Never mind their nationalistic posturing, many of our elite are at heart closet tribal champions and ethnic jingoists waiting to manifest. Squeeze them a little and they break out in their true colours.
Their rhetoric shows that more than a century after the amalgamation by the British in 1914 of the Northern and Southern Protectorates, the lure of the tribe remains quite strong. That’s why we proudly rally round such groups as Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Afenifere, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Middle-Belt Leaders Forum, Ijaw National Congress (INC) etc.
Deep down there remains much anxiety about the long term sustainability of the Nigerian project. So, while pretending to be committed to some sense of nationhood, we spend our days prosecuting mini tribal wars – with unelected warlords leading the charge.
One such war just broke out over the relocation of a few departments of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the headquarters of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) from Abuja to Lagos. Given the heat these seemingly innocuous actions have generated, you would think secession was imminent.
In reality, these are just two out of hundreds of parastatals and agencies owned by the Federal Government. So why would matters of administrative convenience in a couple of organisations stir such much controversy? Politics, sheer political mischief!
Here’s what happened. On January 12, the CBN announced plans to decongest its head office in Abuja.
It explained the rationale behind the move thus: “The action plan focuses on optimizing the utilization of other Bank’s premises. With this plan, 1,533 staff will be moved to other CBN facilities within Abuja, Lagos, and understaffed branches.
“Our current occupancy level of 4,233 significantly exceeds the optimal capacity of 2,700 designed for the Head Office building. This overcrowding poses several critical challenges.”
Affected by the relocation are five departments: Banking Supervision; Other Financial Institutions Supervision; Consumer Protection Department; Payment System Management Department and Financial Policy Regulations Department. That’s just five out of the institution’s 17 departments. The headquarters and the office of the Governor remain domiciled in the federal capital.
Just to confirm that there was nothing sinister about the move, a former Deputy Governor of the bank, Dr. Kingsley Moghalu, in a post on X, revealed that the CBN’s Lagos office was inaugurated 12 years ago but had been underutilised.
He noted that the relocation addresses the overstaffing challenges at the Abuja headquarters, where the staff count exceeds recommended health and safety limits.
Moghalu argued that the decision was logical because affected departments primarily oversee market entities situated in Lagos.
With conspiracy theorists still chewing on the CBN decision, the announcement that the headquarters of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria’s (FAAN) would also be moving, was confirmation that that the end of the world had come!
The organisation in a statement by Obiageli Orah, its Director of Public Affairs and Consumer Protection said: “Those affected by the decision to move the headquarters to Abuja have since returned to Lagos as there is no office space for them in Abuja. It was ill-advised in the first place to move the headquarters to Abuja when there was no single FAAN building in Abuja to accommodate all of them at once.”
She explained that retaining the status quo would mean abandoning “the old FAAN building in Lagos to rot away and to use its scarce resources to rent an office space in Abuja for millions of naira of public money when in actual fact more than sixty percent of its activities are in Lagos given the huge passenger volume of the Lagos airports. The stakeholders and the Minister decided against that and to save the country from this waste.”
Those vociferously opposed to the relocation would rather ignore important matters of waste of public resources that has been going on since the headquarters was moved in 2020. They are not concerned about prolonging the bleeding at a time when the nation is struggling economically. So much for love of country!
What is particularly provocative about this controversy is the way it has been spun as an attack on a section of the country. ACF’s National Publicity Secretary, Prof. T. A. Muhammad-Baba, claims the moves were part of a plot to under-develop the North.
“The CBN’s decision is no means of isolated or normal administrative action to fix some logistics problem. Rather, it fits into a disturbing pattern of antagonistic actions often taken by certain federal administrations against the interests of Northern and other parts of Nigeria,” he said.
This raises immediate questions as to how the CBN and FAAN movements affect the North. Is Abuja capital of Nigeria or of a particular region? Is the federal capital the property of the North or of all Nigerians?
This curious sense of ownership is perhaps borne out of the fact that in over 40 years either by design or otherwise only Northerners have been Ministers of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). When President Bola Tinubu broke that pattern with appointment of former Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, he was attacked by the likes of Sheik Ahmad Gumi as though he had done something sacrilegious.
If people want to make a political mountain out of something as simple as the movement of an agency’s departments, then they invite awkward questions that people have chosen not to ask for reasons of national cohesion and peaceful coexistence.
For instance, is there any provision of the country that requires that all parastatals of the Federal Government be located in Abuja irrespective of their operational peculiarities? For instance, does it make sense to site the headquarters of a marine-based agency in the federal capital?
Have those hyperventilating about the CBN and FAAN asked why the overwhelming majority of the nation’s defence establishments are located in the North – Kaduna specifically? No one is making waves about this.
Can they, beyond an inexplicable sense of entitlement, explain why over the years certain federal ministries like Defence, Agriculture, Education, FCT, Water Resources etc. always ended up in Northern hands and no one cried foul?
I would have been alarmed if the relocation meant Northerners working in these two establishments would lose their jobs. But that’s not the case. So in what way has the region’s interests been hurt?
The curious position of the ACF has received backing from the Northern Senators Forum (NSF). Aside rejecting the CBN and FAAN relocation to Lagos, they argue the 2024 budget was not favourable to their region and threatened legal action to address their grievances.
It is amusing that the legislators have just discovered that this year’s Appropriation Act doesn’t favour their region. It bears pointing out that all 58 of them participated in discussions that led to the passing of the budget in December 2023. Whether at committee level or as part of the whole house, they signed off on what was allocated.
Are they now suggesting that someone cast a spell on them to pass a spending plan that doesn’t favour their region? As willing participants in this legislative equivalent of scoring an own goal they have no one else to blame but themselves.
In trying to inflame passions or bully the rest of the country, the ACF, NSF and their co-travellers want to start something they cannot finish. Every section of the country can play the game of threats and bluff. But before going further they should spend quality time reading the constitution.
Rather than wasting their days on mischief, there’s so much they can do to better the lot of their people. They can throw their collective energies into reducing the number of out-of-school children, synergise to get more people back to farms, improve access to healthcare and attack widespread poverty in their region.
Their parochial agitation is a distraction the country doesn’t need at this time. I understand that individuals may be aggrieved over loss of privileges and access. Yet, in all their scheming they can never get to the point of convincing majority of Nigerians that what they define as their regional interest is superior to our overall national interest.
•Written By Festus Ariye
