My take on political restructuring: Nigerians must own Nigeria

Political restructuring is the defining issue of our time, the answer to the existential threat that confronts Nigeria. Anyone who disagrees with this view is living in cloud cuckoo land! Those, for instance, who think the economy is Nigeria’s main problem don’t understand the drivers of economic performance. Economies respond to external stimuli, and politics and institutions are the most important. The 19th century economists, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, were called political economists precisely because they were concerned with how political institutions shaped economic performance. And, long before them, Plato and Aristotle drew attention to the causal relationships between political stability and sustainable development.

A few years ago, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) published a report in which it stated that “political settlement is central to all development”. According to DfID, “political settlement explains the difference in performance between countries with apparently similar endowments and disadvantages”. In other words, if two countries have similar initial conditions, similar levels of development, but one achieves a political settlement, while the other doesn’t; the former will outperform the latter in terms of progress; after all, let’s face it, you can’t have progress without peace and stability.

So, what is a political settlement? Well, it is a negotiated political and constitutional pact that addresses the questions of how the people of a country should leave peaceably together; how power should be organised and exercised to generate political stability; and how the institutions and the economy can be structured so that they can work harmoniously to promote sustainable and inclusive growth and development. But, as we know, none of these conditions exists in Nigeria. The people are not living peaceably together; power is not exercised in a way that generates political stability, and the institutions and the economy are not working for Nigeria and ordinary Nigerians. Surely, if any country is in dire need of a political settlement, it must be Nigeria.

Yet, despite this exigency, one doesn’t get the sense of “there is no alternative, we must do something”, the TINA sense, in the public debate. Instead, there are reality deniers, who argue bizarrely that there is nothing wrong with the current institutional architecture; Nigeria’s current political structure is absolutely fine, they say! They argue that the problem is not with the political structure, but with Nigerians themselves. Restructure your minds, not Nigeria, they admonish!

Obviously, they haven’t heard about behavioural or institutional economics; they haven’t heard about how institutions, the right institutions, constrain behaviours. They can’t explain why Nigerians behave rowdily at Murtala Muhammed Airport, but queue up at Heathrow Airport; they can’t explain why Nigerians drive recklessly in Lagos, but obey traffic rules in London or New York; nor can they tell us why James Ibori denied corruption charges in a Nigerian court but admitted the same charges in an English court. They forget that it’s all about incentives. As the authors of the book, Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, put it, “An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation”. And the most powerful incentives are institutions, structures and systems. Get the institutions, structures and systems of any society right, and social, economic and political behaviours will adjust appropriately, if not immediately, at least with time!

So, what Nigeria needs are structures, institutions and systems, formal and informal, that condition certain behavioural outcomes. But Nigeria’s political structures have failed woefully to engender progress and unity. They are, of course, legacies of the country’s colonial past, of its birth defects, which continue to stop it from moving from statehood to nationhood, and, which, even if they don’t lead to its disintegration, could leave the country permanently fractured, unstable and weak. This is why the urgent task facing Nigeria is a political settlement, and political restructuring.

But what does this mean? After all, even the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s governing party, doesn’t seem to know! Recently, it set up a committee, chaired by the Kaduna state governor, Nasir el Rufai, to define restructuring, saying that it did not know what Nigerians meant by it. For now, let’s suspend our scepticism about APC’s real intention, and let’s assume the party genuinely wants to know what Nigerians mean by political restructuring. So, what should Nigerians tell the el Rufai committee? Well, here is what I would say to it. The political restructuring of Nigeria must achieve three outcomes: First, ownership; second, decentralisation; and third, regionalism.

The last two – decentralisation and regionalism – are commonly understood, so I won’t devote too much attention to them. However, it’s worth pointing out that decentralisation has been, as John Naisbitts put it in his book “Megatrends”, the “revolutionary global trend” since the 1980s. In the UK, decentralisation is pursued with vigour in what the government calls “devolution revolution”. So, the political restructuring of Nigeria must involve    substantial devolution of powers from the centre. You can’t have an over-centralised political system in a multi-nation country. But a meaningful restructuring must also result in regional integration. Where devolution has been successful, it is linked to regional development, such as the “Northern powerhouse” idea in the UK. The federal government should do significantly less that it’s currently doing, and own significantly smaller share of the national resources than it currently owns. Then, substantial powers should be devolved to the current six geo-political zones, each of which must restructure itself to promote regional integration and development. There is no space to explore the regionalism question here; an issue, perhaps, for another day!

Now, to my main point: ownership! The Africa editor of the Financial Times, David Pilling,    rightly pointed out recently that “Africa’s so-called tribes are better seen as mini-nations, with mutually unintelligible language as distinct as French, English and German”. So, you could take the Yoruba for the English, the Hausa/Fulani for the Germans, and the Igbo for the French, just to mention the three main tribes. And if you consider that the French, the English and the Germans can’t live together in one union, let alone in one country, without a negotiated order, why then would Nigeria’s diverse ethnic nationalities to do so without a negotiated political pact? Recently, India and Pakistan celebrated their 70th independence anniversary. But it’s easy to forget that British India included today’s India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka. Can anyone imagine all these five countries, with different histories, belonging to one entity today?

So, what’s my point? Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities, most of which can be independent nations, should be commended for enduring one another in an imperfect union they did not create.  There are two ways different nations can become one: by conquest or by agreement. Since none of the Nigerian ethnic nationalities conquered another, the only way they can all live peaceably together in the imperfect union called Nigeria is to perfect it through a negotiated political settlement. This means all the ethnic nationalities must come together, with other critical stakeholders, to negotiate, in good faith, the terms of their co-existence in Nigeria. The outcome of that bargaining and negotiation should then be put to a referendum, and then through constitutional changes. Some have suggested that the political restructuring of Nigeria can be done by the National Assembly alone. I disagree. The recreation of Nigeria that will give Nigerians ownership of this country must come through a negotiated political settlement, be put to a referendum and, finally, a new constitution.

HLA Hart talks about the “internal point of view”, which makes people feel a sense of legitimacy about an institution. Most Nigerians don’t currently feel that way about Nigeria. There is widespread sense of unfairness, injustice and inequity. Nigeria’s independence leaders put their differences aside to secure political independence from Britain. But they did nothing to perfect the flawed union foisted on them. Their successors must do better and create a new Nigeria, where the ethnic nationalities can live peaceably together. But this can only derive from consent and ownership, which must come from a negotiated political settlement.

Olu Fasan