After a major civil war, a series of minor insurrections, much acrimonious debate over some five or so decades and four or five constitution-making efforts, one would have thought that some issues about fiscal federalism should be considered settled within the mainstream of rational Nigerian opinion.
The words ‘mainstream’ and ‘rational’ are used here advisedly because, on the lunatic fringe, anything and everything should be expected. Recent events, however, seem to indicate that one would be gravely mistaken to so think.
I refer of course, to the views recently expressed by such non-fringe elements as the Central Bank Governor; Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Northern Governors Forum led by Alhaji Aliyu Babangida; the Governor of Niger State and the Arewa Consultative Forum, to the effect (a) that the Boko Haram phenomenon is a direct result of the 13 per cent derivation monies paid to Niger Delta States; which payment has impoverished the states of the North and (b) that this ‘injustice’ to the North should be rectified by reviewing the revenue allocation formula on the basis of population. For such mainstream personages and organizations as the aforementioned to not only hold this kind of views but to go ahead to publicly express them in Nigeria today, speaks volume about our future as a country. Clearly, the Northern Nigerian establishment has learnt nothing and forgotten everything.
Mallam Sanusi has obviously forgotten, for instance, that the payment of 13 per cent of oil revenues to Niger Delta states commenced only with the 1999 Constitution. Even then, the maintenance of the obnoxious on-shore/off-shore dichotomy meant that years after that Constitution came into effect; the oil producing states did not get the full share of oil revenues as they were entitled to. Nigerians can legitimately ask if the sort of poverty that has allegedly driven Boko Haram to commit horrific acts of terrorism had been eliminated from the Northern states prior to 1999. The Central Bank Governor has also forgotten the history of fiscal federalism in Nigeria. He could not have remembered that between independence and the emergence of military rule, the revenue allocation formula was a whooping 50 per cent (against the 13 per cent that he alleges is now causing so much poverty in the North). Was there no poverty in the North at the time the region was getting 50 per cent of all revenues derived from the resources found thereat?
The bald, unvarnished fact of history is that the 13 per cent derivation principle, over which the North has gone apoplectic, has been partially applied only for the past 12 or so years. Prior to this relatively short period, the derivation principle was either 50 per cent, which favoured areas other than the South-South, or was not applied at all. For most of the years that Nigeria has been a petroleum oil producer, wealth plundered from the South-South was arrogantly ploughed into the development of other areas of the country. The oil-bearing region from which the wealth was stolen was left to wallow in want, pollution and abject neglect. Yet today, Anthony Sanni of the ACF has the temerity to speak of the ‘injustice’ of the 13 per cent derivation principle; conveniently, all too conveniently, forgetting the historic injustice done, and still being done, to the South-South.
Whichever way you slice it, establishment figures and organisations of Northern Nigerian extraction, make poor advocate of true fiscal federalism, if that is what the Northern Governors Forum meant by their recent call for the share of the Federal Government in centrally-collected revenues to be reduced in favour of states. For years under the military, the Northern establishment watched the wholesale conversion of the country from a federation to a unitary state but said nothing. In fact, they were complicit in that unholy process and benefited substantially from it. Thus, a unitarist central government which they dominated and controlled, took over the most basic government functions and distributed the perquisites deriving therefrom by ‘allocation’. The cardinal principle of fiscal federalism that what each federating unit could get out of the central pool should have some relationship to what it contributed to that pool, was cheerfully thrown overboard. Access to state power and suspect population figures, which clearly favoured the North, became the criteria for the distribution of our collective patrimony. The question we must ask, as many have done before, is whether this situation improved the development performance of the North? Few, not even Sanusi himself, would answer in the affirmative.
Leaving aside for the moment, but only for the moment, the arguably subjective issue of who held the reigns of federal power under the unitarist military years, indisputably objective indicators are available to expose the falsity behind the claim that the payment of 13 per cent derivation to Niger Delta states lies behind the rise of Boko Haram and sundry developmental challenges facing the North. What would Sanusi et al make of states outside the North that receive no oil derivation money but have not spawned any bloodthirsty anarchists? How come Ekiti, Cross River, Enugu, Anambra, Osun and Oyo states, to be specific, all show better performance in critical spheres of human development than the so-called North? Surely, it cannot all come down to the size of federal revenue allocation otherwise, as some pundits have pointed out, the WAEC failure rate in Kano State which gets the highest statutory allocation of any state in the country would be much lower than that of say Enugu State (but it isn’t). Might something else be at work here?
Mallam Sanusi et al have a grouse with 13 per cent derivation funds going to Niger Delta States (states, mind you). What do they expect people from the Niger Delta to feel, or say, about the extent of oil money going directly into the private pockets of individual Northerners (as opposed to states)? Might the brazen partiality, and questionable competence of leaders, virtually all Northerners, who ran both the country and their region, have something to do with the widespread prevalence of poverty in the North? In all the years they ruled Nigeria, could they have done more to relieve their people of the burden of poverty and ignorance? Let’s have a little bit of honesty here. By every sincere account, Nigeria has fallen way behind its contemporaries on virtually every index of development. That embarrassing relegation predates the implementation of 13 per cent derivation principle. When leaders of Northern extraction governed Nigeria with the benefit neither of a legislature to question their conduct nor laws other than those of their own making to guide them, they elected to do so primarily for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. Which explains not only why the country as a whole is so backward but also how a coterie of influence-peddlers of largely Northern extraction cornered the oil business to the almost total exclusion of Niger Delta indigenes. The names read like a who-is-who of Northern plutocracy:
- Alhaji Mai Deribe – Cavendish Petroleum
- Prince Nasiru Ado Bayero – Seplat/Platform Petroleum
- General T. Y. Danjuma – South Atlantic Petroleum Limited
- Rilwanu Lukman – Afren Energy
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