For the Record 26
Daily Times Nigeria Monday, April 16, 2018
Growing the economy, improving governance and integrating the nation By Atiku Abubakar
I
would like to thank Professor Isawa Elaigwu and the Institute of Governance and Social Research for honouring me with the invitation to speak at this symposium. The invitation said that the stakeholder from each of our six geo-political zones making a presentation, as I am, would “decently express their grievances, while proffering solutions to Nigeria’s problems of nation-building.” Mine however will not include the airing of the grievances of my zone, though those exist. My grievances, if you can call them such, will focus on a few critical national issues that need to be addressed if we are to become a truly productive, sharing, integrated and peaceful society, a society that draws strength from its most important characteristics. So I would rather try to input into the ideas and plans for improving our federation to enhance economic development, democratic participation, national integration and social peace. There’s no doubt that we are facing serious challenges as a nation, including building an economy that creates vast opportunities for our citizens and giving each of our diverse peoples a sense of fairness in the distribution of opportunities across the country and creating in them a sense of unity and oneness. Over the years political and civic leaders have stressed the inviolability of Nigeria as one united country and called on our citizens to show a sense of unity and patriotism. Unfortunately, as leaders, we have not done enough to encourage the behaviour and values we expect of our citizens. We have not always matched our rhetoric with our actual behaviour. Thus it has been difficult for us to achieve national integration and development. I will identify objective or structural and subjective or non-structural factors responsible for this: Objective/Structural Factors: The Structural/objective factors include our multi-ethnic/multi-religious nature, with regional differences and imbalances with respect to population, natural resource endowment, land mass, topography, etc. Our governments are also dependent on revenues from oil derived from a small patch of the country, mainly three states. We are also characterized by differential location of economic and political power or dominance, among our groups/ regions. This diversity is in itself not a problem. Indeed it can be a source of strength if we are organized in a way that each section or group contributes its special endowments to the whole. The issue is our subjective responses to our diversity. Those responses have profound impact on nation-building processes, especially our perception of our relationships with one another. I also have to point out that while our dependence on oil is now a structural fact, it is not natural; it re-
Atiku sulted from conscious government policies and practices which can be reversed. And we have excessive centralization and concentration of power and resources at the federal level relative to the states. Non-Structural/Subjective: These are what we do, can do or fail to do to improve our society and realize our national goals. These include quality of governance: what the government does or fails to do as well as the practices and pronouncements of political and civic leaders, which profoundly shape political discourse and the relationships among citizens. Let’s take a coser look. We are a diverse, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society with three dominant groups in three geographic regions each with many minority groups. None of the three major groups and neither of the two main religions has overall dominance in the country. Another dimension of our diversity is that the government’s revenue base (oil) is located within a minority section of the country while political power is broadly located elsewhere – with the majority group(s). Although these two features can make for a harmonious relationship among the component groups, by locating different forms of power in different groups/ regions, they have largely been a recipe for conflict in Nigeria. Another aspect of our diversity, which contributes to conflicts, is the uneven development among the regions/zones, which had been there since our political independence. There is also what I regard as the excessive cen-
There is also the need for political majorities to be more sensitive and accommodating to the interests of the minorities. The self-restraint of majorities is critical for the maintenance of peace and harmony. Nigeria’s selfrestraint in the ECOWAS and AU, despite her overwhelming power, population and resources, is, in my view, a secret to the endurance of those organizations tralization of power and concentration of resources in the federal government relative to the federating states. This resulted from a subjective response to the inherited structure that I have described above and the political crisis that flowed from our poor management of same. And it became a cause of our dependence on oil revenues. Our leaders at independence, after vigorous debates and negotiations, decided, rightly in my view, that a federal system is better suited for our situation. A federal system allows for shared national goals and policies but also allows federating states the autonomy to pursue peculiar priorities. A federal system is also best suited for the protection of the interests of minorities, especially with the cre-
ation of states that allowed many numerically large minorities to have more political influence. At independence we had three (later four) regions with adequate autonomy and powers to develop at their own paces. When the regional leaders tried to extend their influence outside their region of dominance, especially in ways that were less than democratic, it created a political crisis that helped precipitate the military’s seizure of power. Military command and control structure and the crisis and civil war led to centralization and concentration of power and resources in the centre at the expense of the federating states, which had then been carved out of the regions. Oil revenues underwrote the process, ensuring little resistance. That’s how we came to have “unitary federalism.” Our “unitary federalism” has also been characterized by too much government involvement in economic and other activities. We now have federal roads, schools, and hospitals, in addition to business investments that the federal government embarked upon. With unprecedented inflow of oil revenues the expansion of government didn’t seem to be a problem. The state became the means to wealth. Politics became a zero sum game. But soon government overreached itself and when oil prices collapsed, the folly of our ways became very obvious. The collapse of our infrastructure and the fiscal crises across Continued on page 27