They are forgetting that many Nigerians are saying that the 2014 national dialogue failed to address such important matters as fiscal federalism, multinational federalism, and finding a people-friendly process of constitutional reform.
Whatever may be the weaknesses of former President Jonathan (and they must be legion) he is a man with the kind of consistency that made him predictable while in office and after. He ruled with relish; fought for tenure renewal with gusto; and accepted the judgment of majority of Nigerians with resignation. Even when he complained bitterly after his exit brought about by voters, he did so with the faith of a child, especially when he said at different times that he accepted the verdict of the last election in order to grow the country’s democracy and that he could see no reason why he or his assistants should be singled out for punishment for any wrongdoing after his generosity to the country. But the harmony between Jonathan’s theory and method or between his vision and policy appears to have disappeared within the group of Jonathan’s national conference veterans, despite the boundless enthusiasm that marked the investiture of members of Nigeria’s most cited group of political structural engineers or architects.
When Jonathan picked about 400 Nigerians in 2014 to think and talk about various aspects of the country’s condition, those awarded the status of polity designers felt encouraged to stay united on one issue: Delegates appointed and anointed by President Jonathan were the right Nigerians to change the destiny of the country before or by the time of the 2015 presidential election. This was despite warnings from millions of Nigerians that Jonathan’s sudden convening of a national dialogue was not the most democratic way to address the issue of sustainable federalism in a multinational democratic state. It is ironic that the source of unity among handpicked conference delegates before the presidential election in 2014 now appears to be the cause of disunity among them after the election in 2015: using the occasion of ‘national conference’ to stay relevant politically.
How else does one explain the recent eruption of opposing stances among those who claimed just a year ago that they had created the best blueprint for the re-making of Nigeria? In a recent press release by Northern Reawakening Forum, one of the nominees of Jonathan to the 2014 conference announced the decision of the North (or just North East?) to call for another national conference. It is not clear yet if the proposed conference is, like the Jonathan conference, to be called by Buhari and driven by Buhari’s men and women in the corridors or reception halls of presidential power. What is clear so far is the sudden recognition by NRF that the North in general and the North East in particular are holding the short end of Nigeria’s stick of growth and development.
Northern Reawakening Forum’s claim of the North’s underdevelopment in relation to the Southwest and Southeast is based on convincing statistics: “The North has the highest number of people below $2.00 a day. 71.5% of the population in the North East live in poverty and more than half are malnourished. A 2013 World Bank Report showed that poverty in 16 out of the 19 Northern States have doubled since 1980. The North has the lowest literacy rate in the country. Lagos is at 92%, Kano 49% and Borno less than 15%. 65% of Northern girls and 53% of boys are not in school compared to only 20% for the Southeast…”
No better case can be made for immediate and sincere intervention in the situation of the North than the communique of NRF. What is wrong with the proper diagnosis is the suggested treatment that Nigeria as a whole needs to summon a national conference to discuss what can better be addressed as a regional problem. For example, when the Yoruba region, otherwise referred to as the Southwest, came to terms with its social and economic decline a few years back, it convened a regional summit, which produced a blueprint (largely still to be implemented by the six governors in the region) for regional integration and creative solution to the region’s underdevelopment. There is no section of Nigeria that is better positioned to identify the problems of the North and proffer solutions to such problems than the nationalities and communities in the North.
While it may be uncharitable for anyone to read hidden meanings into the call of NRF for help in its new efforts at renaissance, it is advisable for opponents of Kumaila to acknowledge that calling another jamboree of friends or supporters of the new president in Abuja (as it was with the 2014 conference) may be another round of misuse of scarce resources. Should President Buhari be favourably disposed to identifying with regional initiatives, the most he should be encouraged to do by his advisers is to provide matching grants for the communities in the North to come together to find solutions to a problem that has been in existence for over half a century of post-colonial Nigeria.
Questions or comments about why Mohammed Kumaila would, after full participation at the 2014 national dialogue, suddenly realise that the most serious problems of the North were not addressed at the last conference may not be as relevant as making efforts to understand paradoxes in NRF’s desire for genuine social progress. Why should a region that supplies most of the protein consumed in the country have the most malnourished people in the country or why should a region that collects more funds from the country’s oil-wealth for having over 400 local governments have the highest number of illiterate citizens, sixty years after the exit of British colonialists? The best way to assist NRF is to empathize with the regional think-tank by showing it how other former educationally-disadvantaged states in the South of the country were able to move to the group of states with over 70% literacy and numeracy.
Ironically, the most mordant critics of Kumaila and the NRF are his fellow veterans of the Jonathan Conference. His fellow delegates from the Southwest and the Southeast are already calling him names. For example, his fellow delegates from Afenifere are drawing Kumaila’s attention to a greater problem than what he has identified in respect of the North: the clear signs (that may be invisible to NRF) that “what will restructure Nigeria is already here.” Others are reminding NRF of the consensus at the 2014 conference to remove “some of the undeserved privileges of the North” as the cause for NRF’s call for a new conference. In addition, Kumaila’s fellow delegates from the Southeast are drawing his attention to the fact (yet to be verified) that “the majority of the North want the report of the confab implemented.”
Intentionally or unintentionally, Northern Reawakening Forum, Afenifere, and Ndigbo are joined in what looks like an effort to distract President Buhari from the immediate tasks he has set for his presidency: fighting corruption, fighting terrorism, and diversifying the economy and preventing it from collapsing under the weight of low revenue from petroleum. Such distraction in itself is not anti-democratic. It is needed to make President Buhari realise that the problem of Nigeria may be about being blessed with good leadership once in a while as much as it is about having a good structure for governing a culturally diverse ‘republic.’
Both proposers of a new conference at the instance of the North and supporters of Jonathan’s ‘mother of all national conferences’ at the instance of the South are ignoring something very crucial. They are forgetting that many Nigerians are saying that the 2014 national dialogue failed to address such important matters as fiscal federalism, multinational federalism, and finding a people-friendly process of constitutional reform. It is, however, reassuring that at the same time that Kumaila was promoting NRF’s call for a national conference to address the problems of the North, some of the most cerebral or intellectual veterans of Jonathan’s conference were attending a conference in Edinburgh on Constitutional Change in Canada and the United Kingdom: Challenges to Devolution and Federalism.
Once the noise over the imperative of a Buhari conference and the inviolability of the recommendations of the Jonathan conference subsides, it may be easy for genuine federalists to benefit from the new knowledge acquired by some of the delegates at the 2014 conference at the Edinburgh Conference about effective ways to create and sustain federalism in a polity that has constitutionalised regional or ethnic domination under the guise of unity. Neither the old conference nor the new once (if it happens) will amount to anything, if efforts are not made to adopt modern ways to find out how citizens want to be governed in a plurinational state like Nigeria. No genuine national conference is likely to hold any water until citizens are allowed to choose their delegates and to vote Yes or No on recommendations from such conference.
