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• SERVICE TO FATHERLAND: PRESENTATIONS BY JFCN GUEST SPEAKERS AT ITS ANNUAL LECTURES

  SERVICE TO FATHERLAND: PRESENTATIONS BY JFCN GUEST SPEAKERS AT ITS ANNUAL LECTURES
  
  
  
                                                           BENJAMIN DIKKI
   
  Mr. Benjamin Ezra Dikki, was until his appointment on November 27,2012 by President Goodluck Jonathan as the acting Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the Director of Industries and Services at the BPE.
   
  Born on December 30, 1958, Dikki is a 1980 accounting graduate of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria. He also holds an M.B.A from ABU.
   
  He joined the BPE as a Director on December 1, 2004 and has served in many departments, starting as Director of Power and Communications. He has also served as Director (Finance and Management Support); Director (Transport and Aviation); and Director (Communications and Capital Market).
   
  Before joining BPE, Dikki had worked as a Consultant with Galaxie Securities Limited. He was Managing Director of First Atlantic Securities Limited, a stock broking company. He also worked with Continental Merchant Bank (Former Chase Merchant Bank). Dikki has also been an employee of Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) and the Health Services Management Board, Sokoto State.
  He was licensed as a stockbroker in June 1993.
   
  Dikki has attended several courses and seminars in Nigeria and abroad. He is married with three biological children and adopted ones. He is from Zuru local government area of Kebbi State.
   
   
   
  
  Born in Kaduna State on 13^th October, 1964, Mr. Anthony Chidi Ejinkeonye, was raised in Onitsha, Anambra State. He is a graduate of Accounting from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka and is a Certified National Accountant.
  He has strong family roots in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria and has over 15 years of broad-based Chamber experience. In 2014, he was elected the President of Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
  Currently, a National Vice President of the umbrella body of the Chambers of Commerce in Nigeria—the National Association of Chambers Of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA)— he is also a Council Member of the Consolidation of Northern States Chambers Of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (CONSCCIMA).
  He brought Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry into the Silk Road Chamber of International Commerce, China as the only Nigerian Chamber presently a member. 
  Ejinkeonye is the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of Lee Nigeria Limited, a Nigerian company incorporated in 1965 with interests in manufacturing, recycling, merchandising, construction, financial and engineering consulting. He has over 20 years of business development experience.
  He is on the Board of the following companies—Nigerian Polypropylene Bag Company Ltd; Nelson Benjamin Ltd; and Nelan Consultants.
   
  THE ROLE OF PRIVATE SECTOR IN FCT DEVELOPMENT
  BY MR TONY EJINKEONYE
  President, Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry
  At the 2017 ANNUAL LECTURE OF JUST FRIENDS CLUB OF NIGERIA @ Sandralia Hotel, Jabi, Abuja Thursday, November 30, 2017 Km 8, Airport Road, Abuja, FCT
  1. Introduction
   Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
  Good morning!
  It is with profound gratitude that I thank the Just Friends Club of Nigeria for inviting me to share these unforgettable moments with you this morning. It is both a privilege and an honour to be in your midst and to give this year’s Annual Lecture which is another dimension that Just Friends club uses to foster and encourage the spirit of oneness, companionship and comradeship amongst members and between the club and other friendly associations. I choose the topic: “The Role of the Private Sector in FCT Development,” because, as you may know, the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) is the voice of the private sector, especially in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). And the ACCI was established with the principal objective of promoting economic and industrial development within the FCT in particular and Nigeria in general. Therefore, I would like to focus on a number of issues that I feel are central to the development of the capital city: The Federal Capital Territory (FCT), why private sector? the role of the private sector and the contribution of ACCI – a private sector organization, in the development of the FCT. 2. The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) The Federal Capital Territory, commonly known as FCT, is a federal territory in central Nigeria. Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, is located in this territory. FCT was formed in 1976 from parts of the states of Nasarawa, Niger and Kogi. It is within the Middle Belt region of the country. Unlike the States of Nigeria, which are headed by elected Governors, it is administered by the Federal Capital Territory Administration, headed by a minister appointed by the President. The territory is located just north of the confluence of the River Niger and River Benue. It is bordered by the states of Niger to the West and North, Kaduna to the northeast, Nasarawa to the east and south and Kogi to the southwest. Lying between latitude 8.25 and 9.20 north of the equator and longitude 6.45 and 7.39 east of Greenwich Meridian, Abuja is geographically located in the center of the country. The Federal Capital Territory has a landmass of approximately 7,315 square kilometres and it is situated within the Savana region with moderate climatic conditions. The territory is currently made up of six local councils, comprising the City of Abuja and five Local Government Councils, namely: Abaji, Abuja Municipal, Gwagwalada, Kuje, Bwari, and Kwali. Some of the natural resources in the FCT include: Marble, Tin, Clay, Mica, Tantalite, and Lead / Zinc. Abuja which is within the FCT is a planned city which replaced the country's most populous city of Lagos as the capital of Nigeria on 12 December 1991. The city which at the 2006 census, had a population of 776,298 persons, according to the United Nations, grew by 139.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, making it the fastest growing city in the world. Since 2015, the city is still experiencing an annual growth of at least 35 percent, still retaining its position as the fastest-growing city on the African continent and one of the fastest-growing in the world. Abuja has witnessed a huge influx of people into the city; the growth has led to the emergence of satellite towns, such as Karu Urban Area, Suleja, Gwagwalada, Lugbe, Kuje and smaller settlements towards which the planned city is sprawling. The unofficial metropolitan area of Abuja has a population of well over three million, making it the fourth largest metropolitan area in Nigeria, surpassed only by Lagos, Kano and Ibadan. As at 2016, the metropolitan area of Abuja is estimated at 6 million persons, placing it behind only Lagos, as the most populous metropolitan area. 3 | P a g e Apart from being the centre of executive power/governance, Abuja inhabits the federal legislative chambers, all federal ministries as well as the Supreme Court. Also, foreign embassies, consulate offices, diplomatic institutions as well as private enterprises operate in the city. Over the past two decades, billions of Naira have been invested in physical infrastructure, basic amenities, security as well as other public goods across the city. In fact, the annual budget allocation to FCT leapfrogged from N11 billion in year 2000 to over N220 billion in 2017, with capital expenditure taking about 70 percent of total votes. Against the backdrop of increased public spending, a lot have been achieved in the areas of provision of quality road network, sprawling urban housing, street lights in strategic places, and the Abuja-Kaduna railway network which is the only standard gauge rail network in Nigeria in operation; However, there is still a huge infrastructure deficit in the FCT. Many abandoned development projects with huge commercial viability in the nation’s capital abound, such as the Millennium Tower, National Cultural Centre, Centenary project, uncompleted bridges, poor access roads, the 220-bed Utako District Hospital; many public-school projects, water and electricity projects. The dimension and nature of development challenges in FCT is so worrisome that in some communities, residents still sleep on open places and drink from the streams. Thus, with the fast-increasing rate of the population in the territory, there is an urgent need for adequate infrastructure as well as the need for increased production, processing and commerce in the territory to match demand. 3. Why Private Sector? The private sector is the part of a country's economic system that is run by individuals and companies, rather than the government. Most private sector organizations are run with the intention of making profit. But, private sector for development is about the various forms of engagement through contractual partnerships between a public party on the one hand and a private party on the other for the purpose of achieving specified development objectives. A growing choir of voices within multilateral institutions and donor aid agencies started championing the role of the private sector in development at a time, very probably not coincidental, when Official Development Assistance (ODA) budgets started declining and the private sector is seen as a key partner in the broader development finance arena. Perhaps the most powerful ‘push’ factor explaining the increased interest in the role of the private sector in development circles is the opportunity for creating tied aid. Some donors are in fact very explicit about the link between efforts around the private sector and aid tying, despite the latter running directly contrary to the principles and commitments agreed to under the Aid and Development Effectiveness agenda. Another important driver is the perception that the public purse has run dry, government allocations not enough to cater for public goods and ODA flows are declining. In other words, as public budgets are squeezed, there is a need to look to alternative forms of development financing. Key to this line of thinking are the notions of “value for money” and of “leveraging” private finance through public support. Yet these concepts are poorly defined and problematic. Importantly, tied aid appears to be a strong underlying motive for development initiatives targeting the private sector. Finally, it may be grounded in the economic underpinnings of some governments and policy makers, which upholds the common belief that the market and hence the private sector simply “does it better”. 4 | P a g e On the business side, the agenda creates opportunities for multinational enterprises to enhance access to markets, but also to access policymakers. The rise of an “inclusive business” agenda, which is actively supported by the World Bank is testimony to that trend. In essence, inclusive business is about unlocking the business opportunities of the poor living at the “bottom of the pyramid” to transform these people into a “financially profitable business model”. 4. Requirements for Private Sector Participation Interactive planning and decision-making processes are needed to support private sector participation in urban governance, and to co-ordinate this participation with municipalities. Municipalities can strengthen urban governance in co-operation with the private sector by fostering partnerships and local economic development strategies that combine local skills, resources and ideas to stimulate the local economy, enabling it to respond innovatively to national and global economic changes. For example, effective local economic development strategies detail how the municipality will: • develop and maintain infrastructure and services; • promote and expand existing businesses; • address inefficiencies in the local economy; • promote human capital development, to help vulnerable groups especially, to participate in the labour market; • encourage community development by promoting community business and co-operatives, local exchange systems and informal credit etc.; • promote micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) through supply-side measures (training, provision of space and facilities for commercial activity etc.) and demand-side measures (reforms to procurement policy to ensure access for MSMEs to contracts); and • attract investment in the city. An explicit local economic development strategy links long-term economic growth issues with short-term concerns about joblessness, inequality and the role of the private sector in a sustainable development strategy. In fostering partnerships, municipalities need to build relations with local and foreign private sector interests by involving associations and companies in city-wide strategic planning processes. This can build commitment to a broader vision for the city that goes beyond short-term interests. This might involve a formalized partnership with organized business (e.g. Public Private Partnerships -PPPs) based on the municipality’s strategic vision. Other innovative collaborations include private sector provision of managerial and technical training and support to help municipalities improve the strategic management of urban areas. In many countries the informal sector is the main provider of goods and services to the poor. City-wide development initiatives need to assist businesses with potential to mature by eliminating punitive regulations that discourage the informal sector. But programmes need to balance two objectives: maximising the potential of informal enterprises to create jobs and alleviate poverty, while ensuring that necessary social protections and regulations are in place. As earlier noted, a common approach to engaging with the formal private sector is through PPPs. They can be defined as contracts between a private enterprise and government, providing a public asset or service in which the private enterprise bears the risk and management responsibility and remuneration is linked to performance. Involving the private sector in the design, construction and maintenance of infrastructure and the provision of services has been highlighted as an area where PPPs can be particularly 5 | P a g e influential. The rationale for PPPs is that they provide a mechanism for governments to procure and implement public infrastructure including services, using the resources and expertise of the private sector. The requirements for successful partnerships include a buoyant private sector alongside a capable and authoritative local government motivated by a common economic interest. Policymakers need a clear vision of PPP objectives and a sound understanding of the local context to appreciate advantages and limitations. 5. The Role of Private Sector in Development The private sector clearly is an important engine of economic growth and wealth creation. But to be effective and benefit the people, it needs to be framed within a normative approach to development – one that guarantees rights – and a vision of governments that maintain its developmental leadership role An active engagement of the private sector is critical for the much-needed acceleration in the progress for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other internationally agreed development commitments. Through its core business activities, inclusive market practices and above all on-going corporate social responsibility activities, the private sector has proved its pivotal role in ensuring sustainable development and contributing to job creation, growth and expanded access to products and services. The private sector is a key stakeholder in both urban and economic development, being a major contributor to national income and the principal job creator and employer. The private sector provides about 90 percent of employment in the developing world (including formal and informal jobs), delivers critical goods and services and contributes to tax revenues and the efficient flow of capital. Furthermore, it undertakes the majority of future development in urban areas. It is increasingly being encouraged to help leverage the opportunities, and mitigate the challenges, of rapid urbanization. Private sector actors are perceived as playing a role in urban governance: they influence whether urban areas develop in inclusive and sustainable ways, and they affect poverty reduction and drivers of fragility and conflict such as unemployment, exclusion and instability. Building more and better infrastructure is an important goal for many economies with limited public revenues because, the quality of urban infrastructure determines the growth-enhancing benefits of urban concentration. Countries with good urban infrastructure can accommodate rapid population increases in urban areas and sustain high economic growth. The quality of a city’s infrastructure (housing, electricity, roads, airports, public transport, water, sanitation, waste management, telecommunications, hospitals, schools, etc.) also influences social inclusion, economic opportunity and quality of life. Therefore, partnering with the private sector could extend services into poorer or informal communities, provide safer work places, promote adoption of non-discriminatory employment policies, help the poor access credit, and boost investment in low-cost housing. From the fore-going, Abuja which is the fourth largest city in Nigeria today with a population estimated at the current growth rate to rise to about 16 million by 2025, provides huge attraction for private sector participation. Similarly, the huge infrastructure deficit creates a significant opportunity with strong commercial attraction and compelling business case for the private sector. It is therefore imperative for the private sector to take active part in developing the FCT. It is in this regard that the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello affirmed, at Katampe District Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) engineering infrastructure project, that his administration is designing a strategic plan that will stimulate private 6 | P a g e investment in the creation of public goods. He specifically noted that the Administration was considering the fact that the past system of developing the FCT based on budgetary allocation is no longer sustainable, simply because the funds are not sufficient; and this position is in tandem with modern realities. Government no longer monopolizes development initiatives, the idea of lone ranging by conceiving, designing, delivering as well as managing public goods, is no longer the norm. Research has shown that Investing in and developing infrastructure helps countries to generate jobs, improve the quality of life for their population and boost economic growth. All industrially advanced economies and cities adopt this template of development to unlock the economic potentials of their people; and the only sustainable way to achieve this aspiration in the FCT is perhaps through Public Private Partnership, because, the National Integrated Infrastructure Masterplan (NIIMP) proposed a US$3.05 trillion annual spend on infrastructure over the next 30 years to close Nigeria’s infrastructure gap but currently spending a paltry US$3.3 billion annually amongst the 36 states and FCT. Development theories and empirical evidences have proven that adequate infrastructure is an enabler of economic development. In the same vein, it emphasizes effective cooperation between the state and private sector, the underlying philosophy of Public Private Partnership (PPP). The key idea of efficient PPP projects is to attract private capital and their expertise to build and improve public infrastructure and to provide high quality public services. PPP arrangement is working world over as governments leverage on the private sector expertise, financial wherewithal in building an efficient infrastructure network and creating an environment conducive to industrial development. Through active private sector participation in state development, the governments of India, Philippines, South Africa, Malaysia, Turkey, Singapore and many developed and emerging economies have accelerated their infrastructure provisioning. In Turkey, for example, collaboration between government and private sector delivered significant infrastructure projects like the third Istanbul bridge over the Bosporus; The Eurasia Tunnel linking Europe and Asia under the Bosporus; The Izmir to Istanbul highway and Sea Bridge all costing over US$ 8 billion. Also, the largest airport in the world at over 7000 hectares (the 3rd Istanbul Airport) costing over USD 4 Billion is also being built through PPP. The South Korean government gave large role to the private sector to develop its wastewater - Between 1998 and 2008, investments of more than US$800 million were financed by the private sector to construct 100 wastewater treatment plants. Today, Istanbul is not only a thriving industrial and commercial city, it is equally a melting pot of culture with huge tourism attraction that generate substantial foreign exchange to the state. Seoul, the South Korea capital is a major global manufacturing hub, notable for commerce as well as hospitality grandeur. If the private sector investment could be mobilized to develop these cities which are in more disadvantaged terrains, it can be replicated in the FCT. 6. Why Should FCT Development Revolve Around Building Infrastructure? Infrastructure as capital stock propels the provision of public goods and services in an economy. It unlocks innovative approach to production and foster competitiveness, including those on production activities and quality of life for households which thus, permeate the entire society and economy of the nation at large. According to U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette, every US$1 billion spent on infrastructure create 42,000 jobs. 7 | P a g e Thus, the Private sector can invest in or participate in developing the following sectors or thematic areas in FCT. i. Roads and rails network ii. Abuja international airport iii. Agriculture and agro-allied industries iv. Manufacturing and industry v. Science and technology vi. Urban housing vii. Electricity value chain viii. Public transportation ix. Waste management and recycling x. Social amenities 7. Government as the Aggregator To unleash private sector participation in FCT development, the federal government together with the Federal Capital Development Administration must create the right environment. Government can stimulate private sector involvement in this regard by: i. developing a steady pipeline of well-structured economic and social infrastructure projects; ii. Creating a framework of mutual trust between the public and private sectors to provoke and sustain the development of a diverse and competitive infrastructure supply ecosystem; iii. Implementing efficient, transparent and standardized PPP procurement processes, including consistent project agreements and payment mechanisms, evaluation methodologies, and financing requirements; including financing instruments that supports long term low interest lending like long term bond, road pricing (tolling) and uniformed pricing template for public goods; and iv. De-risking infrastructure projects to align profit-seeking and sustainability objectives. 8. The Contribution of ACCI – a private sector organization, in the development of the FCT. As you may know, the core mandate and activities of the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry is encapsulated in the promotion of trade, agriculture and industrialization in the FCT and Nigeria. And these play a vital role in economic development. The prudent use of trade, agriculture and industrialization can boost a city or country's development and create absolute gains for that entity. Besides, the Abuja Chamber of Commerce as the city chamber has initiated investment projects that will support the FCT development objectives, the ACCI is embarking on the following projects: (i) Convention Centre The International Expo Centre is expected to host a wide variety of events, including fairs/carnivals, rodeos, concerts, banquets, Livestock shows, conventions, Booster Clubs and Home and Garden/Craft shows as well as motor shows and a tennis court. The plan is to do more than 50 exhibitions per year, and to strive to be one of the world's most successful exhibition venues. With a planned capacity of about 150,000 square meters indoor and 100,000 square meters outdoor exhibition area. The Expo Centre facilities will include 10 exhibition halls, conference rooms, and a business centre. • Conventions / Banquets 8 | P a g e • Entertainment / Concerts • Sporting events • Animal / Equestrian / Livestock • Trade / Consumer show (ii) Industrial Park The development of the Abuja Industrial Park will be on 100 hectares of land within the FCT. The Park would have provisions for: Vehicle Assembly Plant, Tyre, Plastic, Metal, Wood, and Biodegradable Recycling Plants. Other provisions will include - Captive Power Plant, Gas Bottling Plant, Packaging Plant, Agro-allied Processing Plants, Water/Steam/Gas/Power services, Electricity, and Fiber optic cable services (iii) Pegi Ultra-Modern Market in collaboration with the Kano Chamber of Commerce ACCI plans to build an ultra-modern market in Pegi, a sleepy village some ten minutes drives from Kuje in the Federal Capital Territory. The market will have a modern abattoir amongst other first-class facilities. (iv) Technology Mall This will make inclusive all facets of the Nigerian tech space from software to hardware modelling / robotics, and from telecommunications to augmented and virtual reality. (v) A 5-Star Hotel 250 rooms on 10 floors building with large parking space and other infrastructure on 10 hectares land to the business travelers with appointments either in our established facilities, or in any part of the nation’s capital. (vi) Integrated Agri-Park The ABUJA INTEGRATED MODEL AGRI PARK PROJECT will be developed on at least a 100 hectares land within the FCT. The Project will amongst others have provisions for: Grains Farm, Grains Storage, Grains Processing Plant, Poultry Farm, Poultry Processing and Packaging, Fish Farm, Fish Processing and Packaging, Staff Housing, Offices, and related facilities. 9. Conclusion Distinguished audience, as you have seen, the private sector has a great role to play in the development of the FCT; and will remain the catalyst to FCT development. However, the vision of giving Nigeria a befitting capital territory may not be realized unless the private sector plays its role. Thank you. 9 | P a g e References Annual Abstract of Statistics, Nigeria, 2010 Census 1991, 2006 Local Government Area. Page 23+ https://www.informationng.com/tag/national-population-commission Libertun De Duren, N. and R.G. Compeán (2015) ‘Growing resources for growing cities: density and the cost of municipal services in Latin America’, Urban Studies, September 16 "Official Website of the Federal Capital Territory Administration". Federal Capital Territory Administration. Retrieved 2017-10-30. Rybczynski, W. (2010) Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, Scribner, New York Rydin, Y. (2013) The Future of Planning: Beyond Growth and Dependence, Policy Press, Bristol Rydin, et al (2012) ‘Shaping cities for health: complexity and the planning of urban environments in the 21st century’, The Lancet 379(9831): 2079-2108 UN-Habitat (2015c) ‘Housing at the centre of the New Urban Agenda’, position paper, October 2015, UNHabitat, Nairobi UN-Habitat (2015f) International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning: Towards a Compendium of Inspiring Practices, UN-Habitat, Nairobi UN-Habitat (2015g) The Challenge of Local Government Financing in Developing Countries, UN-Habitat, Nairobi, http://unhabitat.org/the-challenge-of-localgovernment-financing-in-developingcountries/, last accessed on 22 March 2016 United Nations (1996) The Habitat Agenda: Chapter IV: C. Sustainable human settlements development in an urbanizing world, A/CONF.165/14
   
  ABRAHAM E. NWANKWO
  Abraham E. Nwankwo holds a Ph.D. Economics degree (1985) of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; his M.Sc. Economics (1983) and B.Sc. Economics (1980) degrees were also obtained from the same university.
  His professional working experience spans economics journalism, university lecturing, banking, and public debt management. Between 1981 and 1982, he worked as an economics journalist with the Newbreed Organization—publishers of the then Newbreed magazine and The President magazine – in Lagos. Between 1982 and 1986, he was a lecturer in the Department of Economics, University of Nigeria Nsukka.
  From1986 to 1994, he worked in the banking sector and rose to top management positions. From 1994 to 2001, he engaged in consultancy and turn-around services with some private commercial enterprises.   He joined Nigeria’s Debt Management Office (DMO) in 2001 and was appointed the Director General in 2007.
  He was an active member of Nigeria’s Economic Management Team under four different administrations – Obasanjo, Yar’adua, Jonathan and Buhari.
  His tenure as the chief executive officer of the DMO was characterized by rapid development of the domestic bond market with the introduction of new products, as well as Nigeria’s successful foray into the international capital market with a variety of instruments, including Eurobond (three times) and Diaspora bond. After completing 10 years of two tenures as the Director-General, he retired from public service in June 2017.
  He is a variedly published writer, not only of books and academic articles on economics but also of books in drama, poetry and prose. His published books include: Tatu (drama), Through the Storm (drama), Minds of Time (poetry), Oracles for Heroes (novel), Stable Growth & Foreign Exchange (economics) and Inflation & the Structure of Aggregate Output (economics).
  Dr. Abraham Nwankwo, who hails from Umulogho Obowo in Imo State, is married to Dr. (Mrs.) Stella Obioma Nwankwo, an educationist. They are blessed with three children.
   
  REALISM AND PARADOX IN FINANCING NIGERIA’S HUGE INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS
  By Abraham E. Nwankwo
  Presented at the 2019 Annual Lecture of Just Friends Club of Nigeria
  (Abuja, April 16, 2019)
  Introduction
  The issue of Nigeria’s huge infrastructure deficit is well acknowledged and so is the attempt to finance its solution along various lines suggested by conventional wisdom. The point of departure of this discussion paper derives from the following four propositions:
  i.                     Infrastructure development is important, not only for the solution of the problem of economic backwardness but also for the solution of the problem of defective fiscal federalism and ambivalent, inconclusive nation-building.
  ii.                   The scale of infrastructure development required for meaningful transformation has to be bold, massive and rapid; not timid, incremental and sluggish and, therefore, requires substantial financing. Unfortunately, government’s ability to contribute its quota, even after taking into account the contribution of the private sector, is already highly constrained by unfavourable fiscal realities, indicating the imperative of substantial public debt financing. This is a paradox, given Nigeria’s problematic debt profile, debt history and public allergy to public borrowing.
  iii.                  However, reliance on a well-articulated and detailed business-type transformation plan for ensuring that debt-financed infrastructure is effectively used to achieve a diversified, significantly growing and  self-sustaining economy, that is to say an end-to-end or macro value-chain approach to public debt-financing of infrastructure investment, provides the answer to the dilemma.
  iv.                 There is need to change the mindset to emphasize Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit as also an opportunity for, rather than as only a constraint to, growth and development. This is evident for at least one reason: additional investment in infrastructure in itself constitutes increase in the gross domestic product. As Bello-Schunemann and Porter (2017: 23) have aptly noted, “...Nigeria is the biggest infrastructure market on the continent. However, the investment climate in Nigeria is very complex.”
  From the foregoing, we can claim that the required financing posture is one that is confident and assertive, rather than ambivalent and ambiguous.
  Accordingly, we will present this paper on the “Realism and Paradox in Financing Nigeria’s Huge Infrastructure Needs” under three parts: Part I discusses not only the economic but also the socio-political context necessitating massive investment in infrastructure; Part II deals with the imperative and paradox of financing the big infrastructure programme with public debt; and, Part III outlines the argument for, and the essentials of, the transformation plan -  the technical working document  -  which is needed to make debt financing of infrastructure development programme not only a viable venture but also a debt-sustainable strategy.
  1.Economic and Socio-Political  Context for Big Infrastructure Development
  We are all familiar with discussions about the litany of economic deficiencies which are routinely blamed for Nigeria’s weak and unstable economy: huge infrastructure deficit – particularly of electricity, road, rail and waterways transportation, clean water and sanitation, and ICT, with the country ranking an abysmal 132 out of 138 countries on infrastructure sufficiency (Bello-Schunemann and Porter, 2017: 2)  ; low productivity in the real sector, including in agriculture and manufacturing; failure to develop a variety of natural resources available in huge quantities, including several solid minerals – which represent missed and delayed opportunities in terms of substantial employment, which could have been generated if those idle resources were exploited; domination of foreign exchange earnings and public revenue by crude oil and gas exports – to the tune of 87% and 77% respectively ; weak non-oil tax revenue of about 6% compared to peer group range of 18% - 20%; weak and unstable exchange rate; high cost of production, high inflation rate and high interest rate; etc.
  But what we are not familiar with is an explanation of how these conditions are all interrelated and have a common denominator in infrastructure deficit.
   While it is acknowledged that Nigeria’s weak and inadequate infrastructure accounts largely for the poor performance of the real sector and is estimated to be causing a loss of about 4% in real GDP growth per annum relative to other middle-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Foster and Pushak, 2011:iv), it is also important to note that poor performance of the real sector has repercussions for macroeconomic indicators: high-cost of production arising mainly from deficiency of infrastructure leads to high prices of final goods and services and high inflation, which in turn influences the monetary authority (the Central Bank of Nigeria) to set high policy rates because it would be a distorting and costly economic policy to set the policy rate below the rate of inflation and thereby generate negative real interest rate.  High monetary policy rate, in turn leads to high market interest rates, including interest rates on bank credits. Of course, a high-cost economy is an uncompetitive economy, which encourages imports and discourages exports, thereby making the external sector, in terms of balance of trade and payments, unfavourable.
  Conversely, adverse fiscal and monetary conditions impact adversely on the real sector. For example, high interest rates charged on bank loans limit access to finance and inhibit growth of the real sector, particularly small and medium enterprises. More importantly, once the two-way causation between the real and nominal sectors has been set in motion, this mutually reinforcing relationship assumes a momentum of its own – a new variable different from the original ones is created – with a life different from the individual lives of the original factors. 
  Besides the internal deficiencies, Nigeria’s economy in general and investment inflows, in particular, are also vulnerable to shocks built up from economic policies of other countries. For example, changes in the U.S. Federal reserve rates, such as the hikes in the first and second quarters of 2018 and announcement of the same stance into and through 2019, generated anxiety in the Nigerian money and capital markets and even in the real sector because of the implications for cost of borrowing from the international capital market by both the public and private sectors. There is also trepidation on account of expected negative capital flows. Given Nigeria’s delicate exchange rate management approach, such a development also impacts expectations and volatilities regarding the foreign exchange market. In the last analysis, these external shocks are relevant because of the internal weaknesses; when the domestic economy is transformed and strengthened, the external vulnerability will significantly decline but such a transformed, diversified, strong and self-sustaining economy can only be achieved on the back of adequate infrastructure.
  At this stage of the discussion, it would be appropriate to highlight the critical role of infrastructure development in the pursuit of the all-important goal of economic diversification.
  Infrastructure and Diversification
  Adequate and reliable infrastructure, particularly electricity, transport, clean water and sanitation, and ICT infrastructure is critical for stimulating economic activities around the country’s varied natural resources. As can be learnt from the case of Norway, which strategically invested its oil revenue in infrastructure in order to stimulate activity in other sectors (Pariona, 2017), for Nigeria, diversification from oil requires deliberate and dedicated investment in infrastructure. However, we must caution that it is quite another matter whether the source of funding Nigeria’s infrastructure would still be oil revenue, in view of the irrational pattern of public expenditure with oil revenue established over the years, with its distortive implications (Nwankwo, 2011:11). In particular, spatial connection of the country’s vast land mass will be critical. As the World Bank has noted in its Nigeria Bi-annual Economic Update (2018), the lack of connectivity dampens economic collaboration and cooperation among the country’s regions. It argues that economic diversification can be strengthened through connectivity. It would stimulate diversified, long-term growth; it would promote spatial integration and sub-national specialization; it would help develop nationally integrated markets for goods and services, thereby enabling the exploitation of economies of scale. This condition would attract much-needed private sector investment that would want to benefit from a big home market with a growing middle class and about 65 million economically active people. Again, what is being emphasized here is that infrastructure is key to any serious programme of economic diversification in Nigeria.
   One can discern that there is a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, and the bottom-line of the vicious cycle is a devastatingly high rate of unemployment and of poverty.  This cycle of underdevelopment and poverty needs to be boldly broken and reversed into a virtuous cycle of prosperity.
  More importantly, one can discern from the foregoing that the whole gamut of deficiencies and failures in the real sector, fiscal sector, monetary sector and external sector can be traced substantially to, and remedied from, the state and performance of infrastructure.
  Infrastructure, Insecurity and Violence
  Beyond the economic front, it is noteworthy that even the pervasive challenges of violent crimes, insecurity led by internal and external agents, as well as separatist inclinations and agitations have much to do with the weak economy, not only in terms of low per capita income, but also the high degree of inequality in income distribution and the consequent high poverty level. These underlying maladies can be significantly reduced with a more prosperous and equitable economy and corresponding advancement in nation-building. However, the required rapid transformation of the economy will be made feasible only with a single-minded massive financing of infrastructure projects.
  Infrastructure and the Challenge of Nigeria’s Fiscal Federalism
  Indeed, it is plausible to reason that infrastructure development is key to achieving a viable federation because it would make feasible the development of the resources in each geographical area and make the regions more economically viable. By enhancing the internal revenue generating capacity of constituent units of the federation, infrastructure development will make them less apprehensive of a future where dependence on oil revenue is not the basis for fiscal viability. They would, therefore be better disposed to prosperity-friendly political restructuring.
  Nigeria operates a federal system with three tiers of government: it has the Federal Government, 36 State Governments and the Federal Capital Territory and, 774 Local Governments. The total area of the country covers a diversity of climatic, soil and vegetation types which provide the basis for diversified economic activities. In such a federal system, States or regions should be fiscally autonomous and each would be creating a diversified range of economic activities based on the natural resources in its territory.  From such economic activities, including exploitation of solid minerals, a sub-national entity would generate revenue to finance its development projects and programmes while contributing to the federal treasury for the running of the country’s common services. In essence revenue generation and utilization would be decentralized and the revenue base of the entire economy would be highly diversified because it would be a combination of a diversified range of revenue sources from the various sub-nationals based on their varied natural resources.
  A country that is practising federalism should, therefore, naturally incline towards economic diversification but the subsisting arrangement in Nigeria works against that expectation and renders the system a sharing one rather than a producing one; a contractionary one, rather than an expansionary one. Oil revenue which accounts for between 75 and 80% of public revenue over the past four decades is adjudged owned by the federation and not the sub-national territories where they occur. Following the unitary approach to administration entrenched by military governments for about 30 years starting in 1966, the 1999 Federal Constitution requires that such revenue be moved to the federal treasury, from where it is shared to all the governments according to the prevailing revenue allocation formula. The sharing formula has nothing to do with useful contribution to the revenue, which could have resulted from effective response to their environment and day-to-day natural conditions.  Rather it is based on such factors as population, school enrolment and land mass. This economic model encourages sharing and irrational consumption rather than production and strategic investment. The weakening of the economic aspect of federalism is akin to cutting of the limbs of an animal: having been amputated, the animal can neither walk nor work effectively. As a result, States get lazy about developing and depending on internally-generated revenue and neglect diversification of their revenues. This behaviour is a variant of Resource Curse generated in a disjointed federal system like Nigeria’s. We would name this pathology “Amputation Effect”. It is the result of an amputated federalism.
  In essence, it would be noticed that there is asymmetry in Nigeria’s federal system: while the political arrangement is federalism, the economic arrangement is essentially unitary. Therefore, from the perspective of the nature of Nigeria’s federalism, the economy is not diversified. The unitary arrangement in the conceptualization and management of Nigeria’s economy, particularly oil economy, is a major factor inhibiting economic diversification.
  Therefore, a strategy that pushes massive infrastructure development for achieving effective diversification springing from the constituent units is good for building a vibrant, stable and progressive federation and nation. Infrastructure development is good for the building of a politically sustainable nation. It is good for making political restructuring acceptable because as noted earlier in this section, it will make the constituent units less apprehensive of a future where dependence on oil revenue is not the basis for fiscal viability
  The Wand of Big Infrastructure
   
  Our thesis is, therefore, that the most effective approach to addressing Nigeria’s socio-economic development deficit is to frontally address its infrastructure deficit – with rapid and massive investment in infrastructure. What is required is not the mere enhancement of budgetary allocation to infrastructure because this will not create the degree of momentum needed, given the depth of the hole that needs to be filled.  What is required is a bold and creative initiative not only to cover  decades of arrears of what ought to have been achieved but also to meet up with the ever-advancing target of peers and other groups of countries on the global stage. For example, in terms of electricity, Nigeria’s current electricity need is more than 12,000 megawatts, but the actual supply has been hovering below 5,000 megawatts in the past 5 years (even though the installed generation capacity is about 12,500 megawatts) and the electricity access ratio is about 45 percent; compare this with South Africa’s current power supply of over 51,303 megawatts and access ratio of 86 percent.
  In terms of overall economic wealth, according to World Bank’s 2016 data, Nigeria’s per capita income was USD2,180 compared to South Africa’s USD5,316. This means that even if Nigeria’s output (GDP) is shared equitably, we would all still be relatively poor compared to our South African counterparts. This means that our GDP is still very low relative to our population and the commensurate output expected of it, even though in absolute terms, our GDP is currently the largest in Africa. In any case, Nigeria’s infrastructure stock-to-GDP ratio is only 35% compared to 70% in advanced economies. 
  In essence, Nigeria is decades behind schedule and needs a big push.
  1.Financing the Big Push: The Imperative and Paradox of Public Debt Financing
  For such a big-push programme, the challenge which must be addressed is how to design an appropriate strategy for mobilizing and managing the enormous investment. Going by the estimates of the National Integrated Infrastructure Master Plan (NIPP) (2015: xiii), Nigeria needs to invest, on the average, about USD100 billion per annum for 30 successive years to sufficiently address its infrastructure deficit. This is the total amount to be provided from a variety of public and private sector sources.
    According to the NIIMP which “provides the roadmap for building a world class infrastructure that will guarantee sustainable economic growth and development”, out of the total investment required over 30 years, 52% would be provided by the public sector and 48% by the private sector; it also identifies four major options for financing government’s share of the needed investment: government budgets, government debt, other government-controlled sources such as sovereign wealth fund and pension funds (2015: xiii).
  As regards the planned private sector contribution, the public sector would need to encourage Private Direct Investment (PDI) as well as Public Private Partnership (PPP), including through the use of incentives and enhancements, for example, provision of Sovereign Guarantees.  Such special supports would be almost imperative where the private sector shows interest in investing in infrastructure and mega industrial projects that would conventionally be provided by the public sector. 
  However, there is always a high degree of uncertainty around the quantum and speed of private sector contribution to financing infrastructure projects, even with the best incentives.  Therefore, the onus of predictable outcome lies with the public sector and requires it to proactively lead and implement its share of the responsibility. Indeed, it is our view that sustained implementation of the government’s part of the investment plan would inspire the private sector to play its part.
  Regarding the plausible strategy for financing the public sector contribution, the intriguing conclusion is that given the existing resource constraint facing the country and the well-acknowledged lack of domestic fiscal space, the plausible source of a greater proportion of public sector capital injection is external borrowing. We need to look at this proposition more closely.
  Why Borrow? 
  The logic is simple:
  (i)         The quantum of funds needed to cover the infrastructure deficit is quite huge;
  (ii)         From the existing public revenue and expenditure profile, it is evident that available resources are not adequate for the structurally and historically established recurrent expenditure; accordingly, capital expenditure is seriously jeopardized;
  (iii)        Even with effective revenue and expenditure reform measures, up to the next five years, much of the improvements in revenue from such fiscal reforms would still be used up in recurrent expenditure, which for several years have been eating into borrowed money;
  (iv) In the modern market economy, private firms, as well as governments need to combine equity and debt in an appropriate ratio to be competitive and to grow adequately: that is, there is need for optimum leveraging or gearing; and,
  (v)        Public debt can be designed to be sustainable after the projected positive impact of the huge infrastructure investment and development, in terms of substantial and sustained boost of activities in diverse sectors of the economy.
  For the above reasons, it is appropriate for Nigeria to borrow to fund a big infrastructure programme.
   
  Why Domestic Borrowing is Not appropriate
  In contrast to external borrowing, domestic borrowing in Nigeria will not be appropriate at this stage for the big-push infrastructure funding due to a number of reasons:
  (i)         Average cost of domestic debt is significantly higher than average cost of external debt.
  (ii)         In the existing public debt portfolio, the ratio of domestic debt to external debt ratio is still far from the 60:40 mix recommended in Nigeria’s Medium Term Debt Management Strategy (2012-2015) formulated by the Debt Management Office – although some progress is being registered in the right direction.
  (iii)        Given the existing high domestic interest rate structure, significant additional domestic borrowing would exacerbate the domestic debt service revenue ratio, which has already become unacceptably high.
  (iv)        In order to avoid crowding out the private sector, government domestic borrowing should be minimized.
  (i)               Moreover, as government provides the policy and infrastructure environment for rising economic activity, the private sector is expected to respond by playing the lead role in direct production in the real sector. It stands to reason that government should also leave ample borrowing space for the private sector to enable it adequately and affordably fund its production activities. This will enable the achievement of the ultimate objective of big infrastructure development, leading to a diversified, big and growing real sector.
  As a corroboration of the above point, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has observed that the domestic capital market lacks the size and capacity “to fund a substantial portion of the equity and debt requirements of the proposed infrastructure programme” (2014:46). The bank further noted the inadequacy of the domestic banking system as well.
  But disappointedly, the AfDB proposes the development of the domestic capital market as a solution to inadequate financing of infrastructure. While the development of the domestic capital market is not  an arguable need for an economy, we consider that it is less than imaginative to suggest that the financing of Nigeria’s or any African country’s pressing infrastructure needs will have to wait until the domestic capital market is developed. Rather, the proactive solution is to design a credible framework for safely accessing, and productively utilizing, the enormous pools of debt funds available in the external markets.
  Accordingly, the preferred sources of the un-delayed strategic public borrowing would be external.
  Paradox
  But how can a country like Nigeria borrow substantially without intolerably breaching the standard debt sustainability?  This question is germane because following the country’s exit from the London Club and the Paris Club debt overhangs in 2005 and 2006, even though its debt-GDP ratio remains the lowest among its peer group, its debt service-to-revenue ratio has been above the safe threshold, thereby leaving the overall public debt profile a matter of concern. Apart from the high debt service ratio, the poor acceptability of debt public debt financing by most Nigerian stakeholders can be appreciated against eloquent historical facts:
  (i)               The unsustainable debt crisis among the less developed   countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America in the last three     decades of the 1900s and early 2000s; in the case of       Nigeria, it experienced a tortuous and torturing route to            obtain debt relief during 2005 and 2006.
  (ii)                 The sovereign debt crisis among the more advanced economies during 2008 – 2014, as exemplified: in such Eurozone countries as Spain, Italy, Ireland and Greece; in the U.S., debt and financial sector crisis caused mainly by sub-prime mortgage lending; as well as in Japan’s experience of lingering crisis of ballooning public debt which co-exists with stagnation.
   
  More importantly, in our view, a major implicit factor of scepticism for public debt financing in Nigeria is the failure of officials in charge of planning, finance and central banking to demonstrate with detailed and credible macroeconomic plan, how debt financing could be predictably used to deliver economic and social development goals. Those public bodies have not delivered on the responsibility imposed on them – to ensure the development of a robust economy – either by virtue of their statutory mandate or by virtue of professional standing or by virtue of historical circumstances.
   
  At the same time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) tends to be overly alarmist about borrowing by African governments with a tinge of blackmail by pointing at the inadequacies of the present and failures of the past, instead of helping in the shaping of a better future by applying its vast reserves of technical knowhow in championing the development of a framework that would assure transparent, productive and transformative use of borrowed money. 
   
  Nor have scholars and expert institutions in this field helped matters. The posturing that Nigeria’s infrastructure deficit can be addressed with debt financing is not scarce; for example, Fatai , Omolara and Taiwo, (2016: 46) postulated as much. But what is scarce is the attempt to convincingly address the concerns of stakeholders about the undesirability of debt financing. Indeed, a report by the Institute for Security Studies (Bello-Schuneman and Porter, 2017:24) explicitly states that building Nigeria’s infrastructure would require “innovative funding and financing models”. Yet it did not suggest even the essential elements of such a model that would make it credible and able to counter the scepticism and revolt against public debt financing.
  As already stated in this section, it has to be admitted that the conclusion that public debt should be used to finance Nigeria’s massive infrastructure need is intriguing and is indeed a paradox because of the existing precarious public debt profile. The resolution of that paradox lies in a creative unbundling of the concept of debt sustainability. In the context of financing infrastructure for the structural transformation of the economy, we are of the view that distinction should be made between conventional debt sustainability, which is essentially static, and what one would identify as structural debt sustainability, which is based on a forward-looking view of the economy.  Assessment of debt sustainability in the latter case should focus on whether and how, the additional debt would be effectively applied to the development of infrastructure, to pull the economy out of backwardness; how it would enable the economy to establish a growth trajectory that will enable it re-gain or enhance debt sustainability and more stable growth, by a forecasted time.
  The secret is that it is feasible to articulate a bold plan for the transformation of the economy, the Transformation Plan, financed with new debt towards one that is more diversified, more competitive, more export-capable and less vulnerable to external shocks. Specifically, the new debt will generate adequate output and cash-flow to cover its servicing and amortization and create surplus, while avoiding, by design, foreign exchange risk. The net impact of the new debt on debt sustainability, therefore, is that by creating substantial value added, it even helps to reduce the pre-programme debt burden, rather than exacerbate it.
    Moreover, for a country with identifiable and substantial idle capacity in agriculture and agro-processing, manufacturing, mining, ICT, etc, as shown in Table 1, the transformation plan hinged largely on debt financing of critical infrastructure, is propitious: the picture of the possibility of harnessing the idle capacity over the medium and long-term, to achieve diversification and sustainability is quite convincing.  The existence of considerable idle capacity, which indicates more or less, that the economy is operating far from full employment, holds the key to the conviction that massive infrastructure investment financed with
  Table 1:  Indications of Idle Capacity in Nigeria
  (As at the beginning of 2016, unless otherwise stated)
  

  	Sector	Status of Capacity
  1	Geography and Ecology	-      Land area: 923,768 square kilometers -      Coastline: 3,122 kilometers (World Resources Institute) -      Geo-vegetation variety: territory extends from mangrove swamp through: rain forest, deciduous forest, shrubland, guinea savannah, sahel savannah, to the desert -      Variety of fauna and flora -      Land mass conducive for commercial growing of a variety of legumes, grains, root crops, tree crops and livestock breeding
  2	Agriculture	-      Arable Land, 76,200,000 hectares -      Cultivated land, 39,200,000 hectares -      Uncultivated land: 48% of arable land
  3	Solid Minerals	-      More than 30 solid minerals available in commercial quantities -      Actual production, mainly on unorganized basis and estimated to be less than 10% of potential
  4	Oil & Gas Reserves Favourable to a flourishing petrochemical industrial economy	-      Crude oil reserves: 37.2 billion barrels and 10th largest in the world -      Gas Reserves: 5.1 trillion Cubic Meters and 9th largest in the world -      Opportunities for industrialization on fertilizer and other agro-chemicals; industrial and medical chemicals; polymer, plastics, etc.
  5	Housing	-      Deficit 17 million -      Rate of addition to the deficit: 2 million per annum
  6	Water supply (Domestic + Industrial + Agriculture)	-      Nigeria: 89.21 cubic meters -      Brazil: 306 cubic meters -      India: 613 cubic meters -      South Africa: 271.7 cubic meters
  7	Power	-      Current Electricity Requirement: 12,000 MW Electricity Generated: less than 5,000MW
  8	Stock Market Capitalization	-      Nigeria: 21.5% -      India: 68% -      Brazil: 54.6% -      South Africa: 159.3%
  9	Internal Market (A major strength factor for countries like  U.S.A. and China)	-      Large population: 177 million (2014) -      Population Growth Rate: 2.47% p.a. (2014) -      Youth Ratio: about 50% of total population . 15-24 years – 19.3% . 25-54 years – 30.5% -      (Index Mundi)

  Nwankwo, A.E.: (2016). From Economic Downturn to Turnaround & Prosperity. (Lagos). The Republic Media Limited.
  public debt is a viable strategy – even from debt sustainability point of view.
  Mainstreaming the Real Sector
  As a corollary, therefore, infrastructure development investment must be undertaken, not in the hope of, but in conjunction with, real sector development; hence, the imperative of planning and executing it closely with the private sector. In addition, the business model for investment in infrastructure should be such that, as much as possible, infrastructure services are provided on fee-paying and cost-recovering bases and there should be no illusion of heaping the entire funding burden on the public treasury.
  It is important to emphasize that Nigeria’s strategy of external borrowing would be to prioritize in favour of cheaper sources with sufficient moratorium period and long tenors of 10 years and above. Given that Nigeria is currently a “blend” credit country in the classification of multilateral financial institutions particularly, the World Bank Group and the AfDB, the main source of external borrowing will be
  from the commercial windows of the multilaterals – the World Bank Group, the African Development Bank, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the European Investment Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, as well as bilateral sources – Agence Francaise de Development (AFD), KFW of Germany, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), China Eximbank, etc.  These sources are still affordable because interest rate charged on their credits range from 3% to 5% per annum.
  Besides, since the approach is to make as many as possible of the infrastructure projects bankable, the loans would be further softened by attracting  co-investments from sovereign wealth funds, fund managers, ethical and green funds, among other global investors. There are also possibilities of attracting grants from foundations and charities, particularly for infrastructure related to clean water and sanitation, and education funding. In addition, creative funding models such as land capture value (LCV) can be introduced. For example, applying LCV to rail-line and waterways infrastructure would mean that part of the resulting enhancement of property value (capital gains) in the geographical space adjoining those infrastructures could accrue to the government while part would accrue to the private owners of the properties; that is, it is feasible to monetize, securitize and fiscalize land capture value as a funding option. In the last analysis, therefore, debt-financed infrastructure investment could be significantly sweetened, softened and de-risked with financing founded on a broad-based funding model.
  Management Model
  In terms of management of the proposed infrastructure businesses, appropriate models of private sector management will be relied upon, even in cases where there is no non-government equity. In cases of Public Private Partnership (PPP), co-investment and other forms of participation by private funding and resourcing, private enterprise management model would be the natural position. In view of significant government ownership in such enterprises, it is important to propose the type of government-side institutional arrangement responsible for programme conceptualization, policy design, project implementation monitoring and regulation, which is compatible with private enterprise. It would be appropriate to exercise these supervisory responsibilities outside the conventional public bureaucracy but there should not be an entirely new government agency created. An option that would be effective is one whereby an Infrastructure Work Team (IWT) is constituted across relevant public entities to include: Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority, Infrastructure Concession Regulatory Commission, Debt Management Office, Central Bank of Nigeria, Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Budget and National Planning.
  1.       The Transformation Plan
   
  The Transformation Plan (TP) is needed as the formal policy document narrating, macroeconomic model-wise, how infrastructure can be effectively financed with public debt to agitate economic growth without worsening the debt service situation.  The TP is a condition-precedent to debt financing of infrastructure advocated by this paper and should, therefore, address the following issues:
  (a)        clarity of policy direction;
  (b)        logicality of the defined route of escape from economic     backwardness through big infrastructure;
  (c)        plausibility of strategy; and,
  (d)        predictability of outcomes.
   
  As Figure 1 shows, a credible plan would engender confidence, positive expectations and positive perceptions from stakeholders, local and foreign, including investors.  What would be expected from this atmosphere is a more favourable economic decision behavior towards the economy.
  A robust macroeconomic model with detailed financial programming is perhaps the most important component of the plan documents.  The purpose is to build an integrated macroeconomic model that will elicit the trajectory of transformation, breakthrough and self-sustaining growth that would result from the capital injection in big infrastructure development.  It will include specific project documents and business plans, including business plans for the major complementary real sector projects. The model will highlight how cash flow will be generated to successfully service and repay the capital-injection debts; it will, of course, capture existing debt obligations and their implications.  It will include projections of the gross domestic product and its components over the next 10 years – to be revised annually or bi-annually.  In addition to sectoral details, including external accounts, the projections will include nominal macro indicators such as policy interest rates, exchange rate and inflation.  It will show how the balance of payments and the reserve position will trend towards healthy conditions.
  Risk of Exchange Rate Exposure
  A major issue which has to be addressed while using debt financing for infrastructure is the impact of exchange rate risk since substantial portion of the debt is obligated in foreign currency. Concerns about exchange rate risk and, generally, concerns about the ability of a country that is a weak player in the global market, to meet its external debt obligations are quite relevant. So how could one justifiably propose more foreign currency denominated borrowing under this condition?  The answer lies in the Turnaround Plan: The essence of the financial and structural programming contained in the TP, is that within five to seven years, the implementation of the plan will have produced a sustainable and continuously strengthening economic progress, and that from about year eight to year ten, the economy will start generating adequate public revenue, including in foreign exchange, with which the external debt will be serviced and repaid.   That is why the external borrowing for the purpose of achieving the turnaround will be at favourable terms including, particularly, a moratorium period and a long tenor.
  With the structural diversification made possible by adequate and functioning infrastructure, a diversified export sector would have been achieved.  With the improving and sustained investor confidence generated by the noticeable transformation gains, capital inflows would become favourable.  The impact of the sectors individually and collectively would be to improve the economy’s reserve position, whilst improving the external value of the Naira.  In essence, over the programmed period, the question mark on exchange rate risk would be removed: the country’s foreign exchange reserve will rise and the exchange rate will become more favourable.  For these reasons, the country will have the capacity to service its external debt.
  How the Economy will be Stimulated
   At this juncture, it is appropriate to identify the major channels or sources of stimulus for the economy derivable from a plausible transformation plan that supports massive debt-financed infrastructure investment (Figure1).  These are:
  (i)                               Response by stakeholders in general and investors in particular, to a credible plan;
  (ii)                             Inflow of the proceeds of the investments - equity as well as debt;
  (iii)                            Activities that constitute the actual building of infrastructure; and,
  (iv)                           Activities in the real sector stimulated by progressing infrastructure development.
   
  Figure 1:  Stimuli for Economic Transformation
   from Debt-Financed Infrastructure
   
  
                                                                                                                           
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
  
  Source: Nwankwo, A.E.: (2016). From Economic Downturn to Turnaround & Prosperity. (Lagos). The Republic Media Limited.
  The first stimulus for economic progress is generated from the announcement of a bright future which the plan documents will convey. With the availability of a credible infrastructure investment plan, investors, local and foreign, will begin to frontload investments in the real sector – agriculture, manufacturing, solid minerals, etc, - in order to take advantage of the attractive future opportunities projected in the infrastructure development plan. Indeed, with the TP, government would attract co-investment for well-packaged infrastructure projects, thereby reducing the burden on itself. In addition, the TP will crowd in independent private sector investments, gingered by the confidence engendered by a credible plan of how debt-financed infrastructure can be economically and commercially viable. The second growth stimulus is the inflow of the proceeds of the external public borrowing and other private sector investment resources, with its multiplier effect on the economy.
  The third stimulus in the sequence would result naturally from the activities around the actual building of infrastructure. Effective demand for labour and materials for constructing roads, railways, ICT infrastructure, electric power systems, etc, will trigger off a chain of economic activities and income multipliers. The fourth stimulus in the sequence is from the activities in the real sector in response to improvements in infrastructure. Existing firms will scale up their capacity utilization significantly, while new firms will be established by investors. Greatly improved quantum and efficiency of infrastructure will bring down cost of production and make the economy more competitive.
  The position of this proposal is to insist that a bold plan for the transformation of the economy to make it more diversified, more competitive, more export-capable and less vulnerable to external shocks is what must be done to make public debt financing of infrastructure feasible.  
  Mainstreaming the real sector goals makes for viability. In designing and programming infrastructure development it will be explicitly linked to the real sector objectives: the need to boost and diversify agro and agro processing; the need to encourage small and medium enterprises; the need to bigly diversify exports via agriculture and agro processing, manufacturing and solid minerals. For example, the power supply boost strategy will be influenced by the recognition that it is necessary to emphasize independent and dedicated power facilities for industrial clusters, industrial parks, and viable residential estates, as a way of accelerating the impact of the economic plan.
    As has been indicated earlier, huge untapped opportunities for economic activities should make investment in infrastructure attractive even to the private sector. As shown in Table 1, there is diversity and abundance of exploitable opportunities and idle capacity in agriculture and agro-processing, in solid minerals and petrochemicals, in manufacturing and services. With such abundance of resources and the economies of scale they offer, it is reasonable to expect that the huge infrastructure investment will generate a reasonable cross-sectoral rate of return, in addition to pure economic rate of return and social rate of return.
  Conclusion
  Financing of Nigeria’s infrastructure development is an enormous task, given the size of the problem and the country’s dire fiscal condition. Even at that, all that is required is to proceed a little beyond the conventional space usually explored by experts to identify and provide an intelligent and relatively heterodox solution. This should be  guided by the Igbo proverb which states that “the coconut always comes along with the rope with which it can be lifted”. The wisdom is that often, a good solution to a problem is embedded in the problem itself. Accordingly, in spite of the country’s problematic debt profile, a plan-based, project-tied, output-driven, commercially-modelled and private-sector-managed debt programme remains a robust option (arguably the most robust option) for financing the solution for Nigeria’s infrastructure development. It is a solution that can be structured to produce a transformed and self-sustaining economy without worsening debt sustainability. Indeed, it has the capacity to bail out existing debt un-sustainability while improving long-run debt sustainability. Accordingly, and importantly, such a plan-based solution can be readily marketed to a diverse universe of investors and development partners while enjoying the positive consideration of all stakeholders, including the general public.
   
  References
  African Development Bank. (2014). An Infrastructure Action Plan for Nigeria. African Development Bank.
  Bello-Schunemann, J. and Porter, A. (2017). Building the Future of Infrastructure in Nigeria Until 2040 . Institute for Security Studies.
  Fatai, O.O., Omolara, Y.J., and Taiwo, A. B. (2016). “Infrastructure Finance and Development in Nigeria’. Arabian Journal of Business and Management in Nigeria. Vol. 3 (12): 44 – 54.
  Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2015). National Integrated Infrastucture Master Plan. Abuja, National Planning Commission.
  Foster, V. and Pushak, N. (2011).  Nigeria’s Infrastructure: A Continental Perspective.  IBRD/The World Bank Group.
  Nwankwo, A.E. (2011). Stable Growth and Foreign Exchange. Ibadan, Ibadan University Press.
  Pariona, A. (2017). The Economy of Norway.
  https:// www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-economy-of-norway-html
  World Bank Group. (2018). Nigeria Bi-Annual Economic Update, April 2018: Connecting to Complete. Washington, D.C., World Bank Group.
   
  GEORGE EHUSANI
  Reverend Father Omaku George Ehusani is a thinker, tinkerer, and a doer…a theologian, teacher, speaker, poet, musician, human rights activist, social commentator and writer of numerous books, journals and newspaper articles.
  But this urbane fellow can bite too. “He once debarred a governor from entering his church, because the latter violated the rule on lateness. He was to later calmly explain that the rules were clear from the beginning, that they were repeatedly explained to everyone and that his homilies were usually not interrupted by movement, due to lateness,” according to Professor Okey Ikechukwu.
  Professor Olugbemiro Jegede, former Secretary-General of the Association of African Universities Accra, Ghana, describes Ehusani as “such a remarkable, greatly talented, versatile, enigmatic, yet simple, easy-going, but very focused and firm Nigerian and reverend gentleman,”
  Born in December 1957 in Kogi State, Father Ehusani started his priestly journey on October 1, 1975 at Saints Peter and Paul Major Seminary, Ibadan.
  At 16, he was the President of the Young Catholic Students (YCS) in the Diocese of Lokoja. Between1975 and 1978, he had his philosophical studies at the Ss Peter and Paul Seminary, Ibadan, and then went on to the St. Augustine’s Seminary, Jos, for his theological studies. Father George, as he is popularly known, graduated in May 1981, and on August 15, 1981, he was ordained a priest by the then Bishop of the diocese, the late Most Reverend Alexius Makozi.
  He worked as Assistant Parish Priest of his home parish, Christ the King Catholic Church, Okene immediately after his ordination. He was later posted to the Teacher Training College in Ogori as a teacher and chaplain of the college. He was also a teacher and supervisor of religious education in the Kogi State Education Board. He was also the Editor-in-Chief of the Lokoja Diocesan Newspaper “The Light,” for many years— starting from 1990.
  In 1990, he earned a doctorate degree from the Howard University School of Divinity, Washington DC. His doctoral essay won the award of the Most Distinguished Dissertation of the Year.
  He served as theological expert at the first Synod of Bishops for Africa in Rome in 1994. He would later join the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria. From 1994 to 2007, he served as Deputy Secretary-General and later Secretary-General of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria.
  From 2007 to 2008, he had his sabbatical year at the Development Agency of the German Bishops Conference.
  He returned to serve the Archdiocese of Abuja as parish priest of Church of the Assumption, Asokoro, while setting up Lux Terra Leadership Foundation of which he is currently Executive Director and Lead Faculty of the organization. It is an outfit for the training of future leaders of the Church and society in Nigeria.
  In 2012, he set up the Psycho-Spiritual Institute (PSI) with its first study centre located in Nairobi, Kenya. PSI is aimed at training and graduating experts in psycho-spiritual therapy for English-speaking African countries. The institute is affiliated to the Catholic University of East Africa, Nairobi and the awards a master’s degree in psycho-spiritual therapy. The Abuja campus runs short-training programmes in Basic Skills for Psycho-Trauma Healing for a wide range of professionals and volunteers.
  For several years he served as a Faculty Member of the Haggai Institute for Advanced Leadership Training, whose leading campuses are located in Hawaii and in Singapore. He continues to serve on the Board of several local and international organisations, including the Editorial Board of The Guardian Newspapers, the Board of Trustees of the Centre for Values in Leadership and the Nigerian Sodium Study Data and Safety Management Board. He is also a fellow of Nigerian Psychological Association.
  Father Ehusani is recognised in Nigeria as a prominent moral voice and regular advocate for equity, and the justice that makes for peace, unity, dialogue and human solidarity, using both the traditional electronic and print media outlets, as well as social media platforms. His leadership formation programmes, his pioneering psycho-trauma healing training workshops, his justice and peace advocacy, as well as his inter-religious dialogue initiatives, have over the years been widely acknowledged, such that he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Prize for International Development, which was conferred in 2017.
  As a human rights activist and fiery writer, Father Ehusani is one of the most gripping clinical analysts of the Nigerian condition. His book, “Nigeria: Year Eaten by the Locust,” chronicles the many provocative essays and biting satires that he published in several Nigerian newspapers at the height of military regime in Nigeria.
  Ehusani has published numerous books and journal articles, and given several conference papers, covering a wide-range of issues, from the Dynamics of Justice and Peace to the Challenge of Leadership, and from Christian Anthropology to the Imperative of Psycho-Spiritual Integration. He runs two weekly programmes on national television, namely: “Reflections with Father George Ehusani,” and “Sunday Homilies.”
   
  Ehusani has gathered a wide readership and followership, not only in Nigeria, but also in the international community. Millions of people watch his TV programmes on African Independent Television and Lumen Christi Television, as well as via his online platforms
   
  BEYOND THE 2023 ELECTIONS: THAT NIGERIA MAY BE SAVED
  BY REV. FR. GEORGE EHUSANI
  Executive Director, Lux Terra Leadership Foundation
  ____________________________________________
  A keynote address presented at the 4^TH JUST FRIENDS CLUB of NIGERIA Annual Lecture
  at the A-Class Park & Event Centre, Maitama, Abuja, December 1, 2022
   
  _________
   
  INTRODUCTION: Nigeria is Today Teetering on the Precipice
  Nigeria as a national entity is on the verge of collapse. All the indices of state failure are in place. There is an unprecedented level of impunity, and a never-before witnessed orgy of violence across the land. Criminal gangs are holding swathes of the Nigerian territory, bombing state infrastructures, collecting taxes, kidnapping travellers for ransom, sacking whole villages, burning down police stations and INEC Infrastructure, dislodging soldiers from their military outposts, abducting school children – transforming some into child soldiers and others into sex slaves, carrying out mass executions, and sending periodic threats to the Federal Government.
   
  In the face of these brazen attacks that are equivalent to an open declaration of war, the government in place appears either utterly incapable or inexplicably unwilling to perform the primary duty of government, namely, to protect the lives and property of Nigerians, to such an extent that many Nigerians in exasperation no wonder if high level agents of government are not actually complicit in this genocidal war against innocent Nigerians. Indeed, many are beginning to believe that there are treasonous persons within the governance structure, who have resolved to destroy the Nigerian state in the manner we are witnessing today.
   
  Election cycle after election cycle, Nigerians have kept on re-arranging chairs on a Titanic that is drowning. The state is failing, and it is failing at an alarming rate. Nigerians have seen their lives devalued and their rights diminished on every count. Rural farming communities are being deserted massively and rapidly, on account of the menace of bandits and killer herdsmen, that have taken over territories which used to be referred to as the “food basket” of the nation. Many of the farming communities in Benue, Plateau, Kaduna, Zamfara, Katsina, Adamawa, Taraba, and Borno States, have become killing fields from which everyone is fleeing for their lives. The situation has been further worsened in recent times by the floods that swept through most of the states in the country, killing hundreds of people, and destroying livelihoods, including cultivated farmlands.
   
  Our well educated, highly skilled, most brilliant, and most promising young professionals, including Doctors and other Medical Professionals, IT Specialists and Engineers of all categories, as well as our most qualified Professors, are fleeing the country in droves, begging to be allowed into not only the UK, the US, and South Africa, but also Rwanda, Kenya and even Ghana, as they see no future for themselves and their children in Nigeria. Some of our less educated but ambitious young people are daily perishing while attempting to cross the treacherous Sahara Desert or Mediterranean Sea, towards some form of slave labour or sex trafficking in some European or Arab country.
   
  Among the others who are not able to escape the madhouse which our country has become, some have felt pushed into crime – engaging in the infamous Yahoo-Yahoo and Yahoo+ business, or they are resorting to the now profitable enterprise of kidnapping for ransom or the shocking and disgusting business of killing and harvesting vital human organs allegedly for money. Perhaps worth mentioning here are also those young people across the country who have been so traumatised and diminished by the acrimonious Nigerian circumstances that, having given up the idea of their lives having any meaning at all, they now waste whatever is left of their lives on all shades of hard drugs and narcotics.
   
  With regards to the ravages of corruption, it is indeed most lamentable, that while the generality of Nigerians are groaning under the weight of ever-worsening economic fortunes, to which the government of the day has no answers; and the National Bureau of Statistics announces that 133 Million Nigerians have now slipped into absolute poverty, the sensibilities of the people are insulted by what has become a string of daily revelations of monumental corruption, or the reckless looting of state resources, to the tune of hundreds of billions of Naira, involving high ranking officials of a government that rode to power on the back of an aggressive anti-corruption propaganda. As the government is daily borrowing money from foreign creditors, expending over 90 percent of its earnings on debt servicing, and ensuring that generations yet unborn will be carrying the burden of these ill-advised loans, agents of the same government are looting away the borrowed funds and squandering them in a life of debauchery, abandoning the mass of the people to dehumanising poverty, bankrupting the moral fabric of the nation, and leaving the social infrastructure in a state of utter decay. Corruption has become so institutionalised and so normalised, that nearly every position of leadership is poisoned and polluted. True, Nigeria is today one giant asylum. We seem to have habituated and normalised all the indices of insanity, though we keep going around, wearing the mask of sanity. But sane societies do not behave the way we do. ***
   
  The Nigerian ruling class is perhaps among the most opportunistic and rapacious ruling classes in the world, constantly re-inventing and re-invigorating itself, and seizing every opportunity to violate and devalue the people they claim to serve. They have so shamelessly exploited the people’s poverty, so callously manipulated the people’s illiteracy, and so brazenly weaponised the people’s ignorance, that it is not at all in the interest of this ruling class to make any serious investment in quality education for the people. No wonder schools, colleges and universities could be shut down for eight months, and the leaders would just carry on business as usual, as if nothing is amiss. Now wonder the government a developing nation that has critical manpower needs, could treat its public universities lecturers as shabbily and so disdainfully as we have been witnessing in the last few months. But let me seize this opportunity to remind the unrepentant conquerors of the Nigerian people that islands of affluence cannot co-exist for long amidst a sea of destitution. Yes, those who are smiling to the bank after putting us in the mess of the moment, must be reminded that in the process of evolution, if any species is over-hunting and over exploiting the very resources they depend upon as nourishment, sooner or later, natural selection would take the predator out, and restore some measure of equilibrium.
   
  RESTRUCTURING: A Demand for the Rule of Law and Equal Citizenship
  Many of those who cry of marginalisation today indeed have a case. Across the country, there are clear instances of the abuse and violation of the federal character principle as contained in Chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution. In the last few years, we have witnessed bare-faced and brazen acts of nepotism and sectionalism, whereby federating units are not treated equally, rewards and particularly sanctions are not applied equally (if, and when they are), and appointments to the leadership positions of critical organs and agencies of government are seen by many as often in blatant and reckless disregard for equity and justice.
   
  The apparent lack of political will to crush the marauding bandits across the country, and the near absence of any sanctions for the criminal herders that are terrorising the population across the country for example, have so utterly divided and polarised the population, have sown so much discord among the people who have lived together for generations; yes, these real and perceived acts of injustice on the part of government, have so terribly induced and elevated political tension across the land, and precipitated so much distrust for and resentment towards the leadership, that indeed today we cannot continue to speak of the unity of Nigeria as non-negotiable with any measure of seriousness. Our unity is indeed negotiable, and the terms and rules of engagement for our union should now and again be evaluated and subjected to review, since we claim that ours is a democratic union, and democracy only finds expression in the mutual acknowledgement of the right to self-determination. (See Article 1 of the UN Charter, and Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights).
   
  Justice and the Rule of Law are the first conditions of humanity. The law is the anchor upon which the entire systems of society revolve. The widespread demand for restructuring could be seen as a blanket cover for several grievances bordering on the impression that we do not all enjoy equal citizenship – yes, that in Nigeria there are super-citizens on the one hand, who often make up the ruling class who enjoy many rights and privileges, and non-citizens on the other, whose experience of the state is that of pain and distress, and in many instances, multi-generational trauma. But the demand for justice and equal citizenship can only be met where the rule of law is firmly in place. If the law does not rule, impunity reigns, as is largely the case with us today, whereby the state is configured to protect the rulers and their allies or kinsmen and women. When people feel perpetually victimised by an unjust, inequitable, and iniquitous governance system - that nation or country will continually be in a state of war. And discerning persons can attest to the fact that our situation in Nigeria has for a long time been the moral equivalence of war. The reason people are being killed with impunity everywhere across the country today, and others are being abducted or kidnapped, is that the perpetrators know they will often not have to answer for their crimes. They know that there are slim chances of their being apprehended or punished for their crimes. So, the crimes continue to flourish. This is the reign of impunity, and no nation can survive for long under such a regime of impunity.
   
  Let us put political correctness aside and speak the hard truth to ourselves: Does any thinking Nigerian really believe that where we are today is sustainable beyond the immediate? Yes, notwithstanding the familiar posturing of those who are benefiting the most from our ignominious system, does any discerning Nigerian really believe that as presently configured, Nigeria will survive beyond a few more years of fumbling and wobbling on the precipice? We can shout “God forbid” as we may, but quite frankly, my reading of the situation is that unless we change our course, and do so very quickly, we would end up where we are headed: And I say with all sense of responsibility that we are racing imperiously towards a predictable disaster in one form or the other. True, everything in the horizon is suggestive of an imminent implosion, from Sokoto to Calabar, and from Maiduguri to Lagos. Where we find ourselves today is comparable to a boiling pot or a pressure cooker. If we do not find a way to let out the steam, it is bound to explode with devastating consequences.
   
  Many discerning and privileged Nigerians have seen the handwriting on the wall, and they have been perfecting some form of “PLAN B” for themselves and their immediate family members. But those of us who have no Plan B of any sort, must now take the bull by the horns, and summon the courage to address the major cracks and crevices in our structural arrangements, in our perception and regard for the rule of law and equal citizenship, in our leadership recruitment processes, and in what priority we accord to leadership integrity and accountability.
   
  Nigeria was not designed to be the monster it has become today, recklessly devouring its children, and callously inflicting pain and distress on the most talented and patriotic of its people. The original terms agreed upon by the founding fathers of Nigerian (the result of the painstaking negotiations at the constitutional conferences held in Nigeria and in the U.K. between 1953 and 1959), have been severely violated and senselessly brutalised by both military adventurists and civilian conquerors. Many legal experts today believe that the constitutional arrangement which the military bequeathed us by way of the 1999 Constitution, has little semblance with the 1960 Independence Constitution or the 1963 Republican Constitution, by which Nigeria became a federal republic. This explains in large measure why 62 years after independence, and after fighting a bitter civil war, where we lost millions of our brothers and sisters, there is today a renewed clamour for not only self-determination, but even outright secession by significant elements from some of our ethnic nationalities that came together in October 1960 to form the independent Nigerian federation.
   
  Time for a Critical Dialogue Towards 2023 and Beyond
  In the run-up to the 2023 general elections therefore, those of us who have not given up on Nigeria must start asking – and we owe it as a duty to ask: National Unity - at what cost? And on what terms? What really are the fundamental bases of our being together? What do we hold in common? What do we agree should be our core national values, and the basic rules of engagement for our corporate existence? As individual politicians and political parties justle for positions, come 2023, some of us recognise that just a change of ruling party or ruling persons (which the 2023 elections will hopefully achieve) is not enough, and it cannot take us far. A re-negotiation of the terms of our union (as a matter of utmost urgency and priority national imperative) is to me the most viable path for salvaging our failing and collapsing nation.
   
  Meanwhile, Nigerians have held several profound conversations in the past, including Ibrahim Babangida’s 1986 Political Bureau, Sani Abacha’s 1995 Constitutional Conference, Olusegun Obasanjo’s 2005 Political Reform Conference, and Goodluck Jonathan’s 2014 National Dialogue. We have produced tons of documents from previous dialogue sessions, whose recommendations have been ignored by a succession of leaders. The recommendations for structural reforms from these previous dialogue events must now be considered among the low-hanging fruits from which to start the project of salvaging our collapsing nation. If Nigeria is to be saved, the changes we require to bring about are not superficial, but massive, fundamental, and far-reaching. But in my view the required changes can be summarised under the three broad themes of RULE OF LAW, EQUAL CITIZENSHIP, and SELF DETERMINATION or what has often been described as DEVOLUTION OF POWERS, to reflect our true nature as a federal state and not a unitary system that is claiming to be a federation.
   
  We must trace our steps back to the federalist route negotiated by the founding fathers and understand that the basis of the existence of Nigeria is mutual respect for the religious, ethnic and cultural diversities of all those in the union. The 1999 Constitution appears to have vested too much power in the centre and emasculated the federating units. There is widespread call today that we dust up the 1963 Constitution and amend it for our present-day circumstances. This implies that we go back to embrace the parliamentary system, adopt no more than six or seven viable regions or states, and grant a good measure of self-determination to those regions, thereby reducing to the barest minimum the items on the exclusive legislative list. We need to cut down massively on the cost of governance by merging ministries, departments and agencies (perhaps in a more radical manner than the Oronsaye report recommended). We must now summon the courage to discuss openly and frankly the thorny issues of religion and state of origin, agree on what place if any religion should play in governance, and resolve on whether we want to live under a monarchical theocracy of some sort, or we want to live together as a modern federal democratic, multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity, founded on the principles of justice, equity, equality and mutual respect. If we are not able to resolve these thorny issues once and for all, I would humbly submit that we allow any geo-political entities desiring to secede, to do so peacefully, before it is too late; for quite frankly, as presently constituted I see that time is running out for Nigeria.
   
  We Need a National Network of Thinking Nigerians
  We need a network of thinking Nigerians, from North to South and from East to West, who are prepared to engage in a wholesale peaceful revolt against a degenerate governance system that is daily inflicting fatal wounds on the people and turning the impoverished masses against themselves in an orgy of violence. We need a network of thinking Nigerians to engage in a peaceful revolt and the mobilisation of grassroots people, against a leadership recruitment process that has been suffocated by street thugs, cult gang leaders, internet fraudsters, ex-convicts, ethnic bigots, religious extremists, known rogues and treasury looters, and such remnants of primitive feudalism that we call political godfathers; because a society cannot have credible and honourable leaders, when the process that leads to their emergence is corrupt, bankrupt, decadent and degenerate.
   
  We need a network of thinking Nigerians, from among the Christian and Muslim populations, and from the diverse ethnicities across the country, to help salvage our country and its people from the politics of bloodletting, greed and acrimony, that is largely superintended by shameless prostitutes of power, who often have nothing to show for their stupendous wealth, except that they have held political offices as legislators, governors, ministers, board chairmen, chief executives of federal parastatals, or party chieftains; during which time they often so callously and recklessly looted the state resources entrusted to them, that many soon became richer than the institutions which they superintended. They habitually use these often ill-gotten wealth to further enslave the already emasculated people, constantly recycling themselves in positions of power, habituating corruption and normalising violence in our national landscape. During the last political party primaries, Nigerians witnessed the ignominious spectacle of the open auctioning of delegates votes, with bundles of dollars or Ghana-Must-Go bags of naira. Many of these agents of our national ruination have also been positioning some their sons and daughters in key political positions, and others in such strategic and juicy federal agencies and institutions as CBN, NNPC, NLG, NDDC and NCC, thus entrenching a set of family dynasties, which is a form of historical and multi-generational injustice that will only end in violent revolution.
   
  Conclusion: Need for Grassroots Education and Mobilisation for Real Social Change
  If Nigeria is to be saved (beyond the 2023 election ritual, we need as a matter of utmost urgency, we need the kind of restructuring that will demolish the ignominious system which props up low-grade, vile and ignominious characters for high public office, and begin to work on a new system that is to be founded on sound knowledge, demonstrable competence, ang unassailable integrity. We must do all we can to wake up the sleeping giant called Nigeria. The ignominious system has endured for so long, largely because of the appalling state of illiteracy and political ignorance across the country. Schools and colleges, religious institutions, progressive political parties, and all manner of civil society organisations, must begin to invest heavily in civic and political education at the grassroots level. Democracy presupposes a certain measure of enlightenment and civic awareness among the people who have the right of periodically choosing their leaders. Without such enlightenment and awareness on the part of the masses, majority rule can often camouflage the dictatorship of primitive feudal lords, whose poor subjects have accepted their deplorable state as God’s design for them and are unable to see how things could ever be different. Yes, as the Prophet Hosea says, “my people die for lack of knowledge.” Those of us who desire wholesome change in Nigeria, must get into the trenches quickly, and engage the poor victims of the Nigerian leadership misadventure in the empowering process of critical social analysis for grassroots political emancipation.
   
  CHIDI ODINKALU
   
  "It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask,"Milan Kundera, the late Czech-French writer told his friend and writer Philip Roth in the New York Times.
  For Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, he is comfortable in the realm of enquiry and that should come as no surprise. In August 2021, he was named Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, USA. Odinkalu is a former Chairman of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and served on the panel of eminent persons that negotiated the return of The Gambia to the Commonwealth in 2017.
  Odinkalu was born in Ihiala, Anambra State to two teachers— Augustine Chukwuma Odinkalu and Anthonia Ihunna Odinkalu. He hails from Orlu, Imo State.
  Would you be surprised if he “stands on June 12?” Born on June 12, 1968, he left Nigeria for the United Kingdom in the wake of the crackdown of human rights activists by the General Mohammed Abacha junta.
  Intellectual curiosity took him to Imo State University where he  obtained his law degree (LLB) in 1987 and was called to the bar in 1988. He was the best graduating student of the School of Legal Studies, Imo State University in 1987 and won the Chief FRA Williams prize for best student in Legal Drafting and Conveyancing in 1988. He obtained a master's degree in law at the University of Lagos in 1990 and holds a Ph.D in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1991, Odinkalu won the USIA Fellowship on the Bicentennial of the Bill of Rights.
  He became assistant lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan between 1988 and 1989 and worked with the Civil Liberties Organization as director of projects and planning. In 1998, United Nations Observer Mission in Sierra Leone appointed him as a Human Rights Advisor. Between July 1998 and February 2003, he became the legal officer for Africa, INTERIGHTS. In February 2003, Odinkalu was appointed as the senior legal officer for Africa for Open Society Justice Initiative.
  He has worked as an advisor for the Ford Foundation, New York; World Bank; African Union; and International Council for Human Rights Policy, Geneva.
  Odinkalu is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on contemporary challenges of multilateralism in regional systems in development, human rights and governance.
  His research focuses on contemporary challenges of multilateralism in regional systems in development, human rights and governance.
  He currently chairs the Truth, Justice, and Peace Commission, a transitional justice initiative established to address the crises of violence and agitation in the states of south-east Nigeria.
  His publications include “Behind the Wall: Prison Conditions in Nigeria and the Nigerian Prison System” 1991 (co-author); “Justice Denied; Areas Courts in the Northern States of Nigeria” (1992); “Too Good to Die” with Ayisha Osori(2018); and “ Building Bridges for Rights: Inter-Africa Initiatives in the Field of Human Rights” 2001 (co-author).
  He is Chair, Board of Directors of International Refugee Rights Initiative, IRRI, Kampala, Uganda; Chair, International Advisory Board of Global Rights, Abuja; Co-chair,Sudan Consortium, Kampala/Khartoum, Uganda; Member of the Board, Atrocities Watch, Africa, Kampala, Uganda; Member, International Advisory Board of Physicians for Human Rights, New York, United States; and Member, Editorial Advisory Board of Health & Human Rights, Boston, United States.
   
  RESETTING NIGERIA[1]
  BY CHIDI ANSELM ODINKALU
  INTRODUCTION
              I should begin by congratulating the Just Friends Club of Nigeria (JFCN) for making it to 10 years. In a country in which most start-ups die in their first year, this is no mean feat. The survival feat of the  JFCN is even more impressive when we recall that it began its associational journey as an informal wedding planning enterprise. Even more than congratulations from outsiders, members of the club also deserve to indulge in some thanksgiving at the fact that their membership has enjoyed additions only over the period since the club has been in existence.
  I would, therefore, want to thank the leadership and members of the for inviting me to be part of the 10^th anniversary of the Club. At a time and in a year where events in politics and public life continue to put to test bonds of coexistence across the country, the value of friendships and the need for sustaining them cannot be taken for granted.
  In a country in which government only works for those who run it, friends can often be the only people standing between us and fate. The COVID-19 Pandemic showed us all how invaluable friends can be for our mental, psychological and overall health and wellbeing.
  Good friends in particular are also assets for those who wish to make progress in life. It is therefore a privilege to be able to join in this celebration of multi-dimensional bonds of friendship at a time when coexistence in Nigeria is challenged.
              I am informed that JFCN began in the modest circumstances of planning a wedding one decade ago. In other words, it began as an exercise in family solidarity, itself, the basis for building society. Since then, it has evolved into a socio-cultural association that seeks to foster companionship, comradeship, and oneness among the members as well as solidarity with others based on shared values. Its membership of about thirty-five persons comprises mostly professionals in engineering, communication, accounting, business, legal and other sectors of the economy. In a sense they are mostly drawn from the liberal professions in vocations bound up by some rules of ethics, including social responsibility. The club promotes wellbeing through investment in leisure and sport, both human rights guaranteed (unknown to many) in Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It also advances social solidarity through outreach to needy members of our communities.
              This public lecture began in 2014. The speakers who have preceded me in this event include senior public servants, such as the Director-General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises; Director-General of the Debt Management Office; the President of Abuja Chamber of Commerce; and a senior Catholic priest who headed the Secretariat of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Nigeria. I cannot hope to match the erudition, experience, expertise, or authority of any of these.
  ABOUT NIGERIA, ITS SETTINGS AND AN IDENTITY CRISIS
  The theme, “Resetting Nigeria” is pregnant with more questions than illumination. First, it implies that Nigeria was already set without disclosing who did so. Second, it suggests also that the initial setting is flawed, imperiled, or spent, without indicating why, when or how this happened. Third, it suggests that this old setting now needs reworking but does not say who will do it, why they are qualified for that task or from whence they derive their mandate to do so. Taking on any of these three sets of questions would itself be a mammoth intellectual task. Taking on all three is fraught with assumption and risk about my ability to do so, none of which I can guarantee. I do not presume to come to this task with any pre-notions or promises.
  Three events signpost the significance of the theme for this lecture and its rationales. On thing that is clear from the framing is not merely that Nigeria has problems but that the causes of those problems are in the structures of its political economy. This event takes place while the National Assembly continues with the task of confirming nominees for ministerial positions in government at the federal level. S. 147 of the constitution requires the president to nominate at least one minister from each state of the country, an indication that national cohesion is far from achieved.
  sets of questions would itself be a mammoth intellectual task. Taking on all three is fraught with assumption and risk about my ability to do so, none of which I can guarantee. I do not presume to come to this task with any pre-notions or promises.
  Three events signpost the significance of the theme for this lecture and its rationales. On thing that is clear from the framing is not merely that Nigeria has problems but that the causes of those problems are in the structures of its political economy. This event takes place while the National Assembly continues with the task of confirming nominees for ministerial positions in government at the federal level. S. 147 of the constitution requires the president to nominate at least one minister from each state of the country, an indication that national cohesion is far from achieved.
  This dysfunction with civics and citizenship itself is reflected in a leadership ethos that is incapable to treating citizens with dignity as well as in a national preoccupation with discrimination. In Nigeria today, the only significant minorities are Nigerians. We are all polarized along a multiplicity of lines: Christians vs. Muslims; Militants vs. Boko; Men vs. Women; ruling party vs. opposition; Indigenes vs. Settlers; Poor vs. Rich; Army vs. Police; Police vs. Bloody Civilians. I could go on. It is increasingly difficult to find or celebrate or protect the human being outside these instrumentalised and narrow epithets. Despite the firm prohibition against it in s. 41 of the 1999 constitution, discrimination has become institutionalized. Those who think they do service would only seek to serve those that they know not those who need to be served. A re-engineering of the service space is called for before we can effectively re-claim the ethos of service.
  According to S. 14(2)(a) of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution, “sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” But, given the above context, it is difficult to know who “the people” of Nigeria are. Disenfranchisement has become a mechanism for access to and retention of power. At the heart of everything, citizenship is in crisis in Nigeria and that crisis in turn cascades into and derives from an underlying crisis of nation-building.
  I should make clear the underlying assumptions that frame my own reasoning. First, I regard Nigeria’s diversity as a positive resource not a curse but recognise that Nigeria’s leaders have, for the most part, failed to transcend the narrownesses inherent in this diversity. I would argue that professionals have a role to correct this. Second, I believe that Nigeria is greater and better than the sum of its individual parts but understand that achieving this coherent whole remains a promise as yet unrealised. Third, I argue that the synergies inherent in a big country like Nigeria offer greater long-term prospects to all within it than the risks and inefficiencies in smaller territories. Harnessing these prospects, however, requires vision and leadership of the sort that the country has historically not been blessed with on a significant scale. Whether that happens will depend significantly on whether professionals, like the MPC, accept the challenge of civic leadership. I want to illustrate the challenge with Nigeria’s settings with the citizenship problem.
  A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ALLOCATION
  The framing for this lecture implies a fraying or an imperiled civics and unstable polity. If so, several lines of inquiry suggest themselves. We could investigate the nature of the instability in the polity; its causes and symptoms; the lines and nature of responsibility for it or the history and provenance of the instability. Any or all of this and more would be a worthwhile venture. Given the limitations of time and attention span at our disposal presently, I propose to work my way from fundamentals to symptoms in locating a handle on the subject.
  Many explanations have been proffered for Nigeria’s current unhappy condition: corruption, violence, impunity, among others. I want to suggest that these are symptoms not the underlying problem. Two decades ago, Chinua Achebe declared that the “the trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership”, and argued that “Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable.”[2]
  As a supplement or complement to this, I propose shortly to suggest that we have a structural crisis in our political economy indexed as it is on allocation rather than production. This is an important point to make to a gathering of professionals. The defects of this fundamentally flawed political economy are compounded by a long-established ethics of deliberate political innumeracy. As a political economy, we specialize in fraudulent counting and accounting, legitimized post-hoc by the instruments and skills of the law.
  To preserve our innumeracy of public accounts, we have used everything from coercive instruments to commissions of inquiry whose reports have never been seen. In over half a century as a country, we have never held a credible census. To legitimize the outcome without addressing the underlying malfeasances, we establish Census Tribunals. In the same period, we have struggled to undertake credible elections. For each flawed election, we establish an Election Petitions Tribunal, procuring judicial legitimacy for returns that have been - in most cases - fundamentally flawed.
  Over 20 years before the 2007 elections, in its 1986 report, the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Affairs of the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) between 1979-1983, which was chaired by former Supreme Court Justice, Bolarinwa Babalakin, noted with reference to election petitions that followed the 1983 general elections that:
  As the verdicts began to be pronounced, the general public often expressed shock and dismay. Some commentators in the nation’s newspapers took the view that the verdicts in a number of instances constituted a rape of democracy perpetrated through the law courts. Allegations of corruption in high places were freely made.[3]
  The defining character of those flawed elections was that they neither reflected the will of the people nor promoted democratic accountability, thereby encouraging an appearance of government without legitimacy. In place of the votes of citizens, most office holders procured the authority to govern from court orders, leading the Economist to describe Nigeria’s as a form of “democracy by court orders.”[4] To understand how extensive this pattern of judicialisation of our elections is:
  arising from the 2007 general elections alone, there were 1,299 election petitions challenging official results out of a total of 1, 496 elective offices in respect of which INEC organizes elections, yielding an astounding 86.5%. From the 2011 elections, there were an additional 769 petitions, which despite the decrease still netted a majority (51.4%) of electoral posts challenged.[5]
  The price we have paid for this is huge, for the tendency to get electoral legitimacy from the courts instead of the people corrupts the judiciary and judicialises corruption. It makes it impossible to evince remedies for even the most basic wrongs in our country. As a result, the only remedy that matters is vigilantism or self-help.
  Most of Nigeria’s crises with corruption, impunity, mal-governance and resulting instability come down to this: as a people, we cannot count honestly and our public institutions and professionals (such as are represented in Rotary) have encouraged a system in which there are no consequences for dishonest counting and accounting. This has removed rationality as an impetus for progress or competitive politics from among us, establishing in its place a politics of irrationality and denuding our civics. This reality has destroyed the potential of the system to deliver macro-justice; undermined its credibility with respect to micro-justice; robbed it of legitimacy; brought us to the point where violence has become largely democratized and threatens generalized instability on the country if we don’t address it honestly and urgently. Without addressing this context and re-engineering it, we cannot credibly build an ethos of service, fairness, benefit or co-existence. We have created a political economy that has no interest in accounting its citizens, their votes or their money or accounting for any of these.
  WHY COUNTING AND ACCOUNTING MATTER
  A country that does not care to evolve the capacities to count its citizens or account for or to them will always struggle for legitimacy of its existence, its institutions and its government. This is easily borne out by Nigeria’s experience. It is necessary for present purposes, however, to explain the relevance of the institutional skills and political values of counting and accounting in a modern political economy. Three processes are essential to the effective functioning of a country. These are:
  (a)     the processes of legitimating public power (elections);
  (b)     the processes of quantifying the demographic coverage/composition of the country (census); and
  (c)     the processes of estimating and distributing the commonwealth (public accounts, including revenues and appropriations).
  These three inter-related processes – elections, demography, and public accounts - rely on the basic skills and institutions of honest policy numeracy. In elections, this involves the counting of votes and the conferment of a mandate usually on the persons with the greatest number of counted votes. In a census, we count the people, which in turn helps to determine the bases for allocation of representation, social services, revenue and sundry public goods. In the management of public accounts, we count the size of the common wealth, so as to know exactly the pool of resources that those who have the legitimate mandate through elections can distribute for the benefit of those that we have counted.
  The rationales for these and relationships between them are obvious. Through the votes validly counted, government acquires its legitimacy to rule; through the census, it knows the number of people it needs to cater for and among whom the resources need to be distributed; and in the public accounts, it knows what it needs to manage in the interest of these people. Democratic politics, after all, is about acquiring the legitimate exercise of power over the commonwealth/public accounts for the benefit of the people.
  The proper conduct of these three signal foundations of public policy making in a modern political economy requires the articulation of a coherent national interest, norms of political ethics and values, and an infrastructure of capable state institutions to underpin them.
  That infrastructure is built on three values, which I will explain briefly. Theoretically at least, the dispersal of power within the institutions and processes of democratic government should constrain possibilities for venality. The accompanying protection of civil liberties and human rights should make for open and transparent government and provide a check on abuse of power. Competitive politics under-pinned by periodic renewal through elections of the mandate to govern should reward politicians with a credible record of protecting the public resources and interest. Together, these three occurrences – dispersal of power, kinetising the institutions of accountable government, and competitive electoral politics for periodic renewal of government’s mandate – are essential elements of democratic government.
  But if you can acquire power or win without counting, then why bother with any of these? Paul Collier explains how not counting votes properly can undermine everything as follows:
  If politicians can still face a reasonable chance of winning without bothering to deliver good performance, then….the sort of people who seek to become politicians will change. If being honest and competent does not give you an electoral advantage, then the honest and competent will be discouraged. Crooks will replace the honest as candidates. …Evidently, one reason elected office is more attractive to criminals than to the honest is that only the criminals will take advantage of the opportunities for corruption. But there is a further reason: elected office provides immunity from prosecution.[6]
  The stability of a polity is, therefore, founded on a tripod of three values: legitimacy, accountability, and capacity. To explain briefly, the legitimacy or credibility of the government is essential for its authority, revenue generation and service delivery. Credibility is a function of both the nature of its electoral legitimacy or mandate, and government’s fidelity to the norms of political behaviour (counting). This is founded on effective civics. Illegitimate government is not accountable and lacks the authority to deliver anything.
  There is a logical connect between credibility and accountability.  Accountability has both political and institutional dimensions. Politically, it speaks to the ability of people to participate in their government, and if necessary, to change it through transparent electoral processes; institutionally, it refers to how far the institutions and mechanisms of government are able to play their roles in ensuring that government operates properly within the law – in one word, ensuring oversight (accounting).
  Implicit in the political, institutional, and service delivery dimensions of government is the assumption that there is the institutional capacity to fulfil these functions. This institutional capacity is located in the independence and abilities of the legislature, judiciary, civil service, and bureaucracies of government to police the rules without which government becomes whimsical, arbitrary, and personalised. Put differently, therefore, the establishment of a stable, democratic polity is thus, inherently a project in both counting and accounting.
  Because so much hangs on this, logic and intuition would suggest that we should take them seriously. But Nigeria is both illogical and counter-intuitive. Nigeria’s multiple crises of governance exist because these foundations are non-existent or have been methodically destroyed and corruption is such a problem because whenever we have to count as a people, we compromise the institutions that exist to do it and subvert the processes of counting and accounting without which it is impossible to run a State that works. In the terms of this innumerate political economy, the citizen is displaced in significance by the indigene who is set up in conflict with the settler. In this formulation, three conflicts are set up contemporaneously. One between politics vs. economics; another is a livelihood conflict between the sedentary vs. pastoralist peasant; and the third is between documented and un-documented Nigerians.
  INDIGENE, SETTLER AND CITIZEN: A CONCEPTUAL CHECK ON AN IDENTITY CRISIS
  All over Nigeria, as in many other African countries, the various conflicts and associated atrocities over the citizenship rights of the indigene and settler are invariably characterized by conceptual ambiguity and confusion with bases in the constitution. The 1999 Constitution consecrates Federal Character in Sections 14(3)-(4) as a Fundamental Objective and Directive Principle of State Policy, directing that the conduct of government at all levels – federal, State and local – should be carried out “in such manner as to recognise the diversity of the people within its area of authority and the need to promote a sense of belonging and loyalty among all the people of the Federation.”
  Since 1979, Chapter III of Nigeria’s Constitution has recognized both national citizenship which may be founded on descent from grandparents who belong “or belonged to a community indigenous to Nigeria”[7] and, rather curiously, state indigeneship, requiring the President to appoint at least one federal minister from each State “who shall be an indigene of such state.”[8] The Constitution does not necessarily define the word “indigene” but, in a provision remarkable for circuitous lack of imagination, contains a definition for “belong to or its grammatical expression”, which, “when used with reference to a person in a State, refers to a person, either of whose parents or any of whose grand-parents was a member of a community indigenous to that State.”[9] Yet, the same Constitution guarantees that “Every citizen of Nigeria is entitled to move freely throughout Nigeria and to reside in any part thereof”,[10] and also prohibits discrimination in the following terms:[11]
  A citizen of Nigeria of a particular community, ethnic group, place of origin, sex, religion or political opinion shall not, by reason only that he is such a person:-
  (a) be subjected either expressly by, or in the practical application of, any law in force in Nigeria or any executive or administrative action of the government, to disabilities or restrictions to which citizens of Nigeria of other communities, ethnic groups, places of origin, sex, religion or political opinions are not made subject; or
  (b) be accorded either expressly by, or in the practical application of, any law in force in Nigeria or any such executive or administrative action, any privilege or advantage that is not accorded to citizens of Nigeria of other communities, ethnic groups, places of origin, sex, religion or political opinions.
  Thus, having set up a conflict between the citizen and the indigene, Nigeria’s Constitution offers no sensible framework for resolving this tension and sets the country on course for violating its international obligations on nationality rights. In the absence of clear constitutional guide, several interpretations have naturally mushroomed serving narrow interests. In 1993, Nigeria’s former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, had warned that:
  The concept of “settler” or “non-native” syndrome has of recent hardened into a theory of ethnic exclusiveness and moulded and propagated to foist a pejorative meaning to advance economic and political control among competing elite groups for interests during democratic regimes.[12]
  In its 2005 report, the Plateau Peace Conference defined indigenes as “People who are the first to have settled permanently in a particular area and who are considered traditional natives”,[13] which “should be peculiar to a people who are the first to have settled permanently in a particular area and who are often considered as ‘natives’. Such people have rights to their lands, traditions and culture.”[14] In particular, the conference determined that “Indigene Certificates should only be issued to Afizere, Anaguta, and Berom in Jos North Local Government Area in line with the definition of indigeneship.”[15] These conclusions relied heavily on the earlier work of the Justice Aribiton Fiberesima Commission of Inquiry which argued in its 1994 report that:
  An Indigene of Jos is one whose ancestors were natives of Jos, beyond living memory. This does not include any person who may not remember from where his father or grand-father left his native home for Jos as a fixed home, domiciled there as of choice for life; or who is ignorant about from where his family moved to Jos permanently in quest of better living or in the process of his business…In the light of the above consideration or careful thought, we concede to the claim of the Afizere, Anaguta and Berom tribes, and to declare that they are ‘indigenes’ of Jos. But as to the Hausa-Fulani people’s assumption, we make bold, on the evidence at our disposal, to advise them that they can qualify only as ‘citizens’ of Jos….[16]
  These attempts at definition polarize the relationships between indigene, settler and citizen over space and time. They distinguish between politically explosive concepts without attaching consequences to categories. With reference to space, the latter formulation suggests that “indigene” is a bounded or territorialized identity marked by supposedly defining characteristics and not a racial category. Implicitly, the indigene loses their status as such if s/he steps out the recognized territorial markers of this identity grouping into a zone of less or no protection.
  In terms of time, the establishment of indigeneship is posited as an exclusive, once-and-for-all-time occurrence that can only be asserted by one group or set of groups and their descendants. It is also determined on a group not individual bases. Thus, on this definition, a person from a group not recognized as an indigene group cannot be recognized as an indigene irrespective of how long they and their descendants have lived in the location and even if their proof of contact or settlement in the land pre-dates that of members of a group recognized indigenous. One clear consequence of this, for instance, would be both naturalized Nigerians and their descendants would be ineligible to access federal appointments as they can never qualify to claim indigeneship of any place.
  There are several flaws with the Fiberesima formulation. Firstly, its vaguely neo-Biblical suggestion[17] that there can be citizenship of a city of Nigeria has no legal or constitutional bases because Nigeria’s Constitution only recognizes citizenship of one country and not of any constituents thereof. Secondly, this definition of indigeneship privileges sedentary over pastoralist communities in an asymmetrical competition of livelihood styles and does not account for the transitory character of pastoralist communities, which do not establish themselves in a place by building sedentary populations. It is easy to see why this formulation can be a source of conflict and crises.
  Third, most claims of indigeneship in Nigeria are founded on colonial records of settlement and occupation, themselves made by colonialist settlers involved in establishing what Jules Harmand described as “colonies of domination” over indigenous populations, which involved convenient manufacture of historical memory.[18] Such colonial domination was based on the dubious notion that the settlements established were both un-owned and un-occupied.
  It bears recalling that most of the cities in Nigeria as in the rest of the continent, are the results of relatively recent settlement. [19] Claims of indigeneship based on such recent records of settlement privilege recent settlement activity backed by settler-colonial records and amount to no more than an assertion of “My ancestors were here before yours”, which is quite different from a claim of “My ancestors were surely the first people here.” Sam Egwu illustrates this with reference to the dispute between the Tiv on the one hand and the Kambari, Alago and Jukun on the other in Nassarawa State, founded on competition for political influence between the Tiv of the Benue-Plateau region and the Kambari, originally of Kanuri extraction in north-eastern Nigeria, who now control the Lafia Emirate in Nassarawa State, following their arrival there in the 19^th century, notwithstanding the fact that the Tiv have been present in this area for up to one century.[20]
  In reality, settlements and the establishment of communities based on them pre-date the contemporary cartography of Nigeria’s geo-politics. It is not always possible to date historical patterns of migration with certainty. Outside Nigeria, many African ethnicities and communities – such as the Masai, Luo, and Somalis in East Africa; the Banyarwanda, Hima, and Twa in East and Central Africa; the Hausa, Fulani and Mandingo in West Africa; the Tswana and Khoi-San in Southern Africa, and many more – straddle the boundaries of more than one country, making it even more difficult to date their location on parts of the continent where maps were drawn after the ancestors of the contemporary inhabitants first arrived or passed through such places.[21]
  Based largely on claims founded on the flawed Fiberesima formulation, the tendency has thus emerged of sub-ordinating Nigerian citizenship to local indigeneship. Abubakar Momoh rightly complains that the situation is now such that “to be accepted as an indigene, one is expected to be a native; and to be accepted as a citizen, one is expected to be an indigene.”[22] In its 2009 report, the Bola Ajibola Commission of Inquiry asserts, rather extravagantly, that :
  One is a Nigerian in the first place because he or she belongs to a community indigenous to Nigeria. See Section 147 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999. It is the application of indigeneship that makes us know who is a Nigerian and who is not.[23]
   
  This conclusion is patently mistaken on many grounds. Although membership of a community indigenous to Nigeria is one of the grounds for citizenship, it is not the only ground. Other grounds for citizenship include descent from a citizen of Nigeria or naturalization.[24] Contrary to the claim by the Commission, s.147 of Nigeria’s Constitution does not provide bases for any such claim, limited as it is to the question of sourcing nominees for ministerial appointments. In the argument over supremacy of indigeneship and citizenship, Nigeria’s Court of Appeal has in fact held that Sections 25(1)(a)-(b) are a “binding guide” in the determination of who is an indigene of Nigeria,[25] suggesting somewhat (but without resolving the problem) that citizenship has primacy over indigeneship.
  In reality, the problem here is at least three–fold. First, the real scope of the indigene-settler dichotomy is situational. It is, therefore, both dubiously ambulatory and elusive, mutating and adapting depending on the communities confronting one another. The concepts of ‘indigene’ and ‘settler’ on close examination appear to be epithets of convenience deployed freely in proxy elite political wars. Secondly, the dichotomy reflects the demographics of political control of territories within the Nigerian federation. Professor Egwu rightly points out that:
  While the indigenes seek exclusive control of existing social and political rights at the expense of the latter, settlers seek to resist their exclusion. The consequence is that millions of Nigerians who live outside the socio-political space within which they can affirm their indigeneity suffer exclusion and are exposed to all kinds of humiliation. While some have endured deprivations in passivity, others have contested their exclusion, leading to a spate of communal conflicts. In many instances, this has assumed the dimension of violent conflicts with dire consequence for development, national unity and the resolution of the National Question.[26]
  This dichotomy relies on poorly documented and verified historical narratives to construct claims of exclusivity of ownership of settlements in changed contexts where even recognition of such claims of original settlement would not necessarily preclude recognition of other such claims. As such, it is a fertile site legends.
  Thirdly, the site of contestation, though very real, is, as a normative proposition, manufactured in an extra-constitutional zone, for, while Nigeria’s constitution contemplates the indigeneship of Nigeria and, for limited purposes, indigeneship of a State, it does not provide for indigeneship of a settlement, community, local government or city. To understand how this has evolved, it is necessary to return to the historiography of post-colonial Nigeria and its territorialisation.
  TERRITORIALISING VICTIMHOODS
  Since independence, the unitarisation of Nigeria’s federalism especially under nearly 30 years of post-colonial military rule and the resulting micro-territorialisation of the federating units following the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) has emerged as arguably the source of the most serious threats to citizenship and coexistence in Nigeria. At Independence in 1960, Nigeria comprised three regions. In 1963, a fourth region was created, bringing the number of regions to four. To head off the ultimately unsuccessful secession of Biafra in May 1967, the four regions were further split into 12 States. Currently, Nigeria comprises 36 States and one Federal Capital Territory.  The last exercise in “State creation” was in 1996. All exercises in the “creation” of States were undertaken by military regimes. Communal identities and boundaries have mutated and evolved as States have been created, un-created and re-created. The balance of the relationship between the centre and the states as federating units has also decidedly shifted in favour of the centre. The result is stiff elite competition for access to federal goods, including appointments, access to and preferment in positions in the security agencies, such as the police and the armed forces, access to federal educational institutions and allocations of federally-held funds.[27] In this competition, the territory of the state and belonging to it is mobilized for narrow gain. Jos illustrates citizenship crisis created in the intersection between territorialisation and the absence of any effective framework of minorities protection.
  These structural causes combust at their point of contact with cleavages of identity, sect, livelihood, traditional institutions, access to land, markets and natural resources, and territorialisation and boundary adjustments for access to power (including location of administrative headquarters for new administrative units). The consequences of this contact and abject failure or co-optation into conflict of institutions designed to prevent, mediate or contain them are dramatized in different ways across different locations in Nigeria. Jos is only one of such locations. It is not the only one. Indeed, it is impossible to understand or address the situation in Jos in isolation of similar situations across the Nigeria, for the Jos crises and the atrocities associated with it – as shown shortly - are symptomatic of national problems the contours of whose settlement need to be agreed with substantial regard to nationally applicable principles.
  The lines of conflict in Jos, centered over the control of the city and access to federal patronage and goods, were crystallized sharply with the creation of Jos North Local Government Area in 1991 and boiled over into violence on 12 April 1994 when a counter-demonstration by members of the Hausa-Fulani Community against the refusal of the Berom, Anaguta and Afizere to allow the installation of Alhaji Aminu Mato as the Chairperson of the Caretaker Committee for Jos North Local Government Area turned violent, leading to large-scale destruction of property and loss of lives. According to the 1994 report of the Fiberesima Commission of Inquiry:
  A recurrent friction for many years, between the Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere tribes on the one hand, and the Hausa-Fulani tribes on the other hand, is a remote cause of the riot.  Each part lays claim to Jos. The Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere claim that they are the indisputable indigenous people of Jos, that the Hausa-Fulani are settlers, strangers, who migrated into Jos for various reasons which include commerce, employment and repair of fortune. But the Hausa-Fulani contend that they, as owners of Jos, had the privilege of producing the rulers of the town since way back in 1902. They also claim political ascendancy over the other communities at all times. This feeling of one having supremacy over the other simmered for years, only to break out into open confrontation and riot on 12th April, 1994. [28]
  In 1991, Nigeria’s Federal Military Government (FMG) created 89 new Local Government Areas (LGAs). Until then, the metropolitan area of Jos was one local government area in which all major populations in Nigeria existed. The major ethnic groups in Jos were the Afizere, Anaguta and Berom (sedentary) and the Hausa-Fulani (with significant pastoralist population). Both groups respectively petitioned the then FMG for the creation of new LGAs from the then Jos metropolitan area. Both groups had requested that Jos be split into two. However, the sedentary populations sought the creation of a new “Federe Local Government” while the Hausa and Fulani communities petitioned for the creation of a Jos North LGA. In 1991, the FMG split Jos into two, creating Jos North LGA with Jos Metropolis as its Headquarters and Jos South with its Headquarters in Bukuru. According to the Aribiton Fiberesima Commission of Inquiry report
   
  This was totally against the wishes of the Berom, Anaguta, and Afizere communities who prior to the exercise had requested for the creation of Federe Local Government Area out of the then Jos Local Government Area. With what actually transpired, the said communities found themselves in Jos South LGA, while the Hausa-Fulani community was left to enjoy numerical dominion in Jos North LGA where Jos metropolis is located.  The former communities saw this arrangement as a grand plan by the Hausa-Fulani to seize Jos town from them. They also resented the pattern of the newly created LGAs because it left their paramount ruler, the Gbom Gwom Jos, isolated in an enclave of the Hausa-Fulani in Jos municipality.[29]
   
  In April 1994, the then Military Administrator of Plateau State appointed Alhaji Aminu Mato, a Hausa-Fulani, Chairperson of Jos North LGA Caretaker Management Committee. The Anaguta, Afizere and Berom rejected this, and, on 5 April, the day before the scheduled swearing in of the new Committee, organized protest marches to both the then Military Administrator and the Palace of the Gbom Gwom Jos, ostensibly threatening to prevent Alhaji Mato from assuming office. On 8 April, 1994, when the new Committee was to assume office, the Plateau State Cabinet Office, apparently responding to a public show of force by Afizere, Anaguta and Berom youths, threatening to physically prevent Alhaji Mato and his team from assuming office, issued a letter Reference Number S/SSG/E/81/V.1, requesting the Director of Personnel Management in the LGA to temporarily assume management of its affairs.
  In a counter-protest on 11 April 1994, some Hausa-Fulani butchers slaughtered cows and other animals on the highway near the Abattoir in Jos to protest Government’s suspension of the assumption of office of Alhaji Aminu Mato, vowing that they would continue their protests until Alhaji Mato was allowed to assume office.[30] A protest demonstration by the Jasawa Development Association (Hausa) Youths in Jos North led to what the Fiberesima Commission described as “chaos”,[31] in which many lives and property running into millions of Naira in value were destroyed.
  Since then, Jos has experienced several other situations of mass violence, each succeeding one more serious than the ones that preceded it. The 2002 report of the Niki Tobi Commission of Inquiry contained 63 pages of killing and destruction including the names of 904 persons killed in the crisis of 2001 and an itemisation of destroyed property which it valued at millions of dollars, excluding forced displacement.[32] Other researchers claim that “initial estimates compiled by local human rights groups, religious communities and other organisations indicate that more than one thousand people were killed in the six days that the violence lasted.”[33]
  The response to these cycles of atrocities and reprisals has been largely expeditionary, including enhanced security sector presence, curfews and a state of emergency. Following another cycle of killings and reprisals in Yelwa, Plateau State, in 2004, then President Olusegun Obasanjo, declared a State of Emergency in Jos and appointed a former Chief of Army Staff, General Chris Alli (Rtd) as the Administrator of Plateau State for a period of six months. General Alli organized a State-Wide Peace Conference which issued a consensus document, Plateau Resolves, which he assented to as Administrator, outlining measures to be implemented to restore normalcy to the State.
  Far from restoring normalcy, however, things appear to have degenerated in Jos. In 2009, the Ajibola Commission report identified by name over 323 persons killed in the November 2008 crisis.[34] In 2010 alone, there were three major incidents of mass killing and arson in Jos and several other less known ones. The casualty count from these incidents may never be fully known. However, over one decade beginning from 1999, the attacks associated with the conflicts in and around Jos in Plateau State “according to estimates from the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, killed 13,500 in Plateau State since 1999.”[35]
  It is worth noting that Jos is not the only place where the creation of new administrative units has crystallized identity-based crises in Nigeria founded on dichotomies between competing claims of rootedness, belonging and alienage. In a study of the Urhobo-Itsekiri crises in Delta State, for instance, Ukoha Ukiwo, recalls that following the creation of the Mid-West region in 1963:
   
  The Constitution of the Midwest Region became a source of conflict because it essentially recognised Warri Division as Itsekiri homeland and reserved all elective positions to the Itsekiri. By this legislation, the Urhobo and Ijaw could not contest for election in Warri or be appointed to any elective positions from Warri. This remained the position until the post-civil war period, when the military government appointed an Urhobo as member of the Warri Division Management Board.[36]
   
  This crisis was to intensify and boil over into killings and reprisals following successive exercises in state and local government creation in 1991 and 1996 in which the creation of new local government areas raised issues as to which community to host the headquarters of the new administrative units.[37] Similarly, the Itu-Odukpani crisis in Cross-River/Akwa-Ibom was crystallized by the creation of Akwa-Ibom State from the former Cross River State in 1987.[38]
   
  In the three year period between 1999 and 2002, the Organisation Mondial Contre la Torture (OMCT) and CLEEN Foundation, documented over “50 outbreaks of targeted violence” in Nigeria associated with local citizenship issues of the indigene-settler variant.[39] These outbreaks were usually characterized by “extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, maiming and destruction of property and livelihood.”[40] Some of the other well-known locations of similar conflict and occasional atrocity include Aguleri/Umuleri in Anambra State in the south-east; Ife/Modakeke in Osun State in the south-west; Zango Kataf in Kaduna State in the north-west; Itu/Odukpani crisis (over the Ikoroffiong) at the Akwa-Ibom/Cross-River State boundary in the south-south;[41] Tiv-Jukun in Taraba State in the north east;[42] Urhobo-Itshekiri crisis in Delta State in the south-south;[43] and the Tiv-Kambari-Jukun crisis in Nassarawa State in the north-central.[44] The geo-political spread of these crises indicates clearly that Nigeria confronts a national pathology.
  In addition to the huge toll of tragic mortality associated with it, the Jos situation is arguably the most well-known of these situations largely because of a sense of nostalgia for what it represented before the onset of this brutal spiral. A city of stunning natural and locational endowments, Jos is the capital of Plateau State in north-central Nigeria, a State comprising over 54 ethnic and national groups but whose description as the “Home of Peace and Tourism”, now has a ring of cruel irony to it. Established at the beginning of the 20^th century as a tin transportation camp, “Jos is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Nigeria on account of the mass migration into the area during the tin mining boom at the turn of the 20^th century.”[45] Since the last decade of the 20^th century, a murderous spiral of cyclic violence has pitted presumed “owners” or indigenes of Jos against presumed “settlers” resulting in the killing of thousands, the displacement of possibly hundreds of thousands and the destruction of property valued in multiples of millions.
  These situations are often a contest over context and varying claims of historically-sourced superiority of territorial entitlement. In Jos, the contest is between the claims to ownership of the city, exclusive indigeneship of the Anaguta, Afizere and Berom to the city and the competing claims of the Fulani and Hausa communities to be recognized also as indigenous to the city. This conflict has a history in the organization and territorialisation of Northern Nigeria that pre-dates its more recent descent into mass killings.
  Politically and demographically, the Anaguta, Afizere and Berom of the Plateau are minorities in Northern Nigeria. In 1957-58, the United Middle Belt Conference (UMBC) took their fears of domination in a post-colonial Nigeria to the Willink Commission, established by the colonial government to “enquire into the fears of the minorities and the means of allaying them.”[46] The Willink Commission described the communities represented by the UMBC as “both ethnic and religious minorities and it is the claim of some of them that their best hope for the future lies in the carving out from the Northern Region of a Middle Belt state.”[47]
  Until May 1967, Jos was an administrative division within the Northern Region and all ethnic groups in the region were indigenous to the region and all parts thereof. The deepening of the indigene-settler problem is thus one of the consequences of re-territorialisation through the creation of new administrative units like States and local government areas. In a testament to the undisguisedly situational character of the indigene-settler dichotomy, the Willink Commission did point out in its 1958 report that:
  It was until recently usual to find Southerners throughout the Northern Region in posts as clerks, overseers, artisans, ticket collectors and the like; today there is sharp resentment at their presence. They are regarded as foreigners and are now being discouraged, sometimes by positive steps, from taking or even keeping employment of this kind.[48]
  In May 1967, Jos became the administrative capital of the newly-created Benue-Plateau State (the forebear of the current Benue, Nassarawa and Plateau States), before becoming in 1975 the capital of Plateau State, following the creation of Benue State. Rather than resolve the tensions between the various ethnicities of the Middle Belt, re-territorialisation through State and local government creation has deepened them. Ironically, the ethnic groups that argued as minorities in the unified territory of pre-colonial and early post-colonial Nigeria have now become majorities in the newly created States since 1967. By contrast, the Hausa and Fulani who were majority in the old Northern Region are now a minority in and around the Plateau. This changed architecture of the demographics underlying the indigene-settler is an important one.
  The response of government – both State and Federal - to the cycle of violence that has characterized the crises in Jos and other parts of Plateau State has been to establish Commissions of Inquiry often chaired by judges. Since the beginning of these crises in 1994, there have been over twelve of such commissions.[49] Thus the reports of these Commissions have themselves become part of the contest over both context and history in Jos,[50] illustrating a pattern of leadership failure and a deepening of internal citizenship crisis. 
  CONCLUSION
  Evidently, the end of colonialism in most of Africa simultaneously de-racialised mobility and re-tribalised power. The African political, educated, and urban elite emerged into independence as a new class of economic and social mobility and opportunity while the un-educated or rural folk remained locked in the dynamic of extended post-colonial exclusion, thereby transforming the colonial-era distinction between the native and the European into a post-colonial one of status and class among Africans depending on economic mobility. However, access to power, defined as it is by local concerns, was shaped with reference to local identity, essentially excluding the migrant population of the nouveau post-colonial elite who have to migrate out of their localities as the price for their new-found material comforts. What has, emerged, therefore, as the post-colonial contest between indigenes and settlers reflects a rough symmetry in distinction between our politics and our economics – the dynamisation of economics and the tribalisation of politics. In a sentence, the indigene-settler divide forces the “settler” to concede political participation in return for transactional mobility and economic prosperity.
  This bi-furcation of political and economic life in our post-independence context diminishes society, denudes politics (governance), and eviscerates rights, without enriching economics. It is always looking back to where people come from rather than forward to what they have contributed to the societies that they re-locate to.
  Ultimately, however, the persistence of indigene-settler crises announces a clear failure of post-colonial political leadership to expand the frontiers of opportunity, transform the normative architectures they inherited or ensure compliance with the international norms that they have signed up to. For places like Jos, peace building initiatives without reform of the structures and opportunities of both political governance and economic and human development will not be enough. Expeditionary responses to what are essentially a failure of political leadership, laws and institutions will probably also not work. A far-reaching re-modelling of the architecture leadership, participation and inclusion is also needed.
  For the moment, the promise of post-colonial citizenship is still just that, a promise. Most Nigerians continue to aspire to equal citizenship – “wannabes” at best in the only country that they can call theirs. The victims of Nigeria’s many citizenship crises are victims of a failure of leadership at all levels – federal, state, local. 63 years after independence, the avoidable tragedies of the story of their earthly sojourns should inspire the current generation of the country’s  leadership to prioritise citizenship as the project of our next half-century.
  The consequences of not doing so may be too difficult to imagine. The only way to avoid those consequences is to come to terms with reality that the country needs to be re-setting. That re-setting, however, must begin with attention to the political values that underpin coexistence in the country. But addressing this values problem requires a new kind of leadership that is national in outlook. That is where we must begin and in this, associations like the JFCN have a significant role to play.
  
  
  
  

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  [1] Text for 10^th Anniversary Lecture of Just Friends Club of Nigeria, NAF Conference Centre, Abuja, 2 Aug, 2023.

  [2] Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, (1983), 1

  [3] Federal Republic of Nigeria, Report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Affairs of the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) 1979-1983, Main Report, Nov. 1986, para 10:01 (hereafter called “The Babalakin Commission Report”)

  [4] Nigeria: “Democracy by Court Order”, Economist, 24 Jan 2008, available at www.economist.com/node/10567560  

  [5] National Human Rights Commission, An Independent Review of Evidence of Gross Violations of the Rights to Participate in Government, to Public Service, and to Fair Trial through the Election Petition Process  in Nigeria, 2007 & 2011, para 1.17, p. 13 (2014)

  [6] Paul Collier, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, 27 (2009)

  [7] 1999 Constitution, s. 25(1)(a)

  [8] 1999 Constitution, s. 147(3); 1979 Constitution, s. 135(3).

  [9] 1999 Constitution, s. 318; 1979 Constitution, s. 277

  [10] 1999 Constitution, s. 41(1)

  [11] Ibid., s. 42(1)

  [12] Olusegun Obasanjo, Opening Address Seminar on “The Settler Question in Nigeria: The Case of Jos Plateau”, organized by the Conflict Prevention and Management Centre, Africa Leadership Forum (ALF), Jos from 15 to 17 December, 1993.

  [13] Plateau Resolves, supra, 30

  [14] Ibid.

  [15] Ibid., p. 37, para 7.3.0

  [16] Government of Plateau State of Nigeria, Fiberesima Commission Inquiry Report, 1994: 25, Item 3.1.4 

  [17] “But Paul said, I am a man which am a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city: and, I beseech thee, suffer me to speak unto the people.” See Holy Bible, Acts of the Apostles, 21:39 (King James Version)

  [18] Cited in Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, p.83 (1996)

  [19]For instance, settlements like Suleja, Kontangora, Yolo, Jalingo, Jema’a, Keffi, Nassarawa, and Wase were established in the 19^th century. Enugu marks its centennial as a city in 2010; Jos will celebrate its centennial in 2014-15; while cities like Kaduna, Barkin-Ladi, Dorowa, Gana Ropp, Gana Bauje, Gindin Akwati, Minna, Kafanchan, and Makurdi, among others were similarly established in the 20^th century after the onset of formal colonialism. Umar Danfulani, supra, p. 20

  [20] Sam Egwu, supra, p. 10

  [21] Africa’s pastoralist population is estimated to be over 17.3 million. Or an estimated 2.3% of the continent’s population. Visit http://www.pastoralpeoples.org/pastoralists.htm

  [22] Abubakar Momoh, “Even Birds Have a Home: The Social Pathologies of Citizenship in Nigeria”, 1 (2001)

  [23] Bola Ajibola Commission Report, supra, p. 54

  [24] 1999 constitution, ss. 25-26

  [25] Anzaku v. Governor of Nassarawa State, (2005) 5 NWLR (Part 919) 449

  [26] Sam Egwu, supra, p. 2

  [27] S. 4(1)(a) of the Federal Character Commission Act, 1999, thus empowers the Commission to “work out an equitable formula…for the distribution of all cadres of posts in the civil and the public service of the Federation and of the states, armed forces, the Nigeria Police and other security agencies, bodies of corporate owned by the Federal or State Government and Extra Ministerial Department and Parastatals of the Federation and States.”

  [28] White Paper, Fiberesima Committee Report, Para. 2.1.2 (April 2009)

  [29] Ibid., 2.1.4

  [30] Ibid., para 2.2.5

  [31] Ibid.

  [32] Plateau State Government, White Paper on Niki Tobi Commission Report, pp 15—170 (2002)

  [33] Idris Bawa & Victoria Nwogu, “The Jos Crisis”, in OMCT & CLEEN Foundation, Hope Betrayed? Supra, 105 at p. 107

  [34] Ajibola Commission Report,  p. 291 (2009)

  [35] Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Policy Brief, March 2010, p. 1

  [36] Ukoha Ukiwo, supra, pp. 23-24

  [37] Ibid., pp. 19-31

  [38] Obbo Effanga Jr., “The Violence in Odukpani LGA of Cross-River State”, in OMCT/CLEEN Foundation, supra, p. 169 et. seq.

  [39] Innocent Chukwuma, “Introduction”, in OMCT/CLEEN Foundation, Hope Betrayed? A Report on Impunity and State-Sponsored Violence in Nigeria, (2002), p. 11

  [40] Ibid.

  [41] For a study of the Aguleri/Umuleri, Ife/Modakeke, and Zango-Kataf situations, see, OMCT/CLEEN Foundation, Hope Betrayed? A Report on Impunity and State-Sponsored Violence in Nigeria, (2002).

  [42] See Moses Aluaigba, “The Tiv-Jukun Conflict and the Ethnic Question in Nigeria” in Clement Boutillier, Ed., IFRA Conference on Conflict and Violence in Nigeria: Proceedings of the 2009 conference in Zaria,(2009)

  [43] Ukoha Ukiwo, “Creation of Local Governments and Ethnic Conflicts in Nigeria: The Case of Wari, Delta State”, (2006)

  [44] See generally, Sam Egwu, “Bridging the Indigene and Settler Divide: Challenges of Peace-
  Building in Nigeria”, Paper Presented at a Seminar for Opinion Leaders to Provide Inputs into Conflict Management Discourse in Jos, on Wednesday 9th February 2005, at the Leadership Institute, Dandaura Road, GRA Jos

  [45] Umar Danfulani, “The Jos Peace Conference and the Indigene/Settler Question in Nigerian Politics”, p. 2 (2006)

  [46] See, Colonial Office, Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of the Minorities and the Means of Allaying Them, July 1958 (hereafter cited as “Willink Commission Report, 1958”)

  [47] Ibid., p. 53, para 6. The Commission estimated the population of Northern Nigeria at the time of its report in 1958 to be 16.148,000 of which 8,441,000 were reportedly Fulani and Hausa; 1,175,000 were Kanuri; 347,000 were Nupe. With reference to faiths, it reported 11,322,000 were Muslims; 4,279,000 were animists; and 547,000 were Christians. Ibid., para 8

  [48] Willink Commission Report, 1958, p. 53, para 6

  [49] These include: These include:
  ·         Aribiton Fiberesima Commission of Inquiry into the Riots of 12 April 1994 in Jos Metropolis;
  ·         Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Communal Clashes in Langtang LGA, Wase LGA, Shendam LGA, and Quaan Paan LGA headed by Justice Jummai Sankey, submitted in May, 2001;
  ·         Justice Niki Tobi Judicial Commission of inquiry into the Jos civil disturbances of dark Friday 7-14 September, 2001, reported in September, 2002;
  ·         Hon. Justice C. Okpene, Federal Judicial Commission of inquiry into communal conflicts in Benue, Nassarawa, Plateau and Taraba States, 2002;
  ·         Revd Dr. Pandang Yamsat High Powered Committee on peace and security in Plateau State submitted in 2002.;
  ·         Private Peace Initiative on Southern Senatorial District of Plateau State headed by Alhaji Shehu Idris, Emir of Zazzau, 2002;
  ·          Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the civil disturbances in Shendam, Langtang North, Langtang South and Wase Local Government Areas, headed by Justice Felicia K. Dusu, reported in June, 2003;
  ·         Presidential Peace Initiative Committee on Plateau State, headed by Alhaji Shehu Idris, Emir of Zazzau, reported in May, 2004;
  ·         Plateau Resolves, report of the Plateau Peace Conference convened by the Sole Administrator, Gen. Chris Alli, reported 2005; and
  ·         Bola Ajibola Commission of Inquiry into the Unrest of 28 November 2008, reported October 2009.
  Quite apart from these, the Emmanuel Abisoye Commission of Inquiry established by the Federal Government into the unrest of 28 November 2008 was still in session when the recent wave of killings in early 2010 put its work into abeyance. While some of the following narrative relies on the reports of some of these Commissions, it is important to acknowledge that “the various Commissions of Enquiries also created their own distinct myths of legitimisation too.” Danfulani, supra.

  [50] A review by Nigeria’s National Security Adviser in 2011 concluded that “With this record, the commissions of inquiry appear to have become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution to the crises in Jos.” See, Federal Republic of Nigeria, Office of the National Security Adviser, “Jos Crises: A Diagnostic Review and Analysis”, December 2011, para 5.8