tax. Since oil money came, we said we won’t give local governments money again.
Now, our roads are bad and we don’t know who to turn to. In the local government reform we did, the population in a local government should not be less than 160,000 and not more than 800,000. And what do we do? We joined communities like Ilora, Ilawe, Olorunda and others to become AFIJIO as their acronym. They all contributed to build few secondary schools. For you to emerge as the local government chairman, you have to campaign round the communities. But today, we have a situation of dysfunction of local government system. It looks neat to say we have 774 local governments. We started with 299 and now we are having 774 local governments.
Are you saying that local councils and states must generate their own revenue?
Yes. Why else are they government? Let me explain something to you, I was teaching at Northwest University in the U.S. in 1979, I had to take my children, two of them, with me. They came home on Thursday saying there was no school on Friday. They said their teachers said they should not come. So I went to the school to find out and the teacher told me they were having a referendum. The town had 80,000 population. That shouldn’t have been a local government then. It had two high schools asking the local government council that they wanted French to be taught to their children.
The agitation by the government was how much were they going to spend for the payment of the teachers and they felt the only reason to achieve this was to raise property rate and to know how much it will cost. Property tax is usually the source of revenue for local governments. So, that was why they sent home the children for the referendum to take place. The referendum was to ask whether people wanted French to be taught and vice versa but people voted in favour of it with the implication of a raise in the rate. In those days, if you say you wanted water, the question would be, how do we raise the money?
All these structures we built on the fact that the federal arm controls oil money and gives to the local government; it is disempowering government. Now that the oil money is going down, we must go back to traditional institutions and this is, people must do their civic responsibilities by providing resources for those that will govern us.
People forget the free education of the West by (Chief Obafemi) Awolowo was without oil money. But when the government decided to do it, Chief Awolowo had to raise capitation tax from six pence to 10.6 pence and there were people who revolted. He had to go and persuade them about the need for it although there was no corruption as it happens today. People contributed their money for government to do its job.
How far is the Nigeria of today to the Nigeria of your dream?
It is very far because oil, with the military, disempowered people. We all went for the federal system of government. The last constitution that addressed that issue was the 1963 constitution. It resolved many things but it asked regions to look for resources, but remember you are part of a nation. So, any resource you find, the royalty on it, you can take 50 per cent, give 20 per cent to the federal. The other 30 per cent goes into a pool for developmental projects. When the oil came, the 100 per cent comes to the federal and while the federal takes 52 per cent, the federating states take 48 per cent with their local governments.
The Federal Government has been creating states without paying attention to how the states will survive. In the U.S., people can wake up and say they want their own local government because they don’t like other people in the communities that make up the council. All they need do is to prove that they are able to generate funds for the seven major functions of the local government. The local government has seven functions namely: education, health, fire services, road maintenance and others. And if you cannot afford to effectively perform them, you can negotiate with the neighbouring local government to offer some of these services such as waste management.
The states I was, most local governments had three counselors who were Chairman, Secretary and the Treasurer. And because there are seven functions to perform, they have to share the functions among themselves. The chairman of the local government could be the fire chief. He must be able, as soon there is fire, call whichever community is providing that service to them because people will call him as soon as there is fire or whatever.
The point I am trying to make is, you must as a local government be able to have your revenue generated and that can make your people keep an eye on you, not that you are away.
If President Buhari invited you to offer advice on the steps to be taken to take Nigeria closer to the country of your dream today, what would you offer?
We were close to that in the conference we had but there is no country that can be run without the local government system. It is either you have the bad one which you must improve or good. So, my advice to President Buhari is that he should strengthen local governments to engender development. I have been on the Advisory Board of US Habitat for many years. So also on the Advisory Board of City Alliance for World Bank. There we asked to have a conference of mayors. Nigerians could not send mayors because our constitution does not recognise that there are towns. When we broke Ibadan into 11 local governments, we forgot to put the Metropolitan Planning and Transportation Authority on top of it. As a result, Oyo State Government seems to be performing that function. There are things we need to redo in this country. That’s why hopefully, this downward trend of oil revenue would force us to have a rethink.
States that can’t perform should merge and they should remove those receiving salaries for doing nothing. Awolowo had one single service and can, through this, perform well in the area of free education and others. In Nigeria, we like to build our house from the roof downward and local government is a fundamental element for a democratic system of government in any country. Normally, we used to call town hall meetings but the reason there is nothing like such again is because people have been disempowered. It is at the town hall we always decide what we want such as electricity and other social amenities.
On the basis of having minimum of 160,000 and 800, 000 population, we had at the beginning 299 and two local governments in Abuja to make them 301. When the civilian came in 1979, people were saying ‘give us own local governments’. When Buhari came in December, 1983, he forced us back to the 301. When Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB) came, he could not resist the pressure, so, he raised it to 459 without criteria. By the time he left, we had about 580. And after he left, the agitation went on when Abacha came on board. He did not only mess up the states but the local governments situation. Up to that time, Lagos and Kano were initially having 15 but later went up to 20 local governments. But when Abacha came, he gave Kano 44 councils, while Jigawa had 26 and Lagos had 20. And now what is special about 774 local governments? US has 19,000 local governments, Britain has over 9,000 and Britain is less than half of Nigeria. But we don’t have urban centres and our constitution does not recognise any urban centre and we don’t have mayors.
