Nigeria must not take its unity for granted-Ozekhome

All the census or censuses have not reflected the true population of Nigeria. Nigeria is the only country in the world where the more you go to the dry savannah region, the more population you have, it is actually the exact opposite in all parts of the world, that the more you go to arid zone the less population you have.

This is because we have held up population as a measure for the calculation of our national resources as to who gets what, how much and when under Section162 of the 1999 constitution which deals with revenue allocation.

So of the 774 local governments of Nigeria including the FCT areas councils are the 36 states, so it is one of the major roles for calculating your entitlement for the national till, because we only share the national cake we do not care how the national cake is baked. One of the greatest measuring rules is population and the population itself is based on the number of local government areas that you have in a state. Take a look at it, where is the social justice in the system? When Kano State, the old Kano State, was later divided into two, Kano and Jigawa states, as I speak to you, Kano State has 44 local government areas; Jigawa State has 28 local government areas, so between Kano State alone there are 72 local government areas and a large measure of sharing of our national cake is to these areas and the population. Let’s look at the reverse side of the coin, because a one sided coin is a bad tender. Bayelsa is a golden goose that lays the golden egg. Since the discovery of oil at Oloibiri in the present day Bayelsa State in 1956, even before I was born, the state is still in tatters, in comatose; do you know how many local government areas it has? Eight (8).
So, if the generator of your national resources is having 8 local governments only and some others that are eating those resources, one of them only is having 72 where is the social justice inherent in such a one sided system.

Go to Bayelsa, I just came back from that side, Rivers and Bayelsa, I saw the fragility of the soil, I saw people living in huts erected on bamboo sticks and they have a hole inside the hut where they defecate directly in the scum called stream below, a stream that has spirogyra, the green filamentous algae, a stream that is ringworm infested, it is that same stream that they drink from.

So, you have water everywhere but unlike in the ancient marina, none is fit enough to drink, you have light 24hrs a day seven days a week 52 weeks a year, not light from the national grid, but from gas flaring, the gas flaring itself emits rainfall of acid rain and vicious substances that destroys agrarian life, aquatic life, gives cancerous diseases to the inhabitants, where is the social justice.

Where they were whipped with kobokos and bulalas because they asked for fish and were given snake and they asked for bread and were given scorpions, their survivors, the present generation are no longer just being whipped, they are being mauled down by bullets and guns through the use of state apparatus, where is the social justice? So when Dogara says he is afraid of a census before 2019, I sympathise with him.

I sympathise with him because he knows that census in Nigeria is an implosive subject matter. The last chairman of the National Population Commission, Chief Odimegwu just made only one statement which some sections of the country did not like and pronto he was sacked from office.

Of all the issues that are inclusive as sensitive in Nigeria, census is unarguably, the most sensitive because Nigerians have learnt not to bake the national cake, but to depend on the sharing of this national cake, so at the end of every month all the commissioners for finance leave the 36 states, they all meet in Abuja to come and share the national cake, after that, the governors use up to 40 percent if it is for their so called security votes which are never accounted for. The one that are due to the local government areas they seize the money upfront and render the local governments prostrate and ineffective and then when they finish that sum of money they wait again for the next month end. No country can grow like that. Japan does not have a single drop of oil, but it is one of the richest countries in the world because they invest in human capacity development.

Where America, UK and some other countries like Netherlands are burning between zero and 3.5 percent of their natural gas reserve, Nigeria with nothing less than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves is burning it on a daily basis. Take a trip to Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, and Delta you will see flames burning everywhere, we cannot get it right like that, we must hereby diversify the economy. Beyond that I am going to give a panacea that will cure all this.

At the 2014 national conference we made over 600 recommendations after discussions for over six months, no one was forced to adopt any discussion of the over 491 delegates, we disagreed and sometimes almost coming to blows, but at the end of the day we were able to synergise and reached consensus in all the matter we agreed on.

For any participant at that conference to come out with a position to say that they do not want the decisions of the conference implemented is arrant nonsense.

Of all the conferences I have attended, the 2014 was the most distinguished, from traditional rulers to the academia, from the civil service to the military, from the police to the professionals, from the physically challenged group, from the youth to the civil society every segment of Nigeria, from all the six geo political zones from the 36 states from the FCT from the 774 local government areas from all the gender including people in the diaspora were represented.

So those decisions form the basis of Nigerian unity, infact we unanimously agreed that we should go back to the old national anthem which was more unifying in terms of content and rendition.

We saw it as uniting the weak fabric of Nigeria, to come together and we were happy, we broke up finally happily and one of the major decisions we took which I actually proposed in the law reform legal and human rights sub-committee was that in the constitution of Nigeria these decisions that we are taking should be subjected to a popular referendum of the people of Nigeria so that they will have a say in it, because the origin of a constitution is more important than the content of the constitution.

Part of the reason that Nigeria is having a problem is that we didn’t agree as federating units to synergise, to come together, rather we were coupled together, individual states, individual regions and kingdoms that were already on their own that had started enjoying their autonomy were coupled together, the Sultanate under Uthman Dan Fodio was on its own, the Borno empire was on its own, Ife the origin of Yoruba was on its own, the Benin empire was there.

These autonomous people the British came and knocked together when they had taken over the other kingdoms, some resisted but forced and amalgamated together which is why Chinua Achebe will tell us in his Things Fall Apart that the center cannot hold, because the falcon cannot hear the falconer and mere anarchy has come upon the land; that is why we are where we are, so we need to get it right, otherwise we should not take our unity for granted.

I laugh when I see section 1 of the constitution saying Nigeria is one indivisible and indissoluble country united by God, beautiful moral platitude, didn’t we have old Yugoslavia, the Indian Pakistan and Bangladesh were they not once one country, what of Sudan and Southern Sudan, what of Eritrea and Ethiopia, so we cannot take our unity for granted, unity is a jealous woman that needs to be nurtured and pampered, like a seed planted in the farm it needs to be manured, fertilized and watered so that it continues to germinate and bloom, we should not take Nigeria’s unity for granted.

The panacea is going back to fiscal federalism, the over 600 recommendations of the 2014 national conference which the President unfortunately said will be put away in the archives because the APC never believed in the 2014 national conference to me is unfortunate, the solution to Nigeria’s problems are embedded in the 2014 national conference, devolution of powers from the centre to the federating units is there.

True fiscal federalism whereby states control their resources and pay tax to the government at the centre, each state having its own police force rather than the present oppressive national police force under sections 214 and 215 0f the 1999 Constitution is also addressed.

The recommendation that in having state police force, we should also have community policing as we have in the USA where the CIA and FBI have their functions, each of the 50 states in America has its own police force in-fact the universities have their own police.

The general picture is a synergy of security coming together and wherever there is a crime, that crime is nipped in the bud, but in Nigeria we have the oxymoronic situation where the governor of a state is made the chief security officer of that state but does not have the power to control his own police force because section 245 says before the commissioner of police can obey him he has to ask the Inspector General of Police at the centre or the minister of police affairs or Mr president.

So what I mean by true fiscal federalism; it runs the system of revenue generation and allocation that pervade in Nigeria before 15 January, 1966 when the first military coup occurred in Nigeria by Maj. Kaduna Nzeogwu, the system was that each of the three regions then generated their resources and used their resources.

With the famous Kano groundnut pyramid and the hides and skin and cotton the Saduana of Sokoto was able to build a conglomerate, the Northern Nigeria Development Corporation, (NNDC) and that gave rise to Ahmadu Bello University, Durbar hotel, Yankari Games Reserve, New Nigeria newspapers and Bank of the North.

In the east, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Michael Okpara, the premier, they controlled the palm oil produce. It was said that Malaysia picked palm kernel from Nigeria, but today Malaysia is not only one of the highest producers of palm oil in the world, we import palm produce from Malaysia, with the wealth generated from Eastern Nigeria, Okpara was able to build structures that are still standing there till tomorrow, University of Nigeria, Presidential hotel in Enugu and Port Harcourt, Obudu Cattle Ranch, the Enugu Stadium, all these were done because they could generate their own resources and they could use it according to their needs.

The sharing formulae was that the state that produced the commodity took 50 percent and 50 percent was paid as tax to the government at the centre, 25 percent was shared among all the regions with the region that had already taken 50 percent again sharing from that 25percent; that was true fiscal federalism.

In South West, Awolowo was able to harness the cocoa resources to put up landmark projects like the Cocoa House in Ibadan, the first television station in Africa (Western Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation) launched in 1957, Liberty stadium, the Obafemi Awolowo University, he threw a ring of roads through the Yoruba land, he gave free education at all levels to Yoruba people, that was the vision of one man who had the opportunity to control his own resources.

In the Mid West region they had timber and rubber produce, the Northerner didn’t need to depend on the Yoruba for existence nor did the Igbo depend on the North for existence, every region developed according to its own pace and needs. Do you know that Nasarawa has 37 mineral resources, Plateau 28, Sokoto 27, Edo and Oyo about 35 each, but everyone is waiting for the black gold which is fast depleting and becoming useless, so we are not going to get it right until we enthrone true fiscal federalism again and stop the parasitic nature of existentialism, what is referred to as disarticulate economy where we produce what we don’t consume and consume what we don’t produce, no nation grows like that and we can never grow like that