Unanswered Questions (II)

Written by Dan Agbese

Tuesday, 02 November 2010

Given his enormous powers over the national purse and being the distributor-in-chief of national patronage the president’s capacity for effecting instant changes in personal fortunes is limitless. Now you know why a Nigerian president commands the largest army of willing defenders and supporters in the world Our late prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, once observed during a parliamentary debate: “In America, the people practise ‘democracy,’ in the United Kingdom, there is ‘democracy.’ France is ‘democratic,’ but they are all different kinds. So maybe, our ‘democracy’ in Nigeria may be yet another kind of ‘democracy.’Our successive military rulers, who came up with this fangled idea of a corrective regime, thought so too. If they would remake Nigeria - and they very verily believed that was their respective divine assignment – they needed a political system unique to our country; one which, it was to be presumed, the rest of the world would envy.In the heat of the political crisis in 1966, the head of state, Lt Col (as he then was) Yakubu Gowon kicked off the monumental search. He asked the ad hoc constitutional conference to find an ideal political system for Nigeria. The crux of his assignment was that the wise men were free to choose, if they so found, a political system totally strange to contemporary political lexicon. Twenty years later, President Ibrahim Babangida saddled the Samuel Cookey political bureau with the same burden.And thus did our nation begin its dizzying experiments in the search for an ideal political system under the watchful eyes of military men. The search did not find the needle that was not even in the haystack but the experiments gave us a political system made up of 45 percent democracy and 55 percent dictatorship. The law of unintended consequences are unalterable. This system is a demonstrative fact of our national history: military psyche sits uneasily on democratic psyche. I see this quaintly disturbing picture of a country trashing in a sea of democracy but weighed down by 100 tonnes of discarded khaki uniform.I have not had the opportunity to ask Gowon and Babangida if this was what they had hoped to find for the country but I am willing to bet they would be reluctant to drink to this new system that makes Nigeria an object of political curiosity. Oh well, the two men are teetotallers anyway. Balewa could not have had this sort of thing in mind either but we will never know for sure.Actually, the man who cleared the path to Nigeria’s ‘kind of democracy’ was the late head of state, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed. In his address to the constitution drafting committee in 1975, he said the country needed a new constitution in which the locus of executive power was clear and unambiguous such that it would “eliminate cut-throat political competition based on a system or rules of winner-takes-all.” In other words, Nigeria did not need institutionalised parliamentary opposition. One man, one vote should logically result in one man’s rule, not a multiplicity of views and voices.The 49 wise men had no problem with that. They were equally persuaded that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government (because) the unity of a single executive clearly conduces more to the energy and dispatch.” They replaced the British parliamentary democracy with the American presidential system. They reasoned that the Nigerian president must be the chief executive of the country and the state governors the chief executives of their respective states. Now you know why the governors call themselves executive governors. Ah, yes, local government chairmen are the chief executives of local governments too. With 811 governments, we effectively have 811 political chief executives in the country. Too many cooks may spoil the broth but no one ever said that 811 chief executives would not make Nigeria better governed. Still, I am willing to bet that there is something nightmarish about every Nigerian, man, woman and child, being subjected to the executive orders of 811 chief executives down the length and breadth of the country.The 811 chief executives are the 811 faces of unintended consequences of too many experiments intended to save us the trouble of sweating the hard stuff. The structure of our federation has implications for the nature of our federalism. The one being an unfinished job, the other is the sole source of fractious politics. Our three tiers of government – federal, state and local government - are technically independent but the states and the local governments are, in effect and practice, administrative units of the centre. The states are not constituent units of the federation like those in the US. Local governments were brought into the centre of political reckoning because a) the states are defined by their local government areas and b) the local governments made the grade in the revenue allocation formula: the more local governments a state has, the bigger its monthly share from the federation account. And because we are unwilling to resolve the structure of our federation and the nature of our federalism, we have virtually re-written the book on federalism. Here are two anomalies strange to federalism. One is the uniformity and the centralisation of our federal system. We have a uniform structure of government at the centre and the administrative units; uniform salaries and allowances; centralised labour unions and centralised police, among others.  The Nigerian president was conceived in the military mind as the father of the nation. Everyone is at his beck and call. He is easily the most powerful president in the world. He presides over the executive council of the federation, a body that technically makes it mandatory for the constituent administrative units to take orders from the president. Given his enormous powers over the national purse and being the distributor-in-chief of national patronage the president’s capacity for effecting instant changes in personal fortunes is limitless. Now you know why a Nigerian president commands the largest army of willing defenders and supporters in the world.We flail in the wind, unsure where our country is and where it will be in the next 50 years.Balewa once raised an interesting question in parliament. He asked:  “Do we want Nigeria to be a happy place for everybody, or to be a hell for the masses and a paradise for the few?”        I wonder.  SMS: 08055001912