by Akin Osuntokun

 If these states require a bailout to pay backlogs of salaries, the central question remains how then do they respond to the same challenge going forward?

One of the most significant casualties of the last general elections is the proposition of the constitutional review of the political structure of Nigeria. The argument that the failure of Nigeria ultimately devolves on a fundamentally deformed structure was lost in a national mental block against any other rationale than the crisis of governance personified by the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan. If Nigerians were prepared to reflect deeply on this crisis, they would have been struck by the irony that begat the preferred electoral choice.

If Jonathan was as bad as adjudged by his critics (a judgement I persistently questioned) the most important question should have been- how does Nigeria constitute itself to minimise the damage that a leadership of that nature can inflict in the event of its recurrence. As the adage goes, prevention is better than cure; immunity vaccination is of far greater utility in responding to the potential outbreak of a pandemic. The validity of science is predicated on the extent of its anticipation of the worst case scenario. The fact that airplanes have more than one engine is a component of the anticipation of worst case scenario in its design and engineering. Expect the best but prepare for the worst reasons is a common banter pregnant with the same meaning.

President Olusegun Obasanjo was singularly instrumental to the emergence of his two consecutive successors whom he subsequently adjudged as desperate failures. He would have had less cause for regret if the structure of Nigeria limits the latitude that the failure of a bloated centre can impact the whole country. The principle of separation of powers, of checks and balances and other contrived limitations on the exercise of power was inspired by the negative assumption that it is less probable that the better angels of human nature will predominate in those elected and appointed to govern.

In contemporary times, the worry of Nigeria was the development inhibited lopsided ratio of recurrent to capital expenditure but more tragically we are now enmeshed in the throes of the abject lack of capacity to fund either. Given that almost all the states are sustained by monthly sharing of petrol dollars in Abuja, the reality is that those states never had the capacity for viable existence in the first place and it was a matter of time before this stark reality call to question the viability of Nigeria-as it is presently constituted, in such a dramatic fashion.

If these states require a bailout to pay backlogs of salaries, the central question remains how then do they respond to the same challenge going forward? What is the solution to the problem of these clearly bankrupt and non-viable so called constituent units of the Nigerian federation? What happens if the price of oil crashes further on the international market? The tragedy here is that these are no longer moot questions-they are already knocking on the doors.

It is a mark of lack of national seriousness and the height of absurdity that within this context we are even seriously contemplating the creation of more of these pseudo states! Now I do not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge of rebuilding and restoring Nigeria into a sustainable federal structure, the problem I have is the prevalent elite attitude of playing the ostrich and pretending that all is well with our disarticulate and wobbly constitutional structure despite all indications to the contrary.

Willingness to adequately confront this challenge is compromised by the fact that the main beneficiaries of the status-quo are the political elite-especially those in office. The untenable opulence of the perquisites of office, legitimate and otherwise, is open to the interpretation that the states exist to serve the governors rather than the citizenry. Without prejudice to his qualities as governor, the behaviour of prioritising the ownership of a helicopter is a vivid illustration of how these states seem to now primarily exist for the benefit of incumbent office holders; and of how such public functionaries would be indisposed towards a restructuring of Nigeria that entails the abolition of the states.

In a manner of speaking, Nigeria is a victim of its political history and it is a history that is instructive and teachable. The first learned experience is that we arrived at the present conjuncture by the accident of the 1966 coups and the civil war and it is to that extent wrong to lay anti-nationalist allegations at the doorstep of those who argue against its adoption and retention. Second is that its consolidation resulted from the military tail wagging the Nigeria dog. Since 1966 Nigeria has been fashioned not only after the unitary command culture of the military but also on its inherent philosophy of might is right.

Third is the misfortune of the evolution of Nigeria into an oil economy and the attendant domino effect disruption of fiscal federalism. In the circumstance of the concentration of the crude oil resource in only one region, fidelity to fiscal federalism has the potential to result in a huge disparity in per capita income of the oil rich region and the rest of Nigeria. The question arises whether there would be a material difference in the response to this potential national imbalance under a civil democratic rule dispensation rather than military dictatorship-that inflicts no damage on Nigeria’s federalism.

The misfortune is equally captured in the profligate mentality encapsulated in the gaffe that ‘the problem of Nigeria is not money but how to spend it’; and its unintended expression in the degradation of the agriculture economy and consequent distortion of the economic development path of seamless progression to a participatory integrated agro-allied complex economy.

The financial insolvency of the states has forcefully brought to the fore the question of the constitutional structure of Nigeria and its irrational tendency towards becoming drainpipes for profligacy and waste rather than been units and centres of development. The contemplation of what might have been the golden alternative to what presently obtains cannot fail to excite the imagination.

If we take the consolidation of the states of the South West zone into a regional governmental unit as hypothetical alternative, it means there would be no replication of governmental structure and skyrocketing administrative and other recurrent expenditure across six capitals. The logic of the resultant large (combined) economies of scale suggests that operational costs-both capital and recurrent would be considerably minimised. For instance, maybe rather than have several glorified high schools we would have one or two world class universities with campuses across the states. Maybe…………….

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.