Federalism and the Politics of Restructuring in Nigeria

The longstanding federalist debate seems to have taken the front burner in Nigeria's public discussion as it reflects people's discontentment with certain prevailing political phenomena. Consequently, calls for restructuring are usually manifestations of the gross marginalisation of one unit over others in Nigeria. The demand for implementing the 2014 National Conference, constitutional review/amendments, regionalisation of the federation, state creation, devolution of powers, rotational presidency, secession agitations, and others are the products of contradictions of economic interests of advocate groups. Of course, there are a plethora of scholarly works on the meaning, nature and dynamics of restructuring with scanty efforts on the nexus between the economic interest of advocates and how restructuring should take place. Specifically, this paper investigated the economics of restructuring and the consequences of centralised federalism in Nigeria. The study was predicated on the Marxian political economy approach as the theoretical framework of analysis and relied on the documentary method to generate data. The analysis of data was anchored on qualitative-descriptive and content analysis. The paper argued that various proponents and advocates of restructuring are motivated more by the economic benefits accruable to them than to Nigeria as a whole and therefore concluded that this falls short of federalism practised by the component units at independence. Therefore, the paper recommended the enthronement of equity in the distribution of political and economic resources to various federation units as a panacea for agitations for restructuring in Nigeria.