THE assent by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to 16 of 35 constitution amendment bills presented to him by the National Assembly in January represents a slight shift towards federalism. But in total, they still fall short of taking Nigeria to its natural configuration of a fully functional federal polity. While a few of the bills align with universal federalist practice, others miss the mark, or are patently unnecessary. Once again, after so much public expenditure, effort and time, Nigerians are disappointed and stuck with a pseudo federal basic law that inhibits development.
This is not surprising; for over two decades, the country has been trying vainly to knock the centralising 1999 Constitution into a workable federalist document. All efforts have ended in failure. Like this newspaper and other stakeholders have for long articulated, the military-imposed document is irredeemable; it requires wholesale dumping and a new, realistic federal constitution freely negotiated by the country’s component parts and nationalities via a representative national conference.
The dominant political class, for lack of vision, sectional, and private interests, has since 1999 demonstrated its aversion to doing the right thing, preferring piecemeal amendments that do not restore federalism, are cosmetic, or only serve narrow interests. The latest attempt by the federal and state legislatures makes a nod towards federalism, but only just.
The Fifth Alteration Bills 2023 promised much but delivered little. Out of the 16 approved, seven amended the names of those local government areas. These are mere typographical corrections and insignificant. The identities of LGs have no place in truly federal constitutions, not being federating units. LGs are typically state affairs that should feature only in the sub-national constitutions.
There are however, some positive and necessary clauses. Bill No.6 for instance grants financial independence to the state houses of assembly and the judiciary. Hitherto, these two organs of government had been under the grip of the governors, rendering them subservient in many ways to the state helmsmen.
Other significant alterations are Bills No.31, 32 and 33, revolving around power devolution. After renaming the Nigeria Prison Service to the Nigeria Correctional Service, Bill No.31 expunged the correctional services from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent List. This means state governments can now establish and run their own prisons. This is standard in a federation.
Bill No.32 also moved railways to the concurrent list, a major, far-reaching and long overdue step. States can now establish their own railway systems. Before now, only the centre could operate the railways. The Railways Act 1955 had severely hindered development in that sector. The World Bank says Nigeria has only 3,528 kilometres of rail tracks (2015) compared to Brazil’s 32,622km, South Africa’s 30,000km, China’s 109,767km, and Egypt’s 5,625km.
Bill No.33, which allows state governments to own electricity power grids, even in areas where the Federal Government covers, is resonating at the sub-national level. With the sole national grid unable to wheel more than 5,000 megawatts, this changes the game for states that prioritise electricity in socioeconomic development. Commendably, Lagos has swiftly bought into this and plans to deliver 1,000MW of solar energy by 2030.
But NASS and Buhari are not done with redundancy. The provision on the 60-day timeframe to name cabinets is one. It may have been informed by Buhari’s indolence. It took him over five months to inaugurate his cabinet after he assumed office in 2015, and wasted another three months before appointing ministers on winning re-election in 2019. And when he did, he simply recycled many of his first cabinet members. This can be taken care of by an ordinary Act of the legislature, not written into a constitution, or by established convention and good governance ethos requiring a President or governor to hit the ground running.
Except for the bill on the movement of fingerprints, identification and criminal records to the concurrent list, the President rightly rejected the other bills. Plainly, most of them hint at lawmakers lunge for entitlement and privileges. Buhari threw out the bill on the inclusion of former heads of NASS in the National Council of State, the power of NASS/state HoA to summon the President/governor for a State of the Nation/State address and other frivolities.
Perhaps most significant were the bills not passed. One is state policing. It is illogical, downright irrational that lawmakers did not include state police in the constitution amendments despite the magnitude of the security threats confronting the country. A more responsible body of lawmakers anywhere else would have made it the No.1 priority!
The current single federal police force is anomalous. Apart from being inefficient, under-staffed, under-funded, and monumentally corrupt, the huge task of securing Nigeria is certainly beyond it. None of the world’s other 24 federal polities engages in the folly of operating a single police force. Pragmatically, the United Kingdom, a unitary state, has a decentralised policing system consisting of 45 territorial forces. The US has about 18,000; the Indian constitution expressly charges the states with policing. Mexico’s 32 separate forces combined had 123,070 police officers by 2021.
NASS also missed the opportunity to instil fiscal federalism by not raising the derivation fund from 13 per cent to 50 per cent. This is the primary cause of indolence and irrational dependence of the federating units on the centre via sharing the monthly revenue collections. Fiscal federalism worked excellently in the First Republic, enriching the regions and facilitating rapid development.
To save Nigeria’s tottering political contraption, returning to true federalism (restructuring) is sacrosanct. The current system in which 774 LGAs are part of the constitution, is anti-federalist. States should have the sole legal right to oversee LGs as they deem fit.
True federalism is the only political system that can accommodate the disparate interests of the over 250 ethnic nationalities inhabiting Nigeria and allow them to develop at their own pace. Any other arrangement is bound to collapse sooner than later. Nigerians should not relent in fighting for true federalism.
