AYOOLA BABALOLA writes that Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori’s call for an institutionalised, decennial national dialogue has reignited long-standing debates over Nigeria’s reliance on national conferences as a tool for resolving structural and governance challenges, with experts divided over its practicality, necessity, and political feasibility
For more than six decades since independence, Nigeria’s leaders have repeatedly reached for the same instrument whenever the federation wobbles: the national conference. Summoned in moments of crisis and disbanded in inconclusion, these gatherings, analysts argue, have become the country’s political reflex — a go-to mechanism whenever questions arise about nationhood and the structural burdens borne by the most vulnerable.
From this perspective, calls for national conferences often amount to an appearance of action, a way of looking busy while deeper structural rot continues to fester beneath the surface. The question now gaining traction in governance circles is not whether Nigeria needs dialogue, but whether dialogue, as currently practised, can transcend symbolism and become something more meaningful than political theatre.
Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori has offered a bold response to that question.
Speaking at the Centenary Anniversary lecture of the Yoruba Tennis Club in Lagos last Wednesday, he proposed that Nigeria moved beyond the emergency-room model of ad hoc conferences and instead institutionalise a periodic, legally grounded national dialogue process — one convened every ten years, anchored by an independent secretariat, and backed by a legislative pipeline capable of translating consensus into law.
It is an ambitious vision. Whether it is the right one remains an open question.
The history of Nigeria’s national conferences is, in many ways, a history of postponed reckoning. From the Ibadan Conference of 1950, which produced the MacPherson Constitution, to the London Conferences of 1953 and 1957 that shaped the framework for federalism and eventual independence, these gatherings were typically convened to address specific, pressing challenges — and disbanded once the immediate pressure eased.
In the post-independence era, however, the pattern deepened into dysfunction. The 1994–1995 constitutional conference under General Sani Abacha, though notable for institutionalising the six geopolitical zones that continue to define Nigeria’s political structure, remained firmly within the logic of military control. The 2005 National Political Reform Conference under President Olusegun Obasanjo collapsed amid suspicions of a third-term agenda, with its resolutions ultimately lost in political controversy.
Then came the 2014 National Conference under President Goodluck Jonathan — the most extensive of them all, bringing together 492 delegates and producing about 600 resolutions at a reported cost of ₦4bn. Yet, despite its scope, it was quietly shelved following the change of government in 2015.
“The Jonathan administration held one successfully,” says Professor Sylvester Odion Akhaine, a political scientist at Lagos State University who specialises in comparative politics, “but its product was binned due to the sectional interest of the succeeding government.”
“We have not had genuine dialogue. And the outputs of the few we have had are simply swept under the carpet.”
This is the inheritance Oborevwori is seeking to break from.
“Rather than treating national dialogue as an ad hoc response to crisis,” he told the gathering on Wednesday, “Nigeria must embed structured, recurring engagement into its governance architecture.”
Oborevwori’s model rests on three interlocking pillars.
The first is legislative integration. Under this arrangement, resolutions from national conferences would not be abandoned in drawers or left to gather dust in ministry archives. Instead, they would be transmitted directly to the National Assembly, where lawmakers would be constitutionally required to consider and, where appropriate, codify them into law. In practical terms, this would transform decennial consensus into legislative proposals, giving the process real legal and institutional weight, and shifting it from an advisory exercise to one with enforceable outcomes.
The second pillar is the establishment of an independent, non-partisan secretariat, modelled loosely on institutions such as the Fiscal Responsibility Commission or the Independent National Electoral Commission — bodies designed to outlive successive administrations. This permanent structure would be tasked with tracking implementation and publishing annual audits of conference resolutions, effectively creating a public accountability scorecard that governments cannot easily ignore. In Delta State, Oborevwori already operates a related mechanism through his “MORE Agenda” monitoring office, which tracks development indicators across the state’s geopolitical zones.
The third pillar focuses on thematic prioritisation and dedicated funding. Rather than convening broad, unwieldy assemblies that attempt to address every national issue at once and often achieve little, each ten-year conference would concentrate on a limited set of critical challenges — such as fiscal federalism, security architecture, or youth unemployment — rotating them in line with prevailing national concerns. Crucially, Oborevwori also proposes a dedicated National Cohesion Fund to ensure that conference resolutions are backed by funding, translating recommendations into budgeted action rather than leaving them as aspirational documents.
Together, these pillars are designed to address what the governor describes as the core failure of past efforts. Without “written law,” he warns, national conferences risk remaining “jamborees that will not achieve anything.”
The PUNCH spoke with experts from Nigeria’s academic and governance community in discussions that were engaging but critical. One of the most pointed responses came from Professor Kamal Bello, Professor of Politics and Administration and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the National Open University of Nigeria, who questioned the conceptual foundation of the proposal.
“A conference, by intent and purpose, is an emergency fire-fighting tool,” Bello argues. “It cannot be institutionalised as a scheduled, once-in-a-decade event.” His critique is rooted in definition as much as policy: a national conference, he explains, is traditionally convened to address a specific and urgent problem, not to serve as a recurring mechanism for dialogue. He points to historical precedent: the Ibadan Conference addressed constitutional restructuring; the London Conferences of the 1950s shaped independence arrangements; each was driven by a defined problem and a clear sense of urgency.
“Proposing a ten-year cycle for conferences is not conceptually right,” Bello says. “Conferences are meant to resolve specific issues and should be convened only when such issues arise.” More fundamentally, he argues that with a functioning democracy and an elected legislature already in place, the need for such conferences may be redundant altogether — whether national, sovereign, or institutionalised.
For Bello, Nigeria’s challenge is not a lack of dialogue structures, but a failure of execution. “What the average Nigerian needs is concrete action on employment, poverty, and inequality, not institutionalised talk,” he says. He also warns against overestimating institutional design as a solution. “No amount of legislative or constitutional backing will ensure implementation without political will.”
Adejumo Kabir, Senior Researcher at Good Governance Africa, shares the scepticism about the proposed structure while remaining open to its underlying ambition. “Nigeria’s problem is not a lack of laws and order,” he says. “It is the failure of implementation and the unwillingness of authorities to enforce existing laws.” For him, legislative backing is not the decisive variable. “History has shown that without genuine political will, even the most well-crafted reports hardly achieve impact,” he argues.
Where Kabir departs more sharply from Oborevwori is on the proposed ten-year cycle. “A decade is indeed too long,” he says, “especially in a country like Nigeria, where socio-political dynamics can shift rapidly.” His alternative is a four-year conference cycle aligned with the electoral calendar. According to him, this would allow each administration to inherit a clear set of nationally agreed priorities. “It would also serve as a way of setting agendas for successive governments, regardless of their manifestoes or promises,” he adds.
He points to the resurgence of police brutality in the years following the 2020 #EndSARS protests as an example of fast-evolving national issues that a ten-year cycle would likely miss. “A shorter interval would support a more agile governance approach, ensuring that citizens’ voices are regularly heard and addressed,” he says.
Oborevwori’s optimism, Bello’s scepticism, and Kabir’s conditional endorsement converge on a single, uncomfortable reality: the problem is not merely structural. It is volitional.
Professor Akhaine puts it more bluntly: the persistent failure of past conference reports lies in a “lack of sincerity of purpose.” He recalls that the Obasanjo-era conference collapsed over the revenue-sharing formula — a dispute rooted less in procedure than in political self-interest. Similarly, he notes that the 2014 National Conference under President Goodluck Jonathan produced extensive resolutions, only for them to be set aside by the incoming administration in 2015 — an action made legally possible because no binding framework existed to compel adoption.
For Oborevwori, the proposal is an attempt to design around that weakness — to create institutional safeguards strong enough that successive governments cannot simply discard consensus outcomes. It is, in many ways, a rational response. But Bello’s objection remains firm: “No amount of legislative or constitutional backing will guarantee implementation without political will.” In his view, a system can mandate consideration of conference resolutions, yet still allow them to be ignored in practice. Even an independent secretariat could be weakened through funding constraints, administrative neglect, or outright disregard.
The counterpoint, implied by Akhaine, is that such reasoning risks fatalism. Imperfect institutions, he suggests, are still better than none.
“Dialogue is always better than conflict when parties are honest,” he says, adding that the condition of honesty — however difficult — must be assumed if progress is to be made.
“We should not plan to fail.”
One of the most persistent weaknesses of past national conferences in Nigeria has been their narrow social composition. Delegates have largely emerged from established political structures: ruling elites, regional power blocs, and entrenched interest groups. Meanwhile, millions of Nigerians most affected by systemic dysfunction — traders, subsistence farmers, informal workers, and unemployed youths — have typically remained on the margins.
Oborevwori’s proposal explicitly seeks to break from this pattern.
“Every key stakeholder in the nation’s progress should have a place at the table,” he argues. His vision includes structured representation for digital economy entrepreneurs, women’s groups, disability advocates, agricultural associations, and traditional institutions, alongside conventional political actors.
Professor Akhaine frames the design challenge with precision: “Delegates should be elected for genuine representation.” That single word — elected — carries significant weight in a system where conference delegates have historically been appointed by the same executive authority that convenes the process. An elected delegate, he argues, carries a fundamentally different mandate; they answer to a constituency rather than a patron. If Oborevwori’s proposal is to reflect its stated commitment to inclusion, then the method of selecting participants becomes as important as any other design element.
The risk Akhaine identifies is “elite capture” — the tendency for formal deliberative processes to be dominated by organised interest groups at the expense of broader, less politically organised segments of society. “It is a dilemma,” he concedes, “but the application of democratic principles may help, as well as greater inclusiveness.” His response is deliberately open-ended, reflecting the complexity of the problem itself.
Kabir, whose work at Good Governance Africa focuses on citizen engagement, places greater emphasis on what happens after the conference, rather than solely on who participates in it. “Engaging citizens in monitoring the outcomes of these conferences will foster a culture of accountability and ensure that recommendations translate into tangible action,” he says. For him, the effectiveness of any conference lies less in its composition than in the broader ecosystem of oversight — civil society, independent media, and grassroots monitoring — that can make elite capture costly rather than consequence-free.
Oborevwori, for his part, argues that his governance approach in Delta State offers at least a partial proof of concept for the equity-driven framework he envisions at the national level.
In Delta State, major infrastructure projects have been deliberately distributed across ethnic and geographic lines. Key roads linking historically divided communities — including the Effurun–Warri flyover and the Ughelli–Asaba highway — were designed with integration in mind rather than narrow political considerations. Critical medical equipment, including MRI scanners and dialysis machines, has been spread across the state’s three senatorial districts instead of being concentrated in the capital. The state’s universal health insurance scheme now covers more than 2.7 million residents, while job creation programmes have reportedly reached over 300,000 people.
The underlying argument is that when communities across ethnic lines experience visible and equitable benefits from governance, incentives for identity-based agitation are reduced. Transposed to the national level, Oborevwori’s proposal suggests that a decennial conference, operating within this framework, could serve as a structured audit of the federation’s promises — identifying gaps, directing corrective action, and creating a public record of how national resources are allocated.
It is a compelling theory of change. However, the gap between state-level governance and federal execution remains significant — not only in institutional complexity, but also in the scale of competing interests and the limited capacity of any single administration to enforce outcomes across the federation’s 36 states, 774 local governments, and diverse ethnic landscape.
Oborevwori also points to international precedents, citing Switzerland and Canada as examples of federal systems where devolution has helped mitigate regional tensions. Yet the comparison, while useful, is not exact. Switzerland’s consensus-driven model is rooted in a constitutional framework developed over centuries and sustained by a deeply embedded civic culture. Canada’s First Ministers’ Conferences, meanwhile, are not constitutionally mandated national dialogues in the sense Oborevwori proposes; they are executive-level intergovernmental meetings whose outcomes depend heavily on political alignment between the federal and provincial governments.
No major federal democracy has, in fact, institutionalised a periodic national conference of the kind the governor envisions. This is not necessarily a fatal objection; Nigeria’s governance challenges are themselves without precise precedent. However, it does suggest that the proposal is being developed without a clear comparative roadmap.
What comparative literature does offer, however, is a consistent finding: in deeply divided societies, processes that sustain peace are rarely one-off events. They are iterative, embedded, and supported by credible enforcement mechanisms. Northern Ireland’s peace process, for instance, unfolded over decades of structured dialogue. South Africa’s post-apartheid transition was anchored on sustained, multi-stakeholder negotiations rather than a single defining conference. The lesson, therefore, is not that national conferences themselves are the solution, but that durable, legitimate, and accountable processes of dialogue can be.
Whether Oborevwori’s model can achieve that level of sustained legitimacy in the Nigerian context remains the central, unanswered question.
The road ahead
For the proposal to become law, it would require presidential endorsement, passage by the National Assembly, and — crucially — the cooperation of the 36 state governors, whose interests do not always align with federal initiatives, however well-intentioned. In an election-driven political environment, the incentives for such reforms are far from guaranteed.
Professor Akhaine is realistic about what success might look like. “If it works well, it will reduce tension in the polity and foster national unity,” he says. It is a deliberately modest benchmark — not transformation, but tension reduction. Even so, in Nigeria’s political context, that would represent a significant achievement.
Bello, however, remains unconvinced that the mechanism addresses the core problem. In his view, Nigeria does not need another institutional layer but the political will to implement the recommendations already available. Since previous conference resolutions — particularly those from 1999 onward — have largely gone unimplemented, he questions what would make a new decennial process different. “Nigerians may not trust conferences as a means of reform and unity based on the experience of previous conferences which were not implemented,” he says.
Kabir’s position is more nuanced: reform the idea rather than reject it outright. Align the cycle with electoral realities, strengthen citizen oversight, and recognise that law alone cannot substitute for political culture.
Governor Oborevwori himself appears aware that rhetoric alone cannot move the machinery of the state. What he has presented is a framework — and the challenge he has issued to governors, lawmakers, and civil society is whether they are willing to engage it seriously enough to shape it into something workable.
“Nation-building does not happen by chance,” he said on Wednesday. Nigeria understands this. The remaining question is whether it is prepared to make it happen by design.
Read the full article here
