‘Our federalism should be in line with our culture’

Rev. Peter Obadan, an Accountant, was the first Deputy Governor of Edo state. He spoke on the first anniversary of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration in this interview with Alemma-Ozioruva Aliu in Benin City Excerpts:

First anniversary

Before we start assessing the current administration, we must look back and try to know what was the state of affairs as at the time Buhari took over.

I think Nigerians were in a dreamland, the economic truth of the country was masked and it was the blind actually leading the blind, it was at that point that Buhari came in and the first thing in my opinion the administration did was to lift the veil so that Nigerians can behold the truth of the economy and it was only then we came to the realisation of the truth that the country has sunk and has actually been privatised by a handful of people. It was on that premise that Buhari actually drew his action plan and it is the man that wears the shoes that knows where it pinches and many facts were made known to him which were not known to Nigerians and he needed to fashion out a plan that will structurally re-engineer the country and he was very systematic in realising this.

The first thing that Nigerians ought to realise is the perception of the international community of this great country of ours, we were worthless in the eyes of the international community and we were in the past window dressing issues and there is a limit to which you can hide the truth and you can never do a thing against the truth because it will always surface and President Buhari decided to tackle that and we accepted the fact that we were corrupt beyond pardon and if the international community must have implicit confidence in us, must have trust in the administration, we must first accept the truth and work to redeem it and that was what Buhari did and he took steps by visiting countries to re-assure them and to also request for assistance to help redeem the country from the hands of those that held us bound over the years.

Of course we are beginning to see the results and you also see what transpired at the National Assembly which led to the delay in the budget, although some Nigerians were blaming Buhari for being slow, but he was conscious of the fact that nothing can be done until the budget was approved and even when figures were juxtaposed to confuse the ordinary layman by the National assembly, his eagle eyes picked out those variances and have to stop them and he insisted on the budget presented to the National Assembly to be considered.

What Nigerians must realised is that it is not the responsibility of the National Assembly to draw up the budget, it is the responsibility of the executive and the National Assembly was trying to evolve a budget for the executive, that is not the way it should be done.

Nigerian federalism

I want to look at the content of the National Assembly because I know that we derived our constitution from America against the parliamentary system which was hitherto operated and it is purely British and when you operate a system in a different cultural environment in my opinion, it should be subject to modification and the idea of the Senate and the House of Representatives is wasteful realising that each section actually has less jobs to do. That is why most of them actually end up becoming contractors instead of legislating so I think Nigeria should start looking at an environment where we merge the two, it is either you scrap the Senate or scrap the House of Representative which will not only help reduce the administrative cost, it will help to ensure a measure of seriousness in the arm that will be left.

They will then have a lot of jobs to do. Let us re-engineer the whole section completely they will have a lot of jobs to do and they will truly earn their salary. If we want to look at the American setting, we must look at the vastness of the setting of that country and the way the country actually came together in Nigeria, it is not so and you take California for example is like four to five states put together to give you the land mass. So I think we can re-fashion our own in line with our cultural setting and that will smoothen things for us.