A 47-page document marked “Key issues before the Northern delegates to the 2014 National Conference” was circulated at the National Conference last week. Subtitled rather emphatically “Northern Nigeria, The backbone and strength of Nigeria”, it brings up the obvious issue; how on earth do you define what they allude to as the ‘North’ in today’s context?
Is the use of the concept ‘Northern Nigeria’, a geographical expression or is it hankering back to the pre-January 1966 political structure? There is obviously an emotional backdrop to the use of the concept. This, however, obscures a reality. This is that, it is impossible to get back to pre-1966 politically, structurally and emotionally. Far too much has happened in the interlude.
We are made to understand that the document ‘Key Issues’ is produced by a think-tank constituted by Northern Governors, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation. The position paper unfortunately fails to navigate a way forward to get Northern Nigeria out of its present predicament. Insecurity, poverty, educational underachievement as well as lack of access to health care and safe drinking water, is even more pronounced in the North today than elsewhere.
Nowhere in the position paper is there a roadmap out of the quagmire. This is a disservice to the memory of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the pivotal figure who moved mountains to enhance the developmental process of Northern Nigeria. Underachievement and poverty will continue in the North as elsewhere as long as the mindset is based on rent-seeking from a single commodity. Unfortunately, the position paper is fixated on a Nigeria based on the sharing of oil revenue.
Contradictorily, the position paper looked back fondly to a period when the” funding of the civil war was entirely done by the North at a great sacrifice to its wellbeing, at the expense of investment in human and economic development of the region”. This position is of course contentious since it is not under pinned by any verifiable empirical evidence. The other regions – the West and the Mid-West – can very well dispute this assertion.
Nevertheless, even this claim shows that the North is best served as everyone else by a return to a proper fiscal federalism. This is the situation the position paper writers ought to have been fighting for. We must collectively place production ahead of consumption. This is why the Sardauna performed so well. And there is no shred of evidence that he was displeased with the revenue sharing arrangement of the first republic.
Countries such as Japan, Singapore and territories such as Hong Kong have shown that there is no need to be obsessed about sharing a mono-crop. Societies are best developed when they develop their own productive base as well as their human capital. Unfortunately, the mindset of those who produced the position paper is in the opposite direction. This is a disservice to the people they claim to represent. What a shame!
The way out is to go back to the fiscal arrangement associated with a proper federation. In the words of a proper prime minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker, “Federalism means that you eat what you kill”.
Everyone, of course, has a constitutional right to push out a position paper. This is guaranteed. Unfortunately, this position paper which is full of self-serving propositions and the same old tired ideas will in no way elevate the public discourse. It is unfortunate, for it is a wasted opportunity.