In Loving Memory of Zoning…

Simon Kolawole

12 June 2011

column

Zoning is dead. So I have been reading in the newspapers since the emergence of Hon. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal as speaker of the House of Representatives and Hon. Emeka Amadioha as his deputy. The positions were originally zoned to the South-west and North-east respectively but Tambuwal is from the North-west and his deputy from the South-east.

So everywhere I turn, I hear people announce the death of zoning. To them, zoning is currently lying in state. The burial will follow shortly. As the funeral goes on, some are gloating while others are worried because of the long-term implications for the polity. But, really, does the election of Tambuwal mean zoning is dead? We shall discuss this today.

Obviously, I differ with many Nigerians on their understanding of zoning and power-rotation. I have thought over it again and again and I still come to the same conclusion: power-rotation is not zoning and zoning is not power-rotation. Both concepts, I must quickly add here, are desirable in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society practising underdeveloped politics such as ours. What is zoning? By my own understanding, zoning is the sharing of offices, especially political positions, to reflect the ethnic diversity of Nigeria. It makes sense anyway. How can you have the president of Nigeria from Bayelsa, the vice-president from Rivers and the senate president from Akwa Ibom? It doesn’t make sense. The main idea behind zoning, therefore, is to give everybody a sense of belonging.

Power-rotation, on the other hand, is applied to the No. 1 position in the land. It is to be rotated between the North and the South, according to the PDP. The decision of President Goodluck Jonathan to run in the 2011 presidential race disrupted the rotation arrangement in his party. The North is supposed to be in power between 2007 and 2015, according to this understanding. So in the real sense of it, it is power-rotation that has been endangered. Zoning, or balancing, is intact.

We need a clear understanding of these concepts so that we can confront the issues properly and look at the way forward. Zoning is now accepted nationwide. Every governorship aspirant, for instance, chooses a running mate from another senatorial district and picks his team from across the state. It is voluntarily practised. It is even entrenched in the constitution through the federal character principle. However, power-rotation is not entrenched. How do we make sure power rotates? For as long as we keep mixing things up and arguing emotionally, we will keep missing the point.

What is the origin of power-rotation? I think it started with the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. With the crippling crisis that followed and the death of the acclaimed winner, Chief MKO Abiola, there were cries for “power-shift” in 1999 when the military wanted to return Nigeria to democracy. “Power-shift” was the un-coded language for a Southerner to be elected president. As at 1999, the North had ruled-whether military or civilian-for a combined period of 35 out of 39 years. So Southerners believed they had a good case. They were crying all over the place for it.

The powers that be then sat down and agreed that the way out of the June 12 acrimony was to allow the South to have it. All the parties were mandated to produce a presidential candidate from the South, specifically the South-west where Abiola hailed from, in the spirit of “power-shift”. The belief then was that the eventual winner, President Olusegun Obasanjo, would do only one term and quit in 2003, with power returning to the North for unspecified number of terms thereafter. But as 2003 drew near, Obasanjo could not let go of the “ogbono” soup. It was too sweet. He decided to go for a second term, as permitted by the constitution, despite the presidential aspirations of his VP, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.

It was even said then that Obasanjo had entered into an agreement with Northern power brokers that he would not run in 2003. Sections of the North felt betrayed by Obasanjo’s decision to run. It was about this time that the PDP decided to adopt “power-rotation” so that the issue of equity would be taken care of. It was decided that the North and the South would take turns to rule every eight years. At the 1995 Constitutional Conference, Dr. Alex Ekwueme had advanced rotation as a temporary way of calming the tension in the land. Ekwueme’s idea was for power to rotate among the six geo-political zones, not North/South.

Unfortunately, when the PDP stalwarts adopted power-rotation in 2003, they did not envisage or address the issue of what would happen if the sitting president dies, resigns or is impeached. The constitution says the VP will step in, but because of zoning, the VP will always come from another region. So if the president is from the North, the VP will be from the South. How would power-rotation work if the VP becomes president by default? This was the vital question which would later haunt us when President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua took ill and died last year.

But Ekwueme had suggested in 1995 that there should be six VPs, one from each zone. He proposed that if the president dies, resigns or is impeached, the VP from his zone should step in and complete the term. No zone would be short-changed by this. Power-rotation would still be intact. Power would move to the geo-political zone next on queue. Ekwueme also proposed single-term tenure for the president. The PDP did not look at this critically when adopting rotation. It just assumed a president would be there for eight unbroken years! That’s the price we are paying today.

I would cite several examples to illustrate the difference between zoning and power-rotation. Let’s go to Kogi State. All positions are zoned but power is never rotated. Since the creation of the state, all the governors have come from Kogi East. The deputies have always come from the other districts-Kogi Central and Kogi West. But for the fact that governorship election did not hold in the state this year, Kogi East would have produced the governor again possibly for the next eight years, making it a total of 20 years out of 20 (1999-2019)! It is easier to enforce zoning than power-rotation because election is a game of numbers. Except, well, all the parties are forced to field their governorship candidates from the same zone.

In 1999, PDP was the leading party in Kogi. But as soon as someone from the West (Chief Stephen Olorunfemi) was made its governorship candidate in the interest of “power-shift”, the East used their population to install one of their own, Alhaji Audu Abubakar (All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP), as governor. The East had the numbers. They did not commit any offence. They simply queued behind their “brother”. End of story. Of course, Audu’s deputy and the speaker came from other districts in the interest of zoning. But power-rotation? Forget it. Is it fair? Well, that is another question altogether.

Let’s now go to Yobe to wrap up our discussion. The current governor, Alhaji Ibrahim Gaidam, is from Yobe East. He was deputy governor to Senator Mamman Ali, who was from Yobe South. Ali died in office two years ago. Gaidam took over. He completed Ali’s tenure as specified by the constitution. This year, he decided to run. And he won. There was nothing Yobe South could do about it! You cannot tell an incumbent not to run! If you have the numbers, the best thing to do is defeat him. But you can’t stop him by intimidation. (This is exactly what was replicated at that national level where Yar’Adua’s death led to the emergence of Jonathan.) In the interest of zoning/balancing, Gaidam picked his deputy from Yobe South. The fact that he ran did not end zoning. These things look so simple that you would expect a primary school kid to understand them.

The real problem we have with the balancing game today is power-rotation. Zoning, like I said, is already in our DNA. But rotation is an endangered species. How can it be entrenched? Should it be entrenched at both state and federal levels? Should it be entrenched at all? Should we turn political contests to the battle of the fittest? Will that augur well for national cohesion and integration? For me, that is the real debate we should be having. But for as long as we keep arguing that zoning is power-rotation and power-rotation is zoning, we will never identify the problem nor work towards a solution. We will continue to live by our confused definitions of concepts that, though complementary, are clearly different.

I conclude. Zoning will never die. It is because many Nigerians cannot differentiate it from power-rotation that they are announcing its death. After all, PDP is already rezoning offices to correct the imbalance caused by Tambuwal’s victory. What we have problem with now is power-rotation. Should we entrench it? How can we entrench it? How can it become part of our political DNA like zoning? That is the debate we should be having. I insist that zoning is alive and kicking. Its obituary has been grossly exaggerated.

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