Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. The word Nigerian is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who not.—Obafemi Awolowo in Path to Nigeria Freedom, 1947
The task now at hand was to devise new modes of human co-existence – arrangements that would replace or by-pass the nation-state. The hegemony of the nation-state and its totalist claim on the individual could escaped only by recognizing that nation and nation-state were concepts embedded in a particular age. If only thought could be diverted from the nation-state and re-orientated around a more sensible parameter, the co-existence of nations and nationalities in Europe and elsewhere could start to be restructured on federalist and autonomist principles.—Peter Alter in Nationalism 1989.
Obafemi Awolowo wrote about Nigeria when globalization was cutting its teeth while Peter Alter wrote largely about Europe at a time that globalization had become a toddler, but both did the same thing: interrogate the universality and immutability of the Western model of the nation-state, not only for Europeans but also for Africans and Asians once colonized by European nations. The ongoing controversy about restructuring, particularly President Buhari’s new dichotomy between process and structure certainly requires making connections with efforts in other parts of the world in a global ethos that is struggling with change on many fronts.Globalization is taking more attention away from individual nation-states than before; transnational organizations are causing more problems for individual nations than before; and citizens across the globe are struggling to juxtapose two major issues of globalism: marrying local and international identities and struggling to sustain both.
It is saying the obvious to argue that Nigeria has been a product of the Western model of the nation-state. Colonization led to creation of Nigeria through amalgamation of several nations and nationalities that had not shared language, culture, religion, worldview, and even aspirations until they were ‘discovered by Frederick Lugard and found qualified for amalgamation, not necessarily for their own reasons or perhaps for a future unknown to the nations at the time they were fused. Even though the United Kingdom, though a multinational state at the time it sent nation builders to West Africa, acted as a typical nation-state within the tradition of Western nation-states, practised as far as it could a unitary system of government at home. But the British chose to think outside the box by choosing to encourage a governance mode sensitive to multi-nationality.
Consequently, the Nigeria obtained independence from Britain as a federation in which the central and subnational governments shared both powers and functions, best illustrated in three categories of power sharing: Exclusive, Concurrent, and Residual. Fiscal federalism was the rule of the game of governance between the two levels: federal and regional governments. Put simply, Britain left behind a political system for managing a multinational state that it did not have for England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in its own United Kingdom. At the time that Nigeria assumed independent nationhood, there were just four federal systems in all of Western Europe: Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria. All other nations—homogenous and heterogenous—were unitary. In fact, it took the United Kingdom another 60 years after Nigeria became a federation for Nigeria’s designer and creator, the UK, to experiment with a para- or pro-federal system for three of the Kingdom’s nations: Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.The jury is still out on where the UK is heading in term of political and economic structure of governance.
Nigeria was a federation in the proper sense of the word until the Biafra-Nigeria War. Financing the civil war under a military rule threw up a new system which grew between 1967 and 1979 into a cosmetic federalism that later grew into a full-blown unitary system under the 1999 Constitution that had become since its appearance a source of controversy between federalists and regional autonomists and advocates of political and economic centralism in Nigeria’s multinational space.
Of course, the Nigerian military started as a colonial institution. Military rulers were in the UK where the proper unit of government was the nation-state. In the tradition of being able to give only what a person has, military rulers gradually re-designed Nigeria into a unitary system with the hope that such homogenization would create the solidarity that had been a source of success for organizing people with the same language, culture, religion, worldview, and aspiration into a nation-state managed generally in a unitary manner. After the first thirteen years of military rule, departing military rulers bequeathed in 1979 a constitution that had substantially de-federalized Nigeria. The second republic started in 1979 was terminated by a coup de’etat at the end of 1983, leading to another thirteen years of military rule which came to an end with the 1999 Constitution, a constitution that has since its appearance been a source of controversy between advocates for return to federalism and those who preferred unitary governance.
One trait that featured in the various military governments between 1966 and 1999 is the belief that Nigeria’s problems came from absence of political and fiscal centralism. Each new military dictator increased the number of states until the country had 36 states, that are now referred to as federating units in what Nasir El-Rufai had once characterized as a federation without federalism. Many people had argued that military dictators who changed Nigeria from a federal to unitary system wanted a system close to military culture. Others believed that military dictators believed that a system that aspired to function like a unitary nation-state system was superior to a multinational and multicultural system.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the two retired generals who had served as elected presidents: Olusegun Obasanjo and Muhammed Buhari act and talk as if they are obsessed with running Nigeria like a homogenous state. It is also not surprising, given the attitude of the two presidents to the mode of thought that a state that seems like a homogenized society is the one best for Nigeria, just as it is not surprising that the ambition of former military rulers serving as civilian presidents is attainment of unity and that no sacrifice should be too much to pay for unity, even if citizens have to live in an underdeveloped polity and economy; even if they lack access to electricity, good education, and other sources of social and economic progress.
Today, Spain issimilar to Nigeria in some respects. It is culturally a multinational state that its rulers since 2010 had wanted to run like a culturally homogenous nation-state, largely because of the belief by rulers in Europe and many of its former colonies that governing multinational states like a homogenous one is more likely to succeed better than accepting the dynamics of multicultural states.
When Chief Awolowo said over 60 years that federalism is the only effective mode of governing a multinational state, he was thinking more critically than his contemporaries, rather than acting as an irredentist. He was not only historically-minded like other intellectual leaders; he was also proffering a solution to a polity that could not benefit from methods of governing homogenous societies. Today, even centuries-old homogenous states are showing interest in nudging the European Union in the direction of a super federal state for economic, social, and security reasons. It is instructive that Emmanuel Macron, the president of a country that is often cited as the poster child for creating the world’s first modern nation-state is the champion for transforming EU into a federal state for survival in a more competitive global economy.
As this column observed last week, adopting the route of inter-elite negotiation for re-federalization of Nigeria alone is likely to be less effective than creating a mass movement or political party. People with the mindset that pushed Nigeria from federal to unitary system are not likely to be persuaded easily with superior arguments alone. They need to be made to see where the minds of those seeking change are. They need to be given empirical evidence that millions of voters want more than unity and that there is more danger than is apparent in a system that is only able to get unhappy and poor people united and at the same time hungry. The danger in resisting calls for federalism includes creating populations that can espouse irredentism and separatism, which Nigeria can ill afford.
