By Jesutega Onokpasa
Contrary to rather quite irresponsible speculation and baseless propaganda making the rounds, there is absolutely no intent, not to talk of attempt, overt or covert, on the part of the President Bola Tinubu administration to move the capital of Nigeria to Lagos, I can authoritatively report.
What occurred of recent is the relocation of certain offices for greater functionality and enhanced practicality to a location that best suits them.
Some of these offices never even effectively moved to Abuja, in the first place.
By the way, this idea that everything must be headquartered in a country’s capital is a rather unimaginative one which ends up concentrating development in one place to the detriment of other parts of the country.
In fact, it is not even replicated in most other countries.
The Presidency of South Africa is domiciled in Pretoria; the Supreme Court of South Africa seats in Bloemfontein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa seats in Johannesburg; and, the Parliament of South Africa seats in Cape Town.
In Switzerland, a country with a population that is rivaled by the average state in Nigeria, you still hear of Geneva as much as of Zürich, Basel, Bern or Lausanne.
Dubai is so well-known across the world, many people think it is a country of its own, whereas it is in reality just a part of the United Arab Emirates, a country whose capital is actually Abu Dhabi!
In the United States of America, whereas Washington DC is the capital, numberless and quite strategic departments and agencies are headquartered elsewhere.
The Center for Disease Control, CDC, is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia; the US Nuclear Weapons’ Command (what arguably makes them the world’s most powerful country) is headquartered in Massachusetts; the gold bullion of America, the national wealth of the world’s richest country in solid gold, is not kept in Washington but in Fort Knox in the state of Kentucky!
It is very difficult to find a single state in America where something critical to the wellbeing of their country is not located, unlike in Nigeria where we have had this utterly retrogressive and quite inequitable practice of concentrating everything in a particular place to the detriment of other parts of the country.
Washington State is known for Boeing and Microsoft; Michigan is known for General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, etc; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for steel and Akron, Ohio for tyres; Silicon Valley is in California; Houston, Texas is known for the oil industry and so on and so forth unlike in Nigeria where an head office had initially even been earmarked for the Nigerian Ports Authority, NPA, in Abuja where there is no port (that building is the present location of the Ministry of Defense) or oil companies producing crude in the Niger Delta are headquartered in Lagos!
Let us not make mountains out of molehills or display an inclination to be petty, divisive, clannish or regionalistic over everything in this country.
The Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, is and shall remain the undisputed capital city of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and no one is more committed to upholding that status quo than President Tinubu, himself.
Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.
