Two decades ago, in 1996, as a magazine publisher in London, I wrote to Chief Emeka Anyaoku, then Secretary General of the Commonwealth, requesting an interview for my magazine, African Expatriate. Within days, his secretary replied, “The Secretary General would like to meet you”. So, off I went, with an associate editor and a photographer, to the Commonwealth Secretariat. Arriving, we were ushered into Anyaoku’s office. He welcomed us warmly and told his secretary to ensure there were no interruptions during the interview. And, so, we had his undivided attention for over two hours as he fielded our questions. The result was a five-page cover story, captioned: “Africa is being marginalised… It’s not just a fear, it’s a reality”. Anyaoku’s thesis was that Africa’s marginalisation was largely self-inflicted, caused by failed political leadership and governance structures.
A few years later, in 2001, after he had left office, I saw him at a seminar at the London School of Economics, where he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, and I was studying for a PhD in Law. I told him I had hoped he would run for the presidency in 1999, and would have returned to Nigeria to join his campaign team. I said that, with his experience of helping several Commonwealth nations to achieve political settlements, Nigeria needed him to steer the country towards a viable political system after the fracturing of the polity by the military. He laughed. “You are one of those trying to draft me into politics”, he said, adding, “I was not interested”. It was Nigeria’s loss!
I have started with this story just to make two points. The first is that I am a strong admirer of Chief Anyaoku, who is one of Nigeria’s and, indeed, one of Africa’s best gifts to the world. When the world thinks about Nigeria, it remembers that we have an Emeka Anyaoku. He is a great asset to this country, and it would be a terrible error if, to paraphrase the Bible, this ‘prophet’ is not heeded in his own country! Which brings me to my second point. Anyaoku’s call for the political restructuring of Nigeria is not flippant. He is completely au fait with the issues of governance and political institutions, and his view is the result of experience, a great deal of analysis and reflection. He is, of course, one of Nigeria’s most cerebral elder statesmen; a deep thinker!
In that interview in 1996, Anyaoku lamented the paucity of intellectualism in Africa. He argued that, apart from failed political leadership and institutions, Africa was also underperforming because “a good many of our intellectuals have failed us”. He pointed out that “the thinking that lies behind the progress of any nation is often provided by intellectuals”, adding that “our intellectuals have to be blamed” for failing to provide such intellectual input into Africa’s development. Clearly, Anyaoku is doing what intellectuals should do: think through national problems and proffer solutions!
Over the past six months alone, the Chief (as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair used to call him) has made three powerful interventions on the political structure of Nigeria. In October 2015, as chairman of the Akintola Williams Distinguished Lecture Series, he argued that “unless Nigeria goes back to regional government, it may be embarking on an endless, fruitless search for meaningful development”. And twice this month, February, both at the inauguration of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy and at a public symposium to mark the 50th anniversary of the Bible Society of Nigeria, he urged Nigeria to adopt the current six geo-political zones as the country’s new federating units.
Every rhetorician knows about the Aristotelian modes of persuasion. To sound persuasive on any subject, the speaker must successfully appeal to authority or credibility (ethos), to emotions (pathos) and to logical reason (logos). Chief Anyaoku ticks all the boxes. Clearly, as I noted above, he is more than qualified to speak on the subject. As the Commonwealth Secretary General for ten years, and even long before then in different senior roles in the Commonwealth, he helped to steer many countries towards political settlements, including, most significantly, the end of apartheid in South Africa. He knows from his extensive experience that no country with the ethnic make-up of Nigeria has the centralised political culture that this country has. As Anyaoku himself puts it, “from my over 30 years’ experience of governance in over 50 Commonwealth countries, I believe that, given its history and pluralistic character, a truer federalism is a sine qua non for Nigeria’s achievement of its development potentials and enduring political stability”. Nigeria ignores that wisdom at its peril!
The logic and, indeed, the emotional appeal of his advocacy are also unassailable. I mean, who seriously thinks that a political structure under which most of the 36 states are totally dependent on federal allocations is sustainable? Most of the state governments are technically bankrupt and unable to pay workers’ salaries. What kind of governance structure is it that can’t ensure the payment of salaries to workers? From a functionalist or liberal institutionalist point of view, a political structure exists to solve problems and meet the needs of the people, and should be open to reconstruction whenever it can’t perform these functions. Basically, a political system loses its ethical basis for existence if it can’t meet the people’s needs. And, truth be told, the present political-governance structure in Nigeria has failed catastrophically to meet the needs of ordinary Nigerians.
But it’s clear that a governance structure won’t meet people’s needs if the cost of running it is too high. So, the logic of the efficiency or cost of governance argument for returning to regionalism is also powerful. No one can seriously fault Anyaoku’s call when it’s evident that the current system, with the multiplicity of government administrative structures, drains the country’s limited resources and stultifies its growth. Oil money or not, we truly delude ourselves if we think Nigeria can run an expensive presidential system, with a behemothic presidency, sheltered in opulence in Aso Rock, and having more than 500 overlapping parastatals and agencies, and a bicameral federal legislature with gluttonous lawmakers. Equally, we deceive ourselves if we think we can have similar profligate governance system in 36 barely solvent states, each having extensive and expensive administrative structures and borrowing heavily to build white elephant projects (for instance, every state now wants to build an airport!). Of course, it’s in the nature of centralised political cultures to have weak states that are reliant on the centre and on borrowings to function, but that’s not true federalism.
In March last year, I wrote a column titled “Nigeria needs a political settlement”. I argued that since independence, Nigeria has not had a proper negotiated political arrangement “about how the people should live peaceably together; how power should be organised and exercised to generate political stability; and how the institutions and the economy can work harmoniously to promote sustainable growth and development”. Yet, political settlements are the preconditions for good governance. As the UK Department for International Development puts it in one study, “the political settlement is central to all development”. But, sadly, Nigeria is ducking the issue of political settlement or restructuring, as demonstrated by the flimsiness of the Obasanjo political reform conference, and the self-serving rejection of the Jonathan constitutional conference by President Buhari and his party.
But, as I wrote in another article, titled “A vision of the united nations of Nigeria”, Nigeria is not a nation, but a country of nations, and failure to create a political system or structure that allows the various nationalities to cooperate rather than clash would continue to undermine the progress of this country. I have examined the political systems of all the 53 Commonwealth countries, and it’s striking that virtually none of them with the same diverse nationalities as Nigeria has a centralised political culture. Can you imagine India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain, just to mention a few, being run with excessive concentration of power at the centre? All of these countries also operate the more consultative Westminster parliamentary system of government, and not the presidential system that allows someone to act like a buccaneering chief executive. Thus, those of the Hegelian school, who argue that nations do not matter in the constitution of the state, miss the point. You simply can’t wish nationalities away. And the truth is that, as the experiences of India and other ethnically diverse countries have shown, Nigeria will be stronger when its federating nations are strong; and returning to regionalism will ensure that!
Yet the strongest argument for regionalism is economic. And it’s based on the notions of economies of scale and competitive regionalism. There are countless activities in each of the 36 states that can be done better if carried out at the regional levels to achieve economies of scale and efficiency. Secondly, the six zones would benefit from a healthy competition among themselves. The economic historian and Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, said in his book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, that medieval Europe overtook the rest of the world, including China, which had a technological head-start, because of competition among the European nations. Healthy competition breeds innovation, brings invention and engenders progress. The six geo-political zones should pull their internal resources together and compete on innovative, openness for business, attraction of foreign investors, diversification of the economies, export trade, revenue generation, provision of excellent services etc. But all of this presupposes a substantial devolution of powers to the regions.
So, I am on the same page with Chief Anyaoku and other like-minded Nigerians on the issue of the political restructuring of Nigeria. The good news is that the All Progressives Congress promised devolution of powers in its manifesto. The bad, as I argued last week, is that, so far, President Buhariis silent on political reform. He should heed Anyaoku’s call and mobilise Nigerians for this transformational change. A competitive federalism of six regional governments would make Nigeria a stronger country!
This opinion piece is the second in a six-part series that hopes to steer the current exchange rate debate towards a focus on facts, taken from economic theory, history, and evidence from Nigeria and other countries. The authors hope that Mr. President will read these pieces and reconsider his stance on the Naira and the broader question of economic growth.
Olu Fasan
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