Atiku Abubakar

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has advocated that Nigeria should draw huge lessons from the American democracy which it adopted, a system that fosters individual freedom, productivity, competition, innovation and strong institutional checks on power wielders.

While there is no ideal federal system to which every federating country has to aspire, Atiku argued that there are better working federal systems from which to draw lessons. He added that Nigeria modeled its current federal system after the US, but seem to have avoided the critical elements that make the American system function better. That is, according to him, “greater autonomy for federating states and individuals, and mistrust of leaders entrusted with power.”

Atiku continued: “In particular, the founding fathers of the US knew that human beings, especially leaders, like to accumulate power as much as they can. So in order to protect and guarantee freedoms for citizens from rampaging egomaniacs, the leaders’ powers needed to be limited; the central government needed to be restrained in favour of the federating states.

“Thus the first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, collectively called the Bill of Rights, offer specific protections of individual liberty and justice and restricts the powers of government. The bulk of the seventeen subsequent amendments expand individual civil rights protections, while the rest deal with federal authority or modify government processes and procedures. The Tenth Amendment is of particular interest for our discussion here. It states that powers not delegated to the Federal Government and not denied the states, belong to the states or to the people.

“We have become so accustomed to the current structure and addicted to oil money that even the most reasonable among us still cling to a belief that what we currently have is the most beneficial and is immutable. Nothing can be further from the truth. This is a federal system that has fostered dependence on revenues derived mainly from three states and is characterized by excessive centralization and concentration of power and resources, and intense political competition, and political instability. Today regional gatherings are usually about grievances and how to get more from the central pool of resources but hardly about how to produce and contribute to increasing those resources.”

Below is the full text of the lecture, entitled:

By Atiku Abubakar

Let me start by dispelling some myths that have been thrown around regarding the calls for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation.

1. It is a myth to say that we do not need restructuring, that all we need is good leadership. While leadership is critical, leaders also operate within structural and institutional constraints, which may impede or enhance their performance. Thus if you have a federal structure that encourages dependency while discouraging hard work, innovation, productivity and competition, your development as a nation will be less than optimal.

2. It is a myth to suggest or imply that changes in the structure of our federation are a silver bullet or magic wand that would solve all our problems. Our challenges are multi-faceted and the structure of the federation is only one of them, albeit a critical one. Restructuring itself will not automatically guarantee good governance. As a people we still have to demand good governance and accountability from our leaders.

The organizers of this lecture wanted my speech to explore “the constitutional and political framework for reconstructing Nigeria for true federalism and national integration.” That topic brings me to the third myth about restructuring.

3. “True federalism” is a myth. Federal systems are works-in-progress, and vary from one another according to their specific historical, socio-economic and political conditions. Ultimately people agree on the kind of federal system they will have, and be prepared to make necessary changes if it does not serve them well.

Let me also say that there’s nothing wrong in people agitating for what they see as a better federal system. In fact the perennial debates and agitations by federating units for improved position within a federal structure is the hallmark of a living, breathing federal system. We need not vilify those who disagree with us or treat them as less patriotic or even as felons.

I am a businessman and politician. So my remarks will be informed by what I see as the political and economic imperatives of restructuring. I will leave the matter of constitutional framework for constitutional lawyers and for a future gathering of leaders who would work out the details of the needed restructuring. Even at that, I will show that our current constitution does indeed concentrate too much power and resources at the centre, which has, in my view, impeded national development, security, peace and stability. At some point our leaders and representatives will come together, discuss and work out a framework for restructuring our federation in order to renew it to serve our people better.

The restructuring that I have been calling for involves changes to the allocation of powers, responsibilities and resources among the states or zones and between them and the federal government. I do not see local governments as federating units and, therefore, they should not derive their powers from the constitution. Likewise ethnic nationalities are not federating units and any attempt to restructure the country along those lines will be unworkable. Some of our roughly 300 ethnic nationalities are big enough to constitute independent countries while some are too small to even constitute local government areas.

Dependency and Mistrust:

If we cut out all the sophistry, posturing and pretensions, it is clear to me that the resistance against restructuring is based on three interrelated factors, namely dependency, fear and mistrust. Dependency of all segments of the country on oil revenues, fear of loss of oil revenues by non-oil producing states or regions and mistrust of the motives of those angling for restructuring. This can be seen in the regional patterns of the advocacy for and opposition to restructuring. The bulk of the calls for restructuring comes from the south while the bulk of the opposition to it comes from the north. This tells me that it will be critical for all parties to put their cards on the table, give one another the necessary reassurances and make the necessary compromises in order to secure a restructuring deal. Denials and insults by both sides are not a substitute for these.

Although arguments against restructuring come mostly from the North, there are, however, elements from the other regions who are in government and who argue against restructuring, claiming that it is only good leadership (ostensibly theirs) that is needed to resolve our nation’s challenges. Opponents also argue that restructuring is a ploy to break up the country. They insist that national unity is non-negotiable and claim that the matter has been resolved by the civil war. How the current structure is the only guarantee of unity is never really explained, neither is it demonstrated that devolving more powers and resources to federating units would lead to a breakup of the country.

Why Restructure?

While those calling for restructuring may be driven by different motives there is certainly a strong case for restructuring our federation. My reasons are simply that the current structure, which concentrates too much power and resources in the centre, makes us economically unproductive, uncompetitive, indolent, and politically weak, disunited and unstable. It has made our component units too suspicious of one another, a suspicion that makes any rational discussion very difficult. This structure, which can be called “unitary federalism”, does not serve the country or any section well. It rests on the foundation of dependence on oil revenues, which seem to be in long-term decline and is, therefore, unsustainable. And a country remains united in the long term only because the component units believe that it is in their interest to remain part of the country, that there are important things that they get from remaining part of the country than not. Leaders from across the country acknowledged this and gave voice to it in the last political conference held in 2014, whatever the motivations for convening the conference at the time.

How We Got Here and the Way Out

I will briefly remind us of how we got to our current inhibiting structure. I will then suggest steps needed to get us towards a more robust federal system that will enhance the capacity of our federating units to optimize their ability to provide for their people’s security and welfare.

In the First Republic the constituent regions in our federation raised and retained the bulk of their revenues, mostly from agriculture and with those tried to meet their obligations. They provided security with their police forces, built roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and provided scholarships and, of course, paid their employees, including civil servants, teachers and health service workers. Then came oil, military regimes, the civil war, and measures that progressively centralized and concentrated more powers and resources at the centre.

The regions would have staunchly resisted this power grab by the federal government were we not under a military regime, in which the governors were mere military appointees who may not even be working in the states of their origin. Also the country had seen the prospects of, and become dependent on, oil revenues. And the oil revenues came largely from the Niger Delta, a numerical and political minority.

We have become so accustomed to the current structure and addicted to oil money that even the most reasonable among us still cling to a belief that what we currently have is the most beneficial and is immutable. Nothing can be further from the truth. This is a federal system that has fostered dependence on revenues derived mainly from three states and is characterized by excessive centralization and concentration of power and resources, and intense political competition, and political instability. Today regional gatherings are usually about grievances and how to get more from the central pool of resources but hardly about how to produce and contribute to increasing those resources.

While there is no ideal federal system to which every federating country has to aspire, there are better working federal systems from which to draw lessons. We modelled our current federal system after the US, but seem to have avoided the critical elements that make the American system function better: greater autonomy for federating states and individuals, and mistrust of leaders entrusted with power. America’s is a system that fosters individual freedom, productivity, competition and innovation, and strong institutional checks on power wielders.

In particular, the founding fathers of the US knew that human beings, especially leaders, like to accumulate power as much as they can. So in order to protect and guarantee freedoms for citizens from rampaging egomaniacs, the leaders’ powers needed to be limited; the central government needed to be restrained in favour of the federating states. Thus the first ten Amendments to the US Constitution, collectively called the Bill of Rights, offer specific protections of individual liberty and justice and restricts the powers of government. The bulk of the seventeen subsequent amendments expand individual civil rights protections, while the rest deal with federal authority or modify government processes and procedures. The Tenth Amendment is of particular interest for our discussion here. It states that powers not delegated to the Federal Government and not denied the states, belong to the states or to the people.

Note that the US constitution is only 4 pages (of parchment) long, with only seven articles, excluding the subsequent amendments. Those seven articles include an outline of the national frame of government, entrenchment of the doctrine of separation of powers, concepts of federalism, describing the rights and responsibilities of state governments and of the states in relation to the federal government, as well the procedures for ratifying the document by the states. It is critical to understand that it is the states that came together to delegate some powers to the central government (on matters that they deem best served by a central government).

In contrast, our 1999 Constitution, specifically Section 7, has 83 federal legislative items as against 15 for the states (which the Federal Government can also override). I do not know of any well-functioning federal system in the world that has that kind of lopsided central dominance.

Only our First Republic Constitution came close to the US’s Constitution in terms of the process of federal constitution-making and allocation of powers between the federating units and the federal government. Subsequent efforts have been ones where military leaders amended the constitution through decrees, and, when our peoples’ representatives were involved, set the parameters and redlines that could not be crossed by “we the people.” With eyes firmly set on oil revenues rather than diverse economic activities, and a mindset that saw any push for greater autonomy for regions as a threat to national unity, the efforts resulted in excessive centralization of power and concentration of economic resources at the federal level. For as long as oil flowed and revenues remained high, few people seemed to mind. Thus, our governments walked away from preceding sources of government revenues. Rather than clamour for more productivity and improvements in human resource development, we clamoured for and got more states and local governments.