By Michael Chibuzo
The word, restructuring is one of the most overused political terms whenever you ask an average Nigerian politician and indeed a lot of Nigerians what should be the solution to the “dysfunctional” governance system in Nigeria. “True federalism” is another term that follows it closely. It is common during public lectures or what I call political “mouth shows” to hear speakers list things that Nigeria must do to realise its great potentials.
One of such things is restructuring of Nigeria’s federalist system to meet the standards people often refer to as “true federalism”. Many have advocated for reduction in the cost of governance and particularly size of the federal government in Nigeria. The 2014 Confab recommended the adoption of a unicameral legislature, which means the scrapping of either the Senate or the House of Representatives.
More recently at the Platform, Governor Charles Soludo of Anambra State re-echoed the call for adoption of a unicameral legislature to save cost. Another recurring recommendation is devolution of more powers to the states to reduce the federal government’s responsibilities and powers and allow the states more room to operate in the federation. Closely tied to this recommendation, of course, is the the demand for more resource control by the states to fund these additional responsibilities. This is where talk of fiscal federalism comes in.
Before I go further, I want to point out that no two federal systems in the world are exactly the same. Countries that can be said to be practicing federal systems include: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Iraq, Malaysia, Mexico, Micronesia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Venezuela. Spain and South Africa practice partial federal systems.
In all the above listed countries, you will never find two countries operating the exact same federal structure. The structure is always tailored to their peculiar circumstances and sometimes history. Therefore it is confusing when Nigerian politicians use the term “true federalism”. Some would argue they are referring to the common features of any federalism.
However if we accept that line of argument, then it means Nigeria is already practicing true federalism. In every federalism, there is sharing or devolution of powers between two or more levels (or tiers) of government. The different tiers of government govern the same citizens, but each tier has its own jurisdiction in specific matters of legislation, taxation and administration. The jurisdictions of the respective levels or tiers of government are specified in the constitution.
Speaking about the consistitution, in a federalism, the fundamental provisions of the constitution cannot be unilaterally changed by one level of government, which means any constitutional amendment requires the consent of both the levels of government. Also, the Courts have the power to interpret the constitution and the powers of different levels of government, in essence they adjudicate when there is a conflict between two tiers that has to do with interpreting the limit of the powers of either parties. Finally, sources of revenue for each level of government are clearly specified to ensure its financial autonomy.
So, when you look at all these, you realise that Nigeria’s federalism has all of these features, which means that Nigeria is already practicing “true federalism”. The only question is if what we are practising is fit for our present peculiarities. This is where one can forgive the use of the term “restructuring”. Restructuring our federalism to better serve us is not a bad thing and is necessary especially when actors meant to implement and uphold to the letter the current structure of our federal system as enshrined in our constitution have instead exploited loopholes in the structure over the years to the detriment of the Republic.
However, the advocates of restructuring need to acknowledge that there are certain restructuring that may not be possible considering our history as a nation and the level of diversity we have in this country. For example, the proposal by many for Nigeria to adopt the unicameral legislature at the federal level as a way of cutting down the size of government may sound very good but it is going to be difficult to implement when we look at what led to Nigeria adopting the bicameral legislature in the first place during the first republic.
The vast majority of countries operating federalism have a bicameral legislature. In fact even the parliament of unitary states like the UK, Japan, Italy, France etc are bicameral. These are countries with far lesser diversity than Nigeria. Unicameral legislatures are typical in small countries with unitary systems of government or in very small countries. If you observe closely, countries that adopt the federal system of government do so due to their country being made up of people from different competing backgrounds or territories that were self-governing entities before the formation of the country.
Nigeria is made up of so many tribes and nationalities that had previously existed as independent entities prior to the British colonisation. Many have even fought against some of these independent territories in the time past. The amalgamation of Nigeria brought under one roof different smaller nations who often harbour mistrust for one another. Therefore, from the onset it was obvious that the only system of government that can hold the union together was a federal system of government.
In that federal system, the governance structure must be one that would prevent one section of the country from totally dominating the decision making process to the detriment of the other sections. It was for this purpose that the bicameral legislature was adopted by our founding fathers in 1960. As bogus as the bicameral parliament may be, it is still important for stability. The house of representatives, which is the lower house in the federal parliament is made up of 360 members representing 360 federal constituencies.
These federal constituencies are not equally distributed across the country but delineated based on considerations of population and landmass. The delineation exercise for federal constituencies are supposed to be carried out after every census (which is why census is a charged affair in Nigeria). The last exercise that produced 360 constituencies was carried out in 1996 by the Abacha regime. Out of the 360 constituencies, the North West geopolitical zone with seven states has the highest number of seats (92), followed by the South West (71), South South (55), North Central (49), North East (48) and finally, the South East geopolitical zone with 43 federal constituencies. The FCT has two seats.
If the house of representatives were to be the only legislature, there would be fear of domination by some states with few seats in the parliament. This is why for the sake of proportional representation, Nigeria adopted the Senate to be the upper chamber like the United States with every state represented by an equal number of Senators (3) except the Federal Capital Territory, which has only one Senator making it a total of 109 seats. The senate was given some exclusive powers that the House of Reps did not have such as impeachment of the President/VP, confirmation of ministers and other presidential appointments requiring parliamentary confirmation.
Those recommending a unicameral legislature needs to start by being specific with the particular chamber they propose that Nigeria should retain between the Senate and the House of Representatives. This is where the commotion would start. I can predict that those states with the highest number of seats in the lower house such as Lagos and Kano with 24 seats each, would prefer that the House of representatives be retained, while those states with very few federal constituencies would prefer the Senate where every State regardless of the size of landmass or population distribution is represented by equal number of lawmakers.
In the end when it comes to the stage of voting to amend the relevant provisions of the Constitution that restructures Nigeria into a Federalist state with a unicameral national parliament, the size of the roadblock would become very clear since it would take a miracle to get 24 State Houses of Assembly out of the 36 in Nigeria to approve a unicameral legislature that does not favour their individual interest as a state.
Nigeria would have to live with the reality of operating a bicameral legislature for the foreseeable future. Advocates of unicameral parliament should instead channel their advocacy to removing the excess fat from our current bicameral legislature and doing away with constituency projects so that lawmakers face the legislative duties squarely. The people would then assess the lawmakers based on what their legislative scorecard instead of how many borehole projects, roads, classroom blocks or “VIP toilets” they were able to construct (or attract).
Nigerian political class must move away from the present restructuring mouth exercise and push for more practical restructuring of our federalism that is beneficial to the people and not the ones that benefit the political class. Restructuring conversations should not be focused on just devolving more powers and resources to states or making the governors more powerful, it should rather be geared towards ensuring the sanctity of our laws are respected by all.
You can give the governors or council chairpersons all the executive powers one can think of or channel greater resources to them, but if there are no safeguards to ensure these powers and resources are used solely for the benefit of the people, the dysfunction in governance will still remain. As of today, Nigeria has carried out some form of restructuring since 2015. For example, states now have powers to legislate on power generation, transmission and distribution after power was moved to the concurrent list of the constitution. Yet you hardly see any state that is doing anything to solve the electricity challenge in their states. Less than five states have sought the transfer of regulatory powers from NERC to their own electricity regulatory bodies.
This inability or lack of interest by many states to take advantage of one fruit of restructuring (decentralisation of electricity regulation) to improve power supply in their states is a big indictment on the states who are always mouthing devolution of more powers to the subnationals. It shows that the restructuring they preach for is likely limited to just resource control and powers to control the police. When you look at these obvious indications that the perennial calls for restructuring by most politicians is a mere “mouth exercise” and motivated by self-preservation rather than for the interest of the people.
In conclusion, I therefore find myself aligning with the retort of Vice President Kashim Shettima in 2018 when as Governor of Borno State he was asked to weigh in on the restructuring debate. Shettima famously said, “My own take on this restructuring debate is that we are treating the symptoms, not the disease. Restructuring my foot, let’s restructure our minds, let’s restructure our quality of governance…”