By Olu Fasan

IN a constantly evolving and changing world, corporate entities, countries and humans must adapt and renew themselves to survive and make progress. Those resistant to change will stagnate and atrophy. Sadly, Nigeria utterly lacks the will to change and to succeed. To be a stable and prosperous nation, Nigeria needs a root-and-branch reform, a transformative change. Yet, this country is trapped in inertia-inducing path-dependent ways.

Truth is, Nigeria is so sclerotic that radical systemic change is almost impossible democratically. Virtually all the structural changes in Nigeria took place under military regimes. Yet, a democratic system, by its nature, creates the ideational framework where ideas and consensus-building drive institutional change. True democracies, when they reach an inflection point, a point where there’s no alternative but to change, always rise to the occasion and bring about the necessary change. But in Nigeria, the status quo always prevails regardless of the imperative for change.

A few months ago, a senior lawyer, Chief Robert Clarke, SAN, controversially called for military intervention to terminate the Constitution and sack all governors and legislators. According to him, the military should dissolve the current 36 states and replace them with six states, and military administrators should run the new six states. I was scathing in my criticism of him in this column for what I called “barmy ideas”.

But in fairness, Chief Clarke was probably venting his frustration as a concerned Nigerian. He knew that Nigeria must be restructured, with a radically streamlined governance system, but he also believed that restructuring can’t happen under a civilian administration. Hence, he wanted the military to do the job. But he, wrongly, ignored the question of legitimacy; the end cannot, in this case, justify the means: restructuring, yes, but not by the military!

Sadly, the National Assembly, which supposedly has the democratic legitimacy to do the job, gave credence to Chief Clarke’s prognosis: only the military can truly restructure Nigeria! Speaking during the Senate’s constitutional review hearing, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters, said that Nigeria couldn’t have a brand-new constitution because that would require suspending the current one, which he said only the military could do.

Hear him: “We cannot afford to do away with the current Constitution because it would be an invitation to anarchy. The only way a constitution could be suspended is if there is a military coup that no one prays for. Only the military can suspend the Constitution”.

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Put simply, as long as Nigeria is under civil rule, it cannot have a new constitution; it can only amend, piecemeal, the current one imposed by the military. It reminds one of the title of Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains!

But even some advocates of restructuring favour a less radical approach on the basis that a more radical restructuring, though desirable, is unachievable. Recently, Professor Attahiru Jega, former INEC chairman and a strong advocate of restructuring, said that power should simply be devolved to the current states and local governments in Nigeria. He then added: “The dismantling of the current 36-state structure is at worst unrealistic, a pipe dream, and virtually impossible to do”.

Of course, remember, a military regime, a la Chief Clarke, could do it. But, alas, a civilian government can’t, even if collapsing the current structure would serve the best interests of Nigeria and Nigerians!

Professor Jega’s relatively easy option of devolving powers to the current 36 states, most of which are technically unviable and can’t handle such powers if given to them, is the kind of tinkering around the edges of reform that can’t transform Nigeria, that can’t move this country forward.

Yet Jega argues that “collapsing the current structure would be akin to asking the people to voluntarily surrender their autonomy”. But what “autonomy”? True autonomy is when a state entity and its people have the wherewithal to run their own affairs, generate prosperity, tackle poverty and insecurity, and, generally, enjoy social progress. Only a handful of the current 36 states have such autonomy, and most of the current states won’t have it even if powers were devolved to them.

Surely, when Professor Jega said that collapsing the current 36-state structure would amount to asking “the people to voluntarily surrender their autonomy”, he didn’t mean ordinary Nigerians, who are victims of the widespread poverty and insecurity induced by the current structure, but the political elite and their hangers-on whose vested interests are entwined with the same structure. They are the ones who would not voluntarily surrender their “autonomy” or vested interests.

Let’s face it, Nigeria is in this state of sclerosis because of what political scientists call “path dependency”. In the life of a country, a critical juncture, a fundamental causal event, can create and put structure sin paths that are difficult to alter, because vested interests tied to those structures would resist attempts to reverse them.

The path-switching critical junctures in Nigeria were the military interventions. The military came, created states, imposed constitutions and changed Nigeria’s governance structure, setting the country in paths that are now difficult to reverse. Junctures often unleash path-dependent processes that outlive them.

The last military regime ended 22 years ago, yet the Constitution that the military imposed, the states they created, are still structural obstacles to Nigeria’s progress today. Yet, thanks to path dependency, government and vested interests are resisting calls to restructure the country and replace the old, deeply-flawed structures with new, fit-for-purpose ones.

But path-dependent countries never make progress. And, truth is, Nigeria is utterly underdeveloped and fragile due to path-dependency. It’s time to break free from it and move the country forward. We don’t need a critical juncture, in the form of military intervention, to do that. What’s needed are transformative ideas, the will to talk and build national consensus and, of course, the will to change. Sadly, that will is absolutely lacking. But Nigeria must have it to succeed!

Vanguard News Nigeria