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By adminadmin on January 17, 2016



Based on reports of a surreptitious attempt being made to smuggle the Jonathan Conference Report into the current Administration’s agenda and the necessity to combat the measure, “ooduapathfinder” presents, unedited, this Paper presented at the Yoruba Assembly on March 19, 2015, in Ibadan by the Egbe Omo Oduduwa as the Editorial for this week.

One of the reasons the Egbe Omo Oduduwa was founded during the anti-colonial struggles by Chief Obafemi Awolowo was to “combat the disintegrating forces of tribalism, stamp out discrimination within the group (Yoruba) and against minorities and generally infuse the idea of a single Nationality throughout the Region.” The Egbe was so named because it was designed to foster a pro-development Yoruba sub-nationalism to complement and strengthen the pro-independence Nigerian nationalism.
Time will not permit us to go into full details of the Egbe’s proposals in pursuit of this objective but suffice it to say that the Egbe embarked on historical, cultural and political moves to ensure its goals of value-driven Regional development within the context of one Nigeria. Prominent among the Egbe’s objectives was its major role in promoting the notion , through its memo to the Regional Committee on the amendment to the Richards Constitution established by the then Governor MacPherson, in which the Egbe advocated the “grouping of Nigeria into various Autonomous States or Regions purely on ethnical basis” and that Regional Autonomy should be the prerequisite for a Central government and that if there was any area in which the colonial government wanted to experiment in giving Nigerians complete control over internal affairs, that area should be in the Regional Administration.
Chief Obafemi Awolowo drew extensively on the global models of shared governance between national and sub-national governments in arriving at the Federalist option when the anti-colonial struggle was at its peak. And now, when a similar situation presents itself, the Jonathan Conference relegated this global imperative to the background in the conceptualization and implementation of his conference denying Nationalities the freedom to choose who to speak for them at such an important meeting. This method of selecting or appointing delegates alienated most delegates from the Nationalities whose direct voice was needed on such crucial aspect of restructuring the polity in Nigeria.
Adjudging the “successful completion of the 2014 National Conference” an achievement is the hallmark of a drowning concept; for, Nigeria has had successfully completed conferences in the past; from Ibrahim Babangida’s Political Bureau to Abacha’s Conference and Obasanjo’s Political Reform Conference. The issue is thus not about completion but the alignment of conference outcomes with the hopes and aspirations of the people which was supposedly the raison d’etre for organizing a Conference in the first instance.
Only Abacha’s Conference came up with the Zonal Structure, which, though not made constitutional, is being informally practiced today. The Jonathan Conference, now touted by its supporters as being “successful,” has not only negated this Zonal premise but has gone ahead to further unitarize Nigeria, thus entrenching the country’s foundational crisis, which also runs counter to what the Yoruba had always advocated as being the basis for freedom.
Egbe Omo Oduduwa was resuscitated primarily to allow the Yoruba Nation to look back, take stock, see how far we have come and what issues confront us today. Which is why we are totally and uncompromisingly opposed to both the recommendations of the Jonathan Conference as well as its promoters in Yorubaland.

We are all well aware of the giant strides made by the Western regional Government administration led by the same Chief Obafemi Awolowo and we are also aware of the forceful negation of Regionalism through the military government led by Aguiyi Ironsi and consolidated by successive military regimes. The Jonathan regime concluded its own Conference with a series of recommendations which its supporters in Yorubaland are saying we should accept.
The recommendations, as stated by its promoters, are summarized as follows:
“States can now create employment and develop their own states. Each state can have its own constitution, its own police force, can have its own prison service, can create its own local governments and in addition, in the economic domain, solid minerals that had been the exclusive preserve of the federal government since independence, have now been brought to the concurrent list; self-funding regional institutions” in order to encourage developmental efforts among cooperating states”
We will now briefly take these issues one by one, for purposes of clarity.
(1) Self-Funding Regional Institutions among cooperating states:
In the Western Region, the Action Group government created the Western Nigeria Development Corporation, which, among other things, was responsible for the industrial and economic development of the Region through the mechanism of the various industrial and residential estates as well as other economic entities. It was also directly involved in human development via the provision of educational scholarships.
When the Region was turned into Western State, as the successor entity to the Western Region, the WNDC continued its historical mission and when the State was further carved up into the three States of Oyo, Ogun and Ondo, as successor entities, the then Secretary to the Government of Western State, the late Mr.C.S.O. Akande led others to set up a holding company known as “Oodua Holdings” in order to prevent the outright collapse of the institution, as such was what the then military administration in Nigeria favored. That holding company is what we now know as Oodua Investments Ltd, with all of the Yoruba successor States as shareholders.
Some of its companies went into the doldrums, especially when Nigeria’s economic policies came under the hammer of the Structural Adjustment Program, which among others, saw to the demise of the Marketing Boards, which was loudly hailed as an important element of economic liberalization but which in the end turned out to be an avenue to economic suicide via making local production unattractive at a time that privileged proliferation of imported substitutes, thereby turning a formerly productive sector into an absolute consumer of imported, finished goods which also led to our political and cultural strangulation. In spite of these, some of the ventures retained their viability while some that went under are now being resuscitated by the current APC Governments in Yorubaland.
This brief excursion is to let us know that what the Jonathan Conference decided upon is nothing new as it already existed in a very functional form in Yorubaland, in spite of efforts to destroy it or take it over by interests sympathetic to the Center.
The WNDC concept was part of a political paradigm that saw to the combined and even development of a Region just emerging from colonial underdevelopment and midwifed by the Action Group as its core demand for decolonization. Whereas the Jonathan Conference denied this core political necessity in its approval of further balkanization of the Region via creation of more states which are no longer successor entities of the Western Region and giving us a sop in the form of any form of cooperation between and among the states and which cooperation is dependent upon an approval of the National Assembly.
A “self-funding economic agency” without its political basis is a non-starter, a priori; and a denial of economic self-actualization for an economic platform in a center of antagonistic political configuration is a panacea for economic failure. Recommending a self-funding economic agency without fiscal federalism that makes revenue raising and collection Regional is nothing more than self-deception. A country in which the states or federating units depend on allocation from the center cannot call itself a federal system. None of the federations in the world: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, United Arab Emirate, and U.S.A., operates on the model of state dependency on allocations from the center recommended by the 2014 national conference.
(2) States as“federating Units” that can have their own Constitutions
The Jonathan Conference already assumed the singularity of the geo-political space called Nigeria and all of its solutions to its problems are relegated to maintaining that singularity while turning issues of Federalism into an administrative convenience even when it is obvious that the problem is exactly in that singularity. That is why the Jonathan Conference will promote the ridiculous position that “states are federating Units”. States, as we have them in Nigeria, are administrative entities, which were not even created by the residents but by military fiat. A country can have any form of administrative unit, which was why Aguiyi Ironsi replaced the Regions with “groups of provinces” which are now more or less the “states” and more so when the Jonathan Conference wants to increase the number from the present 36 to 54.
When the Egbe Omo Oduduwa rejected the Richards Constitution, it was based on the principle of a Union or Federation based on the Peoples and not as administrative units. Indeed, every Union or Federation in the world is based on a Union of Peoples which may now be administered either as states (as in the US) or regions as in Germany. For a federation or Union to exist, therefore, the Peoples inhabiting a geographical space must make that decision. That the Jonathan Conference refused to see this point underscores the confusion in its understanding of the concept of federalism in a post-colonial State like Nigeria.
And when the case is made that the current states are now a reality which we cannot run away from, the short answer to that is, Yes, we can run away from it, in the sense that the political and economic circumstances that make for their creation is the root cause of Nigeria’s problems today, such that their retention or changing can only be by the Peoples affected themselves and not by fiat from the Center. Thus, the Yoruba Nation may decide to make every Yoruba town or city an administrative center—that will be our choice based on our economic and political imperatives.
A Constitution is the “basic law”, the Grundnorm of a society. It embodies the socio-cultural essence of the People; it aggregates their existential paradigms; therefore, it is not simply a series of legal codes that can be altered at will. Arbitrary alteration of country’s Constitution has been a regular practice in the country and always without reference to the people who are to use the Constitution. But for the Western Region, its political space is also a cultural space with time-honored values, and this was why the People of the West did not really respond to the 1964 elections but chose to respond decisively to the rigging of the 1965 Regional elections, because they had something to defend; their Grundnorm and the values that drive the Region’s civilization.
We can relate this to the situation in today’s Ekiti State, where we now have 6 legislators in control of the State Assembly as the majority while the remaining 17 are considered minority, all because the Center is supporting that abnormality. The question we want to place before the Assembly is what type of Constitution will emanate from Ekiti State, for example? Would that not create an unstable situation where the opposition will be looking towards a time when it will assume power and thus be able to change such a Constitution and the incumbent will continue to rely on the center to maintain its power, which also means the Center and even the State Governor will try to remain in power by all means as we are witnessing now? So, to promote “states having their own Constitution” through a process that is not authorized by the people or their chosen representatives is to deny the People as the makers of such Constitution.
There is no correlation between a state constitution and Federalism. Having a state constitution has nothing to do with Federalism. Now, in the Ekiti example, what unity would there be between a Fayose State Constitution and Osun State Constitution in order to form a Region, as we are being told? Or are we saying that state constitutions will depend on changing political circumstances or that the Central Government will determine how and when a state Constitution will come into effect, which will also be dependent on the political forces at the center? So, whichever way this is cut, a state constitution is meaningless outside the definition of the Federating Unit in and of itself. In other words, the issue is not about “state Constitution” but about the Peoples that want to create a Union. Such that if we are talking about federating units being in existence, such federating units are not the states, but the PEOPLES, who are already in existence and can decide to administer themselves as they deem fit, be it as states, regions, cities, etc.
(3) Each State can create its own Local government.
The Central government will retain and disburse all the funds for Local Government; yet they are telling us that each state can create its own local government?
(4) State Police
State Police is a consequence and not the cause of Federalism as the Jonathan Conference wants us to believe. Right now, States depend almost entirely on federal allocations to pay their workers’ salaries; and it is this allocation that will be saddled with funding state police. The state police is to be funded from received allocations when the number of states are increased to 54 such that the revenue allocation will have minimal or no change from the existing allocation structure which translates into such state police being underfunded and unable to achieve its maximum potential in terms of training and professional advancement. Once a state police is under the control of the sole Inspector-General who is responsible only to the President, such arrangement is not different than the one that says that the federal government should fund exploitation of mineral resources in states, without any consideration for the centrality of fiscal federalism to a federal system with integrity.
We have also been told that the allocation accruing to the center is reduced by 10%. But we know that the increase in the number of states would have already made nonsense of the increase as more states will now share in the increase in the number of states. Reducing or increasing the amount of allocations is not Fiscal Federalism by any stretch of imagination. Such determinations are precisely what is wrong with the unitary system. Fiscal Federalism proceeds from the control of economic and fiscal policies by the communities whereby it is those communities (Federating Units) that will determine what is to go to the Center for its operations–of course all of these will be negotiated.
Derivation by definition, even as practiced in the First Republic, presupposes that the center does not “give”; the “owner” gives and the center “takes”. The issue about Federalism is thus not about reductions or increases in such allocations–for even if the “state constitution” recommendation is acceptable, there would be no need for such constitutions if these allocations can be reduced or increased at will by the center or its agency.
We can go on and on and on, but we believe what we have stated so far shows that what the Jonathan Conference supporters in Yorubaland are selling to us is the exact opposite of what the Yoruba had been consistently asking for. We cannot simply fold our arms and say we should accept whatever is given to us—for those who “give” such things must have an agenda for giving them; which will, more likely than not, be to our detriment. Restructuring Nigeria back into a Federal system requires the honesty to accept that to have omelette you need to break eggs. Attempting to tinker with the unitary system foisted on the nation-state by successions of military dictators can only amount to a wild goose chase or in Yoruba parlance being sent on ARODAN errand. Therefore, this Assembly should resolve that the recommendations from the Jonathan conference falls far short of the type of Federalism that the Yoruba demand and of what federalism is to all rational peoples. We therefore recommend as follows:
(1) This Assembly should work towards the convening of a Yoruba Constitutional Convention, for the sole purpose of ratifying, rejecting, or renewing the Draft Yoruba Constitution as a counter to Jonathan’s Conference resolutions.
(2) This Assembly should call on the Yoruba States to organize a Referendum after the election to choose between the two.
(3) This Assembly should make copies of the said documents (Yoruba Agenda and Draft Yoruba Constitution) widely available to Yoruba people worldwide, in order to prepare them for meaningful discussion after elections of restoration of federalism in Nigeria.
Thank you all for listening.
Shenge Rahman for and on behalf of Egbe Omo Oduduwa

Really?