A distinctive feature of Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s political thought and praxis, either in the critical roles he has played as Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Ibrahim Babangida military regime, top member of the pro-democracy (National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) or simply as political scientist and public intellectual, is his unwavering faith in the possibilities of Nigeria. This is even as he has never hidden his disdain as regards the scandalous squandering of resources and opportunities that have been the lot of post-colonial Nigeria over the past five decades and seven years. It was thus not fortuitous that his tenure as Foreign Affairs Minister, for instance, witnessed such ambitious initiatives as the Technical Aid Corp (TAC) scheme, the Concert of Medium powers as well as the relentless advocacy for Nigeria to acquire nuclear capability albeit for peaceful purposes as a psychological fillip to the black man everywhere.
Akinyemi’s penchant for not allowing the country’s ills and challenges, which he frankly, even brutally, acknowledges – corruption, maladministration, ethno-regional strife, misapplication of resources, insecurity etc – to dampen his ardor for Nigeria’s potentials as a real giant not just of Africa but also as an aspirant to a critical global role was evident in his 2016 convocation lecture at the University of Ibadan titled ‘Nigerian Exceptionalism: Nigerian Quest for World Leadership’.
Yet, many Nigerians in their merciless self excoriation at their country’s social, political and economic shortcomings hardly give her any chance of overcoming current travails and actualizing her admittedly immense potentials. Those who are reluctant to admit that there is anything like a Nigerian exceptionalism, which could mark a departure from the accepted norm and chart an innovative path for others to follow, would readily perceive Akinyemi’s optimism as illusionary. I beg to disagree. Without strong belief in the positive qualities and diverse endowments of the Nigerian polity, including its numerous and highly resourceful population, our collective will to act decisively towards overcoming current limiting debilities will be effectively paralyzed if not irretrievably truncated.
The idea or undeniable reality of Nigeria’s exceptionalism, particularly in the areas of political and federalist thought as well as constitutional engineering, was brought forcefully home to me on re-reading an essay titled ‘Foundations of Federal Government in Nigeria’ by renowned Africanist scholar and author of the classic, ‘Nigerian Political Parties’, Professor Richard Sklar, which was published in a 2004 collection of essays in honour of another eminent Nigerian political scientist, Professor Oyeleye Oyediran. We often tend to blame what are essentially our behavioural and attitudinal lapses on constitutional arrangements, governmental patterns or structural defects, which are themselves manifestations of deeper sociological and psychological root causes. Hence our unending oscillation of advocacy for either presidential or parliamentary systems, two party or multiparty systems, highly centralized, decentralized federal or even outright confederal constitutions, rotational presidency, reversion to regionalism and so on.
If I understand him correctly, Professor Sklar’s well considered position is that, in terms of creative constitutional thought and praxis, something good and novel but largely unsung and unheralded has indeed come out of Nigeria. In Sklar’s words, “Nigeria is the world’s fifth largest federation after India, the United States, Brazil and Russia. Over the past quarter of a century, Nigerians have pioneered two main innovations in federalist thought and practice; they are known as the principle of federal character and the three-tier federation. Both ideas were introduced into public discourse at roughly the same time in the mid-1970s, an especially creative period for Nigerian constitutional thinkers”. On the constitutional recognition of Local Government as the third tier of government, Sklar contended that “Arguably, the inclusion of a constitutional guarantee for ‘democratically elected local governments’ by name, established principles of local government organization and supporting their viability by means of direct federal funding, should be reckoned an original Nigerian contribution to the science of government”.
Pointing out that this innovation in Nigerian constitutional thought marks a departure from the conventional federal practice of rendering local governments totally subordinate to the whims and caprices of states, Sklar noted that its chief aim, which was in response to experience during the first republic, was to protect local governments from threats of abolition and dissolution by over bearing state governments. Contrary to popular clamors in contemporary political discourse, therefore, the autonomy granted local governments by the extant 1999 constitution marks a significant step forward in the country’s political development particularly in terms of transparency, effective grassroots governance and accelerated development at the lowest rungs of administration in the country.
What this means is that seeking to subject the local governments, once again, to the financial and administrative stranglehold of state governments can only be a regressive and not a progressive step. The policy implication of this is the urgent imperative to strengthen financial autonomy of the third tier of government as well as reinforce mechanisms of accountability at this level especially through institutional reforms that enhance the capacity of State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIEC) to conduct genuinely free and fair elections into local government councils. Despite the brazen theft of humongous public funds at the Federal and state government levels over the years, the no less substantial but hardly discernible pillaging of fiscal resources at the grassroots level of government, perhaps takes a greater toll on Nigeria’s developmental enterprise and the wellbeing of millions of Nigerians at the very base of the governance pyramid than is recognized.
There is the need to jettison the inferiority complex, which assumes that we cannot chart an exceptional path of constitutional arrangement or governmental practice that departs from the norm and mirrors the peculiar historical trajectory and responds to institutional challenges that confront our polity. Apart from the three – tier constitutionally guaranteed levels of government, Sklar argues, that the federal character provision in Nigeria’s extant constitution is another exceptional and unique contribution to the development of federalist thinking and practice. Sklar notes that “Like the device of “double devolution” and its potential consequence of a three-tier federation, the principle of federal character is a distinctive Nigerian contribution to federalist thought”.
As we all know, the federal character provision in Nigeria’s constitution is meant to ensure equitable representation of diverse ethno-cultural groups in the composition of governmental structures at all levels- Federal, state and local. Contrary to the view in some quarters, the federal character requirement in apportioning appointments and allocating other valued resources by the state is not necessarily antithetical to or incompatible with the criterion of merit quite apart from boosting a feeling of inclusiveness by all in a diverse, plural and complex polity like ours.
Many students and observers of Nigerian federalism have dismissed some unique aspects of federalist innovation in the country’s constitution because of their departure from the practice in older federations particularly that of the United States on which the Nigerian federal variant is patterned. As Rufus Davis has pertinently observed, however, “For as all men don’t build their house just according to that model which the rules of architecture prescribe, so no federal constitutional system…has been built, or indeed could be built, in the mirror image of US model…In a word, each system has adapted the US model of its time, precisely as the United States composed its constitution in response to its own imperatives of necessity and circumstances”.
I remember, for instance, how the late legal titan, Chief Rotimi Williams (SAN), speaking on behalf of the political pressure group, ‘The Patriots’ once famously dismissed the preamble of the 1999 constitution, which claims to derive its legitimacy from ‘we the people’ as a fraud because of its largely military provenance. But the lesson throughout history is that constitution making is most times an elitist enterprise. Not many people are equipped with the requisite expertise to participate meaningfully in the exercise quite apart from the fact that millions of citizens do not have the necessary sense of political efficacy to consider it worth their while to engage the constitution drafting process. In any case, the drafters of the 1999 constitution did not drop from the moon and their exertions were not based on a constitutional tabula rasa. Their deliberations were no doubt informed by previous numerous constitutional drafting efforts spanning the pre-colonial to preceding constitution drafting exercises in the post-colonial dispensation.
Yes, by all means let us learn from the pitfalls in our current constitutional practice and make necessary amendments and changes to strengthen and deepen its democratic and federalist content. But in doing so, we must not fall into the trap of denigrating any aspect of our constitution that is a departure from the accepted norm but is derivative of our peculiar ecological realities.
