By Peter Claver Oparah
I don’t think any Nigerian will argue the fact that among the six geopolitical regions of the country, the South East remains the most neglected, the most marginalized and indeed the most abhorred in the country. The marginalization of the South East runs deeper than what is presented at the outside and derives from the mindset of other component units in Nigeria to ensure the South East is maximally reprehended for daring to opt out of the incongruous polity where everything is adopted by the component units to gain stronger hands over other component units.
It is a fact that the South East has the least number of states, least number of local government councils, least number of senatorial, House of Representatives, house of assembly and councillorship seats among the six zones of the country. It is unarguable that the South East has the least number of federal parastatals and establishments, the least mileage of federal roads, the least number of federal appointees and receives the least allocation from the federation account; the wellhead of public revenue in Nigeria and the main corpus of the fractious and acrimonious group-living that has dominated the Nigerian
With five states, the South East trail the South West, South South, North Central and North East regions by one state and trails the North West by one state. The South East is said to have less local governments than the two states of Kano and Jigawa! One is using this as a yardstick to measure how badly the South East is being treated among the component parts of the country. Because revenue and slices from the national cake are allocated based on these very artificial and highly whimsical considerations, it is understandable why the South East feels rightly that its woes and predicaments are man-made and strategically created to deliberately short-change the zone. And to understand the disadvantage the South East suffers from this shortfall, one just needs to calculate the monthly revenue accruable to an average state with commensurate number of local governments. When the calculation is extended to all manners of revenues, appointments and sundry benefits attached to the largely uncoordinated balkanization of the country into various states and local government by the successive military juntas that have taken turns to rape the country and promote their largely Byzantine interests, one will be in a better position to appreciate why the South East cries unendingly about persecution.
I don’t want to dwell on why this deficient position came to be as this has been well explored in previous literature by various interests that seek a redress to this state of lopsidedness. But one can state that the need for an additional state in the South State has come to dwarf all other demands for the rectification of this man-made anomaly that has targeted at a people that have demonstrated the most penchant to work with all tribes and tongue to realize the lofty goals of Nigerian nationhood. It is such that the demand for what has come to be an ‘additional state for the South East’ has wrongly become the easier way to describe the solution to the regime of marginalization of the South East. At present, it captures the demand of the South East for equity, even when it is only a tokenistic appreciation of a deep-rooted and multi-layered policy of state cheating against a people that demonstrates deep love for national cohesion.
The demand for an additional state in the South East, while it had remained hot and topical for long is no more realistic as it was when that anomaly was created. While it has passed through various spasmodic twists and bends, it has remained unrealized because the other groups in Nigeria are not just ready to redress this injustice. At best, they are willing to play around the issue and resume their business of grabbing enough for their people. We have had several conferences, several presentations, several empty assurances and several interventions on the need for the country to do the right thing and give the South East its commensurate number of states and local governments. With each false hope comes an added frenzy by combatants who want to have the envisaged state for themselves and their people. But each effort have rebounded and ended like poor wicks of an ill-tempered fire, leaving the South East as distraught as before they started and the region still trails others in the number of local governments and states as well as the accruable revenue from that arrangement.
But the pertinent question remains why the South East should limit their demand to just an additional state when that will still leave them with a deficit with the North West? What actually makes it imperative for the North West to have seven states and for others to see equity in their having six states? Do the other four regions contend themselves with just six states when the North West has seven states? If so much importance is attached to the number of states a region has and the regions are structured equally with each other, why should the North West have seven regions while the others have six? Who actually decreed that through the stroke of military fiat, one zone should have more states, get more revenue, get more federal representations that the other zones?
It is therefore right and proper that the South East should modify their campaign for an additional state and the other four zones should start their own demand for an additional state each to bring the zones in parity with the North West. Also, the local government structure should be modified to use population as a credible benchmark to create local governments or to create equal local governments for the states. This is the only way to ensure equity in the present Nigerian state. I don’t, for one, believe in the continued balkanization of the country into several unviable chips but since it had been made the determining factor in the distribution of state resources, I have no choice but to embrace this convenient structure and it is on this that I state that the South East must have additional two states while the other four states must have their additional state for each zone to have equal number of states. I believe that this position is supported by equity in a nation where so much premium is placed on this structural imperative. In a nation where bare-faced lies like that which posits that Kano, which ordinarily has less population that Alimosho Local Government in Lagos, has the highest population in the country, just for the pecuniary benefits of this falsity, nothing but a system that encourages equal access and distribution of the country’s resources suffices until we see the need to ensure that this nation is organized on the paths of justice and fairplay.
It is disheartening that the cache of politicians in the South East today are rather engaged in an enervating rat race to corner the envisaged ‘additional state’ where they hope to dip their carnivorous fangs and pillage the envisaged resources that would accrue to that state. They are blind to the fact that with an additional state, the South East still trails the North West. They are blind to the fact that even an additional state would not assuage the deficient number of local councils in the South East. They are more concerned with the selfish underlay of that additional state that they refuse to see a bigger picture, which by the way, will give their selfish intents a boost and give the people of the South east the much denied equitable treatment in the carnivorous Nigerian polity.
All said, let the South East have its two states and commensurate local councils and let the other four regions have their additional states and let all those that should make this happen ensure this is done as quickly as possible. Or let this nation dissolve into six vibrant regions and collapse the states into these regions. This ensured greater development in the first republic than the howling scam that obtains at present.
• Oparah wrote in from Ikeja, Lagos. E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com
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