‘Over-centralisation of government will lead to dictatorship’

Former Nigerian Ambassador to the Philippines, Dr Yemi Farounbi, in this interview with ROTIMI AGBOLUAJE, spoke on how the Supreme Court contradicted itself on local government autonomy, and solutions to the food crisis that led to widespread protest in Nigeria.

What do you have to say on the hardship protests?
Nigerians have the right to complain because this is a democracy – the government of the people, by the people and for the people. And in his June 12 speech, the President quoted Franklin Roosevelt as saying that the best form of government is democracy. But he conveniently forgot that Roosevelt also said four things that democracy must give you are: ‘freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.’

When you have terrorists, bandits and other insecurity, you have no freedom from fear. So, people have the right to say they are not happy, because Tinubu himself was the father of protests as Senator Shehu Sani said. He participated in many protests against governments in the past. He was part of National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), Save Nigeria; Occupy Nigeria. He was part of the protest against Jonathan’s government over the removal of subsidy.

Recently, there was a demonstration in the UK, and Kenya. I was an ambassador in the Philippines. I know what they call Mass Action of the people even under a dictatorship government. You cannot prevent people from expressing their anger. When you prevent them, they get bottled up. And it gets bottled up; it is like boiled water that is bottled up. Its explosion is not always the best.

Obviously, there is hardship. Let’s use the data by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). According to the bureau, inflation has grown to 33.5 per cent generally and when it comes to food products, it has gone to 44 per cent. We can see that in the market. The prices of food have gone beyond the capacity of an average man to buy. Succinctly put, there is hardship, there is hunger and there is anger.

Is there a way out of the situation?
There can be. In his inaugural speech, President Bola Tinubu identified agriculture as an area he would look at. He promised that there would be agricultural hubs and commodity boards. He promised that food would be affordable and accessible. None of those has surfaced.

Two or three months after his inauguration, he promised that he was going to acquire 150,000 hectares of land to plant corn. We haven’t seen that in the market.  So, he’s been tall in promises, but not in action. That’s why there is hunger.

The truth of the matter is the government in Nigeria gets it wrong. They think the solution to hunger is for everybody to go to farms. That is not it. In Europe and America, only seven per cent of the population farms and they feed the whole population. In South Africa, only 20 per cent of the population farms and they feed the whole population. We probably have over 60 per cent of our population in farms, yet we are unable to feed ourselves. There are things you need to be able to provide adequate food for the people. What we need to do is to reduce the number of farmers and increase hectares, provide adequate fertilisation that suits each region and belt.

The third is irrigation to complement the rainfalls especially during the dry season. If your farm is so small you cannot build a dam for it. In the North, they invested a lot of federal money from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture in building dams. These are the things we must do. The fourth is to increase the yields per hectares.

Those are the things we need to do but the federal government is not doing. It is just talking about giving 20 trucks to each of the states, even where the population is not equal. It gives me the impression that they haven’t come to properly understand the problem of the country in order to provide solutions.

We have to feed ourselves. A country that cannot feed itself can’t claim to be independent. I recall that in 1981, I visited Cuba under Fidel Castro. The rule was that you couldn’t eat in Cuba what wasn’t produced in Cuba. We have to look at the solution to agriculture differently. The people who will produce food are in local governments. They aren’t under the federal government. So, the money for reviving agriculture has to be domiciled within the state and local governments. That is where you can mobilise people and encourage them to go into farming. When you have the ministry of agriculture in Abuja or ridiculously the Ministry of Livestock Development in Abuja, how does that help the farmers that are so distant from them?

Can the recent local government autonomy verdict by the Supreme Court address the problem of insecurity, food crisis insecurity and help Nigeria’s democracy?
There are two ways of looking at it. At the theoretical principles of federalism, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his ‘Thoughts on Nigerian Constitutions’, or ‘Path to Nigeria Freedom’, and his other books, offered some insights. Awolowo was one of the greatest authorities of federalism in Nigeria and greatest promoter of federalism said emphatically that where you have multiple ethnic units or languages, you must have a federation. You can’t unify them because they have different histories, cultures, languages and traditions.

You must have a government at the level near the people that would accommodate all these varieties. He advised that we should have 11 federating units. Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe who was more of an apostle of unification, at some time, agreed that Nigeria must have a federal structure. That’s why in 1947 and 1948, the British colonial powers went to each local government district, each provincial district, each divisional district, and each group of regions to find out what was best for the people.

Then, all the people assembled in Ibadan in 1948 and they all agreed that the best way to run Nigeria was through federalism. What is federalism? Let me quote Alexander Hamilton in his federalist paper. In the early days of the U.S., there was this argument on whether to have a federation or confederation. He said a federation consists of a central government and federating units, two levels. And that was what Nigeria agreed; the central government called the Federal Government and federating units as at that time called regions. In Australia, India and Canada, which are federations each has a central government and federating units called provinces. In America, there is a federal government and federating units called states.

So, Nigeria for example, based on that definition consists of the federal government and the states. Section 1(2) of the Nigerian Constitution says Nigeria is a federation consisting of the states and FCT. It does not talk about local government. As a matter of fact, by the time you go to section 7 of the Constitution, it empowers the state to design its structure, organisation, and funding system for the local government.

When you go to section 162, beginning from sub-section 5, 6, 7 and 8, it talks about a Joint Allocation Account Committee (JAAC), that the money from the federal government will be paid through the state into that account and the state will add its own. The section says that the JAAC will allocate the funds based on the law made by the State House of Assembly for their local governments. The emphasis is on ‘their’.  It doesn’t say for the local governments. So, it is possessive.

When you look at it both ways, in principle, you can’t have a federation that has three tiers. Oyo State, for example, consists of the Oyo State Government and 33 local governments. Nigeria consists of the Federal Government and 36 states. It doesn’t consist of the federal, state and local governments.

The error started in 1976 when the Ibrahim Dasuki Committee was set up by the Murtala-Obasanjo regime to unify the local government system. One should recognise that there are differences in cultures. For example, in the North-west they talk of emirate, in the Northeast where the Kanuri are, they don’t talk of emirate, the North-central where they are Christians or animists, they don’t talk about either. In the South-west, they talk about Oba; in the East, they didn’t have kings until 1947 when warrant chiefs were created. So, you are expected to have the government within the state or the federating units to be attentive to the peculiarities of the people there. Unifying different people is disrespecting the whole principles of federalism.

So, from the point of concept and the Constitution, you can’t talk of an autonomous local government. Between 1999 and 2007, Governor Bola Tinubu  of Lagos State took the Olusegun Obasanjo-led federal government to the Supreme Court many times to quarrel about the creation of  Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) Governor Tinubu created and on withholding of council funds. The Supreme Court ruled that Obasanjo had no constitutional right to withhold the money. Governor Tinubu was a federalist who was agitating for the federating units at that time but President Tinubu is no longer a federalist by starting to talk about three tiers of government.

In 2022, ex-President Muhammadu  Buhari issued an Executive Order, asking the Accountant-General of the Federation to pay allocations directly to the local governments. The states went to the apex court and said it was anti-federalism, and that order must not be executed. Surprisingly, that same Supreme Court has now somersaulted in what it calls ‘progressive interpretation’ and has rewritten the constitution. It cancelled the section that gives power to the states to decide on how money would be allocated.

The reason for the inclusion of JAAC in the 1999 Constitution was because some local governments in this country before had zero allocation. Local governments had to pay teachers from primary to junior secondary schools, local government workers; set aside five per cent to traditional rulers, look at health centres, maternity homes, markets and others. So, they found out that, based on the allocation formula, there were local governments that could not pay. There were local governments receiving minus zero allocation. The state joint allocation would pool all the money together and reallocate. Now, we’re not going to have that because one Supreme Court is doing progressive interpretation. I am hoping the states will go back to that Supreme Court to let it know that it somersaulted and there is a contradiction between its previous decisions and the 2024 pronouncement on local government autonomy verdict. So, I think we are on a dangerous path with that decision.

People have been complaining that Nigeria is already over-centralised. The exclusive legislative list has 68 functions. Exclusive to the federal government is 52.8 per cent of the revenue. The 36 states get only 26 per cent and these local governments that they are running after 774 in number get only 20.6 per cent. There is no state that gets one per cent as allocation and there is no local government that gets 0.1 per cent. The way the local governments were created by successive military regimes, there are about 440 local governments in the North and about 300 in the South. The local governments were not created on any rational basis, either on population or viability. There may be local governments that have just two towns in the North. Conversely, a local government may have a network of many cities in the South. You’re going to find out that the staff of one LG in some southern states would be more than the staff of 10 LGs in some northern states. As a result of the inequality in their creation, some LGs will have surplus funds while many in the south will have zero allocation.

This is just reinforcing the over-centralisation and unification of people who are complaining. This has fuelled the agitation of Yoruba Nation, IPOB and others. People are clamouring for a reduction in the functions of the federal government but you are centralising everything. One of the areas is security where everyone is put under an Inspector General of Police (IG) and calls it the Nigeria Police Force. America is also a federation but 22,320 independent police formations. Even in the UK, there is no centralisation of police. What we have now is over-centralisation. It is a dangerous thing, because it leads to dictatorship.