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Federal Character Has Outlived its Relevance

March 25, 2010
Federal Character. It’s Nigeria’s version of affirmative action, our effort, so say its proponents, to ensure that our public institutions are peopled in a manner that reflects our demographic diversity. It is, on paper, a mechanism for accessing public goods and privileges in a fashion consistent with our ethno-regional plurality.


The PDP may be the architect of rotational presidency, to which we are today captive, but the ideological genealogy of rotation is traceable to the same thinking that is at the heart of federal character.

There is also little to quibble with in the effort to engineer fair, balanced representation. There is however something tragically wrong when this becomes an end itself and when federal character becomes the enemy of the very ideals that we claim to be using it to achieve: equity and fairness. What is fair or equitable about shutting down a citizen’s aspiration or ambition — for which they are exceptionally qualified — because of the need to achieve ethnic or state balancing? This is the problem we face.

Equity: the principle does not denote equality, a utopian, unattainable ideal. Equity demands that everyone be given a fair shake and that everyone’s reward mirror the volume of their contribution. That’s fairness, not equality. Fairness is attainable. Equality is a mirage. We seem to have the two confused in our obsession with federal character, rotational presidency, and quota system.

If we applied this understanding of equity in our constitution-making, we would not have a problem with the modest demand of the people of the Niger Delta for a 25 percent derivation payment.

When this demand was broached at the Obasanjo-organized National Conference charade, the proposition gained little traction. The rhetoric of the non-Niger delta delegates found a convenient semiotic connection between equity and equality: as equal federating units of Nigeria, we should have equal shares from oil revenue, many delegates haughtily insisted. Equality was conflated with equity. The existing 13 percent derivation payment was made to sound like discriminatory charity. Some even went so far as to call for its revocation.

Move the discussion to a different context. At stake is not access to oil revenue but the distribution of public office and placement spots in federal bureaucratic and educational institutions. You would expect consistency in the political elite’s rhetoric. What one gets instead is an invocation of the federal character principle. Non-Niger Delta politicians are quick to switch scripts — from the trope of equality to that of regional balance — when the topic shifts from Niger Delta resource control demands. They endorse the discriminatory, unfair, and uncompetitive status quo; they support federal character in fanatical tones. But federal character directly violates the spirit of equality (equal opportunity and competition) that is often advanced to discredit the Niger Delta struggle for fairness and equity in the distribution of oil revenue.

Yet this contradiction has not registered on our politicians from the non-Niger Delta zones.

Our insistence on the application of a federal character principle, which claims to promote fairness and builds towards equality but which actually undermines both, is the biggest indictment on our collective hypocrisy. We pick and choose the issues on which true equity should be the baseline of deliberation and which ones to subject to the counterpoint of the federal quota system.

Then there is the issue of whether Federal Character is something that we still need or whether it is yesterday’s solution for today’s problems.

Our country stands challenged on multiple fronts—political, economic, ethical, and technological. This epic national challenge demands that we turn our country over to our best and brightest and that we determine who the best are through a fair, competitive scrutiny of their claims. Our challenges demand that those who claim to have what it takes to produce what we desire are made to demonstrate their expertise on an equal, competitive platform of evaluation. The last thing we need at this critical juncture is a constitutional provision that venerates mediocrity. A comatose country courts excellence in order to recover; it does not cultivate mediocrity.

The urgency of our national problems makes the hypocritical search for equity through federal character and rotation an expensive, atavistic proposition. It is a political solution to a technocratic problem, an arrangement that harks back to a distant period when politics was held to be more important than economic survival because economic survival was a taken-for-granted fact of life. What Nigeria needs is technocratic competence, governmental efficiency, and an across-the-board meritocracy. What federal character fosters is mediocrity baptized in the argument of fair representation.

This truth has dawned on most Nigerians: that what matters to Nigeria’s beleaguered people is not how many ministers come from a certain region or whether a certain state has any minister in the federal cabinet but how effective these ministers are in making government work for the people.

The only group not to have caught on to this pragmatic reality is the political elite. For them the distribution and allocation of federal political offices and other largesse outrank the commitment to effective governance and problem solving.

There was a time when the federal character principle was crucial to the very survival of the union, and sentimental investments in ethno-regional representation trumped the existential anxieties of Nigerians. This was the 1960s. The potency of identity politics in that immediate post-independence period was expressed dramatically and gruesomely in the vehement and — later — violent opposition to Aguiyi-Ironsi’s unification decree.

But that was then. This is 2010. The economic comforts of the 1960s that cushioned the stomachs of citizens and gave them the luxury of indulging in the crude politics of representation have evaporated. Today, Nigerians and their livelihoods are besieged by a predatory cohort of politicians and bureaucrats who have reduced their existence to a scavenging adventure. In this crisis of survival, the politics of representation is the least concern of most Nigerians. What they desire is a government that meets its obligations to its citizens while working to unleash their potentials. The human faces of such of a government and their ethno-regional labels have come to mean less and less as we slide more and more into a developmental abyss.

The federal character principle is understood, in this new political atmosphere, as a mere conduit for elite patronage and for the circulation of public privileges. It bears little or no relevance to the needs of the suffering peoples of Nigeria.

Even the global political economy has transformed before our eyes, imposing new, competitive imperatives on all nations — burdens that cannot coexist with pandering to mediocrity in the name of balanced representation. We live in a globalized world, where the uncompetitive becomes a victim not a beneficiary of this unprecedented human and ideational mobility. The challenges of this new world call for the patronage and cultivation of excellence and merit at all levels, not shoo-in arrangements that stifle competition and innovation.

A persuasive argument could be made in the 1960s and 1970s about the educational backwardness of the North, the disproportionate historical disposition of Southern Nigeria to Western education, and how that might trouble the waters of our national cohesion without a deliberate policy intervention to skew the levers of equal competition. Today, such an argument would be passé. It would even be patronizing to the North. The most effective way to boost Northern educational aspirations is not to guarantee the region a quota of representation in federal institutions but to act out a tough-love, hands-off policy of non-interference in which the best man or woman wins. Competition is a more effective stimulant than quota patronage.

Finally, the ideal that underpins federal character does not square with a widely shared and expressed ideal: the preference for residency (a counterpoint to ancestral origin) as the supreme marker of citizenship/indigene rights. In the wake of the recent Jos crises, this ideal has gained currency across the political and intellectual spectrums. Conversely, there has been widespread outrage at the practical consequences of the indigene/settler divide.

But where is a similar outrage at the consequences of federal character, which, like the indigene/settler model, excludes and denies access and participation not on the basis of incompetence and lack of ability but of origin? Selective outrage won’t cut it.

The reform of citizenship rights that is widely endorsed across Nigeria violates and is violated by the ideal of federal character, which not only recognizes, codifies, and consolidates ethno-regional and ancestral origin and citizenship but also encourages its use as a basis to make claims over federal privileges and positions. It is disingenuous to advance a reform that seeks to recognize and canonize merit and ability in one arena and turn around to uphold a principle (federal character) that violates same in another.

We can’t have it both ways. If we want to keep a retrogressive and outdated constitutional invention like federal character, then let’s stop pontificating about a cosmopolitan, identity-neutral, universe of fair competition and fair reward as we did in the wake of Jos.

On the other hand, if we agree that the constitutional codification of ethno-regional representation (in the form of indigene-based federal character) is counterproductive and outmoded, the reasonable thing to do is to expunge it from our constitution. This would make it easier for us to move against the indigene/settler dichotomy, rotational presidency, and quota system because we wouldn’t open ourselves to charges of hypocrisy and selective rejection of primordial politics.

The choice is between excellence and mediocrity. My vote is for excellence.



The author can be reached at: [email protected]

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