Fayemi’s Thoughtful Take on the National Question

Postscript BY WaziriAdio

Dr. Kayode Fayemi, the Governor of Ekiti State and the Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, organised a grand event in Abuja on Thursday to unveil his latest book. He has been busy on the lecture circuit lately. He decided to warehouse and showcase some of the major speeches that he had delivered in the shadow of a global pandemic on different topics at different fora across and outside the country in the space of two years. The book is at once his ruminations on and his prescriptions for the critical challenges standing between Nigeria and what should be her manifest destiny. Titled ‘Unfinished Greatness: Envisioning A New Nigeria,’ the book is a hopeful yet pragmatic intervention on the national question.

Fayemi is well credentialled to take on the heavy preoccupations of the book. He is both a man of thought and action, the archetypal man in the arena that Theodore Roosevelt envisioned, whose face has been ‘marred by dust, sweat and blood.’ Forged in the fire of the academia, media and pro-democracy movement, he has also been tempered on the anvil of real politics—running for office, tasting both ‘victory and defeat’—and he has had to wrestle with the quotidian prosaicness of governance at subnational and national levels. These multiple engagements have offered him a vantage, front-row experience, and he has done well to offer in return his considered thoughts on how Nigeria can eventually take its deserved place in the sun.

With ten speeches, wrapped in a preface and a postscript, the book covers issues as disparate as national security, foreign policy, COVID19, nation-building, democratisation, decentralisation and the role of the media, religion and intellectuals in public service. The book’s overriding message, its connecting thread and constant punctuation mark, is a passionate and persuasive argument for one Nigeria. It is tempting to see this as a political pitch in an election season. My reading, however, is that this goes beyond the usual expression of faith. What I hear Fayemi saying clearly is that even with the daunting and mounting challenges, we are better off together as a country but we need to constantly work on perfecting our union by being more inclusive and equitable, by adjusting our administrative structure, by evolving a new compact and compass, by constantly adapting to new challenges, and by being more engaged as leaders and followers.

In the next few paragraphs, I intend to engage with some of the major ideas and positions that jumped at me from Fayemi’s cerebral offering. His main thesis in this book is the imperative of, as well as the precondition for, national unity. Following late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, one of Nigeria’s founding fathers and himself a quintessential man in the arena, Fayemi sees Nigeria as a motherland (no one gets to choose or change their mothers, he says) and thinks Nigeria’s union is ‘perpetual and indestructible’. He interrogates and denounces the view that the 1914 amalgamation of Nigeria was a mistake. He aligns with the eminent historian Obaro Ikime that the colonialists did not introduce the various nationalities that now make up Nigeria to themselves. “The hands that drew the map may not have been ours, but the map was possible only because we were here in the first place,” Fayemi states.

He believes that Nigeria’s diversity ordinarily should be a source of strength but only if well managed. “The more diverse the cultures within a nation are, the more resources they have for development,” he says. “In essence, homogeneity is not necessarily a blessing and diversity needs not be a curse.” He readily acknowledges, however, that Nigeria’s march to greatness has been hobbled by a “tendency to stigmatise difference and weaponise diversity” and the regular use of social categorisations as “boundaries for inclusion and exclusion.”

To achieve the much-desired unity in diversity, he calls for “fulsome commitment to equity and justice,” to “vertical and horizontal solidarity,” to making Nigeria work best for all Nigerians and to anchoring the legitimacy of the Nigerian state on the quality of life that the country can provide all her citizens. Because this is what I think is his main message, I will quote him in some detail here. He submits: “There is no bypassing the hard work that leaders and governments must put in to build, sustain and renew unity…Unity cannot endure where injustice, exclusion, inequity and marginalisation are embedded in the practice of governance. That is why as leaders, we must always pay attention to ensure that as we work to deliver on our mandate, fairness and equity are made our watchwords at all times.

“Our commitment to these values must not simply be minimalist – doing only the barest minimum required of us by the constitution – or token – just for the sake of playing to the gallery – or even rhetorical – through the paying of lip service. Our commitment must be robust, consistent, and demonstrable so that citizens have absolutely no doubt about the important place they occupy in our policy and political priorities. As leaders, we must not only embody the ideals of national unity but also always be seen as their active torch bearers. This way, we can build popular trust in our actions and erase doubts about our intentions.”

Though fully committed to the unity of Nigeria, Fayemi accepts that Nigeria as presently composed suffers from some debilities. His diagnoses include a dysfunctional governance ethos and structural challenges. “Though now operated by Nigerians, the post-colonial state has been as alien and as predatory as its colonial predecessor,” he says. “The structural deformities of the Nigerian federation have circumscribed many possibilities for our state and our country as a whole. It is very difficult to sustain good governance at the national level in Nigeria because of the structural fatalities that have held her hostage.”

He dismisses clamours for secession and even for the creation of more states. But he supports the call for restructuring. He states: “In my view, restructuring should be less about redrawing the map of Nigeria, more about building an efficient governance system that can deliver the greater good to the greatest number of our people.” He advocates for restructuring in two ways: devolving more responsibilities and allocating more resources to the states. On reallocation of responsibilities, he thinks the exclusive list should be pared down to just national security and defence, macro-economic management, foreign affairs, and customs and excise; that internal security and policing should be bumped to the concurrent list; and for the remaining items in the second schedule of the constitution be devolved to the states. He aligns with the position that 42% of revenues should be allocated to the states, 35% to the Federal Government, and 23% to the LGAs. In essence, he advocates for 65% of statutory allocation to go to the subnational level as opposed to the current 47.32%.

Fayemi made other consequential submissions and prescriptions on new constitution, on elite consensus on vision of society and development, on new approach to fighting insecurity, and the need for engaged citizenship and forward-looking, unifying and people-centred leadership. I align with most of his positions and think they are well thought-out and pragmatic. But I think some of his prescriptions need further deepening.

I am a big fan of decentralisation because of the logic that the closer the government is to the people the more effective and efficient it is likely to be. But more devolution by itself will not automatically translate to more development, as our experience with local governance has amply demonstrated. Decentralisation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. We need to accompany devolution with robust investments in capacity for governance and countervailing accountability measures. There is a major deficit of both at all levels of government today, but their presence is wafer thin at the sub-national level.

Beyond this, tinkering with how we allocate responsibility and money without addressing and changing the inherited and well entrenched predatory approach to governance that the author talks about is not likely to result in different developmental outcomes at the subnational level (which is where the citizens really live) and in the country at large. Yes, we need some physical restructuring, but we also need a restructuring of the mind about our conception of power, politics and public office. For as long as we conceive of power as an instrument of domination not liberation, and of politics and public office as avenues for taking care of ourselves and those close to us in terms of blood, ethnicity, religion and region, merely re-allocating responsibility and resources will not amount to much.

And lastly, we need to pay serious attention to how to harness the human and natural potentials of our country for national prosperity. The bulk of what ails us all along is material. It is the scarcity of opportunities that complicates diversity and makes differences mobilizable in the first instance. It is implicated in the growing security challenges and the worsening human development indicators. The humbling fact is that we have simply not created an economy big and deep enough for most of our citizens to fully actualise themselves and for them to live the kind of life they have reasons to value. While allocative and distributive justice is important, we need an economy that is twice or thrice its current size. To use a cliché, we need to bake the pie before we can share it. We need to have a much bigger pie instead of just continuing to fixate on how to share an increasingly shrinking one.

I know there is a school of thought, popularised by Kwame Nkrumah, that admonishes seeking first the political kingdom. I also believe in the primacy of politics. But at this moment in the life of Nigeria, the economy is now the central issue. It will be useful to know Fayemi’s thoughts about how to expand the productive capacities of our people, how to create opportunities for self-actualisation outside of government and politics, how to reduce debts, eliminate wastes and increase government revenues, how to quickly fix and dramatically grow our economy. There is scarcity of this in his very thoughtful and cheerful book. It is understandable that he had not been invited to speak on this important aspect of national life. But it is important he addresses his fecund mind to, and unveils his stand on, this soon.