1st January, 2016
Has the transportation minister ever travelled outside Nigeria? Have those trips ever included stops in any major airport in the United States of America? I use the United States because we pretend that our present system of government draws inspiration from and is modelled upon that of the United States.
What is more, one can only marvel at how much of our scarce foreign exchange continues to be frittered away on earning American credentials for those who govern us at all levels. And outside of government, as I have said in the past, [See “Of Intellectuals, Politics and Public Policy-Making in Nigeria” West Africa Review: Issue 5, 2004],
Nigeria must have the most active alumni associations of elite schools in the United States and the United Kingdom with minimum, if any, value added to the lives of ordinary Nigerians. What the latter get from them are the occasional low-paying jobs that the elite alumni and alumnae have them do at the regular shindigs hosted by the likes of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association and the OxBridge Club.
Let us go back to our functionaries and their regular visits to the United States. Many of them own property in the United States.
Do they make it their business to observe—forget study—how things are done in that country? If they do, is it the case that what they see does not register with them or they are convinced that such things as make life more livable in the United States are beyond their ken or beyond what they themselves, not to talk of ordinary Nigerian humanity, deserve to have?
A disclaimer is in order here. What follows is not written to score points. What I say here is so ordinary, all it takes is a bit of curiosity and deep dissatisfaction with our quality of life in Nigeria to wish to see similar things done to make living vastly better for all Nigerians.
The Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Atlanta, Georgia, United States, just celebrated its 100 millionth passenger.
It has not always been that way. Until about fifteen years ago, O’Hare-Field Chicago International Airport was the world’s busiest airport. The City of Atlanta never thought that they were destined to playing second fiddle to Chicago in perpetuity. Its successor mayors and councillors, its business moguls, its academic elite and all others seized of civic pride decided that their city was capable of attaining higher heights. Time did not hand over the status of “the world’s busiest airport” to Hartsfield-Jackson.
The “federal government” did not pre-select or designate Atlanta as a “centre of excellence” by fiat. The President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of the United States of America did not decree that “federal character” should determine at what pace the United States’ cities or states could march towards excellence or decree that Atlanta in the southeast not exceed Chicago in the midwest in the city attainment stakes. Hell, no!
The reason all the preceding did not happen is awfully simple: Atlanta is a city, incorporated in its own right, with a right to home rule, able to parlay its local wealth in land, infrastructure, quality of life for its citizens, and taxing powers, combined with solid political leadership and sound management of its resources and able to determine how high it wishes to fly. Additionally, its relationships with its neighbouring municipalities, its home county, the government of the State of Georgia where it is located, and the federal government of the United States, are all imbricated in a network of conventions, laws, regulations, political culture, all of which are modulated by serious philosophical principles respecting separation of powers, sovereignty of the person, limits on the powers of the state, and so on. What is not easily perceptible in all this is the sense on the part of everyone that it takes everyone doing his or her own part in this delicate choreography of modern living in order thereby to ensure for all the kind of life befitting their status as citizens and, more important, as human beings.
Why bother with all I just said? I wonder if we are not, on our junkets to other parts of the world, those proverbial strangers that Yorùbá say have eyes but don’t see with them. When you go to the website of Hartsfield-Jackson, under ‘Airport Information’, the top link is “Welcome from the Mayor” and the second is “Welcome from the G[eneral] M[anager]”. No message from the State Governor? No mug of the President? And consistent with this, when anything happens at the aiport, there are procedures in place for the different subordinates of the General Manager to discharge their functions in coordination with other units, each of them having clearly delimited functions and responsibilities. They would surely be called to account, both individually and as a group, when anything goes wrong at the airport. And the General Manager would be the face of the response, the first port of call for journalists, investigators, regulators, etc, right there at the airport.
Most important of all, the airport is owned and run by the City of Atlanta. Say what? A city owning lock, stock and barrel a major airport? Yes, the Mayor of Atlanta and his City Council are jointly the final authority on what happens at the airport and no federal authority or state authority would dare interpose itself in the business of that airport without risking illegality.
Now, I suppose it would be asking too much of my VIP compatriots to burrow into airport websites. But do they notice the ubiquitous signs outside those airports announcing: “Mayor Kasim Reed Welcomes You to Atlanta”; “Mayor Rahm Emmanuel Welcomes You to Chicago”? If they do, does the message of those signs ever resonate with them? If any evidence be needed, many people that I shared it with were surprised that they did not notice any incongruity in a group photograph taken at a conference of the world’s mayors with Babatunde Fashola as a participant. I am surprised that there has been no pushback from any corner of the ex-governor’s team against his being repeatedly identified in publications as “mayor of Africa’s largest city Lagos”. I am even more so that he did not see anything wrong with attending a mayors’ summit as a state governor. But that, precisely, is the problem.
Thanks to the march of illiteracy in our ranks, we no longer have cities in Nigeria. All the things that municipalities are supposed to do as the first, most-proximate-to-the-people tier of government have become buried in nebulous, completely unimaginative, almost no-name “Local Government Councils”. No state government dare try to change the arrangement. And no municipal governments dare think of working out arrangements with one another to secure the synergies that cities can create to make the likes of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport happen.
Does anyone suppose that our deservedly celebrated ex-governor who is now a new minister is thinking of how to dismantle the behemoth that stands in the way of Nigeria realizing its historical destiny?
Sadly, the signs we see are portentous. Nothing in the mantra of change of the present administration suggests that the governing party and its newly-minted bevy of degree-wielding functionaries all along the line think there is any problem with the structure of things as they are. This is where the full picture of the confederacy of illiterates that we call government and its functionaries emerges. I have merely used the Bauchi Airport incident and the contrast with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to set up the big indictment that is at the heart of this essay.
Hardly a day passes without some members of our confederacy venting on the issue of federalism, how we need fiscal federalism, how true federalism is the way to go and so on. But with very rare exceptions, few are those who go to the very heart of the matter and show some awareness of how radical the idea of federalism is in practice. That is, many who canvass federalism do not seem to realize some of its most radical ramifications. And it is our illiteracy concerning this mode of organizing our politics that explains our repeated failures, post-Civil War, to make our country run better for the benefit of all who reside within its borders.
Let me recount another incident. It was 1997. I was having a conversation with one of my old peers at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, regarding the state of our universities. Of course, those who know me from my days as a teacher at Ife know that I did not back then think anything good could come out of the penchant for centralization and micro-management that was beginning to characterize the operation of the National Universities Commission (NUC) back in the late 1980’s of the last century.
So I asked my friend, while making a case for dismantling the NUC, how much sense it makes, in a federal system, for a state to set up a university and put it under the authority of a federal institution like the NUC and its twin, Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board.
My friend was genuinely surprised. He had never thought of it in those terms. Then I reminded him that federalism is a model of conflict management in pluralist societies, that the ultimate authority on any issue under state jurisdiction in a federal system is the state governor and the state legislature. End of story. If there is any conflict with another state, a municipality within the state or the federal government, it is for the courts charged with the responsibility for constitutional interpretation to resolve.
My friend is not atypical. This partly is why I decided that we are either illiterates or frauds. But I don’t think that we are frauds. I sincerely think that many of us who run our affairs are somewhat not up to speed where it concerns what the institutions of foreign provenance that we insist on running our affairs through are or require for their successful operation. That is why we would have governors who shout about true federalism but think the idea of local government or municipal autonomy is anathema to them.
It is why we would enter government and just go blindly shooting darts in the dark hoping something might stick, never pausing to find out why some of our best brains shipwrecked in government in the past. And I am not talking of the light-fingered office holders.
I see some of us in the current administration going down the same cul de sacs. What is the business of the federal government running retail educational institutions like high schools? What are “federal medical centres”? Why do they exist while the big, necessary institutions needed to set the parameters for lower level institutions and train staff for the latter as well as generate research results the lower tiers could profit from are languishing? Why dissipate scarce energy and resources on small fry when the federal might such as it is is better utilized on broad policy and macro-management models? Why is it a federal responsibility to monitor traffic on our roads? Why have we been contented with continuing military rule in mufti? That is all we have done since 1999.
Why is the registration of vehicles, one of the best revenue earners for state and municipalities in other climes, a federal responsibility? Why do our governors think it is a good investment of their scarce time hosting carnivals and carol services?
How can we be a secular state but open legal years with religious services? Why is the judiciary of a state under the thumb of a so-called “National Judicial Council”? Why is it necessary for an Inspector General of Police in Abuja to be the one to decide how many police officers are needed in Ògbómòsó? Why can’t people in Òkè Ògùn, through their incorporated municipalities, use their land as collateral to raise capital to generate power from their thermal energy resources without having to have a minister in Abuja poke her nose into their affairs? Why does a state governor have to humiliate himself before any national assembly to obtain approval to raise a bond to build his state? Why do we insist on running a federal system on one constitution?
Such is the regime of illiteracy under which we live that its functionaries do not pause to ask some of the preceding questions before they enthusiastically plunge into the muck that masquerades as government under the present dispensation in Nigeria. What all this points to is that, as things stand right now, the military never left and only the illiteracy of our confederates and the lucre that accrues to many of them stand in the way of their realising that, in spite of occasional successes, the repeated need to come up with new blueprints for power and housing, solid minerals and railroads, agriculture and education, after each change of administration, points to the inevitability of failure until we decide to act as if we know what the true nature, level, and function of government is in a federal state. Welcome to future ladders of stupidity. Bauchi Airport will definitely not be the last of its kind.
[CONCLUDED]
Prof Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò teaches at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.