Nigeria: Changing Dynamics of State CreationBY OCHEREOME NNANNA, 10 JULY 2014 I find it amusing when people use the concept of viability to discredit the clamour for more states in Nigeria. They parrot it without pausing to ask themselves why states are created in this country. Regions or states are not business enterprises or profit-making ventures which have to be adjudged viable before they are gone into. They are political and governmental structures and platforms, simpliciter. The fact that they operate their own economies does not mean they will shut down, like companies, even if they go bankrupt. Creation of states has served very useful purposes. It has given people a sense of ownership of their slice of the Nigerian political commonwealth. It has benefited both the Majority and Minority groups. The further clamour for more states is merely a sign that smaller Minority groups in some states which have not found political and economic fulfillment want to have something of their own. Secondly, state creation has taken development closer to the grassroots. Go and check the states created on September 23, 1987 (when Akwa Ibom and Katsina states were created), August 27, 1991 (when Abia, Enugu, Osun, Delta, Taraba, Kogi, Kebbi, Jigawa and Yobe states were spawned by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime) as well as those created by General Sani Abacha on October 1, 1996 (Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Gombe, Kebbi and Nasarawa states). You will notice the quantum of both human and capital development which cannot be compared to what they experienced as backwater areas of the old Regions. In fact, it is people from these areas that are in the forefront of kicking violently against a return to the regional structure. I know for a fact that Generals Babangida and Abacha are regarded as liberators in states like Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Ekiti and Ebonyi, in spite of what people say about them to the contrary. States are created in Nigeria to provide political platforms for emerging local elites to assert their clamour for political space. The defunct three regions - East, West and North - were created by the British colonial masters to allow the nationalists agitating for independence to have platforms to lead their people. When the lot fell on the Majority Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa/Fulani, the various Minorities within the regions started demanding for their own states. The politics often verged on armed struggles, subterfuges and cross-regional alliances. It became possible for the Ijaws of Eastern Nigeria to go into an alliance with the leaders of Northern Peoples Congress, NPC, with a view to upstaging the Igbo-dominated Eastern leadership, which was blocking the creation of the Calabar Ogoja/Rivers, COR, State. The Ibibio areas preferred to ally with Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the leader of Western Nigeria. Through the Minorities, the North and West made inroads into the East. The situation was the same in Western Nigeria, where most of the Minorities sided with Dr Nnamdi Azikiwes political party, which helped make it possible for the National Council for Nigerian Citizens, NCNC, to win majority of the seats in the Western Regional House of Assembly in the early 1950s before the carpet crossing even took place in Ibadan. Awolowos party (the Action Group) also won several constituencies in the Minority areas of the North, which in their quest for self-determination, started identifying themselves as the Middle Belt. It was the strength of the accord between the NPC and the NCNC, as well as the support that the NCNC had in the Midwest that made it possible for the Midwest Region to be carved out of the Western Region in 1963. The Mid-Western Region was never created because of any perceived viability. This was further validated when on May 27, 1967 General Yakubu Gowon created the 12 states. Gowons primary purpose was to secure the support of the Minorities by giving them the states they had long fought for. He carved out the defunct East Central State (the core of the breakaway Republic of Biafra) and isolated it by given the Minorities and fringe Igbo-speaking groups two states (Rivers and South Eastern State) which took away the Biafran coastline. This not only secured the support of the Minorities to fight along with Gowon, it also gave him open access to set up the blockades that starved Biafra of food and weaponry, thus eventually leading to the end of the secession attempt. The primary factor in the 12 states creation was the survival of Nigeria as a united entity. For the first and only time in our history of state creation, a balanced federation in which the South had six states and the North also had six was established. The North never complained about sharing equal number of states with the South because they needed the cooperation of everybody to overcome Biafra. But when the war ended in victory for the federal side, the North started surreptitiously, through their sons who were in power in the military, to award themselves a greater number of states and local councils. They created a constitution that put a permanent stamp on Northern Majority. They have done everything since then to prevent the restoration of a balanced federation. Before the war, the North insisted on maintaining its unity as a region. In fact, all the regions made strenuous efforts to ensure new states were not carved out of them. On the other hand, they ganged up with their cross-regional allies to ensure that the kingdoms of their most prominent political foes were reduced at any handiest opportunity. But after the war, everyone started agitating for more states to be carved out of their regions while making efforts to frustrate a similar gesture in regions they considered to be their traditional foes, as evident in a section of the Norths rejection of a sixth state for the South East. There was a very overwhelming reason for this. We will discuss it on Monday, by His Grace.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 08:21:07 +0000
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