Re-Indoctrination Before Restructuring

Whenever you talk about poor governance, Nigerians always mention restructuring as the catch all panacea to fix all problems and issues.

But very few Nigerians really know what type of restructuring is needed or how to secure this much needed restructuring in practice. 

Many believe restructuring is about returning to the regional government system predating 1966, and tagging on a few new regions, while others wish to retain the federalist state structure and others wish for tribal governments for each of Nigeria nearly 360 indigenous tribes. 

Others talk about super imposing a true federalist structures over whatever system but to ensure regional control of resources, most of that agitation seems to be driven by the south east and south-south zones sitting on crude oil reserves, followed by a devolution of items on the exclusive list to those new federalist units. 

Others see restructuring as repeal of the 1999 constitution in its entirety and fashioning a new constitution based on negotiating a new union and agreement between Nigeria’s federating units and others simply advocate for implementing the recommendations of the 2014 confab report, that has yet to be made public. 

What no one talks about is trying to make the system work as decreed by the same 1999 constitution that has enabled 21 years of democracy and elections leading to smooth transitions of peaceful transfer of power to various elected officials over the years. 

With the sudden advent of protests against police brutality, the youth movement has already raised the issue of restructuring as one of its key demands for peace to reign, but the question still remains about what kind of restructuring they are the talking about to demand an immediate response.

As it regards police brutality the feeling seems to be that the President can just decree restructuring into law without due consultation of stakeholders and that he can just institute reforms and the creation of state police without a comprehensive overhaul of current legislation and a timeline of institution.

All this leads to understanding that the biggest challenge facing Nigeria before it can even tackle the issue of restructuring is getting Nigerians to understand why Nigeria is in such a dysfunctional state.

Here are the following realities that need to be understood before restructuring: 

1) The first painful reality to grasp is that Nigeria is not a wealthy country, in fact it is the poverty capital of the world and all its earnings pale in comparison to the mountain of liabilities and its inability to even provide welfare services and necessities to many of its citizens.

2) Nigeria is a third world economy with all the lethargy and dysfunction that comes from such a designation in operations even as the population is rising, most of the problems stem from the primitive nature of Nigeria’s economy at its basic core.

3) the failure to understand the generational capital-intensive investments needed to develop Nigeria’s rural infrastructure from the ground up. 

4) through indoctrination from exposure to the west from watching TV and an unrealistic but somewhat advanced educational system, Nigerians have been trained to be more advanced than their environment and operating and infrastructural systems, what they expect in no way compares to the capabilities on the ground.

5) An expansionist government thrust that does not reconcile new liabilities with revenue receipts instead of maintaining existing systems and infrastructure.

6) unrealistic expectations of overnight transformation fueled by diminishing petrol dollars and Pentecostalism which preaches rags to reaches without generational hard work.

Unless these issues are fully understood, Nigerians are not ready for restructuring because they have no idea about what they plan to achieve in their mad rush to nowhere based on false illusions of baseless and imagined grandeur.

Before any talk of restructuring, Nigeria needs to go through a sustained period of good governance, especially in the areas of budgeting, law enforcement and most particularly in rotating powers between tribal nationalities at the federal and state level.

All that should be followed by a more stringent application of federal character in appointments and an equitable distribution of resources from Abuja to build the infrastructure across the board in all federating units, while still maintaining the focus of investing in strategic sectors and infrastructure to boost the overall economy.

Only after these issues are implemented to a high degree would Nigerians be able to grasp exactly what is wrong with the current system before restructuring.

By Terhemba Osuji