By Yinka Odumakin

Besides, it is not difficult to forecast that the work of government in Nigeria under a unitary constitution is bound to become unduly complex, inextricably tangled, extremely unwieldy and wasteful, and productive of disunity and discontent amongst the people. Unless we have veritable supermen at the helm of affairs, the administrative machinery would eventually disintegrate and break down under    the crushing weight of ‘bureaucratic centralism — Oloye Obafemi Awolowo  on June 12,1967 from CELL DUP2, CALABAR PRISON in his book ‘Thoughts On The Nigerian Constitution’.

IT still amazes me that a man confined behind bars could   beautifully function at a high mental magnitude that his countrymen and women   would still be grappling with 49 years later. And the failure to grasp the point Awo was making in the quote above is the very reason Nigeria will remain in the intensive care unit with our best moment always in the past .

It is a not difficult to understand that a wound covered by bandage without any medication would continue to fester and become gangrenous .The pain of today will always be worse for the wounded than that of yesterday.

Chief Awolowo

It is this pain of untreated wound that always makes the past we detested more attractive to us than our present. I recall Olisa Agbakoba, SAN,   in a moment of frustration under General Olusegun Obasanjo regime openly lamented that ‘things were better than this under Sani Abacha’.

Queuing for ‘essenco’

This explains why   we brought   Obasanjo back in 1999 in spite of the challenges we had under him from 1976-79. The same reason we saw a messiah in General Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 never mind that we were queuing for ‘essenco’ (essential commodities ) in 1985 only for those lines to disappear when Babangida came in 1985.

But for his not -too-great health we ordinarily should be longing for Babangida to come back in 2019 with Abacha waiting for his turn if he did not doze off eternally in 1998 in circumstances that are still hazy till date .

Our affliction is that we ignore Awo’s warning that Nigeria would never function well under a unitary constitution except it is run by ‘veritable supermen’.   And unfortunately our leadership recruitment is one where the cream does not make it to the top.

General Alani Akinrinade and Dr. Amos Akingba have even advanced that argument beyond the sage.Their take is that if you make Jesus Christ the President and Prophet Muhammed the Vice or vice versa under our present constitution, there is no miracle they are going to do. And I dare say that it does not mean these leaders are not powerful but there are immutable laws of God which he would not violate no matter all the prayers that we say. If you have a tree to fell and you carry a dull axe fasting and praying , the tree would remain standing .

We have become totally lost having travelled on a wrong road for 49 years that we now behave like that foolish traveller who was going to Benin and faced Seme border . As he was crossing he asked a fellow standing on the road if he was close to Benin City and was told he was stepping into Benin Republic and that if it was Benin City he had to go back to Ojota in Lagos and head to Edo State.He looked up and down and said having gone   that far it was better for him to continue onward on his journey and that by some divine intervention he would make it to his destination traveling on a wrong road.

That was the point we reached in 2014 when the National Conference held in Abuja and delegates spent months to diagnose our problems and came up with over 300 resolutions which if implemented would have moved us on the pathway to nationhood.

The politicians who were hungry for power to serve self made us to miss that defining moment by declaring the chance we had to remake our country a ‘distraction’. They employed thousands of people who had no sense of history to saturate the social media with a dubious narrative that Jonathan was the problem of the country and once he was removed and Buhari installed,’change’ would come and all our problems would disappear. They unwittingly set Buhari up for immolation by building unreasonable expectation in the old man whom   Nigerians now expect to come and wave the magic wand.

People with sufficient depth countered that narrative by saying Jonathan was not the problem and Buhari was not the answer .That the crises in Nigeria was systemic and that the way Jonathan was a victim of the crisis so would Buhari also be with the same template.

This tendency has always been consistent on this. It backed Buhari in 2007 (yes,he was Afenifere candidate !) when he said he agreed to restructuring. Yours truly served as his spokesman in 2011 when he agreed with the International Centre for Reconstruction and Development, ICRD,   led by Pastor Tunde Bakare and, not Save Nigeria as some mischief makers have suggested , to restructure Nigeria.The first item on the Buhari/Bakare manifesto was to restructure Nigeria into a true federation.

Power mongers muddled the water and did not allow a reasonable debate of the issues confronting Nigeria.Even when Pastor Tunde Bakare made a sensible   suggestion that we should take 12 months to implement the report of the conference and hold an election in which the then incumbent would not participate , he was mischievously accused of promoting ‘tenure elongation’.

We ignored the fundamental issues and rushed to elections with all kinds of promises that were clearly impossible and could only have been believed by simpletons.It is now 19 months and we are yet to see any change. The Nigerian systemic crisis has shown it cannot be moved by any shambolic promise.

Two years ago we said once ‘ change’ comes corruption would be a thing of the past but the grass-cutter and others have made a mess of that illusion.There was the talk of ‘reduction in cost of governance’ but the 2017 budget is the highest in overhead in the last seven years.We were told Naira would be at par with the dollar but it exchanged for N485 to $1 as I permed this. We were told petrol should not sell more than N45 a litre but it has moved from to N145 a litre with diesel selling at N245. A bag of rice that sold for N8,000 two years ago is today N21,000 . We were promised 3 million jobs in a year but the   figures from National Bureau of Statistics is that we have lost over 5 million jobs since May 2015.

It is difficult to find any sector in Nigeria today where things are looking up. Is Buhari now the problem of Nigeria?Those playing cheap politics would say Buhari has worsened the situation in Nigeria and he is the problem.But people of depth would be honest to say we miss the point again if we conclude that Buhari is our problem just as surface thinkers said   two years ago that Jonathan was.

These leaders definitely have their faults but it is too pedestrian to say they are the cause of the problems which themselves are just victims of . If we   get another President in 2019 without addressing Nigeria’s structural defects we would still look back at Buhari days with nostalgia.

Imminent collapse

Patriots who love the country should rise up now to insist on the unfinished or better still, the neglected business of nationhood if this country is to be saved from imminent collapse.

Professor Segun Gbadegesin recently reminded us that the ruling APC in its manifesto made some commitment to federalism .I think it’s time Nigerians hold them accountable to that promise rather than focussing on the impossible ‘change’.

The South West in particular which has taken the lead in this crusade should begin to ask questions from   its prominent sons who are active in this administration and are indeed its faces in the zone.They should tell ‘We, the people ‘ what they are doing on this most important issue that is not on our national agenda . By this I mean Ogun State Governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, Minister of Solid Minerals, Dr. Kayode Fayemi and Works, Power and Housing Minster, Mr. Babatunde Fashola.

Time is running out!

Season Greetings 

I use this medium to send warm wishes to all readers of this column this season .You have been there from inception and you are the very inspiration for writing week after week.Your feedbacks have been encouraging and has kept me going . I ask you to keep it coming as we continue the search for the best ideas to move our country forward .

I must encourage you to keep up hope in the midst of our challenges as a country . The greatest measure of the situation of things in the country for me is that those who used to play around with fireworks in my neighbourhood all night on the eve of Christmas   only had about two minutes outing this year .

It shall come to pass. See you in 2017.