Chidi okoh |As Nigeria continues to battle with severe social economic and political challenges confronting the nation, a former Minister for lands housing and urban development Chief Nduese Essien has called for true federalism as a panacea to the challenges.
Essien a former member of the House of Representatives between 1999-2007, who spoke in an interview with our correspondent lamented that unitary system which is unique to military dictatorship has created more problems for the country under democracy.
According to him,” The Federal Government of Nigeria has been distorted from what it used to be. We are supposed to be a federation but since the emergence of the military into governance, we lost the federal structure because the military is used to unitary system against federal structure. We have expected that after the military rule, Nigeria should have returned to federal structure. People feel that Nigeria should be restructured to what it was supposed to be; which is a federation, because of the multiplicity of ethnic groups that abound in Nigeria“.
The Ex Minister explained that the continuous operation of unitary structure is depriving states resources meant for their development stressing that the over dependence on the centre is stifling progress and development at state level.
In his words,“The continuous use of this unitary structure has deprived a lot of states the money they could have used for their development. Before the advent of the military the regions were developing at their own pace using whatever resources at their disposal, but now the federal government takes all the resources and shares according to her wishes and those who generate the resources are not major beneficiaries as it goes more to those who don’t produce anything“.
Describing the negative impact the absence of true federalism is hoisting to oil producing states, Essien said, “Akwa Ibom State produces up to 30 per cent of the oil revenue in this country but ends up getting just 13 per cent of the production and yet the 13 per cent is far inadequate because of the hazards that accompany oil production which have been on for over 50 years.
“Therefore the output from the oil production is not used to compensate the people suffering from the hazards of the job but taken to the federal level and disbursed indiscriminately. Akwa Ibom has a cause to complain and he have been complaining and insisting that the derivation be increased. It is better we return to the federal structure in which each state controls her resources and pay what is agreed to the federal government. That is how other federations all over the world are run.
The former lawmaker said that there are too many resources available to the federal government and it leads to ineffective utilization.
“When the resources are so much, people always find ways of expending it and some of the ways are not justifiable. You can see what is happening, the Federal Government of Nigeria believes that people can be given raw cash in the streets and villages to live on and they are doing so presently through the federal minister of Humanitarian Affairs who goes round with billions of naira to share out to individuals. Where do you find a government in the world that gives cash to individuals to live on and for how long will they continue to do it and how effective will it be?.
Berating the conditional cash transfer programme of the federal government meant to help the poor, the former minister highlighted,
“I believe that they are doing so because there is so much cash accumulated at the federal level and as a means of expending the money; they provide what I called senseless approach to disbursing the money. I haven’t heard of any country giving out cash to citizens to go and live on against investment. How long will they be giving this N20,000 to selected few people in a population of 200 million people? I think the Federal Government has deviated in the utilization of the country’s funds and should deploy some of these funds to the state where it will be appropriately utilized”.
Leave a Reply