Rising from an emergency meeting last Monday after widespread consultations, Northern state governors,
under the auspices of the Northern Governors Forum, emirs, and chiefs from the region handed out an 11-point communiqué on numerous issues of national concern. Nonetheless, only two or a few more hit the headlines in the media — the rotation of the position of President between the North and the South and the appropriate agency to collect the value-added tax (VAT).
The two fundamental resolutions of the governors were the repudiation of a rotational system ensuring that the South produces the next President of the country in 2023 and their opposition to the collection of VAT by states. The stand of the Northern governors and elders from the region is an infelicitous response to the posture of the Southern Governors Forum, which has gathered a couple of occasions in recent months, insisting on producing the next President of Nigeria from the region.
Governors of the North maintain that zoning is not recognised in Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution. Their claim is if indeed there is a zoning pattern, the North will have to square up with the times the South presided over the country as President since the onset of the 4th Republic. The Northern governors were reportedly angered by the use of the term “must” by their Southern colleagues while expressing their preference for a Southern President. In their view, that word implies imposition, not persuasion, in a polity where no one craves to be browbeaten or perceived to be susceptible.
The North invariably has the misguided supposition that after the tragic death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in his first term on May 5, 2010, their tenure was curtailed. His deputy at the time, former President Goodluck Jonathan, succeeded him, completed that mandate, won the presidential election in 2011 and governed until 2015. He lost in his ultimate bid in that year’s election following a gang-up on him by the Northern elite.
It is difficult to figure out how these Northern governors claim there is no statutory plan for zoning, but maintain that the South usurped their turn when Jonathan assumed leadership in the same breath. This is a clear admittance of zoning. These governors speak from both sides of their mouths and are being clever by half. The truth is, however it is seen, zoning exists even in the slightest political offices in the country. 
There is unquestionably nothing improper with the stand of the Southern governors from the political and geographical viewpoints. Though the Constitution does not explicitly create room for zoning, political parties have deeply ingrained the tradition in their power-sharing deal. Besides, our Constitution stipulates a federal character principle, which is a camouflaged form of girdling to guarantee equal diffusion of appointments to forestall endeavours by any ethnic group to monopolise the nation’s affairs.
As the Northern governors controvert the reality of zoning in the Constitution, what validates the prevalent practice in which both the President and his vice do not, in the main, come from the same zone? Has the practice not been that if the President comes out from the North, the South will produce the Vice President and vice versa? Or was there a time in the history of Nigeria when both offices were occupied by persons from the same section? Not as far as we can tell.
This political fenestration is a derivative of commonsense and has been occurring, even in the military era, as historical records have repeatedly indicated. In fact, besides geographical balance, there is again the prevailing consideration of religious balancing. The only conceivable occasion that would have been altered was in the June 12, 1993, presidential election, when the late Chief Moshood Abiola picked a fellow Muslim, Babagana Kingibe, as vice.
In line with logical ratiocination, it should be presumed that having served broad two terms of eight years by May 29, 2023, the incumbent President, Muhammadu Buhari, from the Northern part of the country, should be succeeded by someone from the Southern divide to illustrate the much-touted unity and appropriate a sense of belonging to that part of the country.
More importantly, relinquishing power to the South will not only douse ongoing separatist agitations that rummage the country, it will equally drench the generalised suspicion of estrangement and resentment among the disparate constituents of the Nigerian federation, a situation that has also deepened mistrust and incentivized others who use agitations based on the need for power rotation as mere masks for engaging in other personal and subjective agenda.
On the vexatious VAT matter upon which Lagos and Rivers States have instituted statutes, it is unsurprising that the Northern governors also countered the position of their Southern counterparts. According to them, VAT is being confused by governors in the South as a sales tax and that if every state formulates its VAT legislation, multiple taxation will result, and that will insure an escalation in prices of goods and services which might disintegrate inter-state commerce. This cannot extenuate the necessity for states to demand the tax, as it could conveniently be worked out by the central authorities.
Unfortunately, the governors from the North seem amenable to abandon constitutionally entrenched state rights like the VAT collection to the Federal Government. In this regard, they have perpetrated a tremendous injustice to the conception of fiscal federalism and the ingenuity of states to obtain necessary revenue for their survival. Like sales tax, VAT is a consumption tax levied on the “value added” to goods and services from production to the final consumption stage.
But, beyond the VAT collection imbroglio, why do states depend on the revenue generated from other states to pull through, yet are unbearably smug about it? Why do states that extirpate sources of VAT like alcohol profit from earnings reaped from it in other states, and even get higher? Why do Northern leaders broach a pernicious and defective impression that the North has a bigger stake in the Nigerian undertaking than the South? Those are pivotal questions, earnestly demanding some feedback.
The way out of the dissenting positions of the governors from both regions on power shift in 2023 is dialogue, not confrontation. Accordingly, we urge the Southern governors to actively engage their Northern counterparts in constructive conversations on the way forward. Both parties must identify an alternative to traverse the cleavage lying between them, particularly as their rhetoric jigsaws the country, provoking further mischief. This country has enough troubles.