Nigeria’s Governance Structure Bane of Development- Fayemi

Governor of Ekiti state, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, has blame the underdevelopment in the country on the defective structure of governance the country operates.

Fayemi who spoke at the weekend while delivering a paper titled “Re-thinking Nigeria for future development”, to mark the combined 8th Distinguished Guest Lecture and 5th Founder’s Day of University of Medical Sciences, Ondo State said the political governance structure need to be reviewed.

“The nation is currently faced with security challenges that include terrorism, banditry, armed robbery, ethno-religious tensions, rape and other low level criminality. In spite of the overwhelming insecurity, Nigeria security architecture remains ineffective because it suffers what some critics called structural obesity,” he said.

“Our political structure is something to cast a big look into; many commentators have identified the kind of federal structure we run as one of the reasons for our numerous challenges. There is a general sense of inadequacy and powerlessness among the federating units in the critical areas of socio-economic development.

“For example, many have asked questions as to why the state cannot develop its own rail system and it has to be on the exclusive list, it is also argued that the idea of national grid is the recipe for energy crisis that we now have.

“It is just elementary that if all of our energy sources are on the single grid, the grid is bound to suffer constant and consistent collapses and infractions. Why do we have to have a national driver’s license and vehicle licensing system when motor licensing is obviously a municipal responsibility of vehicle inspectorate department of the state ministries of transport?

“Why do we have a unitary policing system in a federal structure? Does it not fly against reasoning that a state would have a state legislature to make its laws, the state judiciary to interpret them, but would not have a state police to enforce the law?

“I have always maintained, along with my colleagues in the South-West Governors’ Forum, that if we could trust the state judiciary to discharge justice, which sometimes they stand against those in authority, why can’t we trust same state with the police to bring suspects before the courts?”

The Ekiti State governor lamented the high level of poverty ravaging the country due to high incidence of unemployment.

He listed the problem of nationhood and slow economic development as the two major problems facing the country, saying Nigeria has remained a deeply divided country along mainly ethnic and religious boundaries.

He said: “It is believed that half of Nigeria’s population lives below the poverty line and human development index is at the very low ebb of 0.53 as at 2017, which makes the country 162nd of the 167 nations measured in the world. Current World Bank data suggests that poverty incidence in our country is more endemic in the North with 87 per cent living below the poverty line than in the South-West, where 16 per cent live below poverty line.

“With the labour force of about 90.5 million and roughly 3.9 million new entrants to the labour force annually, unemployment continues to grow at 2.7 per cent, while Nigeria, according to recent statistics, has an unemployment rate of about 24 per cent and youth unemployment rate of about 36.5 per cent.

“Apart from uneven spread of economic opportunities in our planning, one consistent challenge to our overall development goal has been lack of patience in policy execution. We have a national habit of over-reacting to every new idea as destructive and something to be jettisoned immediately. We easily scandalize and demonize new initiatives that challenged old practices.

“While it is understandable that every policy comes to its own inherent challenges, which could be improved upon as time goes on, we tend to focus exclusively on perceived weaknesses and use this as an object of media hysteria. This, regrettably, has led to innovation paralysis and built an impossibility syndrome, what some call the ‘Nigeria factor.’

“There is a wild deficit of infrastructure and very limited resources to urgently fix them. Our total capital spending in 10 years is what we need in a year to make an appreciable impact on the infrastructural development, yet there is no urgent miracle to make it happen immediately.

“Our economy still remains fragile in spite of the tremendous work being done by the Federal Government because we are still a commodity-dependent nation with our intended susceptibility of the unstable international prices. And we have seen that recently, oil price has gone down to $49 and OPEC has cut down supply to the world market, which automatically throws our 2020 budget out of work because it was prepared on a benchmark price of $57 per barrel.”