I have long been puzzled by the paradox of poverty and extravagance – how a man with barely enough to survive somehow finds reason to expand his expenses, stretch his resources thinner, and open new doors to debt. It’s a bizarre impulse, and yet, it’s one Nigeria seems to indulge with reckless abandon. This thought always leads me back to our national obsession: the creation of new states. Recently, the National Assembly, in a move that reeked of excess and political theatre, embarked on a nationwide tour – grouping existing states into regional blocks for convenience – to gather public input on yet another round of muted state creation. The irony was hard to miss. Here was a country struggling to fund its existing structures, now flirting with the idea of multiplying them. And I found myself asking, as I always do: to what end? What purpose does this serve, beyond the optics of inclusion and the politics of appeasement?
This essay begins with that question, but it finds its anchor in Yobe State – not because I bear any personal grievance against it, but because Yobe, in its quiet struggle, best illustrates the deeper dysfunction of our state creation mania. It is not alone in this; many states in Nigeria are…
The political experiment that is Nigeria is a cruel joke – one that began with lofty promises of unity, equity, and progress, but has since devolved into a theatre of contradictions. Born out of colonial amalgamation rather than organic consensus, Nigeria’s structure has always been precarious. The post-independence era offered a fleeting glimpse of federalism, but successive military regimes, driven by centralist impulses and ethnic calculations, redrew the map with surgical detachment. What was once a federation of three regions morphed into 36 states and 774 local governments, each supposedly designed to bring governance closer to the people. In reality, it has become a bloated bureaucracy, a patronage system masquerading as decentralization. The state creation frenzy – often justified as a corrective measure against marginalization – has instead entrenched inefficiency, deepened ethnic fault lines, and created administrative units that are financially and structurally unsustainable.
The proliferation of states has long been sold as a panacea for marginalization, underdevelopment, and ethnic imbalance. It was meant to be a tool for inclusion, a way to ensure that no group felt left behind in the Nigerian project. But decades into this experiment, the cracks are no longer subtle – they are gaping. Most states are glorified outposts of the federal government, surviving almost entirely on monthly allocations from Abuja. Internally generated revenue is a myth in many places, and basic infrastructure remains elusive. The logic of state creation has shifted from developmental necessity to political appeasement, with elites lobbying for new states not to empower their people, but to secure more seats at the table – more governors, more senators, more contracts. The result is a federation in name but not in practice, where the center holds too tightly and the peripheries are too weak to stand on their own. What was meant to heal has only deepened the wounds. And the question remains: how long can a country continue to multiply its problems under the guise of solving them?
Among the most telling examples of Nigeria’s flawed state creation logic is Yobe State – a product of the 1991 wave of administrative fragmentation under General Ibrahim Babangida’s military regime. Carved out of the old Borno State, Yobe was ostensibly created to bring governance closer to the people, address ethnic tensions, and accelerate development in the northeastern region. But more than three decades later, Yobe stands not as a beacon of self-determination or regional empowerment, but as a sobering case study in the unintended consequences of political engineering. The rationale behind its creation – like many others – was less about economic viability and more about political appeasement, ethnic balancing, and the consolidation of military control. Scholars such as Ejitu N. Ota and Chinyere Ecoma have argued that state creation in Nigeria has historically served to entrench northern dominance in federal resource allocation, rather than to foster genuine federalism.
Yobe’s economic profile in 2024 lays bare the structural dysfunction. The state generated a mere ₦10.5 billion in Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), while receiving a staggering ₦103.5 billion in federal allocations. This means that over 90% of its revenue came from the center – a fiscal dependency that undermines the very notion of autonomy. According to BudgIT’s 2024 State of States report, Yobe is among the states that require more than five times their IGR to meet operating expenses. This is not just a local problem – it’s a systemic one. The proliferation of economically unviable states has created a federation where most subnational units are glorified administrative outposts, surviving on oil rents and federal largesse. Political theorists like George Anderson and Sujit Choudhry have warned that in fragmented federations, especially those born out of elite bargains rather than organic consensus, decentralization often leads to weakened governance, bloated bureaucracies, and fiscal irresponsibility.
Globally, the dark side of federal fragmentation is well-documented. In Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, attempts to devolve power without strong institutional frameworks have led to territorial disintegration and factionalism. In Nigeria, while the consequences are less violent, they are no less corrosive. The multiplication of states has not resolved marginalization – it has reproduced it at smaller scales. Every new state becomes a new arena for elite capture, patronage politics, and resource extraction. As Ezenwa Nwagwu aptly put it, “State creation is an elite conversation for control of resources. It does not truly serve the needs of the common man”.
Yobe, with its low Human Development Index (HDI) and persistent security challenges, exemplifies the paradox: a state created to empower its people, now trapped in a cycle of dependency, underdevelopment, and administrative inertia. The question we must ask is not whether more states should be created, but whether the ones we already have can survive without perpetual feeding from the center. And if they cannot, what then is the true cost – political, economic, and moral – of maintaining a federation built on fragmentation?
Yobe’s economic profile is not just stark – it’s symptomatic of a deeper malaise in Nigeria’s federal architecture. In 2024, the state managed to generate a paltry ₦10.5 billion in Internally Generated Revenue (IGR), while receiving a whopping ₦103.5 billion in federal allocations. That’s nearly a tenfold disparity. What this means, in plain terms, is that Yobe contributes almost nothing to the national purse, yet draws heavily from it. It’s a fiscal paradox that would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. And I say this not to single out Yobe unfairly, but to highlight how the very logic of state creation has produced entities that are structurally incapable of standing on their own feet. Yobe is not failing because its people are lazy or its leaders uniquely incompetent – it is failing because it was never designed to succeed economically. It was carved out for political reasons, not economic ones. And now, decades later, it survives on life support from Abuja.
This imbalance is not unique to Yobe, but it is emblematic. It reflects a broader pattern across Nigeria, where most states are fiscally dependent and economically hollow. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics and BudgIT, fewer than ten states in Nigeria can meet their recurrent expenditure obligations without federal allocations. The rest are glorified administrative zones – governed by men who wait for monthly FAAC disbursements like pensioners waiting for stipends. Yobe’s contribution to the national coffers is likely less than 0.5% of total federal revenue, yet it receives a disproportionately large share of the national purse. This is not federalism – it’s a redistribution scheme that punishes productivity and rewards inertia. It’s a system where oil-producing states like Delta, Rivers, and Akwa Ibom generate the bulk of national income, while non-producing states consume it with little accountability or incentive to grow their own economies.
And here’s where my frustration deepens. We’ve normalized this imbalance. We’ve built a political culture where dependency is not just tolerated – it’s institutionalized. Governors boast about federal allocations as if they were earned income. State budgets are crafted not around local productivity, but around expected handouts. There’s no urgency to build industries, attract investment, or reform taxation. Why bother, when Abuja will always pay the bills? This is the dark side of state creation. It has created a federation of beggars, not builders. And the worst part? The people suffer. Roads remain unpaved, hospitals underfunded, schools dilapidated – not because there’s no money, but because the money comes from elsewhere, and with it, the erosion of responsibility.
Political theorists like Daniel Elazar and Wallace Oates have long warned that federal systems must balance autonomy with accountability. When subnational units lack the capacity – or the will – to generate revenue, they become liabilities, not partners. Nigeria’s version of federalism has ignored this principle. We’ve created states that are too weak to govern, too poor to develop, and too dependent to innovate. Yobe is a case in point, but it is not alone. It is part of a larger tragedy – a federation designed to fail slowly, one allocation at a time.
So I ask again, as I often do: what is the purpose of this structure? What are we building, and for whom? If the states cannot sustain themselves, if they cannot contribute meaningfully to the national project, then what are they but administrative illusions? We must confront this reality with honesty and urgency. Because the longer we pretend that this model works, the deeper we sink into dysfunction. And Yobe, in its quiet struggle, is telling us everything we need to know – if only we’re willing to listen.
This is not fiscal federalism – it is fiscal infantilism. At first glance, Yobe’s funding model might masquerade as solidarity: the center shares, the periphery thrives. In reality, it’s more like a parent feeding a toddler who never learns to chew. We’ve built a structure where Abuja doles out resources month after month, and in return demands nothing more than passive receipt. There’s no incentive to build local tax systems, no pressure to diversify or innovate, and certainly no shame in depending on the next federal allocation. It’s a perverse welfare cycle: the state government becomes expert at budgeting handouts, not at cultivating homegrown industries or enforcing even basic tax compliance. And the longer this goes on, the more entrenched the culture of dependency becomes, until any talk of economic self-reliance feels like a foreign language.
Yobe’s economy is not driven by industry or innovation, but by the inertia of cereal allocations and the lifeline of humanitarian aid. Imagine an ecosystem where the most influential market forces are relief agencies tracking the next IDP influx, and where the prized “export” is grains churned out of Abuja’s agrarian programs. There are no clusters of tech startups humming away in co-working spaces. No manufacturing parks humming with looms or foundries. Instead you have warehouses stacked with donated rice, maize, and beans – commodities that sustain people but never create scalable wealth. When calamity strikes, millions flow in under the banner of “humanitarian response,” but when the trucks leave, there’s no residual infrastructure, no local entrepreneurs stepping up to fill gaps. It’s as if the economy breathes only when someone external pumps oxygen into it – and sinks back into stagnation the moment that support recedes.
Its largest employers are the state government, NGOs, and federal institutions. Private sector activity is thin, and industrial presence is nearly invisible. You’ve got civil servants drawing salaries, relief workers running daily operations, and the odd legation from Abuja monitoring projects – this is the lion’s share of formal employment. The private firms that do exist are either micro-scale traders hawking sundry goods in open markets, or a handful of small contractors scrambling for government road contracts. There’s no critical mass of manufacturers to anchor supply chains, no mid-sized agribusinesses adding value locally, and no service industries pushing the envelope in finance or telecoms. With no vibrant private ecosystem, the youth have two stark choices: join the sprawling bureaucracy or chase dreams elsewhere, feeding the exodus of talent that further hollows out the state.
And here’s what really sticks with me: we’ve normalized this infantilism as if it were inevitable. Every FAAC distribution is greeted with celebratory press releases, as if governors invented oil revenue. We applaud the generosity of the center rather than demanding structural reform. Meanwhile, Yobe’s citizens – whose creativity and resilience were once cited as the bedrock of northern trade – are relegated to the sidelines, their potential traded for a monthly stipend. If this is the best we can do with the raw ingredients of fertile land and a hardworking population, then we’ve failed at even the most basic task of governance. It’s time to stop feeding the limbs without demanding they flex. It’s time to reimagine a model where federal support ignites ambition, not suffocates it.
The population of Yobe, estimated at nearly 4 million in 2025, is more than just a statistic – it’s a testament to untapped possibility. With a median age in the teens and over half the population under 25, the state should be riding a wave of youthful energy into new enterprises, inventive startups, and civic renewal. Instead, that wave crashes on the rocks of a system that offers little in the way of economic opportunity or civic empowerment. Schools lack technology labs, vocational centers struggle for funding, and public forums rarely extend beyond town-hall tokenism. The result is a generation brimming with ideas but starved of platforms to launch them.
I can’t help but feel a tight knot of frustration when I see this squandered dividend. Every young person who leaves in search of work – whether to Maiduguri, Kano, or even Lagos – is emblematic of a brain drain Yobe can’t afford. Those who stay are forced into low-yield farming, informal trading, or idle waiting for the next NGO cash drop. Civic engagement remains transactional: you vote for handouts, then you wait. We’ve normalized a quid-pro-quo democracy where obligation ends with the ballot and begins anew with the begging bowl.
Yobe’s industrial landscape exists more on paper than in practice. Grain processing is performed by a handful of small mills, often operating without maintenance budgets, leading to bottlenecks and wastage. Livestock trade moves thousands of heads across borders, but lacks modern abattoirs, cold-chain logistics, or branding that could unlock premium markets. Cottage manufacturing – leatherwork, weaving, embroidery – survives on family labor and local markets, never scaling beyond street-corner stalls. There’s no industrial park humming with mechanized looms, no agro-processing cluster turning millet into packaged snacks for nationwide sale.
Watching this stasis feel like watching seedlings grow under permanent shade. Without deliberate investment in value-addition, these sectors can’t absorb the swelling labor force or generate meaningful revenue. The state survives on meager fees and allowances, but it does not thrive. It exists in a holding pattern, forever one step away from genuine economic evolution. What if we established cooperative processing hubs, offered micro-equity to youth entrepreneurs, and linked local produce to e-commerce platforms? It’s time to stop asking how much Yobe can take from the center and start demanding what Yobe can give the world.
The creation of so many states in Nigeria promised self-determination, local empowerment, and tailor-made governance. In reality, it has bequeathed us the illusion of autonomy without the architecture of viability. We celebrate new state flags and emblems, while ignoring that most capitals lack functional airports, dependable power grids, or even a coherent economic plan. Autonomy becomes meaningless when you can’t pay your civil servants, can’t fund your hospitals, and can’t keep your streets lit. We’ve mistaken political boundaries for functional territories, believing that drawing a line on the map is the same as building an economy.
Beneath every star-studded inauguration ceremony lurks the debt burden of undercapitalized states – loans taken just to cover salaries, grants begging for bailouts, and budgets built on wishful thinking. This is statecraft reduced to a slogan: “we have our own governor,” even as that governor stares blankly at excel sheets showing zero in non-federal revenue. The tragedy is not just that these states fail to stand on their feet, but that the entire federation props them up, hiding their weakness behind the cloak of national unity. When half of your states rely on Abuja to survive, federalism ceases to be a philosophy of checks and balances – it becomes a conveyor belt of transfers, with no barometer for success other than the size of your FAAC tranche.
Layer upon layer of government has sprung up, each with its own emoluments, sprawling ministries, and sprawling parastatals – all consuming precious resources but producing little in return. Governors, once envisioned as regional visionaries, have been reduced to glorified treasurers of federal allocations. Their annual highlight reel isn’t a landmark university or a hydroelectric plant – it’s the flashy announcement of this month’s allocation from Abuja. Internal audits gather dust, local tax drives fizzle out, and genuine policy innovation is sidelined in favor of PR-driven “commissioning” ceremonies.
This relentless cycle of receipt and spend has hollowed out the very soul of leadership. Instead of recruiting technocrats to streamline agricultural value chains or incentivize SMEs, state cabinets bristle with political appointees whose primary qualification is patronage. The real work of governance – identifying local comparative advantage, investing in human capital, nurturing private enterprise – gives way to the administrative chore of allocating federal handouts. We reward inertia rather than initiative, and then wonder why our states never evolve beyond the status of welfare dependents.
Taken together, the result is a nation cluttered with administrative units that lack the economic base, institutional capacity, or political will to stand on their own. Each state exists in its own bubble, jockeying for federal largesse instead of collaborating across borders on rail links, power pools, or industrial corridors. We have become so fixated on the number of states that we’ve forgotten to ask: are these states actually viable? Do they have a plan to spin out of dependency, or have we stitched them into the national fabric as permanent wards?
This isn’t just an accounting problem – it’s a moral one. We owe our citizens more than the promise of a new state name and the spectacle of ribbon-cutting. We owe them roads that connect markets, schools that prepare young people for the 21st-century economy, and health systems that don’t collapse the moment a refugee influx arrives. Until we confront the failure of our architecture, until we demand that states earn their stripes through tangible results, we’ll remain trapped in a cycle of creation without capacity. And each new state proclamation will be less a celebration of progress than an indictment of imagination squandered.
We must stop asking how many states we can create and start asking how many states we can sustain. It’s time for a hard conversation about merging unviable units, enforcing fiscal accountability, and redesigning revenue-sharing to reward productivity, not penalize it. Above all, we need governors who wake up determined to build industries – not just balance budgets – and citizens who refuse to settle for the illusion of autonomy when real empowerment lies just beyond the next reform.
The agitation for more states – still echoing in the chambers of power and in local political rallies – is not merely unrealistic; it is actively dangerous. It is a path that leads deeper into the swamp of dependency, where subnational units learn to survive not on the strength of their own economies, but on the certainty of monthly remittances from the center. I see in this obsession a political class unwilling to grapple with the harder work of reform, preferring instead the cheap populism of “carving out” new administrative units as if a new name and a new capital city could magically resolve decades of underdevelopment. Each new state birthed under this model comes into existence pre-programmed for weakness: low revenue capacity, limited infrastructure, and a political leadership whose legitimacy hinges more on federal patronage than on delivering tangible results to its citizens. It dilutes accountability because when the central government is footing the bill, local leaders can always point fingers upward instead of inward. And it fractures cohesion in a country that already struggles to bridge ethnic, religious, and regional divides – each state becoming a fiefdom with its own patronage network, its own grievances, and its own sense of entitlement.
Yobe is not alone in this predicament; it is simply an unvarnished example of a national pattern. Many states in Nigeria are economic shells, existing almost entirely because the central government underwrites their survival. Budgets are balanced not through enterprise or productivity, but through the reliable lifeline of oil-funded allocations. And here’s the irony: that “generosity” from Abuja is itself constrained. The federal purse is no endless well – it’s fed by an increasingly precarious commodity market, external debt, and a tax base far too narrow for a country of over 200 million people. Yet instead of confronting this vulnerability, we’ve built a federation that functions like a body with an overfed torso and withered limbs. The center – bloated with ministries, agencies, and parastatals – lumbers forward under the weight of its own contradictions, while the states, too weak to contribute meaningfully, are content to be carried. This is not a sustainable union; it is a dangerous co-dependency where neither side has the incentive to break free.
What Nigeria needs is not another round of cartographic surgery, slicing the map into ever-smaller units that cannot sustain themselves. It needs fewer, stronger, and more self-reliant regions – political entities scaled to their economic capacity, not to the vanity of local elites. A return to a structure where each region has both the mandate and the means to develop its own comparative advantages. Where healthy competition replaces uniform dependency, and where innovation is driven by the urgency of self-preservation, not the comfort of guaranteed subsidies. In such a configuration, the North-East could pool resources to build agro-processing hubs, the South-West could expand its technology and manufacturing base, the South-East could deepen its industrial exports, and the Niger Delta could finally integrate oil wealth into broad-based development instead of cash-bloated budgets. This is not nostalgia for an idealized past, but a pragmatic blueprint for survival. The question is not whether such a shift is possible – it is whether Nigeria’s political class has the courage to choose a harder, truer path over the seduction of the easy and the familiar.
This is not some misty-eyed romanticism about the First Republic or a longing to resurrect a past that, for all its mythologizing, had its own flaws. It is the recognition – cold, unsentimental, and urgent – that the present model is untenable. The federation as it exists today is less a system of autonomous units than a centralised dispenser of survival rations. The deeper truth, uncomfortable for many to admit, is that our current structure incentivises indolence, stifles creativity, and rewards political parasitism. To advocate for change here is not to pine for an old map – it is to demand a political economy that actually functions, one in which structure serves progress rather than inertia. And if such a shift requires dismantling the sacred cows of “state creation” and “federal character” in favour of leaner, stronger, self-sustaining regions, then so be it. The alternative is to persist in a slow national asphyxiation, pretending that the patient is stable while the vital signs weaken.
Decongesting the centre and consolidating our patchwork of mostly anaemic states into fewer, viable regions is not just an administrative tweak – it would be a systemic recalibration. By design, it would restore fiscal discipline, for no longer could local leaders rely on Abuja’s monthly largesse to mask their own failures. Regional governments, with a broader economic base and larger markets, would be compelled to think in terms of strategy rather than survival. Planning would extend beyond the electoral cycle to encompass long-term infrastructural, agricultural, and industrial policies. The cost of governance – presently bloated by duplicated ministries, redundant legislatures, and endless bureaucracies – would shrink. My own suspicion is that this is precisely why the entrenched elite resist such reform: it threatens not just their influence, but the very patronage networks that keep them relevant. Yet, that discomfort is proof of its necessity. In a leaner federation, leaders would have to earn legitimacy through results, not inherited through the accident of boundary lines drawn in smoky backrooms decades ago.
Yobe, in its quiet struggle, tells a loud and unflinching story. A state with minimal internally generated revenue, limited infrastructure, and a fragile economic ecosystem – yet entirely dependent on federal allocations – is a microcosm of the broader Nigerian ailment. This is not to single Yobe out for ridicule, but to recognise it as a mirror in which we can see the reflection of many other states cloaked in the same quiet desperation. And here’s my own frank thought: that mirror is unforgiving. It asks whether a nation can survive on a diet of borrowed time and borrowed money. It demands that we admit – before it is too late – that our structural weakness is not accidental, but engineered by a system that confuses proliferation with progress. To confront the consequences of our choices is to admit that the Nigeria we have built cannot continue on its present trajectory without courting collapse. The question is whether we have the courage to look in that mirror, see the cracks, and reforge the frame rather than simply applying another coat of paint.
State creation, once heralded as a bold instrument of political inclusion, has slowly metastasised into an instrument of systemic dilution. In its early days, it promised access – bringing governance closer to communities that felt unseen and unheard. It was meant to give voice to the marginalised, representation to the peripheral, and a stake to those who had long been on the outside of power’s inner circle. But somewhere along the way, this tool of inclusion morphed into a blunt blade, slicing governance into ever-thinner fragments, each too frail to stand on its own. We have not merely 1decentralised power; we have dismembered it. Every new state carved into existence under this model arrives with the same fatal inheritance: a skeletal economy, a political elite beholden to the federal lifeline, and an administrative apparatus more invested in sustaining itself than in delivering development. I see here not the empowerment of citizens, but the empowerment of political gatekeepers who thrive in smaller ponds precisely because the waters are shallow. And with each act of proliferation, the quality of governance, the sharpness of accountability, and the momentum of development are all watered down – until they are little more than pale imitations of what they should be.
The geometry of power in Nigeria must be redrawn – but not with the feverish pen of those who see salvation in multiplying borders. More lines will not bring more justice; they will only create more centres of weakness. What we need is not a frantic redistricting, but a deliberate reimagining. Fewer, stronger, economically coherent regions could realign the incentives of governance, forcing leaders to think beyond micro-political survival and towards macroeconomic transformation. A geometry forged with deeper purpose would recognise that unity is not built by cutting smaller pieces of a limited pie, but by expanding the pie and ensuring each region has the means – and the responsibility – to feed itself. Until that shift occurs, Yobe and its counterparts will remain cautionary symbols, standing in quiet testimony to the peril of fragmentation. They will be the living exhibits of a political project that mistakes multiplication for progress, where the map looks fuller but the people’s lives remain empty of real opportunity. And here is my own conviction: the courage to redraw this geometry lies not in the comfort of cosmetic change, but in the discomfort of structural reform – an act that would force us to confront who we truly are, and who we might yet become, if we dared to choose strength over sentimentality.
From the long arc of our National conversation, a single truth keeps reasserting itself: Nigeria’s structural problem is not the lack of new states, but the absence of a framework that rewards self-reliance, innovation, and regional strength. The decades-long habit of solving every political grievance with a fresh state boundary has thinned the fabric of governance to the point where form eclipses substance. In the early years of independence, the shift from regions to states was justified as a means to cure domination by larger entities and bring government closer to the people. At first, there were tangible gains: some communities saw local representation for the first time, certain infrastructure projects found their way to previously neglected corners, and political participation widened. But over time, this tool of inclusion hardened into a reflex – every complaint met with cartographic surgery, without a serious reckoning about capacity or sustainability.
The regional era, with all its tensions, produced competitive development in ways that the state system has not replicated. The Western Region’s free primary education programme, the Eastern Region’s industrial push under Michael Okpara, and the Northern Region’s agricultural expansion under Ahmadu Bello were far from perfect, but they were rooted in a culture of autonomy and responsibility. Leaders had to perform because there was no federal tap large enough to drown failure in allocations. By contrast, the era of proliferated states has normalised a different incentive structure – one where the primary skill of governance is negotiating larger shares of federal oil revenue rather than building enduring local economies. This is not to romanticise the regions, but to acknowledge that they imposed a certain discipline now absent from our political economy.
Yet, not every lesson from the past is a call to restoration. Regionalism had its own perils – dominance of minority areas by majorities within the regions, political volatility, and uneven development. These are real cautionary tales for those who would simply revert wholesale to that system. Likewise, the state era has not been devoid of progress: some states have made genuine strides in education, healthcare, and infrastructure despite structural handicaps. The tragedy is that these successes are exceptions rather than the norm, and they tend to occur where leadership is visionary and pragmatic – proof that even in a flawed system, the right incentives and competence can yield progress. But building a nation’s future on the hope that enough “good leaders” will emerge by chance is no strategy at all.
The caution, then, to Nigeria’s leadership is stark: fragmentation cannot be your default solution, and sentimentality cannot be your guide. Each new political unit created without an economic spine deepens the culture of dependency, weakens national cohesion, and inflates the cost of governance. Reform will demand unsettling the status quo – shedding layers of bureaucracy, consolidating administrative units, and recalibrating fiscal federalism so that regions or states earn the bulk of their resources and are held accountable for their development. This is not merely an efficiency argument; it is a survival strategy for a country whose population is growing faster than its revenue base, whose youth are more connected to the outside world than to their own local economies, and whose stability depends on delivering not just symbols of governance, but its substance.
My own considered suggestion is for a deliberate, phased restructuring – starting not with a wholesale redrawing of the map, but with the creation of regional economic blocs that pool resources, harmonise policies, and develop shared infrastructure. These blocs could operate alongside the current state boundaries at first, proving their efficiency and competitiveness. Over time, constitutional reforms could then consolidate political authority around these blocs, with clearly defined responsibilities, fiscal autonomy, and mechanisms to prevent internal domination. This approach blends the competitive dynamism of the regional era with the inclusivity aspirations of the state system, avoiding the pitfalls of both. If Nigeria’s leaders can embrace such a model, they would not just be redrawing lines on paper – they would be redrawing the trajectory of the nation from one of perpetual dependency to one of earned resilience. The choice before us is not about nostalgia versus novelty; it is about weakness versus strength, drift versus direction. And history will not wait patiently while we decide.
