Nigerian Politics, drawing into its powerful current everything that surrounds it
Saturday, October 25, 2014
The Structure of Nigeria
In 1914 when Lord Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern
Protectorates to form what is today known as Nigeria, he was under no
illusions what his real motives were.
Faced with the increasing cost of administering the vast lands of
Northern Protectorate, it was to the purse strings of the South that
he looked to bell the cat.
Lord Lewis Harcourt, is reported to have declared that:” We have
released Northern Nigeria from the lending strings of the treasury.
The promising and well conducted youth is now on an allowance on his
own and is about to affect an alliance with a southern lady of means.
I have issued the special license and Sir Fredrick Lugard will perform
the ceremony. May the union be fruitful and the couple constant”
According to F. Nicholson: “Instead of developing things and
administering service, Lugard had been preoccupied with the wide
spread extension of rule over people-an undertaking so unprofitable
that it made the amalgamation of the viable South and the bankrupt
North both far more urgent from the point of view of the home
government and far more difficult than the joining of two viable
administrations would have been. The immediate task was to free the
home government from the expensive milestones which Lugard had
fastened round its neck and to transfer the whole burden to a new
amalgamated Nigeria”
“As soon as the 1914 Amalgamation came into force, the British
Government enacted the Minerals Ordinance, 1914, investing all the
minerals including oil and gas in Nigeria in the British crown. This
was not amended until 1958-two years to our 1960 independence”
(Richard Akinjide)
At independence in October 1960, the Federal Government took the place
of the British Crown and that structure is intact today under our
various Petroleum enactments.
From regional governments to the formation of states by the military
government in 1967, the central government has retained control of
mineral and oil resources.
Under the brief period of civilian rule between 1979 and 1983 this
structure was preserved but was now backed by the constitution and a
revenue sharing enactment.
The parties to the revenue sharing were the Federal Government, State
Governments and Local Governments which the military had introduced as
the third tier of government.
The situation has not changed much since the return to civilian rule
again in 1999, the only slight alteration being in tinkering with the
revenue sharing formula.
Additional provision has now been made for States from which the bulk
of oil and gas resources are derived.
Even at that, these allocations do not go directly to the peoples in
the communities where there is oil and gas but to their State
governments and other statutory formulations.
Copying from the British Crown, successive administrations have
perfected the act of forming artificial entities for handling
allocations of revenue.
These are the ministries, departments and agencies of governments
including committees, commissions, and task forces both statutory and
non-statutory.
Yearly they formulate budgets on our behalf but without inputs from
Nigerians which they submit to their relevant legislative assemblies
which when approved have the force of law.
In military governments the soldiers were both the requesting and
approving authorities and even the executive and legislatures in a
democratic government usually belong to the same political party.
That is why of all Government agencies, departments and agencies, the
Revenue Sharing and Allocation Commission is the most efficient.
It ensures that the Federal, States and Local Governments get their
share of revenue allocation on or before the 26th of each month.
Having legitimized access to revenues, being part of government became
the easiest means of having direct access to these revenues and how
they were disbursed.
Under the civilian governments, the procedure for budgeting and
approval is pretentiously long but at the end of the day, everyone in
the set up gets compensated.
Knowing that all that stands between them and direct access to what
now runs into trillions of Naira yearly are elections that they have
to plan, organize and conduct, and our political rulers see no reason
why they should not manipulate the electoral process to ensure their
perpetual reign.
We have men and women, who under some altruistic purpose are actually
helping themselves to the resources of the state like the British and
the military before them.
To these people, the issue has never been and will probably never be
about the Nigerian people but about the sustenance of a structure
which dutifully served the British and the military.
Talk of rotation of power among the geopolitical zones and of power
shift between the North and the South are but mere variants of the
same structure.
Now it is the turn of politicians who claim that they represent the
interest of the South-South peoples, and before that it was the turn
of politicians who claimed to represent the interest of the Yoruba’s
respectively.
Next will be the mother of all battles between politicians who claim
to represent the interest of the Ibos and those who claim to represent
the interest of the Hausa-Fulani, who will claim they were
short-changed by the untimely death of Umaru Yar’Adua in May 2010
after only two years in the Presidential Villa.
In the midst of all these alignments and repositioning, the mass of
Nigerians have remained poor, unhealthy, uneducated, unemployed,
homeless, hungry, destitute and abandoned.
But at the first hint of trouble those with direct access to state
resources and those who want direct access will play the ethnic,
religious or gender card to achieve the desired result.
This is what the structure of Nigeria is all about, not people but
access to state resources as it was under the British colonialists and
the military oligarchies.
Meanwhile, the mass of Nigerians across all geo-political zones,
religion and ethnic considerations are suffering from the same basic
problems
We gained true independence from the British after the Nigerian civil
war while we gained independence from the military after the June 12
elections and the death of MKO Abiola.
But we are yet to gain independence from our political overlords who
presently rule Nigeria and are prepared to do so in perpetuity.
I cannot pretend to state at what cost that independence will be
obtained from the political ruling class but the price will be steep.
If any blood must be spilled then it has to be the blood of Nigerians
so that evil men will not size that opportunity to unleash the forces
of hell in their attempt to preserve the status quo.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment