The End of Federal Character by... Chris Ngwodo

Since the inception of his administration, President Muhammadu Buhari has been dogged by accusations that he is running a sectional government dominated by Northerners. It is said that the skewed nature of his appointments violate the constitutional requirement that government appointments should reflect and represent the country’s ethnic diversity. Each set of appointments he makes are subjected to geographical screening by the media and then cited to argue that the president is at best a provincial bumpkin and at worst a bigot.

Arguments about the distribution of a president’s appointments are a longstanding Nigerian tradition. They reflect the popular perception of governance as a feeding trough for elites allegedly anointed to eat on behalf of their people. So, to be sure, Nigerian elites never claim that their people are being marginalised when there is actual work to be done. For instance, no politician complains that too few of his kinsmen are being deployed to combat insurgents. As long as public service is seen as an avenue of self-enrichment, we will continue to have these futile and fruitless debates.

Secondly, these arguments reflect the cynical, arbitrary and self-serving ways in which we construct identity. The president is accused of ethnic bigotry because he appoints mostly “Northerners” but the North is neither an ethnicity nor a religious or political monolith. The North is arguably more ethnically diverse than the South. A grid which claims to compare the appointments of “Igbos” and “Yorubas” with those of “Northerners” is conceptually flawed because it compares apples and oranges. In contemporary terms, there is no North. The idea of a Northern monolith – the Arewa construct – was the brainchild of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the First Republic premier of the Northern region and it died with him in 1966. Those who cite the “North” as a monolith do so either out of ignorance or malice – to bolster a self-serving argument.

In today’s lexicon, we should be discussing the North-West, North-East and North-Central zones. And even geopolitical zones are mere approximations that cannot fully capture the complex matrix of identity formations in Nigeria. We have to interrogate these identity constructs and the warped politics that surround them to discern their true meaning.

If the majority of federal appointees so far are natives of the North-East, how can the president who hails from the North-West be guilty of “ethnic” bias? When Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu was named Minister of State for Petroleum, one of the reactions to his appointment was that as an Igbo from Delta State rather from the South-East, he was not Igbo enough. Yet when he relinquished his leadership of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, it was cited as an instance of Buhari’s war of attrition against Igbos. The fact that he was replaced by a “Northerner” was further grist for the mill of ethnic discontent. That it was apparently Kachikwu himself who recommended his successor is an inconvenient fact for the merchants of grievance.

Thirdly, the president has complied with section 147(3) of the constitution which makes it mandatory that the federal cabinet should have a minister from each state of the federation. The much cited section 14(3) which calls for inclusiveness and diversity is prescriptive. It is embedded in the chapter on Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy whose provisions, while compelling, are non-justiceable.

In essence, the president has very broad discretionary latitude over his appointments and his appointees serve at his pleasure. His appointees are there to undertake national assignments, not represent subnational constituencies (that representative function properly belongs to the National Assembly). The president has the right to pick his team as he deems fit and he is exercising that right. The optics may be bad, it may be politically incorrect and it might be terrible politics but the president has broken no laws.

The Keshi Complex and Its Discontents

The interesting thing about the foregoing arguments is that they have not even been made by the administration in its own defence. The administration which professes a commitment to fighting graft has failed to highlight the mutually-reinforcing relationship between prebendal patronage and corruption.

The president cannot feign ignorance as to what the hue and cry over his appointments are about because the distribution of spoils is a key component of the elite consensus forged by his generation. Were he to publicly proclaim his disdain for federal character and preference for a meritocracy, it would provide a clear philosophical benchmark for assessing the administration.

But the president has avoided such clarity and indicated last year that his appointments were aimed primarily at rewarding foul weather loyalists, with competence appearing to be a secondary, if somewhat incidental, consideration. This too, while hardly ideal or favourable, is understandable. Patronage is part of politics and politicians try to balance rewarding consistent loyalists with appointing competent lieutenants. Already there is discontent among ruling party cadres over what they perceive as Buhari’s refusal or reluctance to open the floodgates of federal appointments to those who worked for his victory.

However Buhari’s comportment is such that rather than sectionalism, cronyism and nepotism pose greater risks to his presidency. Because he is famously economical with his trust and has a shallow pool of trusted friends to pick from, Buhari is vulnerable to these plagues.

In January 2013, the Super Eagles coach Stephen Keshi was flayed on social media by some commentators who accused him of filling his team with Southerners, and Igbos in particular. It was a bizarre critique because sports has always been off-limits to federal character enthusiasts and our sports teams, regardless of their composition, have always been regarded as national property. Some made snide remarks about Keshi’s “Biafran” Eagles. The Super Eagles went on to win the African Nations Cup – a triumph that shut the mouths of his critics and naysayers. Like Keshi, Buhari has chosen his team in what seems like a high risk-high reward strategy. The team clearly has too few women and no members under forty and is clearly unrepresentative of the demographic complexion of Buhari’s own electoral base. If his administration succeeds, it will silence its traducers but if it fails, he will pay a steep political price.

By his disregard for political correctness in making his appointments, Buhari is clearly setting a precedent and he is completely at liberty to do so. One only hopes that years from now when an administration headed by a Southern Christian takes similar liberties and equally interprets compliance with federal character so loosely, today’s latter day converts to meritocracy will be just as sanguine.

We Have Been Here Before

There is a sense in which this debate is profoundly futile. As long as the distribution of oil rents remains central to our political economy, these squabbles over the geographical spread of federal appointments will persist. In the last thirty years, every regime has had to manage these kinds of controversies. Both President Shehu Shagari’s administration and Buhari’s military regime were alleged in some quarters to be controlled by the Kaduna Mafia. In 1986, Dr. Junaid Mohammed, who recently accused Buhari of running a nepotistic presidency, also issued a blistering broadside accusing General Ibrahim Babangida of lopsided appointments in favour of officers from the Middle Belt, especially the so-called Langtang Mafia, and bias against Hausa-Fulani officers. The fact that Babangida’s appointments rewarded those that had borne the risks of his power-grab was unimportant.

General Sani Abacha’s regime was rumoured to be controlled by a “Kano Mafia” or a “Kanuri Mafia” or both. President Olusegun Obasanjo was variously accused of bias against the “core North” and the South-East. President Umar Musa Yar’Adua was accused of marginalising the Yoruba. President Goodluck Jonathan was accused of simply favouring the South-East and the Niger Delta.

Even with a forensic examination of the full spectrum of federal appointments in the period under review, these allegations are difficult to prove and are largely bogus. Locating the coordinates of real power and influence under our system is complicated business. Even so, the sort of ethnic hegemony or domination imagined by conspiracy theorists is practically and politically impossible. These arguments are part of a longstanding polemical tradition and occur in virtually every administration.

Even if Buhari had sought to “balance” his appointments, his administration would still have been buffeted by allegations of bias. Why? Because these arguments are not really about equity among sectional constituencies; they are about parity among elite special interest groups masquerading as representatives of ethnic constituencies by shrewdly manipulating ethno-religious sensitivities. Thus, there will always be some aggrieved group or some section allegedly receiving too little or too much of the national cake. As long as consumption rather than productivity drives our politics, these quarrels will continue. The backlash against Buhari is acute both because our politics is more rancorous and polarising, and also because the president does not understand the nuances of perception management and is almost totally impervious to political correctness.

And yet, all this elite talk of marginalisation distracts us from the real inequality in our society which is the widening gap between rich and poor. Northern domination and Southern domination of the public sector mean nothing to the Northern and Southern poor who are the most marginalised of our citizens. This brings us to a final related but unremarked point.

The Crux of the Matter

The champions of federal character argue that there are competent people in every part of the country and that the president’s appointments can reflect both quality and diversity. This assertion requires scrutiny. If indeed there are competent people in every part of Nigeria, then why is much of the country pockmarked by poverty, crime, infrastructural collapse and moral decay? Where are these sleeper cells of excellent leaders to douse the fires raging across the federation? It is either we do not, in fact, have competent Nigerians all over Nigeria or we do but they are locked out of public life. The problem is the latter.

Governance is not failing mainly because there are too few smart people in the federal government, although this is undeniably an issue; it is failing because the over-centralisation of powers and resources in Abuja is actually suffocating governance capacities at the local and state levels. The over-politicisation of Abuja has led to the under-politicisation of the grassroots. The very nature of our politics keeps public-spirited people out of public service in their states and communities where they are needed the most. Many capable Nigerians who are conscripted into the rat race for federal appointments would make far more impact serving in states and local councils. The real issue is that even if a federal administration were populated by geniuses, it would still find Nigeria too vast, too complex and too dynamic to remotely manage from Abuja. The federal government has only become more inept as it has centralised more power in itself.

The concentration of powers and resources that makes Abuja a centre of gravity is also starving states and municipalities of much needed administrative talent. This requires a two-fold reform: greater devolution of resources and responsibilities to states and municipalities and the concurrent liberalisation of the political space. The latter would involve initiatives like legislation to amend the age restrictions that bar young people from seeking public office, amending the Electoral Act to allow independent candidacy, and reform of campaign financing to dismantle the financial barriers that discourage honest competent Nigerians from political engagement or at best leave them vulnerable to compromise by unscrupulous political benefactors.

The aim would be to end the stampede for the spoils of office in Abuja and ignite a radical upgrade in the quality of elite competition and leadership selection at the grassroots. It would be a boon to administrative innovation in the places that need it most.

If the spread of developmental deliverables was dependent on having Nigerians from diverse places in government, then we would not still be grappling with nationwide poverty. Over the past four decades, elites from every part of the country have been in the federal government and enjoyed a measure of federal power. That much of our population still contends with problems of access to potable water and eradicable plagues like Cholera does not tell us that federal power is unfairly distributed. It suggests that our elites are mostly self-serving and also that we are betting too much on federal might as a magic bullet solution to all our ills. But above all, it indicates that development cannot be a top-down imposition by Abuja-based bureaucrats. Trickle-down development is a delusion. Real progress can only be internally-generated; it is the vertical propulsion of communities that have the autonomy and the leadership talent to competently take charge of their destinies. We need local governmental dynamism rather than federal tokenism.

The End Of Federal Character -By Chris NgwodoSo while it is desirable that a federal administration should recruit the best and brightest and while it is true that many competent Nigerians can be found all over the country, it is also true that they cannot all be in Abuja. Indeed, they must not be; all our smart cookies do not have to be in one jar. Rather we need structural and systemic reforms that will avail these competent Nigerians of opportunities to manifest their competence in their communities, municipalities and states thereby creating a symphony of excellence in public service. This is what will make for truly transformative governance.