State governors and insecurity: Isa Yuguda’s gaffe

“If a government will dedicate the entire resources and budget on security to ensure that everybody sleeps in his house…go to the President and say I have secured my state…I don’t have any money, will you please support me with N20bn, N30bn…The President will do that.”

– Former Bauchi State Governor, Isa Yuguda, on Newsnight, Channels TV, Monday, October 31, 2022.

Insecurity, in its different frightening guises, continues to dominate the headlines and the national discourse agenda. Only last week, banditry and kidnapping returned with a bang to the front burner in the South-West region with the abduction, mercifully for a few days, of eminent Political Science Professor, Adigun Agbaje, on the outskirts of Ibadan, and several passengers on the Abeokuta-Lagos Road. Elsewhere in the country, particularly in Niger State, all hell was let loose as terrorists waxed the ever dangling axe of violent kidnapping and a spree of murderous disorder. Despite the offensive of law enforcement, presumably with a view to securing the country for the 2023 elections, total victory remains somewhat elusive.

Given this tumultuous background, the recent bashing of state governors by former Bauchi State Governor, Isa Yuguda, from whom the opening quote is sourced, deserves more than casual inspection. For instance, while governors in the northern states at a recent meeting called for the introduction of state police, Yuguda blamed the governors as well as exonerated the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), and the Federal Government. True, one wishes that the governors had made their position loud and clear a long time before now. Nonetheless, it is hard to justify or uphold Yuguda’s remark, which put the governors on the spot by asking them to spend their entire budget on insecurity and then go cap in hand to Buhari to beg him for billions of naira to carry out other essential governance tasks. It would be interesting to know if this was how Yuguda ran Bauchi State when he was governor; and even if that were so, it would be doubtful if that could be the basis of a constructive governance model for all the state governors in the country.

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This point is not raised to say that sub-national authorities, including local governments, do not have a vital role to play when it comes to fighting banditry and terrorism. They do; but in a situation where the power of enforcement of law and order is resident at the centre, which controls the instruments and facilities of counter-terror operations, it is specious, if not strange, to ask state governors to take the offensive when they do not have their own Armed Forces, or at least Police Force, an essential feature of a federal state. It is disheartening that those who invested time and effort in fighting, even demonizing advocates of state police, are now turning round to blame the governors for not fighting insecurity. Even when the governors creatively proposed such auspices as Amotekun, Benue State Volunteer Corps, Ebubeagu among others; legalists in high places spent time to restrict, restrain and limit such survivalist but creative options. So, territories which were turned into battlegrounds through existential threats to the lives of the people became victims of double jeopardy because their critics and opponents are more interested in enforcing a stale law long overdue for revision than in saving lives. Witness for example the thunderous outcry which accompanied the battle to secure the formation of Amotekun in the face of zealous attempts to prevent its creation.

It is like saying no matter how desperately besieged you are, you must not do anything to defend yourselves, which is similar to tying the hands of people behind their backs while their territories, property and families are being ravaged. Curiously, those opposed to state police are rehearsing the fears of its misuse during the First Republic, rather than discerning it as a vehicle for possible emancipation in the face of emasculation of over-centralised law enforcement. Were there to have been agreement on this matter, and the recent constitutional review exercise profitably deployed to legalise it? Who can tell how many lives would have been saved?

Yuguda’s option is focused on a feeding bottle federalism, which requires the governors to secure their states and then go to the President to solicit funds to carry out governance assignments. In other words, what ought to have been a constitutional issue is reduced to a random and personalised task whose implementation is contingent on good relations with Buhari. That is not all.

Even if the governors decided to adopt Yuguda’s admonition, would they be allowed to buy military equipment, ammunition and train intelligence which the offensive against terrorism require? Why ask the governors to engage in an occupation specifically assigned to federal authorities? It is not clear why Yuguda has decided to engage in what amounts to a whitewashing exercise of federal authorities on an issue which Buhari prioritised as central to national redemption during his campaigns in 2014 and 2019.

Since its inception, the flagship projects of the current administration were probably not thought through. If they were, it could have visualised that the nation could not be secure as a lone presidential project, nor could corruption be fought to a standstill without the involvement of sub-national power. Such logic would have led to the conclusion that the operation of state police would be required to support the often flagging and waning federal efforts. This point needs to be made in a season of campaign, during which the politicians are dishing out a plethora of promises of good life and happiness ever after without coming to grips with the reforms that will be needed to undergird the efforts of the government at the centre. As the saying goes, people cannot give what they don’t have, which, in this context, suggests that some fundamental reforms are essential if the country will be redeemed or bailed out from the current morass.

We have survived enough on the Messiah model of political change in which a deus ex machina will emerge to wave a magic wand at all our problems without giving thought to such factors as institutional change, carrying along the people through persuasive communication, reunifying the country behind thoroughgoing reform, as well as diffusing and countervailing the culture of presidential omnipotence in running the affairs of Nigeria.

Crucial reforms require strategic thinking and governance, which is why ill-thought programmes do not come to light because they seek to pour new wine into old and rustic bottles, which explains why very often they do not succeed. If the future of governance in Nigeria will be better than what it has been in the last decade, the political class must go beyond slogans, jeremiads and catchphrases; to inspect what and what must change at horizontal and vertical levels for the country to be truly born again.

That apart, for genuine change to succeed, there must be a reform agenda, a reform vanguard, rearguard and a green or red book that will market and publicise the gains to be derived from such reforms.

The setbacks of the outgoing season should serve as a cautionary metaphor for those who are glibly talking about change without enumerating those important pillars that it must rest on. This should no longer be so.