Critics of the emerging zonal development commissions aver that they are avenues for parasitic dependency on the Federal Government by politicians.

We beg to disagree. One of the principles that make the Federal system of government attractive, especially for a large and diverse polity like Nigeria, is the need for even development. Due to unavoidable inequality in terms of resources available to the states and their local government areas, some areas of the country are left to fall behind, especially in the area of infrastructure.

The normal annual budgetary system has failed to fulfil this principle of even development. Almost every part of the country is complaining of “marginalisation”. While that may be largely a political gambit, the situation in the country genuinely calls for a mechanism whereby federal funds are deliberately deployed to each of the six geopolitical zones to address perceived marginalisation and promote even development.

Th Nigerian Civil War was effectively ended with proclamation of the three “Rs”- Reconstruction, Reconciliation and Rehabilitation of the former Eastern Region, the core theatre of the war. The Federal Government abandoned the policy. This later sparked the complaints of “marginalisation” by Nigerians of Igbo extraction.

Later, the Niger Delta militants also adopted complaints of neglect to justify their armed disruption of the oil industry. To address this, the Federal Government established the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission, OMPADEC, and later replaced it with the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC.

The regime of former President Muhammadu Buhari was very proactive in fast-tracking the establishment of the North-East Development Commission, NEDC, to address devastation of the zone by Boko Haram jihadist terrorists in October 2017. Since then, the bills for the creation of three other zonal development commissions have come on stream.

They are: The South-East Development Commission, SEDC; the North-West Development Commission, NWDC, which were recently signed into law; and the South-West Development Commission, which has just been passed in the Senate. We expect the North-Central and South-South Development Commissions bills to follow suit. The NDDC is for the nine oil producing states, and the South-South is entitled to its own development commission.

We expect that each of these commissions should be supervised directly by the Office of the President with the leadership of the National Assembly as very active stakeholders, to ensure that adequate funds are appropriated to them and projects are transparently executed.

We congratulate the North-East Development Commission for blazing the trail in an able manner that easily won the debate in favour of extending its success story to the other zones. We also call on the Presidency and National Assembly to adopt equity and fair play in budgetary allocations, and zero tolerance to corruption and misappropriation of funds.

These zonal development commissions will surely foster national unity if properly run. (Vanguard Editorial)