By Olukorede Yishau
On Tuesday, we all got another piece of evidence that we are deceiving ourselves as a nation. Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu was at an estate in Magodo to intervene in a crisis that has seen policemen from Abuja, the nation’s seat of power, lay siege and make the new year start on a sad note for the residents.
The governor urged the police to vacate the estate, but the Chief Superintendent Officer in charge of the suspicious operation told Sanwo-Olu that he would ‘with due respect’ do no such thing. The governor’s plea that the officer should call his superior was also turned down with ‘due respect’. There is an above above the governor!
The governor’s encounter with the CSP, for me, is another clear sign that we are a joke as a nation. It is one of the several things militating against our growth and development.
Our Constitution, whose preamble lies that it was put together by ‘we the people’, recognises the governor as the Chief Security Officer of the state. But, in reality, as clearly shown by this event, this is one of the many lies in this strange document that guides our life as a nation. The policemen obey no one but the Inspector-General of Police, who takes orders from the President.
So, President Muhammadu Buhari is the CSO of each of the 36 states of the federation. The fact that the government of a state like Lagos spends so much money on the police every year means little or nothing. When the chips are down, the police ‘with due respect’ ignore the governors and align with the centre, where their pay comes from. It is a case of he who pays the piper calling the tunes.
The issue of who controls the police has been around for a long time. Politics has played a sad role in this. It was believed that the control of the police must be centralised to prevent politicians at the state level from using them against opponents. Unfortunately, elements at the federal level have also used it in questionable circumstances.
The funny federalism that Nigeria operates borrows nothing from the advanced world where the government at the centre bothers itself only with issues of national security, international diplomacy and such issues of gargantuan proportion.
Instead, our own federalism determines how the natural resources in a state are explored, how the Value Added Tax in a state is shared, how a state is policed, how the local government is administered, and how other minute details of a state’s life are worked out.
Every month, state governments take turns in Abuja to take their share of the national cake. Our governors regularly go cap in hand to beg the Lords in Abuja for porridge. We see this shameful pilgrimage often, so much that we have become used to it and now see it as normal.
I believe sincerely that the challenge with electricity is self-inflicted. The Constitution puts electricity matters on the exclusive list and when states establish power plants, they have no control over the distribution channels, and as such have no control over how the power generated from the plant is distributed.
The Federal Government has ceded the distribution to the clowns called distribution companies and we are all witnesses to the nonsense they do. Many of them simply don’t know what to do with the power they have been given.
The danger in the kind of federalism we operate played out during the Olusegun Obasanjo administration. The administration refused to release local government allocation to Lagos State. Obasanjo’s excuse was that the Bola Tinubu administration created new local governments.
Our strange Constitution gives states the power to create local governments, but it gives the power to list these local governments in the Constitution to the Federal Government. It is a case of giving with one hand and taking back with the other. Despite court pronouncements, Obasanjo held on to the money. It took the Umaru Yar’Adua administration for Lagos to get its due.
We do not need a strong centre. What we need are strong federating units that contribute to the centre and not a centre that is so powerful that states have to cower before it. What we have now allows a President to determine who enjoys federal largesse and we are witnesses to instances where favours are dispensed along party lines. The country belongs to all irrespective of party affiliations.
States should control their resources and contribute to the centre. With a weak centre, the do-or-die over who becomes president will die down. It is warped logic that our federalism allows a state that destroys alcoholic beverages to benefit from VAT paid on the forbidden drink. If you do not like a woman, you do not deserve the grace she carries. It should be as simple as that.
I blame this warped federalism for the illegal mining going on all over the country. From Zamfara to Osun and elsewhere, locals, with help of fraudulent foreigners, are milking the nation dry. Traditional rulers are not left out of this economic sabotage. If our law does not overburden the Federal Government with what it clearly lacks the capacity to do, we should be earning so much from our gold, our bitumen, our tantalite, our granite and our so many other natural resources.
We are instead fixated on oil as if that is the only thing we have, and even that we are messing it up. Big time. Management of these resources should be vested in states. It has no business being on the exclusive list. It is this funny list that has left the vast bitumen deposits in Ondo untapped and thus leaving a potential money-spinner wasting away. We need to stop being a nation of potentials and donning the toga of a land where potentials daily become money and jobs.
My final take: I sincerely see absolutely no sense in a law that allows a CSP to disobey a CSO. It is senseless that our strange law allows the CSP to tell the governor, the so-called CSO, that his orders are from Abuja and only Abuja can tell him what to do. We will go nowhere if we continue with this joke of a federalism.
• Yishau is a newspaper columnist and author of ‘In The Name of Our Father’and’Vaults of Secrets’.