By Adekunle Adekoya

BY now, those who perfected the template that is being used to run Nigeria must be squirming in their chairs as they watch how events unfold. For those of them still alive, a sense of shame may prevent them from coming out to apologise to the rest of us who are suffering.

Those of them who have passed on must be turning in their graves, wiping the orbs of their skulls where their eyes had been with gnarled, skeletonious fingers, and muttering: Is this what we did to Nigeria?

Those who perfected this template that is not benefitting any of us constitute a very large club whose membership is drawn from all ethnic groups. Membership is drawn from all the professions — military, academia, legal, industry, etc. As a collective, I call them the power elite.

They decide who gets what, where, when, and how. They decide which infrastructural project should be embarked upon, when, for how much, and in which part of the country. They also decide, perhaps while picking their teeth after their usually sumptuous dinners, how much the national currency, the Naira, should exchange for, with other currencies.

Perhaps, over aperitifs, or digestifs, they also decide how many foreign exchange windows we should have, and how much the Naira should exchange for in which window.

These magicians also decided that Lagos was no longer good enough as federal capital, and decided to gift the country a better one. Abuja was born, and a construction boom began. Finally, by presidential proclamation of December 12, 1991, the seat of government moved to Abuja.

Apart from that, they also decided that universities in the country must answer to one master, and thus, the President became the Visitor to all federal universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, and colleges of education. In addition, they stopped these institutions from conducting their own entrance examinations, and created an organization to do that for them. JAMB was thus born.

With JAMB came all kinds of criteria; that your child scored more than 50 per cent was no guarantee of admission. Other things like quota, catchment area, disadvantaged area, cut-off point, ethnic group, etc determined whether a child will get a university placement or not. All the aforementioned have given rise to different causes and effects, generating all kinds of emotions in Nigerians, especially that of anger at the system.

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These people speak just one language, the language of money. They don’t agree all the time; in fact they rarely agree on anything at any time, but since their interests collide, they aggregate into groups and the various groups thus formed worm their ways into the political parties where they take control of the levers of power, and from there, they continue the magic.

It is magic because the power elite, apart from being unable to deliver good governance since 1999 have serially demonstrated incompetence in the management of public affairs; save a few exceptions in some states and in some federal ministries.

In 1993, they decided they’d had enough of sales tax; they enacted a law (decree), and Value Added Tax, VAT, came, taking full effect from January 1994.

Twenty-seven years after, a conflict of gargantuan proportions is unfolding over VAT. The Rivers State High court judgement which empowered the state, and not the Federal Inland Revenue Service to collect VAT is a landmark judgement whose impact on politics and policy cannot be immediately seen.

Whichever side will be right at the end of the day, one thing is clear: the decision to challenge VAT collection in court is an emotional one, the result of deep-seated anger and disenchantment with a system that is hobbling progress, to put it mildly.

Besides, our federalism is being put to test in a way that will not just upset the system, but perhaps set in motion the drivers for a federation that runs on equity. FIRS has gone to the National Assembly, even though the matter is still in court. Neither the National Assembly nor the courts will be able to solve this one.

It is an emotional issue, and solutions must be found in an appeal to the emotions of those affected. If anybody is thinking Governor Nyesom Wike is the only  person angry at the state of of affairs, that person is wrong. Very many Nigerians are very angry at the way things are.

In fact, Nigerians angry with the system must triple in number those who are satisfied. It is also instructive that Lagos State, the biggest VAT generator has joined the war, and as I write, all the states of the federation have sued the Federal Government over sharing of revenue accruing from stamp duty collections.

The FG should shift into management mode, and constructively engage the state governments. This is not time for muscle-flexing; the template on which governance runs in Nigeria is not only defective, it is skewed for advantages in favour and disadvantages against, and is generating emotions that we do not need at this time. Caution!

Vanguard News Nigeria