By EMMANUEL UGWU
RESTRUCTURING is the buzzword in Nigeria today. Every intensive discourse of Nigeria by Nigerians hits on it. And the issue is rarely contested like a tentative question: to restructure or not to restructure. The imperative of restructuring is considered to be too apparent to be up for debate. Its exigency is regarded as a given. Restructuring is almost always touted within the frame of the urgency of its implementation. It is invoked as the necessity Nigeria hesitates to reconcile itself to at its own peril.
The identity of the individual that the idea owes its origin to and the time and place he or she first ventilated it as the one solution to Nigeria’s problem are lost in the fog of history. But restructuring has undoubtedly metamorphosed from a proposition broached in some forgettable moment into the dominant leitmotif of Nigerian chatter. There is a vibrant school of thought devoted to its romanticization and propagation. And that school of thought comprises a cross section of the brightest minds of the Nigeria intelligentsia.
The restructuring activists being influential opinion leaders –public intellectuals, successful professionals and socio-cultural organizations – their very subscription to the idea has had the effect of a solid endorsement. The idea now seems valid and unassailable. The proponents are brilliant men who would not lend their conviction to a matter they had not satisfactorily tested. Whatever they support must be credible.
The canvassers of restructuring are campaigning for the return of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the configuration of its pre-Ironsi history. A time before Nigeria was balkanized into jigsaw puzzle of states. An era when strong, autonomous and culturally homogeneous regions were Nigeria’s federating units.
The restructuring crusaders propose the merger of the 36 states along the lines of the six geopolitical zones and the empowerment of those zones to exploit their natural resources, thrive on their own terms, and pay tax to a weak central government.
The rationale for the promotion of restructuring is the popular notion that the current pseudo-federalist system is unsustainable because it is irredeemably flawed, crisis-prone and condemned to be a source of frustration to all of us hemmed in by its strictures.
Current goings-on appear to validate this point:
27 states are literally bankrupt. They can’t pay civil servants for months on end. They need handouts in the form of Abuja bailout to distribute arrears of pay envelopes. There is a resurgence of militancy in the Niger Delta. A plethora of armed gangs are bombing oil installations in uncannily precise and devastating attacks. Their activity of economic sabotage is driving down crude production, oil revenue and causing increased power cuts.
Two groups that aspire to secession routinely protest on the streets of the South East. They are movement that would rally again regardless of the number of their members shot dead by the police at the last demonstration.
Fulani herdsmen terrorize rural communities in the South. They herd their cattle into farmlands, rape women and murder sons and fathers. The Boko Haram still deploys suicide bombers to kill and maim innocent people in mosques, markets and refugee camps.All of these nagging problems, the restructuring vanguard postulates, derive from Nigeria’s maintenance of a constitution that precariously balances the country like an upturned pyramid, with the tip of the federal government packing overpowering control and the base of the states and local governments lacking meaningful agency.
Restructuring is not a new talking point. It is a fairly old topic. However, the word is exceptional in that it acquires louder resonance each time one more public figure steps out and offers his take on it. Of course, the issue also incentivizes its own promotion. It rewards any person who seizes any public platform to elaborate on Nigeria’s need for restructuring. It offers one national attention, perception of ideological sophistication and a toga of patriotism.
So it was that, recently in Abuja, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar restated his earlier call for restructing. At the event he chaired, he said: “As some of you may know, I have for a long time advocated the need to restructure our federation. Our current structure and the practices it has encouraged have been a major impediment to the economic and political development of our country.’’
He said restructuring would neutralize the centrifugal forces, mute the cries of marginalization and make every Nigerian happy and proud. It would make the federation “less centralised, less suffocating and less dictatorial in the affairs of our country’s constituent units and localities.’’
Underscoring the negatives of this set-up, he remarked that it was perpetuating Nigeria’s status as a monoproduct economy. Oil, he posited, is Nigeria’s cursed blessing: “among the most devastating impact of our long dependence on oil resource is the corruption that has eaten into our fabric.’’ The mantra of restructuring as the potent solution to all of Nigeria’s problems makes sense until you pause and critically interrogate it. Do we have the most self-defeating structure in the world? Does our structure bear imperfections that are radically different from those of other countries? Is a change of structure all we need to witness an automatic, dramatic change of fortune?
Blaming the state of Nigeria on the structure is flirting with escapism. Nigeria is a man-made tragedy. It is a tragedy that would have evolved no matter our choice of structure. Nigerians have proved skilled in bastardizing the most promising structures that serves other countries well and domesticating it as a nightmare.
.Ugwu writes from Lagos.