by Okey Ikechukwu

If the United Nations (UN) wants the state with the highest number of carrying ‘ekiti’ prefixed towns to have 30% of all global support for a sustained fight against poverty, it will go to Ekiti State.

Ado Ekiti is the capital of Ekiti State, the South Western Nigeria, and other towns in the state have the word ‘ekiti’ in front, as a prefix. All the states of the South-west put together cannot produce as many ekiti-prefixed towns as Ekiti State.

Should the federal government decide to make the state with the highest incidence of ‘ekiti’ the capital of the zone, then it would be Ekiti State. If the United Nations (UN) wants the state with the highest number of carrying ‘ekiti’ prefixed towns to have 30% of all global support for a sustained fight against poverty, it will go to Ekiti State. If Chadians decide that they will allow their daughters to marry only Nigerians from a state with a preponderance of ‘ekiti’ in its demographic and taxonomical lexicon, Ekiti State will (again) be the beneficiary.

Were the National Assembly to make a law today that allocates 50% of all national resources to any zone with the highest number of towns, villages, etc. with ‘ekiti’ as a frequent feature, the South-west zone will be the beneficiary. This is easy to defend, thus: the Nigerian state has decided that the occurrence of ‘ekiti’ is the primary criterion for determining who gets what from the national treasury. This means that all talk about equity can be addressed by pointing out that the matter is already settled by the simple fact of its being enshrined in the constitution.

Will you now say that the constitution does not exist, or that it should be abolished? But who will do such a thing? Wait a minute, the constitution can be abolished by the Nigerian people. All they need is a people’s constitutional conference, right? But until that happens, and unless that happens, we shall continue to give 50% of our national takings to the South-west Zone. Naturally, the people of the zone will be in the forefront in objecting to any attempt to change the revenue allocation formula that gives them the lion share.

But what if we decide to change the ‘mass’ to something else. What if we say that any state whose capital has up to seven towns beginning with the three letters ‘umu’ should have 77% of all accruals from crude oil sales in Nigeria? Forthwith, Abia State will be the frontrunner, because it can claim that its capital city of Umuahia has umungasi, umuoriehi, umuduiawa, umuhu, umuawa, umuagu, umuekwule, umukabia and several other ‘umu’ towns as constituents. The simple decision to take ‘umu mass’ as one of the criteria for deciding who gets what in Nigeria will naturally put an end to the aspirations of anyone who is angling to inflict ‘ekiti mass’ on the rest of us as a major deciding factor in managing entitlements from the national treasury.

But Ekiti and Abia States can be easily knocked out of reckoning if Ode Itsekiri, or big Warri, comes up with the idea of giving pre-eminence to some other ‘mass’, in this matter of sharing things in Nigeria.

Water mass can be invoked, for instance. Big Warri is a tiny island off Warri mainland, in Delta State. It is the original home of the Itsekiris and probably has more water, water vapour and atmospheric humidity than that of Maiduguri multiplied by four. Using ‘water mass’ as criterion for sharing national revenue will make almost everyone on that tiny island a local government. Who knows, a stray dog may even be named a town and itinerant beggars may be allocated money from the national budget as either national
monuments, or even federal movable reserves and assets. Yes, replacing ‘land mass’ with ‘water mass’ in the section of the Nigerian constitution that talks about revenue sharing will completely change the fiscal equation and attitudes within that federation.

The same thing will happen if you use ‘tree mass’,of some other mass for that matter. The conclusion from the foregoing is that, as Fela, the late Afrobeat musician said with regards to the military uniform; it is just a piece of cloth sown by a tailor. The provisions of our constitution did not come into being with the creation of the universe.

The document itself is the result of consultations, conspiracies and commercialised patriotism in some cases. That is why any calls for constitutional conference, or amendments to any existing constitution, is always resisted by those benefitting from the status-quo. No one will watch you pull out his drinking straw from a full bottle of Coca-cola, just as no mosquito will be happy to be separated from its meal by the fact of his sleeping victim waking up.

The point of all the foregoing rigmarole, if it is one, is that the promised (or is it ‘threatened’) national dialogue presents an opportunity for new thoughts, more stubborn debates and conscious negotiations on many touchy issues. The question of the number of local governments per state, for instance, will come up. It will also generate much heat during the actual conference. So will the power of states to create local governments. Think of what will happen if local governments are removed from the table as one of the means of sharing revenue. If there is no specific allocation to individual local governments, the complaints about the ‘inequality’ in the number of local governments will end without any further ado. If no state is to receive funds from the centre based on how many local governments it has, no one will care half a rag doll if Lagos State creates 300 local governments from Enu Owa Street at Idumota.

The South-east will not make any further complaints about Kano State having more local governments than a geopolitical zone of the country.

One aspect of the occasional debates about some of these issues is that the commentators sometimes forget that the quarrel is over equity and revenue, rather than geography. Those who know and note this often fail to say so. When someone says that all geopolitical zones should have the same number of states, the discussion is not about the aesthetic of having equal numbers across the board. It is not about the polite fashion of saying with a smile: “oh yes, it now looks nice, neat and symmetrical” – no! Instead it is about equity in the sharing of resources. The real problem lies in the fact that many protagonists generally commit the little known fallacy of “Incomplete formulation of propositions”. Let us take a typical example.

A man walks up to you and says: “It is not fair that you should have two oranges while the rest of us have only one”. The speaker has not told us what is unfair about one person having an orange when another has two. The mere fact of someone having two oranges is not bad in itself. All the oranges may be his for all you know and everyone else may actually be enjoying his benevolence by getting any oranges at all. Again, it may be that one person now has two oranges because all the others took one out of their two oranges earlier. The speaker would have left no room for confusion if he had said: “It is not fair that you should take two oranges, knowing that there are six oranges
and that the six of us have been directed to take one orange each”. It is the same with those who are very passionate about the real and imagined inequities of the Nigerian federation; but who are simply too angry or too passionate to make a good case on any matter – or even make sense at all.

So why should someone not argue for ‘ekiti mass’, number of rivers, tree population of the preponderance of a particular species of tortoise as basis to apportioning rights and advantages within the Nigerian State?

Arik Air’s Airborne Yam Roaster
Anyone who flew on the 10.15 Arik Air flight from Abuja to Enugu last Thursday must have had a foretaste of the corridors of hell fire. While the heat in the plane was not enough to burn or roast a human being, it was hot enough for anyone who wanted to steam vegetables, or roast a piece of yam, or plantain, over a slow, smouldering fire.

People were fanning themselves frantically, even desperately. Meanwhile the aircraft stood still on the tarmac. The blast of hot, room heating air from the vents was being turned off by passengers. Many reached for, and shut, the vents with using one hand to fan themselves.

The apparently unperturbed crew went about their duties, wiping their forehead now and again. The strong man of Anambra politics, Chris Ubah, had to also shut the vent above his head to avoid going bald from the steady blast of hot, merciless air. His political strength could not stand the hot aerial assault. Many passengers came close to turning violent, and some screamed at the cabin crew with ill-concealed threats of physical violence. Someone who looked very much like the Petroleum Minister sat through it all, with the full weight, dignity and authority of her office. She had no powers over hot air in an old aircraft.

Then the plane inched forward and eventually took off. This was 33 minutes after boarding and nearly two hours after the originally schedules flight time. Once airborne, it was as noisy as a baby rattle, shaking noisily and almost merrily – while still hot.

The shaking jig outclassed the celebrated gyrations of the Oji Onu masquerade; or the traditional dance of umunwanwa in the Umuahia area. That aircraft is too old and too shaky to be in service.

 

——————————————-

Read this article in the Thisday Newspapers

 

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