Path To Progress: Obong Attah Stresses Importance Of True Federalism In Nigeria

I will tell you another story. My elder brother came back in 1973 as a medical doctor. He worked at the Children’s Hospital in Lagos. One holiday, he decided to drive home. And along Ore Road with thick forests on both sides and a very quiet and lonely road, he had a flat tyre. He pulled over to the side of the road, brought out his spare tyre, in good condition but funny enough, he didn’t have a jack. He was standing there, hoping that a vehicle would come along, so he could flag somebody down and possibly borrow a jack.

But before that happened, from that forest, came one, two, three, four hunters, with dane guns and they looked at my brother and he was scared. He looked at them; he didn’t know what language they spoke and they didn’t speak any English. So, they just stared at one another. Then he started to gesticulate, from his gesticulations, I think they understood what his predicament was. And one by one, they dropped their dane guns, lifted up his car and held the car up until he was able to change the flat tyre on his car.
Now, I can tell you that that spot is not far from the spot where from the same forest, came people with AK-47 and shot and killed Chief Reuben Fasoranti’s daughter, not so long ago.

So, we have made progress, we have graduated from dane guns to AK-47 assault rifles but how are we using the AK-47? Similarly, we have GSM now; we have computers but look at how many Yahoo boys we have and cybercriminals in the process. So far, no Bill Gates, no Zuckerberg. So how do you want me to measure progress? Is there any moral compass? Is there any, what standard do you want me to use to measure it?
I will tell you another story. Several years ago, and I’m talking about many years ago. In my village in Akwa Ibom State, if you were known to be a really bad person, a criminal, a thief or something like that, you would simply disappear and the story would be that your canoe had put out to sea.. Nobody would mourn you, nobody would look for you.

But today, I think it is completely different. If people hear that you have stolen public funds in billions or that you have acquired wealth illegally by improper means before you know it, your veranda will be flooded with praise singers and before you know it, you will be honoured with several awards even national honours. So, things have really changed but is that how we want to measure progress?
Still another thing you would like to know. I remember that there was a minister in the First Republic, who was relieved of his responsibility just because he used his official car to transport his family on a Sunday to church. That is a true story. But today, you know, everything, anything goes.

Going back to my student days, I will tell you two interesting things. As I said, I went to the Nigerian College of Arts and I was approaching 19 and then there was a bill in the Eastern House of Assembly that they wanted to pay pension to people who had been in the House previously and had lost the election.
We immediately sent a telegram to Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and said you dare not. If you try it, you will hear from us. He wrote back immediately and pleaded with us not to do anything untoward. When he came, we had an interaction and that bill was withdrawn. We were students.

In 1960, just before independence, I was approaching 22. There were no demonstrations allowed within a certain distance of the National Assembly in Lagos. It was banned but we managed to penetrate that place and demonstrate because the British wanted the Nigerian government to sign a defence treaty, which we thought would compromise our sovereignty. We demonstrated against the bill and it was withdrawn. We were mere students.

But not so long ago, some young people said they want to end SARS, how did that end? Did anybody listen to them? So really, I find it difficult to say progress. Yes, we made progress but how? We have lost our moral compass; we have lost everything.

Even recently, they brought something called Whistleblower policy, which was meant to expose and punish malfeasance in the public space. Has it worked? I told you I would not like to talk a lot about this progress of a thing because it bothers me. In my days, anyone who graduated from the few schools in Nigeria with a certificate was respected at home and abroad but today, we hear stories of sex-for-marks or something like that. And we have even graduated from that to plain racketeering to even fake degrees, fake professors, all kinds of things. And it bothers me.

So that’s really my problem about talking about progress. But we have to thank God. We really still have to thank God that we have a government today that is determined to correct a lot of those wrongs because from every point of view, a lot of things need to be corrected.

You have been a very strong advocate for devolution of powers and fiscal federalism since 1999. Has anything changed in that regard?

No, it has not happened because clearly we are still operating in a condition that does not allow it to happen.

In a true federal situation, all tiers of the governments are coordinate. No tier is subordinate to the other. But in Nigeria, we have subordinated the governments of the federating units under the federal and this is totally and completely wrong.

I read the other day that the people who fashioned that constitution felt that having just come out of the war, the centre needed to be given a lot of powers so as to bind the fragmented units together. Look, people are not slaves. Nigerian people are not bundles of sticks that you can tie a rope around and bind together. They have to come together by consensus, by agreement, by negotiated terms. So I think that is where we made a mistake.

The condition we have today that gives the centre ultimate and almost total power is totally and completely wrong. And I want to believe that our president, President Bola Tinubu, who suffered similar things like I suffered under the offshore-onshore dichotomy thing, will take steps to address this anomaly.

You remember that as the governor of Lagos State, the current president suffered a lot when he wanted to create new local government areas and the Federal Government openly opposed him, saying that he had no such right to create any local government outside the 774 recognised in the constitution of Nigeria. And apart from stopping him from creating local governments, the Federal Government also seized all of his local government money. I want to believe that he sees the need more than anybody else for a complete and total change from what we are operating today. And believe me, unless, and until we go back to real federalism, where people will take their destiny in their own hands, use the resources available to them to develop themselves and become more productive, we can never make the progress expected of us as a country. Right now we are mere consumers and are not productive at all.

Why do you say we are not productive?

What are we producing? When we were in school, before you finish, big companies like the UAC, Nigerian Breweries and others would come, interview you, and you go straight from school into a job and things like that.

Today, the companies that are supposed to be driving the economy and providing jobs for Nigerians are leaving the country.

I don’t have it, but it’s a long list of people who have been blighted by the economic downturn. I was definitely affected because a big farmer like me with a rubber plantation, selling rubber to Dunlop, I could no longer do so when Dunlop packed up and went to Ghana. You know, they are all leaving.
So, what are we producing? The farmers that are even trying to produce, there was one time when you had about maybe 10 rural farmers feeding one person in the city area.

Then, the ratio changed. And even now you have two very old farmers trying to feed 100 people in the city but they can’t because if they go to the farm, the risk of being kidnapped or killed is there. That is why we are not producing because we are sharing money.

But we are producing oil and selling even though the price and quota are set by OPEC…

That is not production. That is not what I mean when I talk about productivity. You’ are sitting down for somebody to drill oil and come and share the money to you! That’s not productivity by any means. How many textile companies have we not closed down? We cannot even produce the food we eat. We are just a consumer country. But the real problem with us is that the things we used to do that gave us comparative advantage economically are no longer being done and we are fast losing out from those advantages that gave Nigerians an edge.

Could this be why many are insisting that government has no business being in business and that the private sector should handle investments?

Indeed, government should not be directly involved in the production of goods and services but should rather create a conducive atmosphere for the private sector to drive the economy and provide jobs for the citizens. Any time government runs a venture in Nigeria, people see it as an opportunity to steal money, feather their own nest, to favour their own people and it becomes just a matter of sharing, sharing, sharing. Not producing.

Tell me, why are all the four refineries in Nigeria not working?

Dangote has not started producing yet but when it starts to produce, you won’t hear the same stories as you are hearing about Kaduna, Warri or Port Harcourt refineries. You won’t hear the failure stories associated with the government refineries. Most Nigerians see government property as nobody’s property.
Do you think that if this oil that we are talking about had been recognized as somebody’s resource and the owner is the community or state where it is found and he is ready to share it with the rest of Nigeria that anyone would have stolen it? No, nobody would have stolen oil if it had been seen as the only means for some communities to use and develop themselves.

But because it is owned and operated by the government, those who should protect the oil are not really doing that. And, until we begin to see government as a serious business that must thrive, we are not likely to succeed as a nation. Government is a serious business and everyone who works in government must see it as such.

When I was a governor, I set up companies that were the owners of the entities that I established for Akwa Ibom State so that they could run effectively as business enterprises not just government parastatals. If you look at the Akwa Ibom Airport, which is named after me, there is an owner, and there is a company that owns that airport because it must justify its existence and produce money. You know what I mean? Same with the Champion Brewery, there is a company that owns Champion Brewery and pays tax to the government, brings revenue to the government. If that was run by government, by civil servants, that would not be productive. So, I sincerely believe in the private sector development of an economy.

There is a feeling that government bureaucracy is too large and expensive. Do you see this as a problem for the economy?

There are two aspects to that. One, the government is overloaded because the government wants to be the one producing. If the government was not overloaded, the bureaucracy wouldn’t be needed. But government forms all these bureaucracies to the extent that one doesn’t know the boundary where one stops and the other starts. They overlap so much that they are fighting over things they have replicated. Even in NDDC, the bureaucracy is too unwieldy. When the commission was being formed, I asked the president why he thought that a large bureaucracy was needed to take real development to the respective states captured under the law setting up the agency.

If the NDDC had been set up as a development-facilitating agency, states would be free to select strategic projects and present them to the agency for award and payment for such projects. In the same vein, NDDC would work with the respective states to know which project to select, award and implement and determine the amount to pay even if the states are not the ones awarding the contracts. This would have provided the needed checks and balances and brought real transformation to the NDDC states. But this was not acceptable to the government. They went ahead and created a bureaucracy, and the result is what we have today.

It was not created for development but for consumption and empowerment. All that the government needs to do, in the circumstances in which we have found ourselves, is to create the right atmosphere for businesses to thrive. It does not need to be involved in the running of business.

The government had no business being involved in so much business. It must only facilitate it. Can you imagine what would have happened if the government had owned the GSM? Have you forgotten how it was when Nigeria Airways was the only operating airline in the country? Give us power, 24-hour constant power, which is what I wanted to do in Akwa Ibom. Give us running water, give us roads, give us rail lines, give us all the things that will facilitate the industry to take off. And maybe negotiate or open the doors for us to negotiate abroad. That’s all we need.

Don’t forget that there was a time when every region had its agent in London. They were called Agents General and there was only one High Commissioner to represent all of Nigeria. We had direct links, direct negotiations, that’s when things worked.

So, are you suggesting that we should go back to what obtained in the days of the regional governments in Nigeria?

Yes, we have to. We need to do that because if we don’t, there will be no serious production and a country that doesn’t produce just sinks.

Mind you, I am not saying that we should go back to form regions that to my mind is impossible. For me, the states as they are should remain the federating units.

You championed the advocacy to get more money for oil producing states. And now, they have passed a law called the Petroleum Industry Act. Do you think it has solved the problems of the Niger Delta?

First of all, I think you are limiting my vision. I did not fight that fight because I wanted more money for oil producing states. The principle was that resource control is a necessary component of federalism across the country. In a way, I’m glad you said I even fought for the oil producing states because some people even thought I was narrowing it down to the Niger Delta region only. But today, Anambra and Kogi, Abia and Ondo are all in there and so you can see now that it was not a fight for the Niger Delta only but a general struggle for the actualization of one of the key principles of federalism.

Today, we have lithium, gold, all kinds of other mineral resources which the people should be allowed to use to develop their communities and pay taxes to the centre. The law should be amended, the entire constitution should be changed to allow the people to use the resources found in their domains to develop themselves under the principle of true federalism. That is what will engender self-actualization and contentment.

But has the PIA solved any agitation in the Niger Delta region based on your understanding of issues relating to oil production and the agitations of the people?

Can I be honest with you? I am not wasting my time to study the PIA because it is something that should not even happen. It is total nonsense.

Why?

It will not work or change anything until states, as federating units in Nigeria, are allowed to use their God-given resources to develop their areas and people.

There was a time in Nigeria when there were two accountants-general: there was an accountant-general of the federation and an accountant-general of the federal government. This was to make sure that the federal government was not cheated by the federating units. That was the whole idea. So you make sure that what I declared and brought out is correct and the federal government used to take 50% of that. And leave the federating units with 50% to develop themselves and that’s where development came.

So now bringing PIA, you can patch and patch and patch and still you are patching and it doesn’t work. Until this anomaly is corrected, nothing will work.

The important thing is just go back to basics, go back to the principle of federalism and you will see real development. Right now, there is unnecessary bureaucracy created by the government and nothing can work except creating more and more opportunities for stealing money unfortunately.

So the PIA is not a solution to the problem?

I don’t know because as I said I have not spent time studying it because for me it’s a waste of time. It’s something that should not even be. If you allow proper resource control to be implemented under the principle of true federalism and fiscal federalism, there would be no need for PIA. It is not important and cannot solve any problem of the oil-producing communities of Nigeria.

But the government has moved a step forward by trying to grant autonomy to the local government system. Is it a step in the right direction even though it is being opposed by governors?

Let me ask: Under the system that I described, did the local government not have autonomy? You see, the government is trying to make the best of a bad situation.

What really should we do? Take the bull by the horns and change the situation, change it completely. And this autonomy you are talking about will come naturally. But don’t forget that in a federation, only the federating units have business with the centre. The local governments have business with the states, full stop. But we go and list 774 LGAs in a federal constitution. Kano State 44, Lagos State 20, Akwa Ibom State 31, Ondo State 18 and Bayelsa State does not have the required minimum of 10. It appears as if we don’t just know what we are doing. We are mixing, mixing, mixing.. We must be able to separate them and segregate them so that we will have a clear vision of what we are saying.

But like you said that the Constitution did not make room for true federalism. Is it cast on stone that it cannot be changed?

No, that’s why we are preaching and I’m saying, I thank God we have a president who was a governor in Lagos and suffered the consequence of this faulty arrangement where the federal government becomes too powerful while the federating units are tied to the apron strings of the centre. I’m sure he’s in a position to put Humpty Dumpty together again. And I’m sure he will.