Like an albatross that will not go away, the issue of restructuring of the Nigerian polity has returned to the front burner of public discourse in this country. Besides regular reminders of the issue by stakeholders including civil society groups, rights organisations and regional groups, the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the electoral victory of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has provided the basis for the renewed call.

While congratulating President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on his judicial victory, the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) one of the frontline organisations that fought for the restoration of democratic rule in the country restated the need to restructure the country. According to the organisation, “Tinubu, as a Critical Stakeholder in the highest structure of NADECO, who expended his resources and network together with others while we were in the trenches, should prove beyond reasonable doubt that he remains faithful and committed to restoring Nigeria to the Negotiated Federal Constitution. No one needs to remind Mr. President that the current warped, skewed, and lopsided national structure must be reconfigured to give hope and a sense of belonging to all Nigerians that they are equal joint stakeholders in the Nigerian Project.”

It would be recalled that the call for restructuring has been an enduring call right from the days of the anti-military struggle in which the pro-democracy movement in the country asked for the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference to restructure the skewed Nigerian federation, restore physical autonomy to the units to remove Nigerian from the pedestal of unitary governance to a genuine federal structure. The pro-democracy movement believed that the advocacy held the key to unleashing development and progress in the polity, and pursued the objective doggedly.

It is important to note that this has sunk into the consciousness of Nigerians to the extent that after the inauguration of the fourth republic, two successive governments have attempted to convene a conference to address the contradictions of the Nigerian federation.

Beyond the efforts of civil society groups such as the Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarisation (CENCOD) which organised a national conference on the national question as far back as 2000 in Nigeria, former President Obasanjo blazed the trail, by convening a national conference in 2005 in which all the issues were tabled. But President Obasanjo minced no words that the conference did have no-go-areas. He also left no one in doubt on the question of the conference’s sovereignty. For his administration, it was not. However, despite the heated debate on the problematic issues about the Nigerian polity and federation, the conference was stalemated when it came to the issue of the allocation of revenue in the country forcing the South-south delegation to walk out from the conference. That action marked the end of the Obasanjo effort at resolving some of the issues in Nigeria.

It is not clear whether Obasanjo was merely playing to the gallery but the issues did not go away. Also, it took the foreground under the Goodluck Jonathan administration that convoked a conference in 2014 that sought to look at all the issues affecting the Nigerian federation. Compromises were made, and there were disagreements but at the end of the day, that conference came out with a report that included the need to create more states to accommodate minority interest in areas where the minority question was accentuated. Yet, the Buhari administration that succeeded Jonathan did not treat or look at the recommendations that were embodied in that conference report. It was rather abandoned while the administration carried on as though there was nothing amiss in the polity.

It was common knowledge that the polity was overwhelmed by all kinds of crises that included killings across the country almost on a genocidal scale and the Buhari administration ran the country as though there was no constitution. It undermined the federal character content of the 1999 constitution as amended only to fuel the separatist impulse of Nigerian groups and ethnic nationalities that had been aggrieved by the state of things in Nigeria. These groups include the Yoruba nationality movement whose activities have been spearheaded by Prof Adebanji Akintoye, and Sunday Igboho. Much earlier, there were Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) agitations, and in eastern Nigeria, the Movement of the Survival of Biafra. Currently, there is the Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB).

Today, Nigeria has not been productive as a country. It has remained a consumer country, externally oriented. Killings are massively and senselessly still going on in different parts of the country. The ethnic minorities in Kaduna state have been under siege, and the ethnic groups in the whole of the Middle Belt such as Plateau, Benue, Taraba and Adamawa are under siege. The minders of the country have carried on as though the carnage is of little significance.

In the circumstance, the call by NADECO on President Tinubu to make good the objective of restructuring cannot be more plausible; and it has been further accentuated by the report of the El-Rufai Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) that took a critical look at restructuring and urged the government to address the devolution of powers to State, resource control, local government affairs and affair of the states; as well as Constitutional amendments to allow merger of States, State Police, State Court of Appeal and Independent Candidacy.

Although these recommendations were submitted to the Buhari administration, the best that the country got from the last administration was an attempt at reforming the 1999 Constitution by an inclusion of electricity/energy into the concurrent list; as well as railway, which now allows the states of the federation to have autonomy over generation of electricity and construction of railway lines/route within their respective states. The issue of physical autonomy has not been addressed. Nigerians are hoping that those measures would pave the way for a more restructuring of the country, but that has not happened. And so far, the Tinubu government has not displayed a concrete inkling to going the way of restructuring.

There is nothing new in this call, rather, it reminds concerned Nigerians of the country’s failure to address the fundamental problems of the country. It is worth emphasising that the solutions have been respectively articulated in various conferences across the country. There have been draft model constitutions by the Movement for National Reformation (MNR) as well as civil society organizations. The present government led by President Tinubu, a leading figure in the pro-democracy movement that had always desired restructuring of Nigeria, should use his good offices to restructure the polity to unleash progress and development in this country; and establish enduring peace and harmony among the various ethnic nationalities that make up our country.