CONTINUED from yesterday
Again, according to Chief Awolowo (op.cit., p.127), the number of secondary schools rose from 46 in 1953 to 139 in 1959 whilst the number of the secondary modern schools went from 0 in 1953 to 363 by 1959, providing places for over 50 per cent of the primary school leavers. In short, by 1959, the number of secondary school population in the region had risen to 84,374 compared to only about 9,000 in 1954. All of these dramatic developments were possible not only because the Western Region was a federating unit within a truly
federal constitution but also because it was was in total control of all its resources – agricultural, mineral, financial and fiscal.
The control of its mineral resources was evident in the manner in which it developed its cement industry. Although the Colonial Government still retained exclusive control over minerals and mines, a control still reflected in putting these two issues in the exclusive federal list up to the present constitution, the derivation fiscal principle of the initial federal constitutions of 1960 and 1963 conceded that any region where minerals were being exploited would be paid 50 per cent of the royalty received by the Federation on
this account. This provided the necessary incentive for regional governments to want to promote the development of the mineral resources within their territory.
Thus, in 1957, whilst the Federal Government developed a cement industry at Nkalagu in Eastern Nigeria and had plans for another for the Northern Region, it had no plans to develop same in the Western Region because the Nigerian Geological Survey indicated that there was no limestone deposits in that part of the country.
The Western Regional Government, however, did not believe or accept this statement. It hired its own consultants to investigate the situation. Through consultations with colleagues in Benin Republic, it was discovered that a limestone bed located in that country was getting wider and thicker as it proceeded eastward into Nigeria. On the basis of this, the Western Regional Government initiated the development of its own cement industry at Ewekoro, which was commissioned in 1960, well ahead of the federally sponsored Northern Nigerian Cement industry. From this limestone belt were to follow two other cement industries at Shagamu and the more recent development by Dangote at Ibeshe.
This situation was in sharp contrast to what happened when later the Western State under the governorship of Chief Bola Ige was to try to develop the Igbetti marbles. The Federal Government had become more assertive of minerals and mining being on the Exclusive List as a result of the boom in petroleum exploitation that it insist that all licences to prospect for minerals now reside only at the federal level even though land matters remained under the control of state governments.
The confusion that arose as prospective developers try to negotiate between these two contending authorities has been partly responsible for the slow pace of solid mineral development in the country.
Even today, the Igbetti marble is still awaiting development in spite of all the talk about efforts to promote solid mineral development. The same can be said for the bitumen deposits in Ondo State and phosphate deposits in Ogun State, among many others whose development could dramatically transform the socio-economic circumstances of these states.
In respect of agricultural development, the Western Regional Government concentrated on organizing the farmers through promoting the cooperative movement amongst them. The movement, of course, covered other activities such as producer, marketing, consumer, thrift, credit and craft co-operatives but the cocoa farmers marketing cooperative was its linchpin. Under the Action Group Government, a major effort was launched to organize the farmers into co-operatives especially to be able to train them on how to produce their cocoa to Grade 1 standard. The Regional Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources worked hard to mobilize most farmers in the region into co-operatives under such outstanding leadership as Chief Obisesan and Chief Ayorinde such that by 1953, the Movement could open its own Co-operative Bank with an initial capital of GBP 1 milion. The Movement went on by 1957 to develop the Co-operative Buildings in Ibadan with its ten-storey block of offices, an Assembly Hall and a shop (op. cit., p. 126), all of which constituted a novel and striking architectural landmark in Ibadan at that time and even up till today.
All of these remarkable developments in governance would not have been possible without the political leadership paying serious attention to the quality of its civil service. It is on record that it was Chief Awolowo who went toLagos to persuade Chief Simeon Adebo to come over to help build an efficient, effective and result-oriented Civil Service in the region. The importance of this crucial relationship between political leadership and the Civil Service has been well documented in many of the publications of Professor Ladipo Adamolekun. A major outcome of this relationship was the manner in which the Civil Service saw to the effective implementation of the various policies of the government of the day. In this regard, I am reminded of the story told me by late Chief A.A.K.Degun, one of the product of the Adebo School, that when he was the Secretary to the Military Government of Ogun State, he was already used to keeping a small note book in which he recorded on a weekly basis the level of performance of different Ministries in the execution of various programmes or projects of the State Government as provided by their Permanent Secretaries. Such constant monitoring was the basis for going out to the field periodically to confirm the performance information to the presented to the political leadership. From all this, it must be obvious that a well-trained and committed Civil Service is a sine qua non for a political leadership that seeks to deliver services of various kind to promote the welfare and well-being of its citizens.
The Incompatibility with a Military System of Organization
It must, however, be stressed that this Awolowo legacy both in political leadership and governance was spawned largely under the colonial regime. As soon as political independence was attained in October 1960, the struggle for hegemonic control of the new Nigerian State saw the weakness of the “flawed constitutional contraption” which the British was bequeathing to the people, a contraption in which one region was large enough to bend the will of the Federation to itself. As Harold Smith, an Oxford-trained but defiant British Civil Servant who refused to play the game at the time and suffered great personal deprivation for this, noted in his publication Libertas Homepage, “The British did not plan the military coups of 1966. They simply made it inevitable”. The mismanagement of the first coup of January 1966 led to a second coup in July 1966 which virtually returned the country to the status quo ante even with the subsequent attempts to create more states which turned out to be a necessary but not sufficient bases for a true federation.
More serious, however, was the negative impact of the imposition of the unified command structure of the military on a supposedly federally articulated governance system. The position got further distorted with the remarkable rise of the returns from petroleum resources gradually accounting for over 70 per cent of the annual budget of the federation. This development greatly challenged the earlier fiscal arrangement whereby regional governments kept fifty percent of royalties from mineral development in their area whilst the remaining 50 per cent went into a centrally controlled distributable pool that would be used to even up development in all parts of the country. This would have made some of the oil-producing states vastly richer than the federal government itself, a situation which have undermined the hierarchical discipline of the military organization.
In consequence, instead of the derivation fiscal principle of the Federation in the Awolowo era, all royalties from mineral exploitation as well as other sources of revenue such as sales tax were now to be deposited in what is now called a Federation Account from which some basis or formula for distribution between the three tiers of government would be put worked out.
The result of this incompatibility of the unified military command and a truly federal system of government was to make states no longer pro-active in seeking new sources of revenue to enable them initiate programmes of importance to their citizens but to become increasingly dependent on the Federation Account for their operations. For the Federal Government, the more states that exist or are created in the country, the more their dependent status grew. This situation played into the hands of military government which could create states and local governments by fiat. Thus, the military government of General Yakubu Gowon in 1967 created a 12-state Federation to check the secessionist attempt of the Eastern Region and move towards a more equitable federation by breaking up the Northern Region. His effort gave rise to a Federation with six states in the former Northern Region and six states in the Western, Eastern and Mid-West Regions in the south. This situation was soon upturned by the Generals Muritala Mohammed/Olusegun Obasanjo regime which in 1976 increased the number of states to 19 and created 301 local governments based on an arbitrary criterion that no local government must have a population of fewer than 160,000 and more than 800,000 people. The country was further fragmented under General Ibrahim Babaginda first in 1987 into 21 states and 459 local governments, and again in 1991 into 30 states and 569 local government, both times based on no criteria. Finally, under General Abacha, the country was in 1994 again sub-divided into 36 States and 774 local governments.
What was notable about this last sub-division of the country was that it made no pretense to being objective at all. It was at the whim and caprice of the military government and created great inequities in the overall governance system in the country. Perhaps the most obvious was what happened between Lagos and Kano State in this last process of creating new states and local governments. Up to that date, it was assumed that Lagos State and Kano State had roughly the same population and usually had the same number of local governments. This was initially 15 but was later increased to 20 for both states. However, General Abacha decided to carve out a new state out of Kano State which was named Jigawa State. To this new state, it allocated 26 local governments whilst he, at the same time, increased the number of local governments in Kano State to 44, making the number of local governments in the erstwhile Kano State 70 whilst Lagos State was left with its 20 local governments.
This palpable inequity has made it very difficult to attempt any reform of the local government system especially as this might mean reducing the revenue accruing to those states which have been allocated more local governments than they are entitled to on the basis of their population. Indeed, General Olusegun Obasanjo, on his second coming as a civilian President, set up a Committee on Local Government Reform which was seen in certain quarters as an attempt to correct this inequity and was therefore opposed. He himself, however, for party political reason stood against the attempt of the Lagos State Government to try to force the hands of the Federal Government to correct these anomalies.
It is, of course, self evident that state and local governments are easy to create under military than democratic rule where terms and conditions for such creation are spelt out in the Constitution more difficult to fulfill. The motivation for the agitation for the creation of more states and local governments under military rule was the increasing financial resources from the export of oil and gas and the urge of communities to get as much share of this national cake as possible. Today, as the prospect of continuing windfall from this source of revenue is dimming by the day, the country will, sooner or later, be forced to re-examine the sustainability of the present federal arrangement and be more disposed to consider drastic review for a more sustainable federal structure.
The operation of an apparently federal system of states and local governments based on monthly financial allocation from a federation account has done a lot to wean the population from their civic responsibility of paying personal income tax to provide resources for the services they crave for. By the same token, trade unions insist on workers being paid at the same rate across the country irrespective of the differing financial capacity of their State government. All of this disempowers them as citizens to be able to insist on good governance from their political leaders. With state and local government no longer dependent on tax resources they can mobilize from their citizens, the insistence on their accountability to their citizens thus seems very hollow. The citizens too, on their part, not having to pay tax, feel no strong compunction to demand effective and efficient service delivery from those elected or selected to govern them at both state and local government levels. It is thus no wonder that corruption became the order of the day at every level of government in the country. It was a case of don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.
More fundamentally especially at the local government level, the so-called Local Government Reform of 1976 further compounded the problem of accountability. By deciding to ignore the age-long system of local governance on the basis of settlements both urban and rural and choosing instead arbitrary figures of demographic number, the reform under-estimated the importance of social identity in human response to governance. Small and medium-sized towns which had operated on the basis of the willingness of their citizens to tax or levy themselves to provide particular services were lumped together in a local government which had no capacity to motivate individuals for community recognition or provide sanction for infractions against the interest of the community. To make matters worse, services which were best provided at the level of local communities were hi-jacked by state governments following on the federal government which also hi-jacked state functions with the coming of the oil boom. This failure to appreciate the importance of the principle of subsidiarity in governance has now come to plague the country. Everywhere there is evidence of the increasing inability of federal and state governments to effectively perform tasks they had inappropriately saddled themselves with such as waste management, local road maintenance, storm water drainage and so on. Different television channels on a daily basis present us numerous evidence of this failure of governance all over the country.
The other major programme of the military government which runs counter to the federal and democratic governance system was their virtual nationalization of land. The Land Use Decree of 1978 which attempted to unify the administration of land throughout the country gave state governors almost absolute right to dispose of land within their state. This must be seen as one of the factor in the prevailing surge of poverty in the country. The so-called reform in land administration instead of giving economic exchange value to the land of citizens especially in rural areas simply reduced the citizens to the status of tenants on their own land. Except for urban residents who can claim right to their land on the basis of conveyance document or family occupation, rural dwellers were provided no basis for their possessory right to their land. It was thus not possible for them to use their land as collateral for raising credit to improve on their economic status. Indeed, more often than not they found themselves dispossessed because the State governor had allocated their land to some companies or individual and they had to resort to threat of violence to secure compensation.
Such virtual nationalization of land was certainly not in keeping with a democratic dispensation that guarantees rights of citizens to their property. Attempts to rectify the situation has been made very difficult because the Decree was embedded in the Constitution and could therefore not be amended in any form except initially through expunging it from the Constitution.
Challenges of Political Leadership & Governance in post-Military Nigeria
By the time of the return to democratic rule in 1999, so much had changed in the architecture of governance in Nigeria as to make the Awolowo years in government look like the golden and glorious years of development especially in what was formerly the Western Region of Nigeria. Specifically, the country had become awash with funds from one single source, namely petroleum exploration, that dwarfed into insignificance the financial resources available to all the governments of the Federation from all other sources. The three regional governments had become 36 States, the different local government system in the regions have been streamlined to 774 local governments. The Parliamentary System of government has been replaced by the Presidential System of government, a system which was being extended to the local government. The practice that allows public servants such as teachers and university lecturers to contest in politics and seek for leave of absence when elected into office has been replaced by one which required them to first resign from their position before they can contest for any elective position.
Also, instead of elected political officers especially at the local government level being paid sitting allowance, they are now treated as if they are full-time officers.
The effect of the surfeit of revenue from the oil boom of the 1970s was also to affect the relationships among within the three tiers of government. As the royalties from oil exploration accrued to a single account under the aegis of the Federal Government, that Government became more and more powerful whilst the creation of more and more states left state governments in an infinitely weaker position. Also for this reason, the principle of subsidiarity was jettisoned whereby a function was assigned to that level of an organization where it is likely to be most effectively and efficiently performed. Consequently, the federal government took on many services which states were best placed, and indeed, used to perform whilst states, on their part, also took on functions which local governments were best placed and used to perform.
Two examples of this jettisoning of the principle of subsidiarity will suffice. The Federal Government decided to take over the maintenance of a number of roads which used to be State Government roads. More than this, it decided to set up a parallel organization known as Federal Road Maintenance Agency (FERMA) to look after all these roads in the States. Before then, Federal or Trunk A roads within States were usually maintained by the Ministry of Works in the States which send their bill for repayment to the Federal Government. With the setting up of FERMA, the maintenance and repair of these roads now depended on decisions and provision of resources from Abuja which often leads to delay and further deterioration in the condition of the roads. In frustration, states have been known to go ahead and repair damaged parts of these roads within their states but now have great difficulty in getting reimbursement for their effort from the Federal Government. By the same token, States took over roads which used to be under the control of local governments. The result is that everywhere in the country the situation of road maintenance is greatly deplorable since the authority which is in the best position to notice when a break-down in the road begins is not enabled to immediately see to its repair. All of which prompted a foreign visitor to one of our major cities to wonder whether there is any government in our cities.
The same thing can be said for waste management. In other countries, this is the most local of local activities. Whilst local governments can effectively see to the collection of their solid wastes, the role of State and even Federal Government would be to provide and develop well sanitized landfill sites for the safe and hygienic disposal of all types of waste. Such centrally developed landfill sites could make special arrangement for treating medical, metallic and radio-active wastes. Instead, what we have are state-based waste management boards and a situation in which waste collection is reduced to an end-of-the-month one-day affair.
No wonder Nigerian cities are said to be some of the dirtiest in the world. We, ourselves, can see this especially the mounds of refuse that are left to adorn the median of most of our dual carriage ways. There is also hardly a single, well-developed land-fill site in the country and solid wastes are simply dumped in gulleys, river beds and wetlands within and around urban areas.
The changes that the military introduced into the governance of the country dramatically increased the cost of governance and made public service at all levels of government a lot more lucrative than it has ever been. Although it was assumed that the bonanza from oil will always continue, it was clear even in the 1980s that this was also subject to great uncertainty. Indeed, it is worth remarking that General Buhari in his first emergence as a Nigerian Head of State came at a time when the economic fortune of the country had taken a sharp nose dive because of the profligacy and corruption of the civilian administration of Alhaji Shagari.
Although General Buhari’s tenure then was short-lived, the country had to go through many years of the Structural Adjustment Programme which consigned many families into absolute poverty. And although the vagaries of a major dependence on a single source of national revenue has been patent for some time, the structural reforms that could reduce the cost of governance and make for a more economically stable and vibrant country are still hardly seriously contemplated although a lot of empty statements about diversifying the economy continued to be made
Side by side with these developments at the level of government has gone the increasing alienation of citizens from their political leadership and from serious concern with democratic governance. The political relationships has become increasingly mercenary, volatile and unstable. Citizens are willing to sell their votes for a pittance. This is because they do not see how they can effectively influence the manner in which they are governed especially as governance at the local level where they should depend for the services that truly touch their lives has been disempowered and hardly relates to them. Although they are expected to vote for candidates at this level, elections to the position are at the whims and caprices of State governors who can sack a local council anytime and replace them by a care-taker council of henchmen. It can thus be clearly appreciated that the loyalty of such councils will be to the State governors rather than the citizens who elected them. Political leaders no longer present their followers with any vision of what they want for them in a way to catch their imagination and make them feel part of governance for self-actualization.
Citizens’ alienation thus constitutes one of the greatest challenges to political leadership and governance in present day Nigeria. The alienation is manifest in various ways. First, it has kept away from the political arena, especially at the local government level, a good number of patriotic citizens who cannot subscribe to a cynical approach to political leadership.
Such an approach expects political leaders to go with the tide of making all sorts of high-minded promises at their election but, once in office, to resort to a prebendal avocation of enriching themselves through all forms of corrupt practices. Secondly, the alienation shows even among the elected officers by a certain feeling of helplessness in shaping the course of development in their area.
The Presidential system of government assigns a lot of powers to the President and his unelected Ministers. The separation of powers on which this is based means that as an elected member you are not directly involved in promoting your party programme. Instead, you are given some resources to undertake your own constituency project to be able to claim some legitimacy among your constituents. Once elected, the President and his Ministers can fashion out their programmes and there is not much the Party can do to make the President take its manifesto as the road map for his own programme.
Thus, elected members do not see themselves as agents for sensitizing and mobilizing the citizens behind government programmes set out to implement and practizalize the vision of the party. Indeed, in the Presidential system of government the legislature could become more or less the opposition to the government, irrespective of the party affiliation of their members
Thirdly, alienation also shows in the tenuous level of party discipline among elected members of our national and state assemblies. The disturbing exhibition of indiscipline by members of the governing APC party at the inauguration of the 8th National Assembly indicate quite glaringly that at least some members are not in tune with the democratic order within their party. Their action casts a long shadow on the cohesiveness of the legislature and the effectiveness of its role in moving the governance of the country to a higher level.
Conclusion – The Way Forward
Let me conclude then by posing the fundamental question of this lecture. This is as follows: How does the Awolowo legacy speak to our present challenges of political leadership and governance in Nigeria? To my mind, the answer to the question comprises five elements. These are: the vision of political leadership, the mission of translating the vision to reality, counting the cost and planning to meet the challenges of that translation, mobilizing the populace behind the vision, and instituting a regime of discipline to sustain the vision.
All these five elements can be deduced from the narrative of explicating the Awolowo legacy. The Action Group government which he led came to office with well prepared policy documents of its vision for different areas of governance. The party in government, working with the Civil Service, was seen as the major instrument for translating this vision to reality. But, for every sector especially the revolutionary one of free primary education serious attempts were made to count the cost and to devise various revenue-yielding strategies to meet the challenges of the novel programme. All of this required that the masses of the population was mobilized behind the vision and the institution of a regime of creative struggle, of discipline and accountability at the personal, party and public levels made it easy to carry the day and leave us with the impression of a glorious age of remarkable achievements.
Yet, it will be unconscionable not to realize that both the external and the internal environments have changed since the period of the Action Group government under the leadership of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. The external environment, for instance, had seen the end of colonialism and promoted a new world order of globalization, with its pre-eminent capitalist mode of production, the increasingly transforming role of the information technology, the emergent dominance of private sector organizations in national economic development and the fostering of democratic dispensation in most countries. The internal environment had seen the rule and misrule of military governments, the pseudo-creation of what appears to be a more equitable federal structure but under a debilitating unified framework of operation, the remarkable growth in the size of the population and the gross domestic product, the social undermining role of oil glut and the desultory engagement of the population in the struggle for good governance and higher productivity, all of which create new challenges for political leadership and governance in the country.
None of this, however, obviates the fact that with a clear and well-articulated vision of what our present political leadership wants the nation to become in the 21st century beyond just being at least the twentieth largest economy in the world we can begin to see a new path of development for the country. The present political arrangements of an over-centralizing federal government cannot, however, take us to the realization of this vision. The struggle must continue as in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s day to secure a more truly federal constitution which allows the states greater control over their resources and opportunities to compete with one another for the overall growth and development of the nation.
Central to such a struggle is the importance of ending the monthly trooping of States to Abuja like beggars to receive the hand-outs of what the Federal Government regards as their share of the Federation Account. To strive towards a truly Federal Constitution, the least that can be done is to end the fiscal distortion of the military era and move to a position that the 1963 Constitution conceded that its sub-national units or regions are entitled to 50% of the proceeds of royalty in respect of any minerals including mineral oil and mining rents. Twenty percent is then credited to the Federal Government and the remaining 30 per cent to a distributable pool to be shared among the regions in some determined ratio to help even out development everywhere in the country. It will be interesting to calculate how much states would be worse off by this arrangement which gives them the freedom to develop their resources on their own steam that the present system which consigns them to the status of suppliants at the Federal Government’s table.
The point to stress is that even in the United States from where we borrowed our Constitution, the present fiscal arrangement would be something of an anathema to their federal spirit. Indeed, it would seem to the American as the surest way to stifle development and kill the enterprising spirit of innovation and healthy fiscal competition among the States. The situation between the States of Texas and Nevada helps to drive this point home. These two states are almost polar opposites in terms of resource endowment. Texas has abundant petroleum resources, a variety of solid minerals as well as good agricultural land for crops and large-scale animal husbandry. Nevada is virtually desert. Yet, the situation was not resolved by Nevada insisting on sharing the returns from the resources of Texas by putting them all in a Federation Account. Instead, the leaders of Nevada engaged themselves in intelligent planning on how to raise the resources needed for effective governance of their State. They came up with two ingenious and unusual propositions to raise the much needed revenue. One was to make gambling a major economic activity from which the state can derive ample taxation benefits; the other was to make divorce easy for citizens on the payment of a fee. I was visiting Nevada some time in 1999 and was amazed at the level of development based largely on these two sources of revenue mobilization.
More significantly, I learnt that the level of electricity production and consumption in Las Vegas and Reno, the two gambling cities in the State was by far higher than the total electricity generating capacity of Nigeria. All of this is to emphasize that the continued struggle for a true federation could also be seen as part of our struggle to enhance the rapid economic development of the country.
For Nigeria itself, it would be necessary to revisit the costly Presidential system of government with which we are presently saddled. The issue of ensuring that a Presidential candidate is voted for by the whole nation and not just one constituency in the country as in the Parliamentary system of government is incontestable. But many other countries such as France have adopted a system of government which combines both the Presidential and the Parliamentary systems in what is called a Semi-Presidential system. This reduces the cost of governance, provides for a Prime Minister and Ministers chosen from among members of the legislature, enhances party discipline and ensures that the party in power properly projects and strives to actualize its vision for the growth and development of the country. Our political leaders are best advised to re-examine this issue of the cost of governance in an era of reduced prospect of the bonanza from oil production into which we are moving.
The issue of mobilizing the population and making them feel truly involved in their own governance requires re-visiting our system of governance at the truly local level. No one can deny that the present system of local government fails to make the populace feel they are truly participating in their own governance. A system which does not recognize the sharp difference in the needs of urban and rural communities and treats both with equal disinterest cannot mobilize or motivate the citizen to feel a sense of responsibility for their own welfare and well-being. Urban centres, however, small, have needs different from those of rural areas. They need tarred roads, electricity, sanitary waste disposal facilities, water supply, storm water drainage and many other services for which they must pay to enjoy. It would be relatively easy to make them pay either tenement or property tax if they can see that there is a clear relationship between their payment and the effective delivery of these services and that they have the ability to change those called upon to provide these services if they prove inefficient.
Maybe if because of the perceived advantage of gratuitous additional revenue, States in some parts of the country are not willing to accept any fundamental change to the present local government system, one can suggest that the present local governments be treated as and called counties whilst the small and medium-size towns within them be granted municipal status so that they can more effectively look after their own affairs. In the case of large cities which have been broken up into more than one local government, a metropolitan planning and transport authority be instituted to provide some over-arching co-ordinating body for the orderly development of the whole urban area. Election to councillorship could also then be open to all citizens including public but not civil servants and membership remunerated by sitting allowance to concern more funds for the capital development of their jurisdiction.
But more fundamental for effective political leadership is the need to cultivate and promote a high level of discipline and accountability at the individual and party level. It is such discipline that is transmitted to the larger public and gives the needed respect and legitimacy to political leadership. Discipline is not just a matter of adhering to a strict personal code of behavior. It relates also to how the leader is regarded in his inter-action with the public. A leader who cannot be punctual at events cannot be regarded as disciplined or considered as one that accords great importance to his public. And no party can acquire true legitimacy to leadership in the sight of the public if its members don’t exhibit a high level of discipline in regard to the supremacy of the party in the execution of their governance responsibility.
A major plank in the legacy of Chief Obafemi Awolowo is his commitment to continuous constitutional struggle for ensuring that a truly federal arrangement was established in this country. That struggle is certainly not yet rested and one can expect our political leaders to devise various ways of working towards the desired outcome. I do not, for instance, see why State governments cannot take the leadership in promoting mining activities in their states. Oyo State still has the Igbetti marbles to exploit and Ondo State has its bitumen. Their State Universities can be funded to do the feasibility studies of the extent of these and other minerals resources. Once these studies indicate their economic viability, the State could proceed to seek partners for their exploitation. The issue of what percentage of royalties accrues to the State can then become a matter of negotiation with the Federal Government. At any rate, such issues as well as others to further deepen the federal orientation of the country can become a matter for serious deliberations at the Governors’ Forum, leading hopefully to a major amendment to the Constitution.
I believe I have said enough to emphasize that, irrespective of the effluxion of time, the legacy of Chief Obafemi Awolowo still resonates in our present circumstance. His struggle to see that a truly federal State is established in Nigeria was derailed by thirty years of military rule. The hope, therefore, is that our present crop of political leaders will show the same commitment and determination to the continuing struggle to lead us to a golden future through their vision, their determined effort to actualize this vision, their prudent concern with costs of governance, and their strenuous effort to truly mobilize the citizens behind this vision, and, more importantly, their personal discipline and accountability to serve as icon to motivate us their followers. Only through such dedicated leadership towards a truly federal Nigeria, can this nation hope to attain to its manifest destiny of leadership in Africa and the world at large.
I thank you for your attention.
