By Edoba Omoregie

I have carefully followed the debate on Nigeria’s federal system with mixed feelings. While it is heartening that some of the contributions manifest a growing culture of enlightened engagement necessary for democratic consolidation, many needlessly constrict the debate to ethnicity and choose to haul insults as substitute for sense.

The unwarranted fissures generated by such posturing only help to exhume primordial passion when indeed the federal question is neither about our obvious ethnic divide nor is it about who governs the country, but definitely about how best to organize and govern it. The truth is that if we focus on the real issues thrown up by the question and we get it right, every ethnic group within the country’s borders should be able to realize their aspirations.

There seems to be general agreement that the federal system in Nigeria is broken because of too much accretion of power in the federal government. In spite of this apparent national consensus, there remains an intense disagreement on how to resolve this obvious imbalance in the powers distributed to the federal government and the states.

In this contribution, I propose a principle to help refocus the debate on the future of federalism in the country. I propose that we adopt the Principle of Subsidiarity as the template on which to erect our federal system and resolve the lingering question of which tier should exercise what power.

The principle postulates that in a federation, the powers of government should be exercised by the sub-national units (states) because they possess more competence in solving problems which confront government daily and that the national (federal) government should only exercise power in respect of those matters in which the sub-national units are incapable of achieving result acting on their own because such matters are wide in scope, complex in nature or are of broad national effect.

Implicit in the subsidiarity principle are the notions of cooperation and coordination. Both governments must cooperate; and must coordinate their activities to achieve set goals. There is no question of closed compartments of the domain of powers. Thus, a power ordinarily possessed by one government in the constitutional design could be exercised by the other if properly donated depending on the scope, nature and effect of the goal.

The principle forms an integral part of federalism theory and manifests in the practical workings of successful federations the world over although not often expressed in their constitutions. Johannes Althusius in Politica Methodice Digesta, published in 1603 first formulated and proclaimed the subsidiarity principle as the cornerstone of federalism. Most recently in 2011, two scholars (Calabresi and Bickford) took a hard look at the principle and reaffirmed its indispensability in federal formation.

In their paper, “Federalism and Subsidiarity: Perspective from Law”, they identified four of its obvious virtues, namely: 1) subsidiarity ensures sub-national variation in preferences; 2) it deepens competition for tax payers and business and thus improve the quality of service delivery; 3) it enhances experimentation to develop the best set of rules; and 4) it makes policy monitoring less costly and more effective when performed by state officials than when performed by federal officials since it is easier for people to physically observe and question government officials who are in close proximity to them than those far away in the federal government.

Dr. Edoba Omoregie
Faculty of Law, University of Benin