“This conference” according to Comrade Adams
Oshiomhole, Governor of Edo state and former President of the Nigerian Labour
Congress, “will not be different from any previous conference.” I strongly
disagree. I wish to assert the contrary: that this conference will be
different; it will provide defining moments beyond all the shenanigans of the
past; it will buttress ideas that were injudiciously outlawed from previous
conferences; and it will enlarge the room for creativity beyond and above what
was possible before. Even if there is some alchemy that can prevent it from
taking place - in these days of mismanaged university strikes and purloined
gubernatorial elections - whoever succeeds
in achieving such a negative feat will have to carry the burden of making it
happen again, sooner rather than later.
Or earn opprobrium that will never cease.
I take it that the political skills
needed to make such a difference are
actually within the grasp of the Comrade Governor and other skeptics like
All-Progressive Congress leader, former Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola
Ahmed Tinubu who, in my view, should be prevailed upon to reconsider their
positions and to join in the boil of the discussions. Especially now that,
their party, the All-Progressive Congress, APC, has arrived at mega status,
they must be assumed to have a broader position from which to make a
difference. They have had enough experience in and out of office to appreciate
the actual workings, as well as the dysfunctionality, of the Nigerian polity.
So, even without gruelling research, they know how to navigate the issues.
Specifically, for the Comrade Governor, who has only so many years left of his
two-term tenure - he must be deemed to know that, if he misses this opportunity
offered by the conference, he risks running out of time to make his input from
the position of an incumbent. To boycott or postpone it, in the hope that a
different political arrangement will
emerge that is better for his ken than the existing one, is to make
constitutional reform too subordinate to partisan promptings in pursuit of
political power. As for the other APC leader, Major General Mohammadu Buhari,
he has had a historical baggage of being, once upon a time, too strait-laced against
such a dialogue in his pursuit of
draconian change. He owes his many followers, and the whole country, a
responsibility not to want to repeat the past in a way that could find many
incumbents in his party joining or leading demonstrations for constitutional
change, only after their tenure in office.
So to say, the strategy of
complaining ever so loudly about how the Federal Government and its agencies
are taking more than their fair share of power and resources, while rejecting
the chance to confront it as a solvable theorem, is not good enough. Similarly, any gloating over the failure of past conferences
which offers no chance to brace alternatives, can be seen as a genuine bid to
escape the rigours of serious debate.
Let me be upfront with the fact that
I am not, by any chance, a prophet. Nor I’m
I a publicist for the Okunrounmu Committee that was set up by President
Goodluck Jonathan to source modalities for convening a national conference in the way that Nigerians would
want it. I am merely one among perturbed Nigerians who, especially since the
annulment of the June 12 1993 Presidential election, have invested a lot of
passion into evolving superior arguments, and mobilizing bias, against
precisely the kind of national conference that will go the way of all the
previous ones. It is clear to me, from my interaction with other equally
passionate Nigerians, that there is no better means of taking Nigeria
seriously, at this time, than a national conference. The urgency of the issues
demand the use of every opportunity that offers itself to dredge for, and
fine-tune, answers that have been hedged and degraded by successive governments
in our history. If any hidden agenda is discerned as accompanying anyone’s,
including the President’s, commitment to the conference, the point is to build
capacity against the implied ambush and to turn it into a reason for moving the
conference from mere shadow to a viable enterprise.
Anyone who watched, on television,
the clip of pent-up emotion at the meeting of the Okunroumu-led National
conference Committee in Benin city, where the Comrade Governor performed his nay-saying, would
agree that the matter has gone beyond business as usual. It was precisely
because the Governor imputed wrongly that this was an occasion for old-style
grandstanding, that he ran afoul of the crowd at the meeting. Sad, it was, that
he encountered the gung-ho discretion of a member of the panel, who had to
resign, and who should have been thoroughly briefed beforehand to remonstrate
with all citizens, including powerful Governors, in a language that is suavely
parliamentary. Not shouting matches! The Benin incident gave a clear indication
however that shouting matches will diminish as more and more Nigerians realized
that scorning or dismissively upbraiding the idea of a dialogue is like
throttling the throats of the majority of Nigerians who always wanted a
national conference.
To join in denying or
pooh-poohing the wish of the majority is
to compound the disappointment that many have felt especially since the failed
National Political Reform conference organized by President Olusegun Obasanjo
in 2005. That conference ended without a formal report. The result is that
disappointed Nigerians, are now, battle-ready to stem untoward eventualities.
They cannot be distracted by the possibility that President Goodluck Jonathan
may be holding a national conference only as a means of deceit, or diversion.
Nor are they unduly harried by his
presumed lack of sincerity and capacity to make good his commitments. They do
not want to give up the great expectations and efforts that they had put into
bidding for it. This is especially the case, as there isn’t, in the foreseeable
future, a realistic alternative to the answers that they have found and would
like to share with other Nigerians in a context that allows a proper
negotiation to be consummated – that is, if negotiation is what it must
take.
Arguably, it was because of such
Nigerians that President Jonathan,
obviously did not need to be too pushy about setting out a clear agenda. He had to leave it to the Okunrounmu
Committee to try to pool things
together. All the better for a process that was not supposed to have “no go”
areas. Even the no-go about the unity of the country must be seen, in this respect,
as a matter of pooling energies in a goal-oriented manner rather than let sass
and vitriol overtake a necessary project. In essence, Okunrounmu Committee’s
job and its envisaged outcome in a formal national conference, had to be just
in accordance with an unstated doctrine of necessity. It chimes with the zeal
of those unafraid that their answers to the National Question will be tested
under the fire of vigorous debate; those who
cannot afford to wait for the ground to be pure-science-perfect before
seizing any day available to make their stand known; and, those who think their
ideas are germane and viable enough to bear scrutiny. Irrespective of whether it is a sovereign
national conference, a mere national conference, a conversation, a dialogue or
a deal of whatever stamp, those with ideas that cannot pass muster are the ones expected to bow out in the face of
superior argument. This is the way things are supposed to work in a democracy.
It is the reason that the very idea of a
national conference has refused to die. Although very much knocked about,
sidelined, backhanded out of the way, and then taken up, manhandled and aborted
on the corridors of power, it has, like the mythical phoenix, returned again
and again, each time more insistent than the last. It has now been roaded in a way that some strong body of
opinion consider unexpected. Still, may
it be stated, and very quickly, that it was not unexpected by those who took
President Goodluck Jonathan seriously enough to give him due credit for the
attention he was paying to constitutional reforms.
The odd part is that the nay-saying
has come from political leaders who had whipped up the country to a frenzy
about the need for a conference. To be fair to them, they wished only for a
conference that would be sovereign and not merely national. Their efforts for
more than a decade, added up to the pressures that caused President Jonathan, following
Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Yar’adua, to stand for constitutional
reforms of a nature that obviously has not registered well with the agitators.
Quite intriguing is that the reasons that they have given for opposing or
doubting the value of this particular conference, are actually among the best
that one can have for jumping into the bandwagon of the national conference
proposition. As I hope to make clear in this intervention, all the reasons
being advanced by the nay-sayers deserve
to be accommodated as contributions to the impending debates because they raise
questions that cut into the fears of majority of Nigerians who are however bent on seeing that something good will come
out of the current exercise.
Of all the reasons being advanced
against the conference, the most upfront and oft-aired is that the President never supported the
idea until he suddenly turned around to switch on the Okunrounmu wand. This
reason is, however, quite a figment of the sheer refusal by many strategically
placed Nigerians to look at and participate in what was going on all the while.
Those who allowed themselves to believe that President Jonathan was clueless on all questions were
mouthing their unbelief with too peculiar a smirk to pay attention. They took
no pains, except in a highly formalistic manner, to follow the many steps being
taken in pursuit of constitutional reforms.
Too stricken by the clueless washerword,
they turned their backs on the whole process of constitution-making and refused
to take it seriously. The ruling People’s Democratic Party, as a party rather
than as executive and legislature, stood impervious with too strong a sense of
entitlement to advert attention to it. Political parties of the opposition,
obdurately in my view, failed to mark the grounds being covered and could not
intervene where it would have been most deft to do so. Seduced by some kind of
calamity physics, they appeared only to be waiting for things to fall apart
rather than hold together. They could not see that the President was not
running away from but was running with the idea of a National conference that
many of them had all along spearheaded.
The leader who has been most
categorical about his misgivings and who must be thanked for unwittingly
rousing a virtual national movement behind the idea of the conference is, of
course, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu himself. The former Governor of Lagos State
and national leader of the All-Progressive Congress, has acknowledged in a
backhanded kind of way that he was indeed following the steps being taken by
the President although he never expected those steps to be well-meant or
pursued to logical conclusions. In the
statement that he made on his return from recuperating abroad, he averred that the President opted for the “wiser and
more cost-effective line of action when, in November 2011, he inaugurated the
Justice Belgore Presidential committee on the Review of Oustanding Issues from
Recent Constitutional conferences”. The President, according to him, appointed
many eminent personalities to the Committee. After the Committee’s report on
July 11, 2012, the President constituted a Cabinet committee, with the Attorney
General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, as the
Chairman, to report within three weeks. Then: “Under the President’s watch and
directive, a presidential retreat was held for Civil society organizations and
professional groups at the Banquet Hall, of the State House, Abuja”. The Deputy
Speaker of the house of Representatives,
Mr. Emeka Ihedioha, the Chairman of the House Committee on constitution
Review, stressed the fact, at that retreat, and in the presence of President
Goodluck Jonathan, “that the target of the legislature was to complete the
constitution amendment process by June 2013.” When that process was actually
completed, all the principal drivers in the National Assembly began to deliver
reports to the public in a way that was, agreeably, parliamentary. This means
that even while so many were talking about the cluelessness of the President,
so much was actually happening that was being kept at arms length by those who
should have been most enthused by, even if critical of, the process. Although
the public has been kept in the dark about the Belgore Report, the minders of
the amendment process in the Senate and in the House of Representatives kept
faith with the public. So much work they have done to enable any concerned
citizen to follow the pattern of the reconstruction of a new constitution in
the light of the old! The usually unbowed and proactive media across the
country have performed fairly admirably, in my view, and have enabled all who are genuinely interested in the
process to know how different is the work that has been done by the sitting
National Assembly. The pity is that it simply has not registered with political
leaders who sneer, rather than engage the work that has been done. This
explains why among the reasons expressed for not running with the idea of the
national conference is that there was a previous national conference whose
report was never made public and which President Jonathan should have returned
to. This position, taken by the Bishop of Sokoto, Hassan Mathew Kukah,
Secretary to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference
of 2005 is rather understandable because he does admit that he was ‘on top of
his job’ and so cannot be expected to disavow his charge. But to have Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, also demanding that
President Goodluck Jonathan should simply have gone for the 2005 Report say
something about transformations in Nigerian politics which should, on its own,
inspire a national conference. I think
it is good to advert attention to it.
Rooting for
Previous Conference Reports
Under normal circumstances, in a
democratic society, the steps so far taken in pursuit of a new constitution
would have been regarded as necessary, if not sufficient. First, whether to
amend or completely revamp the basic law
of the land, ought to be regarded as firmly within the primary competence of
the national and state Assemblies.
Unfortunately, the fourth republic never managed to pass the test of a people’s
republic because it did not emerge from a people’s constitution. Consequently,
the assemblies have been generally
viewed as mere contraptions, with a plethora of damaged mandates, painfully
stomached by the people as some contingent means of removing military
dictatorship from centrality. What rankles is that the military had compounded
the situation by imposing a constitution which was not even made known until a
government had been emplaced through a format of electoral frauds.
Not to forget: the originating fraud
was set by General Ibrahim Babangida’s endless
transition which grafted, instead of
letting develop, a two party system. He described the parties as one a little
to the left the other a little to the right. The constitutions and manifestoes
and even office designs of the two political parties were imposed by military
fiat. After the dictatorship’s annulment of the June 12,1993 Presidential
election, and the collapse of the interim sortie under Chief Ernest Shonekan,
the process, as thumbed by General Sani Abacha,
produced a much-boycotted confab that yielded a five party option. Bola Ige,
the assassinated former Attorney General of the Federation, very
promptly and appropriately described the parties as five fingers of one leprous
hand. All the parties soon proved him right by rooting for the dictator,
General Sani Abacha himself, as sole Presidential candidate. By the time
General Abdulsalaam Abubakar entered the fretwork of elections that took place
outside any known constitution, and even
before many Nigerians saw the fraudulence in the elections, the Fourth Republic
had become one to be stomached only as a means of getting in place a
transitional government whose primary duty would be that of giving the country
a new constitution. Or so the opponents of military rule supposed.
Unfortunately, once in office, nothing could persuade the Born Again President
Olusegun Obasanjo to do more than make the motions without a genuine move in
the right direction. When he stirred, the constitutional reforms that he put on the road were proactively
vitiated by a much-damned third term agenda that almost gave Nigeria a civilian
dictatorship by constitutional fiat. The worst came when the conference was
boycotted by South South delegates who had been told by an opponent in the
debates that if the inhabitants of the Niger Delta felt too incommoded by the
oil prospecting and exploitation in the place, they should consider evacuation,
or being evacuated, in the national interest.
The fiasco that attended the OBJ
Constitutional reforms never allowed Nigerians to forget however that the military had imposed the 1999
constitution but proceeded to say that we the people enacted it. This has
continued to be held against the current Constitution. Too many Nigerians, there are, with one
stolid objection to the constitution:
that it lied when it said that we the people enacted it. This time, they
want everything, therefore, to be done beyond mere amendments in order to redraft
and remove the military overhang. Even
if it is merely to repeat the same provisions in so many different words, many
consider it a must-do, in order to be able to say we gave it to ourselves.
Except that the objections to the constitution, on this ground, are more than
just about symbolism. Many are based on fundamental objections to certain
provisions of the constitution which cannot be altruistically altered unless a
fundamental rethink of the whole constitution is consummated. Otherwise, there are truly contentious issues
such as the wish by some powerful constituencies to (1) repeal the Presidential
System contracted in 1979 in favour of a return to the parliamentary system
that was saacked by the first military coup of 1966; (2) reverse the assault on
Federalism that began with the declaration of a state of emergency in the
western region in 1962 and was entrenched by military takeover which created a
quasi-unitary structure forever crying for redress. There are other issues
which, to the credit of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his associates, are
spoken about within the need to uproot the ugly legacies of the past.
Again, not to forget: as Governor of Lagos
state, he had a long-drawn battle against impositions by Federal power which
denied Lagos state her due revenue allocation from the Federation account. He has expressed resentment of the fact that
the Federal government controls more revenue than the 36 state Governments and
774 local Governments in the Federation. IN 2001, his bid to create, and he did
create, Nigeria’s first Independent Power Project, the first public/private
sector partnership in the production of electricity, was frustrated by the
over-lordship of the federal government as derived from Exclusive powers that
the constitution still allows. He recalls: “It was only after much difficulty
that the Federal government allowed the take off of the first phase of the
project, which is today generating between 260 MW and 360 MW from Ikorodu”. Besides, too well
known is his disdain for a Federal system of government in which a Governor may
be called the chief security officer of his state but only the Federal
Government can control the police. In spite of a Supreme Court ruling in AG Anambra Vs AG Federation, in which
the powers of Governors to give orders to the police was affirmed, it has been
held in abeyance. Why should a tier of government not have a means of securing
itself? Add this to the other bone of
contention which resides in the exclusive powers of the Federal Government to
make laws for the establishment of, and among other things, the running of
railways. All Lagosians still rue the day that the metro-line in Lagos was
decoupled as a Federal-guaranteed state government policy. Much indemnity had
to be paid to externalities after the coup led by General Muhammadu Buhari reached the decision to pay for the
metro-line not to be established.
In the face of so many outstanding
issues, it is not safe logic to argue that there is nothing new to add to the
constitution or that all that need to be said have been said. Evidently, there
is still so much to be said and so much said that has not been done. This is one reason to be mindful, but
circumspect, in my view, of the position of the Bishop of Sokoto, Hassan Mathew
Kukah, Secretary to Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference of
2005, who is quite convinced that “it is going to be really hard-put to come up
with the kind of report that will surpass the report that we produced at the
National Political Reform Conference”. His views, as I shall soon show,
actually yield more of a rationale for an urgent re-confabulation than it
appears on the surface. As he relates it to the Vanguard on March 3, 2014: “Every President comes with his own ideas
about what he is going to do…….“ every President and governor has to come and
do something different” and “everybody
has to come with his own pet project” leaving us “all stumbling and fumbling
without a collective sense of narrative and clear vision of where we are heading…”.
In a country that is therefore unable to “distinguish between individuals and
how institutions are built”, he believes the problem that cries to be solved
is that there is no appreciable change
in political behaviour. Not even the
moral restraints of the religions that Nigerians profess and confess, and the
“clear instruments of restraints such as the judicial processes, the Police and
the courts”, have managed to make a difference to behaviour in Nigerian public
life. “We are”, he argues “…… not heading to anywhere” in terms of effectuating
constitutional provisions, and obeying the law. Although “everything has
literally been provided for in law”, and
we have ended up with an “encyclopaedia of laws” ….” with one of the biggest
constitutions as a document that nobody is accountable to”, the country is
still virtually not functioning as it should. So, for him, to make Nigerians
accountable within existing basic law and constitutional profile, appears to be
so much more the problem. Hence, his stand: that “it is impossible to build a nation by just
assembling good people” or merely
“having people gather for a national conference”. Without a sense of history, expertise,
commitment and moral discipline, he does not see what difference the drawing up
of a new constitution can make. As he sees
it: “The kind of freshness that you
require from a transition never happened in Nigeria”; so that the key players
in the system are still the same old elites, unchanging; with the result that “in the next ten years about 90 percent of
the Senate is going to be made up of former governors for whom the Senate is
gradually becoming a place of abode”.
As gerontocracy and corruption,
and patronage by President, Governor, and traditional ruler, continue to
over-determine critical personnel in the polity, including the delegates for
national conferences, he wonders, and most Nigerians would agree with him, that
something beyond the usual, something different, ought to be done.
Interestingly, Bishop Kukah does not
quite claim that Obasanjo’s National Political Reform conference addressed the
issues that he has flogged, and should, for this reason, be adopted. He throws in a clanger concerning the
unavailability of the report of that conference. Rather melodramatically, he
tells the Vangaurd: “The greatest
tragedy is that the Secretary to the Government of Nigeria cannot tell you
where the report is. The President of
Nigeria cannot tell you where the report is. The Heads of Service cannot
tell you where the report is. The cabinet office cannot tell you where the
report is. This is why I keep saying that Nigeria is like a pilot flying
without a black box”. Except that, a
question does arise: what are Nigerians supposed to do, if the report, which he
says future constitutions will be hard put to surpass, remains
unreachable? And, since none of those
who have had access to the report can tell, or have told, fellow countrymen and
women what is so truly non-pareil about the Political Reform Conference, how
are Nigerians to price what they have not seen above what they are determined
to give to themselves?
The truth, all the same, is that even
if the 2005 report were to be found, a bare-knuckle demand for President
Goodluck Jonathan to adopt it cannot be met without a process, similar, we must presume, to the
ongoing one. Rationally, no President would just pick up such a report and ask
his People to adopt it, even if he were a dictator. Especially for a report that has had such a
chequered biography, it would require a people’s revalidation. If there are aspects
to it that are wonky enough to put the back of people up, all the more reason
to follow the route that should normally have been taken to turn it into common
property. The short of it is that no
previous exercise in constitution
making, no matter how outstanding, could just have been chosen and adopted by the fiat of the President of
Nigeria. Nor should the say-so of the
leader of opposition or the chest-beating of the Secretary of the National
Political Reform Conference be taken on its own terms. Unless the expired
conference of 2005 was going to be recovened to finish its job, the redress
could only come from another confab.
Besides, after the much that has happened on constitutional reforms since 2005, nothing
can remove the fact that the Political Reform Conference Report, is now just
one among many attempts at a Constitution which must enter a basket of wishes that includes other
contending documents. Among the many that simply cannot be backhanded out of
the way, are the two un-reconciled drafts
between the Senate and the House of Representatives and the PRONACO model
constitution that some Nigerians, rightly or wrongly, consider a superior
document to the Obasanjo Political Reform Conference Report. Quickly, it is
worth recalling in this connection, that the PRONACO constitution was based on
the stand of ethnic nationalities in the country. The late Chief Anthony
Enahoro, mover of the first motion for Nigerian independence in 1953, and
Professor Jadesimi Akande, SAN, former
Vice Chancellor of Lagos State University -
she who had braved plenty of tear
gas smoke during the struggle against military misrule - was a great inspirer of the Pronaco pitch, as
was Professor Wole Soyinka, the 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize for
literature. By bringing ethnic
nationalities into contention for space in the Nigerian political system, they
broadened the base for a choice of
constitutions. Also, they posed a challenge, such as the Belgore Report is
presumed to accommodate, concerning the matching of contending documents, for
purposes of reconciliation. The question
is: why luxuriate in the terms and textualities of only one out of several
contending documents? The answer is that
any pressure for a selection, or
poaching if you like, must approximate a dialogue, a conversation, a
conference, sovereign or supine. Or call it what you will. Nigerians, who have no access to the
documents may be forgiven if they take refuge in the credo of the philosophers
who say the unexamined life is not worth living. A
draft constitution that has not been seen or subjected to serious
analysis, with its exemplariness amply demonstrated, deserves no
enactment.
not to allow hidden agendas
pre-determine or over-determine how the rest of us must speak out for the kind
of Nigeria that we want. Unless we are afraid to take our country seriously,
the point is to use the conference to put our hopes for the future on the
agenda and speak for the kind of Nigeria .
Good enough: the President did not
just want to pull the answers out of his own resource control hat but insists
that the process of legitimation and ownership of the outcomes must begin with
allowing contributions from all Nigerians to determine the agenda.
Even if someone has found an
answer that the rest of us can affirm without a quibble, the fair deal is not
to assume it before the proof. At any
rate, the OBJ confab Report happens to be just one out of many failed
conferences whose deserts we need not gloat over but pool and harness. Although
all the conferences are not all of equal good, it still couldn’t have been
smart political gumption to want to choose one out of the lot because each may
have had some thought of value, still usable, that is not in the others. The smarter thing to do is to be sure that something
of great value is not being thrown away
in the process of making a division. This is an important statement, worth
repeating, in that the least valuable of the constitutions could have had
something, truly good, that the best of them
never had. In actual fact, the
least democratically endorsed of the conferences, the Sanni Abacha confab, was
so massively boycotted and taunted for being a mere run of third elevens, that
it was not supposed to be of any value. Still, it managed to yield some creativity
that has boosted the lexicon of the 4th Republic. Many Nigerians can
recall that until Alex Ekwueme’s embroilment in that Abacha confab, it was not
part of the lingo of our Republic to talk about the six geo-political
zones. There may still be other such
ideas scattered between the various conferences, which ought to be harnessed.
And, there may be lessons to learnt if
only in the negative sense of being forewarned; after what is known about a country like Yugoslavia which set out on the road to ultimate disintegration by
taking each of her six geo-political zones more seriously than the country to
which they all belonged. It warns us
that, carried too far, some ideas lead to a form of rotational civil war. The
short of it is that, reaching out for all the usable ideas in the history of
constitution making in our country and taking a measure of what must be
scooped, harnessed or jettisoned is a way
to produce a constitution superior in fit and reasoning to the existing
one.
Everything taken together, the golden
rule about visiting earlier ‘attempted’ constitutions is not so much to help
the President or members of the National Conference to choose one. It is about
being sensitized to what ought to be added up,
as memory aid, or model constitution, and improved upon. In the history
of constitution making in Nigeria, the most famous model constitution in this
connection has to be the draft constitution which the Constitution Drafting
Committee CDC, inaugurated by the
Murtala/Obasanjo military dictatorship, produced in 1978. The CDC was made up of appointed experts, jurists
and constitutional philosophers in order to avoid the mayhem of letting the
electoral process produce any-comers, hurrah candidates, and educated touts
without the requisite know-how. The drafting of a constitution is not after
all a job for mere joiners. This was the reason that Obafemi Awolowo
rejected his appointment to the CDC apart
from saying he was not an expert and was not used to being appointed by radio.
It turned out that the draft which emerged from the committee was literally
based, on his book, Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution, which he wrote while serving
a ten year prison term for treasonable felony. It was the real spine of the
work done by the 49 wise men after he, the 50th, refused to be a
member. The draft owed so much to that little book that it was a very immodest
Awolowo who had to crow about how he was not exactly plagiarized but,
lifted without acknowledgement. If Nigeria were a place of strict memory, the
1979 Constitution deserved, properly speaking, to be described as the
Awolowo/Obasanjo Constitution although
the framers of the Constitution did not run with all the ideas that the author
considered germane to their project. The bottom-line is that what the CDC
eventually delivered for transmission to
the elected Constituent Assembly became the model or, more properly, the father
of all the constitutions we have had in Nigeria since 1979. I should add that
we have been having sundry agitations over drafting another constitution, each
time a new government comes to power, because the suasions of Thoughts
on Nigerian Constitution were improperly absorbed. Such that: every
constitutional crisis in the country has been like a wake-up call to finish the
unfinished job of the 1979 Constitution.
I might as well add that this is not
the point, or the place to go into the fullness of the ideas that were either
short-changed, truncated or simply abandoned by the CDC and successive
constitution makers. Suffice it to note that the practical implications of the
omissions and negative commissions of that military-gaurded exercise of 1978
are still so much with us. Every attempt at a new constitution has tended to
flunk the necessity finish to the unfinished job. Perhaps, one of the boldest
efforts, outside statutory or governmental promptings, that has been made to
complete the job, is the Pronaco model which decidedly represents the ethnic
nationalities as the constituent units of the Nigerian Federation. Modifiers there
may have to be to the work that the PRONACO has done. But it is certainly the
only people-driven option that may well be called a model constitution. It
would be surprising if it did not enter the basket of drafts that the National
Assembly has considered in the process of amending/drafting what well be a
model for the National Conference.
Surprising is a word I would use because the PRONACO DRAFT and the
Senate copy of the current reforms have similar tropes on the necessity to make
the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State policy, which was
Awolowo’s masterstroke, justiciable. Taken seriously, the process of matching
the good and the necessary provisions in the model constitutions needs to be
quite creatively elective in this manner.
As far as can be seen, there is
no reason why the method employed in 2014 should not be an improvement on the past; especially,
now that the interest shown by the President and the National Assembly have
traversed the commitments of several
civil society organizations, and special commissions like the Belgore
Commission. What may be unforgivable is to allow the
contrived mystery surrounding many of
the reports to remain a mystery unexplained.
I suppose at this point it is fair to
pay due respect to one great activist of the cause of having a truly well
thought out draft constitution before convening a National Conference. I am
referring to Professor Ben Nwabueze who has participated in the search for a
model constitution since the end of the First Republic. He participated in the
49 man Draft Committee that Murtala Mohammed/Olusegun Obasanjo set up in 1978
to draft what became the 1979 Constitution. This season, although unable for
health reasons to accept his appointment to the current National Conference
Committee, Professor Nwabueze will not
be deterred from making his contributions. He has taken the easy-to-support
position that a Constituent Assembly with a model constitution will do better than one that could lose focus
by re-arguing the old questions from scratch and with a high risk of
self-distraction. To help out with the process, Professor Nwabueze, with the
help of a Committee set up by The
Patriots, offered to grant his
report to the deliberations of the Okunrounmu Committee. A good offer or
bequest, one might say. However, it is certainly easier to accept his rationale
for having a model constitution presented to or by the National Conference
Committee than to accept his wish that the Federal Government should adopt the
work of the The Patriots Committee as a virtual stand in for the whole
exercise. It requires no special pleading to see that Professor Nwabueze’s
over-confident faith in his own powers as a constitutional expert has overtaken
his most challenging principle which is to make the people’s constitution a
function of collective will. The point is that The Patriots Committee may
produce the best draft constitution in the world but it would still be no more
than a one-sided choice that simply must share a common basket with others.
Even if President Goodluck were to choose to turn The Patriots’ ‘good job’ into
the draft that the National Conference or Constituent Assembly must take as the
working document, it would not wash as a document with authority; it would be
just one memo among many. The bottom line is that the report of The Patriots
committee is one more memorandum added to the basket of other memos and drafts
that may be submitted to it.
In effect, the great value of
Professor Nwabueze’s proposal is that it sensitizes Nigerians to the
imperatives of a model Constitution whose existence must precede the sitting of
the National conference or Constituent Assembly. That is: it reminds us that
the basket of constitutions in Nigeria’s historical repertory must be reduced
to a managed unit, a formal document, a model constitution, that must be presented to the country for
interrogation and re-interrogation
before possible adoption. Frankly, not
to have produced such a model is to have wasted the best shot of the current
process. Otherwise, making it a part of
the necessary haggling, debates and negotiations that would be going on at the
National Conference, is imperative for enhancing the quality of the final
document and turning it into common
property. It is all about the ideas that great minds have thrown up and people are able and
willing to pool for the purpose of straightening out the complex problems that
have confronted us as a country. To be fair to ourselves, we need to accept
that a Committee of experts ought to be a part of the process of producing a
Constitution. Americans went for their best minds. We, too, have great minds,
that may yet be outed by the current
process. We may well take them on board in the manner that the Americans cadged
upon the best minds to craft the best
that is possible. Deserving every admiration today, they sought out great thinkers and publicists who were able
to achieve a language of resounding inspiration that has thrilled and empowered
not only Americans but all humanity across the ages. Their constitution, which
is quite a classic of the genre, is a fundamental social compact derived from
great arguments and debates lodged in what are today described as Federalist
Papers. They were the means of prior mobilization of consciousness before and
during the great convergence of the people
to give themselves a constitution. To think of it: if those thinkers
thought their opponents unserious, simple-minded absent-minded or clueless,
they did not submit to the dross of what they thought. They went higher-minded
and so left a legacy that political leaders across the ages have emulated as a
way of taking their own countries
seriously.
As for the worldly-wise assumption
that it is not the constitution but the attitudes of its
operators that need attention, let me simply note that no one has yet found a way of turning operators
into angels. It is precisely because operators are not angels that we need
constitutions in the first place. For forms of constitutions let fools contend;
what ever is best governed is best is an old aphorism that makes sense only
in a country that has never had a formal constitution. Otherwise, it happens to be true that bad
constitutions can make good people go bad; or make bad people get worse. Good constitutions, on the other hand, seek
to guide and make people better. They instrumentalize restraints on appetites
and bad behaviour. They point governance in life-affirming directions. And,
where human foibles are particularly dense and difficult to move by simple clauses,
good constitutions, yes, good ones, may spell things out at length, at the risk
of amassing a wide-bodied constitutional document that taxes patience. No
question: in truly bad situations, insufficient wording of constitutions could
insinuate disabilities by leaving too much room for discretion and hedging. To
get the right balance, the job of constitution-making, calls for hard
headedness and creativity.
In
Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, the surprise is that up till the moment of
the announcement of the Okunrounmu Committee, no serious analysis of the
process and outcomes of the various attempts at constitution making had been properly done by the great thinkers
in our midst. Nor have the Secretariats of any of the political parties in the
country adverted serious attention to the matter. Wittingly or unwittingly,
their silence presents attempts at constitutional reforms as a governmentalized
affair of the legislature and executive. In particular, the ruling People’s
Democratic Party, sitting pat with an engrossed sense of entitlement and
self-obsession, has been unable to look beyond its factional scuffles.
Opposition parties, on their own, have allowed the constitution making process
to appear secondary to the workaday gladiatoring for this or that office; as if
they consider the acquisition of power, even within the current shabby
conundrum of an un-restructured polity, more important than tackling the constitutional obstacles to good
governance. The process has been treated
with the kind of popular indifference that has been visited upon the celebration of the Centenary (1914-2014),
making Nigeria look like a country with only distracted minds in government and
opposition. Indeed, both events have suffered similar snide dismissals without
attracting genuine and serious assessment as to how the country has travelled
in one hundred years. Or ought to go in the next. It is shocking that the
penchant for nay-saying , without a demonstrated capacity to propose alternatives to the positions of the
government in power, has yielded a poor quality of decision making across Nigeria’s political culture. It might
well be said that culpable indifference is being serenaded as a virtue.
This is why it is important that there be
model constitutions to reduce the sheer dross that might arise out of
submitting to the debilities in the political system. And by the way, a model constitution serves more than just
the purpose of helping to build up focus and guidance. It should be seen as a means of reducing the time that
ought to have been devoted to re-inventing the wheel. Three months of
deliberation rather than the wasteful venture into one year or eighteen months
of haggling and jousting, as some people have suggested, should be considered
enough. This should rule out the highly distracted proposal made by the current
deputy President of the senate, Ike Ekweremadu who imagines that the lifetime
of the current governments in the Federation ought to be extended, against
the provisions of the constitution, in order
to allow ample time for deliberations. He says “I believe that the way it could work is, now, people
have been elected for four years, let everybody complete the four years tenure
for which he or she is elected. And then, through the doctrine of necessity, or
a sort of jurisprudential approach, do some kind of transition of two years in
which case, the present occupiers like the President and state governors, who
are competing their tenures, maybe, will now do another two years that would
end in 2017. You can see that those who are fighting the President, their
complaint is that if the President gets
his second term, when they are gone, he will start to chase them. So if
we all agree that that is a way to solve the problem, after two years, both the
President and other Governors will now exit, I believe that the fear would not
be there and there would not be much pressure on the polity”.
This is a case of overdone prudence
if not prostration to the culture of derailment which, thank goodness, is not
on display in the draft/amended
constitution that both houses of the National Assembly have produced in the
current session. One ought to ignore Ike
Ekweremadu’s evidently alimentary plea but for the fact that it offers a chink
of insight into the thinking at the apex of
decision-making at the National
Assembly. Is the country being alerted to the possibility that a national
project so fundamental to moving out of current doldrums may be derailed by
corrupt people on the corridors of power who would rather drive the nation to
ruin than face justice? Coming from a stalwart of the National Assembly who
is literally a prince of the very process that he appears to be knocking sideways,
it is a warning that there are hurdles to jump and that drafting a good constitution
may be quite a threat to some people in
whose interest it isn’t for solutions to come home to root. Still, given that the end of the tenure of
most incumbents is on the clock, any attempt to make the process go beyond the
three months promised could create a nauseating credibility gap between members of the National Conference
and the country at large. I think the
job already done by the National Assembly is too much an advance for such evident
retreat to be entertained. Rather than have tenure elongation, the new
constitution should provide for a process of transition. Tenures that are not ended by the
commencement of the new, may be covered
in the manner that gubernatorial terms
delayed by unresolved cases at the election tribunal may be accommodated. This indeed would be a true test of whether
what one hopes will be a form of shared sovereignty between the National
Assembly and the National Conference can function in a law-governed format. It is also
in this regard a test of the viability of the constitutional reforms in the
year of the centenary celebrations. We must remember that the high point of the
recent centenary celebrations was the honouring of military dictators in the same breath as
leaders who came to power through elections.
This is not good enough; in the year of a national conference that is
supposed to provide a platform for the celebration of democratic values. Not Good Enough? There are commentators who think that, as
with his supposed volte face on the question of the national conference, President Goodluck Jonathan’s is so so intent on his candidacy for the 2015
Elections that he is reaching out in a bid to bag the influence of former
military dictators. This is Another way
of saying that he has a personal dilemma to resolve that the National
Conference is speaking to.
The GEJ
Dilemma; Nigeria’s Nightmare
There is a sense in which a President
who has refused to go by any rule of thumb and has chosen to throw the matter
of constitutional reforms into the boil of a national conference in an election
year, is a risk taker. If he once opposed a more draconian version of such a
conference, he ought to be seen as having a genuine dilemma. It means there is a dire necessity to be
served that he knows he cannot postpone.
In essence, those opposed to the holding of a National conference cannot, in
fairness, be accused of far-fetching when they claim that the
President is seeking to use the holding of the Nartional Conference to get out
of a logjam. Let’s face it: It is too
evident for words that there has been a logjam in his political party.
At the core of the logjam, is a
private arrangement in his ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP, which its
supporters consider to be superior to the provisions of the Nigerian constitution.
It touches on President Jonathan’s presumed signing of an agreement that
zoned the Presidency of Nigeria to the
North; at least for eight years. It is argued, in line with the zoning
formula, that he was not supposed to take the slot allotted to the North in the
family arrangement under which he
emerged as Vice President to Alhaji Musa Yar’adua, a northerner from Katsina,
who unfortunately died without completing
his term of office. President Jonathan insists that he never signed any such
agreement but Governor Babangida Aliyu, Chairman of the Northern Governors’
Forum, claimed he signed. Jonathan’s
presence at the meeting where the zoning formula was agreed upon is taken as
the imperative of his commitment to it.. Although the national constitution
allows the Vice President to succeed the President in such circumstances, his
northern opponents raise the family arrangement above it to the effect that
only a Northerner should have emerged to
complete Yar’adua’s term. After the
cross country uproar, fired by the Save Nigeria Group, which induced the so
called doctrine of necessity that enabled him to become President, they claim he was not supposed to attempt to
run on his own steam. But he ran and
won. The error of running for that election which he was not supposed to run
for, or win, has now been compounded, in the eyes of the defenders of the
zoning formula, by his seeking to have a second term as President. Seven Governors out of
23 , threatened to leave the PDP,
and five actually left, because he would not abdicate his right to run again.
Incidentally, the five who carried out their threat including Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, a Governor from the south south zone where
President Jonathan hails from, have since joined the All Progressive Congress,
and have taken with them a host of legislators in the National Assembly. With the APC in what seems an unstoppable
barn-storming, a virtual rampage, across the country, and with sundry
defections to it from the PDP, President
Jonathan is deemed to need a secular wand that can halt what is threatening to
be a runaway victory for the APC opposition in the coming elections. How does he stem the revolt in his party and confront the larger
national constituency which has been made to believe that he is incapable of
delivering the dividends of democracy?
President Jonathan has an even more
discomfiting challenge. This one comes from former President Olusegun Obasanjo
who has sided with the supporters of the zoning formula. Obasanjo, the
illustrious mentor and predecessor, first PDP President in the 4th
Republic, has declared that President
Goodluck Jonathan was allowed to do only
one term and no more. An intriguing element is added by the fact that in his
eight years in office as President of Nigeria, Obasanjo, an Owu from Abeokuta
in the Southwest, was also constantly berated
for signing an agreement with the North that he reneged upon. As
President, Olusegun Obasanjo claimed
that he refused to sign the secret
agreement that required him to bow to the wishes of the North. Professor Jubril Aminu, stalwart of the Arewa
group that negotiated with him, has
insisted that he signed the agreement. The odd part is that no one has said
that Obasanjo was not presented with such an agreement to sign. The question
is: why should there be a secret agreement, supposedly to make a Nigerian
President perform only as the North wishes, each time a southerner has a chance
to become President? How talk about living in one united country if we are
hedged in by such underhand manipulation in favour of a geo-cultural
cabal? These are rhetorical questions.
But they dredge communal memory in the
face of events, such as the annulment of
the June 12, 1993 Presidential election which was won by MKO Abiola, in what is
generally described as the freest and fairest election in Nigeria;s history.
The annulment of that election was carried out by the military dictator, General Ibrahim
Babangida, and his presumed Khalifa, or successor, General Sani Abacha pursuant
to the interests of northern echelons
within and outside the army. Although Ernest Sonekan, an Egba Chief was
inserted in an interim capacity as Head of State to mollify outraged Yoruba groups, it was with the death of General Abacha, Sonekan’s
nemesis, and Obasanjo’s jailor, that the
northern establishment found the man that the
North could trust enough to hand over power to. Obasanjo fitted the bill
in the course of General Abdusallaam Abubakar’s minding of the transition to civil rule in 1999. In like
manner, Goodluck Jonathan was supposed to have fitted the bill of a
mild-mannered denizen of the oil-rich Niger Delta who would serve as Vice President to a northerner and help to
douse the flames of militancy spurting from guerrillas who were fighting
against what Ken Saro Wiwa, the judicially murdered writer and Ogoni leader
taught Nigerians to describe as internal
colonialism.
Surely, against such a background,
and the opposition by a northern group to his candidacy, who would not agree
that President Goodluck Jonathan a personal dilemma. Except that the dilemma has an evident
northern coloration when it is considered that some readings of the ongoing
Boko Haram violence in the North East of Nigeria see its escalation as a way of
giving President Jonathan a virtual hammer to swallow for breaking the power
code in the ruling PDP. True or false,
the fact that the five of seven
Governors who successfully carried out the threat to cross from the ruling PDP
to the newfound All Progressive Congress have advertised their open commitment
to the search for a Northern candidate for 2015
cannot be ignored. Besides, their
movement from the People’s Democratic Party, has the logic of implying that
strategic offices in the new party, especially the Presidency, would be
reserved for them. Indeed, without
self-consciousness as to the parochialism underlying their cause, the Governors
have made the President’s commitment to the family arrangement within the PDP
appear the standard by which the whole country should go. The hard part is that
as they criss-cross the country in search of allies, they seem, wittingly or
unwittingly, to be insisting that their aggrieved sense of entitlement is
superior to the constitution of the country. This logic suggests that
the APC, the mega coalition being put together, also has it as a primary dilemma to deal with
the zoning conundrum.
To this extent, it follows that what
may appear a Goodluck Ebelo Jonathan dilemma is actually not such a personal
problem as one might think as first flush.
In a manner not so peculiar, it points to the existence of a fractured
national psyche which fosters a howling
myth that says a northern leader who submits to the pleas of a southern suitor
runs the risk of being seen by a large segment of the northern electorate as a
betrayer while a southern leader who parleys with a northern leader must
convince the masses that he is capable of the higher standard of public
provisioning that they are used to.
The national dimension of the problem points to how the President’s personal
dilemma is also an impersonal one that he ought to try to resolve not only for
his party but for the whole country. Evidently, it includes but goes beyond the
standpoint of his presumed ambitions for the 2015 Presidential elections, which
opponents regard as his underlying rationale for pushing for a national
conference. The real snag is that In the face of organized groups in the North,
such as the Arewa consultative Forum, which extra-legally arm-twists political
leaders and openly brags about watering down the mandate of every Southerner
that has become President in the Fourth Republic, it is difficult not to feel
that this is a dilemma at the heart of national politics and that it touches on the integrity of the whole
political system. In a Federation, which many have wished to construct on the
principle that no side ought to be so powerful as to possess an over-bearing
veto over others, it has posed a serious
question as to how the political system can be restructured to allow for a more
balanced order. The grouse of marginalized minorities and disadvantaged
majority ethnic groups in both the North and the South may sometimes get shrouded in niceties but the heart of the
matter is that the geo-political sense of entitlement sustained by the northern mafia/cabal has been
over-advertised to the chagrin of those seeking to build a sense of common
nationality across the country. It is as if some people have no faith in the
country and therefore cant find the patience to wait a turn in any arrangement
because they have no faith in a common/shared future. The history of the past hundred years offers
no comfort either; especially when it is
realized that the amalgamation of North and South in 1914 was based on the need
for the buoyant south to cushion the northern deficits. It was a case of
internal colonialism under British auspices. In the first Republic, the south provided the personnel for running
state departments but all the strategic projects were placed in the North: the railways extensions, military
installations, a hydro-electric power dam, and an iron and steel industry. In the military era, river basin authorities,
became a means of meeting the same hegemonic fiscal profile. The civil war
affirmed the pattern when the Northern pursuit of unitarism overtook federalism
after an initial northern revolt in 1966
against the unitary system imposed by
the coup makers of January 1966. A quasi unitary system was thereafter adopted
as a national standard in a manner that ensured the dictatorship of the North
over the country beyond the fact that Nigerian Heads of Government were mostly
northerners and they exercised dictatorial powers to service northern hegemony.
Every attempt at change, whether through the creation of states or change of
the revenue allocation formula merely reproduced the extant structure. This was
how come restructuring became the one-item agenda of the many disadvantaged
groups since the annulment of MKO Abiola’s victory and the death of ken Saro
Wiwa. Somehow, the latter’s civil
approach lost its aura. This led to the emergence of sundry militia
groups in the Niger Delta pursuing the
same cause. The choice for the country became one of either a permanent state of civil war, as was becoming
the norm across the Niger delta or an
agreement to restructure the system, remove the lopsided colonial
overhang, on the basis of ethnic self-governance. This was what Saro Wiwa asked for because he believed that hegemonic
groups were destroying the identities of many ethnic groups, neutering them in
order better to exploit them In the name
of national unity. After his death,
opposition to military rule was conflated with opposition to northern
power. The demand for a conference, the democratic option that had marked Saro
Wiwa’s , struggle, was overtaken by militia groups, the uncivil alternative, aimed at creating a system of
devolution of powers that would remove the hegemony of one region over
the central government and the power of the central government over the states, whether in a military or civilian
era. One powerful notation in this
struggle, which Saro Wiwa claimed he based on Obafemi Awolowo’s theories, was
that every ethnic group, no matter how small
could and should be self-governing within the Nigerian Federation. By
the same token, all the resources in the territorial formation of every ethnic
group should be the responsibility of that ethnic group from which taxes are
paid to the central government. It was the fear that powerful interest groups
dominating the country would not allow any such agreement to hold water, that
led Saro Wiwa and many in the ethnic nationality movements across the country
to demand a sovereign national conference.
The demand for a sovereign national
conference seemed at first only a bargaining position from which to bid for
military exit from power. But it soon turned out to be so fervently
taken to heart by sundry groups that a need arose to match the theory to
the actual necessity to restructure the lopsided Federation. The controversial
edge to the demand is that it is not
only linked to the necessity for devolution of powers from the central
government . It is based on a redefinition of federating units, not in terms of
states created according to the whimsies of military dictators but ethnic
nationalities and language groups as originally proposed by Obafemi Awolowo in
the forties in his book Path to Nigerian Freedom and
re-stated in the sixties in Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution.
True, restructuring for Saro Wiwa was a drift towards the confederal while
Obafemi Awolowo never shifted from his Federalist perspective. Both were
agreed however that restructuring should
return self-governance to carefully
delineated ethnic groups in territorial formation whose pre-colonial mandates
were dismantled by British guns; and whose
post colonial dispositions have been assaulted by the internal
colonialism of fellow natives. The real
news has always resided in the fact that
Awolowo who never stopped demanding states based on ethnic groups has upheld
the most insistent plank for linking all the nationalities together through
common welfare programmes. Along his line of thinking, and in order to formalize a basis for a more
equitable Federation, a virtual national movement of ethnic nationalities
emerged, especially in he nineties, which was boosted by champions of the June
12 struggle after the annulment of the Presidential election of 1993. The
indeterminate possibilities of this movement, along the North /South divide led
to compromises on all sides that must explain why Olusegun Obasanjo was removed from prison to
become President of Nigeria. All opinions agree that it was a sop for the
aggrieved Yoruba over the June 12 annulment. By the same token, the Niger Delta
was being placated when Goodluck Jonathan was nominated as the Vice President
to President Umaru Yar’adua. It was a case of mollifying the much marginalized
oil-producing Niger Delta which continued to account for more than 80
percent of the national income.
On the face of it, what may be
termed the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan
Dilemma, or the GEJ Dilemma, for short, is not difficult to grasp as a factor
of the lopsided geo-political architecture that has fractured national psyche
and given rise to the invidious manipulation of geo-cultural Mafiosi and
cabals. It happens to be an architecture full of terrible imbalances and
incongruities. It has raised fear and
distrust on a ritual basis. So many
serious-minded Nigerians agree that it has
not been good for the North because it
has not been good for the country as a whole. It has given rise to unheeded
demands for mending; healing; recasting, and restructuring of the national frame. Its markers have been
quite vicious: as evident in attempts by
the North to catch up with the south, to halt the south, or simply destroy the
advantages of the south in order to even up. It has witnessed crude attempts at
truly invidious rotation of offices, barring southerners from strategic
political offices, allowing unqualified northerners to overtake truly qualified
northerners, not to mention the suborning of opportunistic southerners. It has been quite a bone of contention in the
negotiations within and between Nigerian political parties across the decades.
As noted, already, even the APC mega coalition that has just been put together
to confront the PDP is already saddled with it as a primary dilemma.
Incidentally, the harshness of the dilemma has had a populist myth attached to
it. It posits that if the southern leader agrees with a northern leader, he has
to worry about placating the masses of ‘his’ people who have always demanded
different standards of public provisioning. And, if the northern leader submits
to pleas by the southern suitor, a large segment of the northern electorate
will need to be mollified against seeing
it as a betrayal. In the face of
organized groups in the North, extra-legally arm-twisting political leaders and openly bragging about
watering down the mandate of every Southerner that becomes President, it was
indeed time to look at the structures that have always permitted such a sense
of entitlement. It has made President Jonathan more right than wrong in bidding for
a national conference that can give northerners and southerners a sense of a common/shared future. Whoever knows Nigeria and believes that this
country has a future should very well have seen that it was impossible to have
a President come from the Delta who would risk failing to accede to the demand
for restructuring which President Umaru Yar’adua, a keen man of northern
extraction, had begun to address so pointedly and fervently, before his demise!
Let’s face it: such a conference
handled aright, would cause many
politicians to shed brickbats and grandstanding in order to confront real
issues. Those who love sheer waffling for electoral effect would need to be induced to think, for once,
in ultimate rather than transient terms. Irrespective of political persuasion, and
what we might think of delegates appointed
to the National Conference, the dilemmas to be faced are so real that reality
wont be able to lie against itself.
Even if the delegates chose to interpret their mandate as that of
laundering the President’s image and wishes, the gravity of the issues to be resolved have too implacable a
persistence that every attempt to deviate from core issues would be always like when a third term agenda was
roaded that ruined the unique historical opportunity offered to President
Obasanjo by the National Political Reform Conference. Thus the key issue, and what must count most
is that hidden agendas are not allowed to pre-determine or over-determine how
we speak out for the kind of Nigeria that we all want. Unless we are afraid to
take our country seriously, the conference offers another opportunity to put
our hopes for the future on the agenda. Good enough: the President did not just want to pull the
answers out of his own resource control hat but insists that the process of
legitimating ownership of the outcomes must begin with allowing contributions
from all Nigerians. The truth is that no
ideal situation exists for that to happen. No ideal situation is ever really
likely to emerge that leaves all and sundry ready to have a go at a no holds
barred kind of conference. Since no one has yet found an answer that the rest
of us may affirm without a quibble, the responsibility to work hard at an agenda for the achievement of common
standards of perception and action must be seen as primary and imperative. No gloating over the failure of past
conferences can be treated as a fit contribution to the debate. It calls for
the continuation not an abandonment of dialogue.
It posits a goring irony: in the
sense that opponents of a national conference, whom we must continue to thank
for rooting the idea in popular memory, are the ones refusing to gloat over the
inexorability that their efforts have occasioned. Although so many of them may be lining up to
disavow the turn of events, the truth is that they had done too much that is
praiseworthy to inscribe their demands as imperatives. Their stand on the
question, however, deserves to be subjected to due interrogation and
re-interrogation until raised to a plateau of understanding, from mere metaphor
to solid ritual. As such, while they
must take the praise for rooting the ideas which they are appearing to disavow,
they deserve to be made responsible for
disjunctions in their own advocacies that have sort of wrong-footed their capacity
to participate in the current outfitting for a national conference. One
disjunction that easily comes to mind, and which cannot be left alone because
of its influential dredge of charisma and sensationalism, is the notion of and
demand for a sovereign national conference which has been rested but does need
to be properly laid to rest.
Sovereign National Conference as a
Dead End.
The most frequently asked question
about the Sovereign National conference has always been what does it mean, and
what are the modalities for achieving any of its meanings? Because neither the
meaning nor the modalities were ever properly spelt out at any time by its
protagonists, the snippets of information and the rather outlandish concepts
that shot up led to more questions. Such as: do they mean it or are they merely
using it as a means of bargaining with opponents and those whom they need to
beat at a power-shift game? These questions, not rhetorical at all, indicate
how advocates of a sovereign national
conference were perceived because they were never really clear about what they
meant and how they wanted it. This is one reason that President Goodluck Jonathan’s presumed
opposition to the idea of a sovereign national conference must not be equated
with a supposed opposition to constitutional reforms. A national conference simply pursues a legacy
that passed from his two predecessors, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Umaru
Yar’adua with the latter being unable to actualize his approach due to
ill-health.
What is inscribed as Jonathan’s volte face or change of heart simply falls
into the earlier acceptance of the idea of a non-sovereign national conference
such as made possible the holding of the National Political Reform Conference
under President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The hard fact is that while campaigning
for a sovereign national conference, the
protagonists failed to anticipate it in relation to the mechanisms for
realizing it. They failed, for instance, to engage sovereignty as it must be encountered in the process of a
genuine authoritative design of a people’s constitution. The dictionary meaning of sovereign as one
possessing supreme power and authority in a state, lacking external control,
obviously impressed them a lot. To organize a conference with such a
pre-possessing thresh was a goal so attractive because it implied the removal
of the overhang of military dictatorship which had been the bane of the
political parties and the national conferences held in the past. It happened
that the national conferences held under military auspices had their reports
tinkered with by the military minders before promulgation. It was in order to
avoid this ugly past in line with the pursuit of a future full of freedom of speech and association that the
agitators embarked on their campaigns.
I need to insert a little
autobiographical detail at this point because
I played some insignificant role in moving Bola Ige, as Minister of
Justice of the Federation, towards the necessity to purge the word sovereign
from the appellation of the conference. Over the NADECO years, I had mounted
several personal missions to debate with him and to argue against the
absolutely dangerous and unprofitable implications of calling a National
Conference sovereign in a country like Nigeria. Once, at a Law School event,
seeing him together with Papa Abraham Adesanya, the leader of NADECO, I made a
pitch for it. It was something to smile about when, down a couple of years,
many members of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, to which the Attorney General
belonged, began to see him as a turncoat because he de-emphasized the word
sovereign after he joined the government of President Obasanjo as Minister. I
saw Bola Ige’s change of emphasis as realism against the romanticizing of sheer
political affray.
Nonetheless, the notion of
sovereignty inherent in the demand for a conference always pointed to an
ultimate status, a classical denial of half-way houses, in pursuit of an All or
Nothing viewpoint. Sovereignty for many proponents of a national conference has
remained implacably unitary and indivisible. A sovereign national conference,
according to their lights, could only be a factor of all the people massed in a
direct relationship to a goal, or cause. Power automatically becomes`
authority. At its most insistent, it is simply People Power, not based on mere
representation but a direct assertion of a common stand and purpose by all the
people. Truly romantic. This, in my
view, was always the source of error. It brooked no possibility of
renegotiation once the imprimatur of authority was stamped by the massed
populace. Sovereignty so structured was believed to work only as direct
democracy; with all the citizens of a polity massed into one fist of morality, conscience and common purpose. A
more liberal notion may allow the mobilized mass to choose or elect those who
will speak for the people. Whatever they say is taken as immutable law.
Besides, no existing government was supposed to
interfere with choosing delegates for the conference, or impose no-go areas,
or tamper with the outcomes.
One convert to the idea of a
sovereign national conference, Auwalu Hamisu Yadudu of the Faculty of Law at
Bayero University, Kano, writing for Leadership
Sunday on 27th October, 2013, has done quite a yeoman’s
definition of such a sovereign conference which I find too seductive to pass
without something of a judicial notice. His writes: “We call upon the National and State Assemblies to, as a matter of
utmost urgency, undertake steps to amend the constitution to recognize the
convocation of an SNC with full executive and legislative powers. Various
provisions of the existing constitution should be amended to “temporarily”
suspend relevant sections and chapters dealing with the exercise of executive
and legislative powers at Federal and State levels by an Act of NASS which also
spells out the procedure to be adopted by the SNC during its deliberations and
the specific steps to take to subject the new constitution to a referendum for
final adoption. To give effect to the convocation of an autonomous SNC, as
envisaged above, it should follow that current holders of executive and
legislative offices at both federal and state levels must relinquish all such
powers immediately upon the coming into effect of the Act referred to above.
This is necessary to avoid giving the incumbents any undue advantage in
influencing the SNC , which has perennially been the bane of constitution-making
exercise in the past”.
It is fair to quote Yadudu at length
because most supporters of a sovereign national conference tend to follow the
pattern of his reasoning even when they differ on details. The bottom line is that a sovereign national
conference, in this conception, is possible only where a coup, a mass uprising
or the willing abdication of an existing government, has made it possible.
After the people have taken over as a conference, a demonstration, or a coup,
no government is considered morally efficient enough to stand up to it. Rather
it commands all bureaucracies and governments.
All previous constitutions, laws and by-laws become subject to its
dictates. This reasoning is endorsed by
our other legal luminary, Professor Benjamin Nwabueze, who argues that “It is a
contradiction, both in ideas and in terms, to demand a Sovereign National conference
when a sovereign government is still in place and in control; you must first
displace and emasculate the latter as was the case in the eight African states
of Benin, Togo, Congo, (Brazzaville) Niger, Mali, Chad, Gabon, and Zaire, in
the period 1990 and 1993.” Very close to the skin is the case of People Power
in the Republic of Benin, our next door neighbor, often touted for its success.
It happened when Mathew Kerekou agreed
to let it happen. He bowed to the will of the people, abdicated, and lived
through the tenure of an elected successor and survived to fight a democratic
election that brought him back to power
after an interregnum. Generally, those who demand such People Power, with a
Kerekou cut, have imagined President Jonathan going by such an example. Except that the successful examples
neither exhaust the possibilities nor
can they be truly invoked as exemplars of the form.
The many historical exemplars that
can be fished for support include the classical models usually invoked - the French and American Revolutions. Distinguishing between the two
allows for differentiation between SNCs that choose leaders and those that
elect delegates – a fact that may well explain why the French incidence of
People Power led to terror and the American one produced a liberal democracy that
has lasted more than two hundred years. To think of it, more recent exemplars
of an SNC, beyond the French overseen cases in Africa, are to be found in the
jasmine revolutions that swept North Africa in recent years. All of them
unfortunately ended up the same way.
Begun as a massing up of people into one fist of power, the jasmine
revolutions moved from mob-ocracy, some form of rule by demagogues to one
primed for liberal democracy but unable to rise above old habits of People
Power. All of them left civility in the hands of some closet Messiah or
Machiavelli who had to navigate eras of elective violence that have taken time
to abate. This, definitively, suggests that the means appropriate to the
removal of a military dictatorship cannot, or should not be equated with the
instruments for the delivery or redesign of a polity that already has a means,
an electoral means, of actually changing governments. The latter, puts some
weight on the necessity to evolve a law-governed process rather than follow the format of
draconian rule in one fell swoop. In essence, while the draconian
approach to sovereignty requires the emasculation of an existing government,
the alternative fore-gathers a process of popular sovereignty that can only be
circumscribed through representation of the same form and source, in popular sovereignty! This has to be based
on moving as close as possible to an existing basic law or constitution. It
cannot be annulled by a mere mob. Genuine change may be deemed to have taken
place only if you do not require another mob to change what one mob had made
possible.
The short of this is that a mob that
wishes to go beyond existing law to exercise
legislative and executive power ought to be firmly distrusted until it
has produced a constitution on the basis
of which it wishes to operate. Even if
the leaders of a sitting government agree to abdicate, it must be seen as unpatriotic and downright
irresponsible to grant leeway to any group, simply because it happens to be
vociferous, or armed enough to remove a government that the majority of the people voted for. The grounds for
allowing such a removal or sacking of a government must itself be law-governed
or it is anarchy being coveted in the name of change. In effect, those who wish
for a revolution but have no patience for the rule of law, may be accused of
despoiling the basis for trust between prime movers and the masses who need to
be empowered to exercise work-a-day political gumption. That is to say, beyond
merely humiliating real or imagined opponents, there are huge and complex
particularities to be met in order for a national conference to be possible and
amenable to the goals of freedom whether or not an existing government is
sacked or simply asked to step aside or collaborate in being pushed sideways to
allow issues of sovereignty to be confronted and resolved. Those who see issues
of sovereignty as purely unitary and outside a divisible and shared or sharable
format are the ones who may feel uncomfortable in such circumstances. Strictly,
the idea of an elected government agreeing to collaborate in solving such a problem is already a sign that there
is a general consensus about the seriousness of the situation. Distrust for a
government arising either from a lack of
probity in its origins, a lack of integrity in its operations as a legislative
or executive organ or simply a lack of
faith in its existing disposition as a representative of the people is what is
being asserted and accepted when such a collaboration exists. I would see it, properly
speaking, as an agreement to guide the route to genuine democracy without
conceding to anarchy or submitting to fear of failure.
In this connection, it is worth
repeating that members of an elected
National Assembly or a revolution-induced Constituent assembly which
insists on exercising work-a-day routine power, as if things were normal, ought to be roundly distrusted in terms of
their capacity to offer a long-term view of national possibilities. Until they
have, by a conjoint arrangement, drafted
and sought approval for a constitution in accordance with which the
governance may thereafter be carried on,
a country that gives away authority without seeking guarantees is giving away
too much. There must be specified, quite early in every such arrangement, how a
government can emerge, be maintained or sacked in order for the word
sovereignty to be meaningful. This is a basic minima for a modicum of stability
in the drive for change in a troubled society. What ought to provide grounds
for ceding sovereignty to any group is the fact that it has been elected to
draft a Constitution. If however they have not been elected, but appointed or
cannot be elected because of debilities un-cleared in the way of normal
everyday politics, then the route to a genuine popular disquisition and
eventual approval of the constitution must be stated. Sovereignty, so to say, is not just about an
election but following the law that governs the process. If as happened with
Obasanjo’s National Political Reform conference, a hotchpotch of appointees and
sundry cronies were roped into the
process, it merely added a Presidential commission, a mere technical service,
to the making of a constitution. What devalues the process is if the product of
the appointees and even elected groups is not subjected to debate and approval
by the elected representatives of the
people for whom the constitution is being drawn up. The sheer need to have a
properly elected, not merely selected or appointed body, to service the
interests of genuine electors is simply to avoid too strong a smell of the
government of the day, or an over-determination by any power, or principality,
that could impugn its integrity.
To believe in an election in the
Nigerian situation however requires a prior assertion of governmentality. It
amounts to granting leeway for a legislative process that ante-dates the
National conference. This, in my view, is an interesting concession for any
advocate to make who uses the Sovereign Word. In 1998, a similarly contentious
situation arose after the death of General Sani Abacha when the new military
bosses grew quite diffident on realizing that
no one could trust the military hierarchy to play the umpire in the
transition to civil rule. Some form of legitimate authority beyond issuers of
decrees was being considered which would be acceptable to pro-democracy groups
that, unfortunately were divided on how to proceed. As it happened, NADECO
stalwarts did not want to see the military playing determinative roles. Except
that they had no notion of how to constitute an umpire for the job. One group asked for a virtual conclave of
NADECO elders in concert with selected
elders from all the six geo-political zones. Another group, a more radical
flank, with which Gani Fawehinmi was identified, insisted on a normal electoral
commission without saying how and who could legitimately set it up. The
unanswered question, during that season of distrust of military dictators was:
who will set up the electoral commission and within what kind of transition process? In the end, by not agreeing with the NADECO
elders, the radicals voted for a
military solution by default. The soldiers, already well-primed, simply played
the sovereign and handed down a constitution that we all now rue. I suppose the
same thing is happening today in the debate over a role for the National
Assembly.
The National
Assembly, and the National conference
All things taken together, what is
most challenging about the current debate – to go or not to go to the National Conference; to amend or
have a new Constitution - is that the popular indifference to constitutional
issues, amounting to a form of self-forgetting,
has been allowed to overtake necessary responses to the work of the National
Assembly. By the way, both the Senate and the House of Representatives had
virtually completed their constitutional review processes and were merely
waiting to reconcile their reports when President Goodluck Jonathan made his
supposed volte face. It follows that
those who have been discussing the role that the Assembly could play, without
considering the work it had already done, are either shadow-boxing or
hyper-inflating their right to ignore the reality on the ground. All the same
before looking at the work done, it is important to note that it is only by going with the suasions
of advocates of a sovereign national
conference that the National Assembly becomes completely irrelevant. Unless the
advocates are able to constitute a power of their own, and the 4th Republic is vacated through abdication, or
some such emergency - a patently
unnecessary expectation in the present circumstance - it will have to be accepted that only the
National Assembly can provide the rational and necessary basis for electing or
appointing people to the National Conference.
Outside the presuppositions of a
sovereign national conference, only the current national Assembly can serve as
the repository or depository of the decisions of any national conference
because it is only within the laws made by the National Assembly that
elections or appointments into the
National conference can be within the law. To be strict, this gives powers to
the National Assembly which many canvassers for a sovereign national conference
cannot abide because it would give the actually existing legislatures the power
to amend the new constitution. This is a matter of logic that only a
revolutionary situation may upstage.
What would be illogical, in my view, is for the National Assembly to have no say about a process that it has to
mid-wife. This is where the bone of contention is. As it happens, an actually existing
government that decides to be a
participant in national renewal through constitutional reforms does need to shed some governmentality in
other to involve civil society and a rather re-defined sense of the people. I
think that President Jonathan’s appointment of a National Conference committee
was supposed to do this. It was the
idealistic thing to do if only to go beyond the Assembly’s seeming pursuit of
re-drafting/amendments of the
constitution as an internal memorandum on the corridors of power. In a way, it was the closest thing to a
puristic approach. Left to its logic it could have spelt the necessity for
popular participation through electoral choice of delegates. But a genuine purist approach? Just like the
sovereign national conference is for the
people to choose their representatives, free of selectorates; that is, without
the load of government appointees to contend with, and no post-facto amendment
of the constitution after the National Conference shall have finished its job. The minimalist definition of sovereignty
on which it is based is supposed to set the legal framework for the job to be
done and for the outcome to be promulgated as the basic law of the land. And,
without undue interventions by any principality or power.
Unfortunately, the situation had long
been trumped by factors in the Nigerian
situation which advised against a purist’s approach. Professor Nwabueze realized that this was unavoidable.
Hence, stepping down from the position of radical champions who prefer existing
governments to abdicate and submit to a sovereign conference, he, who for many
decades had been in the forefront of garnering efforts towards a law-governed
process, simply could not imagine it
without the necessity for the National Assembly to pass an Act that specifies
the modalities for the national conference to take place. Until this is done,
he believes the implied exercise of sovereignty would stand on shaky ground, without muster, thus
creating grounds for supposedly
authoritative interveners to tamper with
the ultimate decisions of the conference.
Standing on the platform of The
Patriots, Professor Nwabueze has deployed a pressure group warrant, shared
with PRONACO, to insist on there being no intervention once during and until
the constitution is passed to the people in a referendum. Somehow, unlike the
classical view of People Power, which requires
an autodidactic approach by the massed populace, Nwabueze’s law-governed
approach prefers an electoral process to determine representation. It is a popular approach from which there
ought to be no reason to dissent. Except
for the clamant reality: that it is simply not possible to have a truly free
and fair electoral process that can
represent the sovereign people of Nigeria in 2014. It has to be faced
that one reason that many had agitated, all the while, for a sovereign national
conference is the necessity to have a way of starting from scratch. From scratch?
Yes. Because no method of representation can be truly fair in a country
where there has been no dependable census, and hence population is
indeterminate, or based perennially on gestimates. This happens to be a country
in which there is no proper voter’s roll; and the electoral commission is
unready for the urgent task. At short
notice even if the federal government did not have a problem with
purse-strings. What exists is a situation of
historical gerrymandering that has witnessed a semblance of civil war in
the creation of regions and states; with
marginalized or under-represented minorities jostling with disadvantaged
majorities to scrape for recognition at the behest of veto-wielders. As will be made obvious
presently, it does not matter which criteria are employed to determine
representation. Using existing state governments as constituting the units of
the Federation is like building on the injustices that ensured that many
minorities could not have protective cultural geographies of their own as states
until the civil war broke the jinx but by allowing the whimsy of the militariat
in office to determine who got what and where. Rather than follow the lines of
ethnic geographies, as so many
advocacies have pursued it, the power of state lobbyists and agitators, highly
dependent on knowing the warlords who can
have tended to over-determine the day. Such that like colonial officials
in their scramble for Africa we still have fractions of the same and contiguous ethnic groups in
different states. If it ogles or attracts tribalism to create states along
ethnic lines, what makes it better to put people of different ethnic groups
together in the same state while those with whom they have affinities are
scattered in other states. The latter approach
makes for the true crucible of tribalism as people of different ethnic
backgrounds grate against one another instead of having a formal conversation
at the level of culture or affinities deriving from other elements of shared
history, . Nor is it much better whether the count of local governments is
used. The almost arbitrary creation of local governments according to Federal
fiat has made a habit of incongruity
between one state and another.
Not a fair basis for representation.
Both the number of states created and the local governments that go with
them are determined by exogenous factors, more applicable to the struggle for
ascendancy between regional hegemonies struggling to have more representation
than the next geo-ethnic, or geo-political competitor. The tendency if for some
states to have
local
governments whose number is meaningful outside only as part of the struggle at
the at the Revenue Allocation Commission.
Isnt this why those who have used the same
electoral system to get to power have
agreed not to rely on it in the bid to get delegates of the right calibre? I think so. And, I think It is a case of
consensual appreciation: that unless
care is taken, thugs and hurrah dirty jobbers rather than people of intellect
and civic responsibility may become the chosen; not because the people want
them but because they are better at purloining the process of recruiting
leaders and spokespersons. Surely, a
process that allows everyone to blame the Chairman of the Independent National
Electoral Commission for cramming the Constituent Assembly with third elevens
and outright misfits, could be psychologically satisfying to critics waiting
for failed conferences. But better to avoid the blame game by inserting an
element, not so populist, that allows the best hands in the country, through a
reputational assessment, to join with the products of popular associations.
The issue is therefore not about choosing the purist approach and going
home to sleep. There is no purist approach to pick in 2014 across the Nigerian
situation. It is a telltale of how distractedly we have travelled in the past
one hundred years that it is almost like
being in 1914.
It is about making-do with the role of facilitator, or half-way house,
that the National Assembly can play, without turning it into a scheme of
overarching sovereignty in the hands of the government in power. This has always been the source of fear and
worry for supporters of a sovereign national
conference who, when push comes to shove, do accept the idea of allowing the National Assembly to play a
role. Of course, to have always distrusted government involvement and control
of the process is about fear; the
fear that governments are known to have about losing
control. Recently, it showed in the
refusal by President Jonathan to wait for the Okunrounmu
Committee to report the views of Nigerians before embossing the role of the
National Assembly as the eventual recipient of the national conference
report. The same factor led to the
jettisoning of the electoral path whose mounting costs advised against
elections and yielded the resort to nominations and appointments of delegates.
Consequently, the whole process has been
left open to justified accusations of
over-determination by the Presidency.
Still whatever is the case, the
two issues – the intervention by the National Assembly and the handpicking of
delegates - need to be separated for
clarity of treatment in order not to lose sight of the purpose of not only
having a people-oriented constitution but one that emerges in a law-governed
format.
I would hazard an intermediate
conclusion at this stage to the effect that if the National Assembly does not
set a legal framework for it, the National conference will remain essentially a
mere Presidential commission. I do not
need a lawyers say-so therefore to express the philosophically germane position
that the existing sovereign, whether damaged or not, acknowledged or not, has
more rights than the unknown sovereign of the future. We cannot wait for the
sovereign still hidden in the belly of time before responding to the existing
representative of the sovereign people of Nigeria. If the existing National
Assembly is responsive to and responsible to the atmosphere of popular distrust
of its powers, it will have fulfilled
its duty by laying a basis for the interrogation and re-design that the
National Conference is supposed to pursue as a basis for future mandates. From
the standpoint of the desired non-interference of the government (legislatures and the executives) in the
process of drawing up the constitution, the great offence, would have to be taking
refuge in an electoral process, so distorted by purloined census
figures, improper voters’ roll and an unready electoral commission. The result
could actually be worse compounded. Or, should the President have waited to fix
the distortions before continuing with the constitutional reform project? Certainly,
not.
What cannot be downplayed is that it
is the extant debilities in the Nigerian situation which we need constitutional
reforms to remove that also stand in the way of creating the instruments for removing them. This is
why there is no law-governed alternative to the necessity for the
National Assembly and the State Assemblies to make laws for the order and good
governance of Nigeria while the process of constitution-making goes on
apace. Damaged as we might claim its
mandate is, the National Assembly has been making laws that we obey in spite of the fraudulence that we all
decry in terms of the emergence of the 4th Republic. Properly,
therefore there can be no gainsaying its power to set the stage for a national
conference if only for the purpose of enhancing its own work and the public’s ownership of the eventual outcome.
Since the National Assembly had already written its own constitution, and it can therefore be said to have a position against which, and within which,
or beside which, the National conference must perform, it follows that In a matter of strict procedure, the National
Assembly ought to have the power to wish that a forgotten item be inserted in
the Constitution, or that a major omission or misfit in the provision be
corrected. There ought not to be a legal or constitutional disability
preventing the Assembly from re-presenting a matter for discussions by the
National Conference. Should the national Conference or a Constituent Assembly
disagree with the National Assembly, it merely provides a basis for an appeal to the ultimate
sovereign: the people. This is when the imperative of a referendum, which so
many have canvassed as a finale of the process, must be invoked.
A referendum should however be
deployed sparingly because it is only after
people have exercised the gravity of thought and spelt out all due
provisions, that a referendum has a place. It is not a cure-all. It makes a lot
more sense however if the issues involved demand a Yes and No kind of answer.
All the chips will have been allowed to fall where they must in arguments and
debates marshalled in carefully and painstakingly ironed out provisions. Those
who want a referendum as a cure-all without going through the grueling maul of
arguments and debates get a democracy of mobs. Such a democracy dissipates
itself whenever the particularity of an action
has to be aligned to abstract provisions. Hence the proper way to go is
to ensure that in pursuit of right or popular causes the terms of engagement
are properly defined rather than taking refuge in transient and, profitless
grandstanding. I repeat: before it gets
to the virtual adjudication by a referendum, it ought to be understood that the
National Assembly can intervene after the Constituent Assembly or National Assembly
has done its job. It is too timid an
attitude to insist that the body that literally mid-wifed the process, should not be allowed to
intervene at the end of the process.
Past experience should tell us that there are actually instances when
second thoughts exercised by guidance groups, such as the military, have saved
the people from suicidal proclivities. So to say, not everyone of the
interventions of the past were as bad as the regimes that made them.
So far, it has in my view performed a
patriotic duty by re-drafting or amending, as some would argue, the
constitution of the Federal Republic.. if the National Conference so wishes,
the re-designed/amended constitution may
be pooled in a basket of other constitutions for the purpose of enhancing the
quality of the current exercise. This is not even a novel proposition
considering that it already happened under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s
National Political Reform Conference. Necessarily, a constitution that must
last needs the input of a proactive populace whose ownership of the final
document should begin with
conversations, between the present and previous exercises. There is no use hedging: the hard realities
of the Nigerian situation demands a spelling out of the modalities through
which the goals of a truly national conference could be attained.
The promoters of the cause should not consider
it enough to have pent up rage and fervor to deal with those whom they consider
anti-people. Anger is not enough. The Americans realized this. Hence they took
the pains to produce what, today, are called
the Federalist Papers. They did not want to come to power before letting
their fellow countrymen know what is, or should be, in store for all. They had to conscientize themselves so as not
to act blindly into the future. They proved it that describing the future, in
good detail, must be at the heart of the exercise. And, they were lucky. They
could afford to have a rather short statement of self-evident ideals as a
constitution because the ideas of their founding fathers had already become
common property for a sizeable body of the people. Unfortunately for Nigeria,
the founding fathers whose positions are
fairly well known are not on the ground to rouse a stand. It boils down to not
merely harping on the formula of one man one vote, or sacking a colonial
government, but reasoning out ways of putting a government in place as a genuine
meeting of minds rather than a stop-gap akin to a military coup or a mob
installation. The lesson we must take from the history is about pooling a body
of ideas, in serious programmatic terms,
for a democracy of free peoples.
The more the people involved, the
better for the process. The sang is this: since an election is certainly not
on, and only associational nomination of people and appointment of delegates by
the Presidency is in order, it leaves room for perpetual doubting of the
document that will emerge. In essence,
it cannot be called a constitution until it has gone through a process akin to
the one prescribed by the existing constitution for amending the constitution.
It may not satisfy the yearnings of the majority of Nigerians who want a
constitution of a particular distance
from the military overhang. Nor would a referendum at the end of the process
truly represent a corrective. But in my view it would be a fair description in
itself of the bad situation in which Nigeria has been steeped and which, in the
first place, created the necessity to amend
the constitution or draft a new
one. Realism does dictate why for instance even in the best of times Nigeria
cannot have a proper census, a meaningful voter’s roll and therefore a fair
election. The very reasons that a sovereign national conference is impossible
are the ones that make everyday electoral politics a nightmare. If the 1999
election was based on a fraud that the military perpetrated, there is no
guarantee that any one that takes place today will be any better. The short of it is that it is impossible to
represent a country that cant count, and has a history of using highly
incongruous impressionism to
determine what exists. Thirty six states
created by the fiat of dictators cannot be used as a basis for representation
in a positive sense. The number of ethnic groups in Nigeria have never been
officially verified at any time in one hundred years. In fact, there appears to
be a taboo against attempting it as the fiasco of census counts have proved.
The sheer drive of elite self-selection has become the rule in a way that would
make even the notion of a constituent assembly a joke but for the fact that
having been so used to approximations, people acquiesce in the results that
emerge. In a computer age, with biometric possibilities that could lay the
matter to rest, partisan politics and
geo-ethnic disruption masterminded by warlords of regional and ethnic
groups have made it impossible to build the kind of bureaucracies that could do
it right. In this regard, it may well have to be admitted that the format of
the National Conference is not to be
judged by the form of representation that has driven it. It is more about how the final document, in
sync with what has been attempted already by the National Assembly can be turned into a means for making the
right pre-requisites possible. To demand a people’s constitution when the
people cannot be counted as involved is truly a misnomer.
The question is what manner of
decision-making can be envisaged in the circumstance which is acceptable to
all? Experience of past conferences
suggests that if decision making is consensual, the sharp differences that
exist could predispose the conference to stalemates on truly fundamental
issues, as happened with the National Political Reform Conference in 2005? If it is based on a simple majority or two
thirds majority as the case may be, it raises the question of who the
represented are in a situation where there was no election and the groups
handpicked cannot be adjudged truly representative of the society. In the circumstance, if we admit that the
best minds on the matter may not emerge from an electoral process based on the
shenanigans associated with the electoral machines in our climes, the one proof
of transcendence of the debilities that cannot be changed is that a document
emerges from the National conference which is superior in thought and
applicability to what we have seen before.
Beyond this is that the draft committees could get absent minded
or over-zealous or even vindictive in a way that challenges the National
Assembly to take a second look before a referendum. Those who do not allow for
this possibility are refusing to agree that even a silly National Assembly
elected by a corrupt electorate can spot a damaging provision or that members
of the public may spot a dereliction that needs urgent attention before passage
into a people’s constitution. In my very well considered opinion, allowance
must be made for this. Even if the National Assembly chooses to play a
spoiler’s role, it is still quite within its rights as a body constitutionally
empowered to mind the process of law-making. A national Assembly was not
elected to re-draft even if it can amend the old constitution. But in the event
that a constitution is being drafted during its tenure, its power to amend the
constitution cannot be completely annulled. One possible scenario, not the
worst, is that it may discover incongruous provisions in the new draft constitution that it may not have had a
chance or even the presence of mind to point out during the deliberations at
the National conference. Should this
happen, the temptation would objectively be strong for the National Assembly to
seek to play a role similar to that of the military dictators, from Olusegun
Obasanjo to Abdusalaam Abubakar, who tampered with the draft constitutions
before promulgation.
The fear of this happening under a
democratic dispensation should however be no cause for panic. This is because
it can only happen, in the context of a National Assembly that, by nature, is
not like a military set up.
Procedurally, the National Assembly must debate its own objections to
provisions in the draft constitution openly before it can alter a clause. Since the two arms of the National
Assembly had already drafted their own
constitutions at the beginning of the process, they can easily be seen to be
acting too much as judges in their own
cause if they seek to make an amendment
after the work of the National Conference. Thus, should there be a fundamental disagreement
between the National Assembly and the National Conference, it brings forth, so
arguably, the circumstance so much anticipated or dreaded, of a common claim
being made between two facilitators of national sovereignty. The difference
between the two merely creates the rationale for a referendum. Democracy is as
easy as that. If people are not unnecessarily contrary or even when they are,
there is no escape from going to the people,
the ultimate arbiter. There is no need to split hairs over whether the
‘sovereignty’ of the National Conference has primacy over and above the
amending powers of the National Assembly. In the present circumstance of a
hand-picked National conference, the National Assembly, much put down, has
primacy. Both must be deemed however to
be subject to the ultimate rationale of the sovereignty of the people exercised
in a referendum. The choice between a Constitution with amendments proposed by the National
Assembly, and the other without such correctives, even if indeed there are
flaws that could be disruptive of stable government, should be seen as part of
the risk of democracy. Having to decide
this in a referendum would be the ultimate test of how we value the
institutions that we create for good and bad times.
Once modalities for arriving at the
ultimate people’s constitution have been dealt with in this manner, we come
upon the substantive issues at the heart of the constitution itself. It is
about what the constitution provides for, and what programmatic relevance they
have for moving Nigeria from its current state. This is also about assessing
the constitution not just as the basic law but an imagined way of life and a
means of creating national identity and development. I dare say that for many
Nigerians, the supreme goal is to have a constitution that will not merely hold
the national cow for a few to milk. To achieve this without regressing to the
structural defects in the national architecture, that is, without entering the
civil war syndrome built into Nigerian politics since 1914, is the real
challenge. Taking 1914 as the year when foreign and internal colonialists
entrenched the corruption and impunity that has become a way of life for all
Nigerians, what kind of constitution will help remove the debilities in
2014?
The National
Assembly and the Constitution Review
Although not completely unimpeachable,
because there are many rough edges and unsavoury peccadilloes buried in the
work that they have done, much of trhe work done by the National Assembly, as
revealed in the media, has proved to be
quite commendable. In no particular
order, the Constitution produced by the Senate provides, among other things,
for the following: – stripping the President and Governors of immunity from
criminal liabilities while in office; granting autonomy to local governments;
making social welfare programmes like free education and free health
justiciable; separating the office of the Attorney General from that of the
Justice Minister; Splitting the office of the
Accountant General of the Federation who now serves a five year tenure
and creating another office for the
Accountant General of the Federal
Government who serves for four years; making all Nigerians indigenes
wherever they have spent up to ten years outside their places of origin; a
constitutional role for traditional rulers in a National House of Chiefs;
moving items like the railways from the Exclusive Legislative List to the
Concurrent List; allowing for independent candidates in elections to break the
monopoly that political parties have had over recruitment of leaders; all revenue by any federal organ, agency or
entity to be fully appropriated and no
expenditures without proper appropriation;
budgets of such entities as the CBN, NNPC, NIMASA, Customs and Excise
etc now to be laid before the National Assembly; and the elimination of the
States Independent Electoral
Commissions, SIECs, if only to ensure that governors no longer have
overbearing impact on their tenure and
effectiveness.
With a little more interest
shown, those agitating for true
federalism ought by now to be nodding or snapping at the skill with which
members of the Assembly packed or failed to pack the Concurrent List with so
much that used to be in the Exclusive List. They, who have been the main
champions of constitutional change, ought to be alerting the country as to how
crudely, cavalierly, or valiantly, and
craftily, if not intelligently, the good work has been done. Or not done. We
ought, by this time, to be debating fine points
that are in agreement or not in agreement, with preferred ideals. Also,
it was time to have started grappling with the rough hewn nature of the
controversy buried by the Senate the
answer to Mahmoud Mamdani’s famous question:
how long does it take for a stranger to become an indigene? Surely,
there is quite a snag in the fact that
citizenship based on culture has been very cavalierly mixed up with citizenship
based on law. Until the full acre of the Senate report comes out this a
controversy awaiting its day. All the same, I would argue that it removes
nothing from the fact that the senate has
done a far reaching job that is
fully backed by justiciable welfare
programmes which should require the
Federal government to shift coupons, at citizen’s rate, from one state to
another as population shifts from one state to another. This should remove the ugliness of quota
systems and federal character overkills that have made nonsense of the
agitation for such welfare provisions. At a time when internal migrations, organized by shadowy
dirty jobbers, in the wake of Boko Haram have caused enormous security scares
in various parts of the country, the full implications of the indigene clause
in the Senate’s draft should by now have been receiving
re-examination in public discourses. There is, in my view, one related
controversy that the Senate may have unwittingly dragged Nigeria into, and from
which much heat may be generated into the future. This concerns the insertion of a National
House of chiefs in the Constitution. I
intend to address it in the context of the status of indigenes, ethnic
representation and the role that the Fundamental Objectives and the Directive
Principles of state Policy play in ameliorating the worst cases of ethnic
competition and animosities. To start with let me simply note at this stage
that it is a matter on which taking a position ought to be the concern for all
who believe that all Nigerians must have a
common, shared future.
It would seem on the surface that
those who are enamoured of a National House of Chiefs are not aware that the
implication of having it is to change the whole mould of the constitution as it
exists. It does not require trumpeting
to assert the definitive attack that it
constitutes upon the Republican essence of the current Constitution. By
providing a role for traditional rulers on a national scale, in a National
House of Chiefs, it impugns the provisions which proffer non discrimination on
grounds of birth sex and religion.
Chiefly-power is about discrimination on the basis of birth and sex and religion. It comes down to the same level as the support
for child marriage which the senate has projecteered in the name of empathy with religious codes.
The insertion of a House of Chiefs is
however worse than the marriage booboo;
because it has the implication of making the issue of birth and place of
origin, a trying displacer of equal
rights for all citizens. A number of provisos it might necessitate to deodorize
it once it is allowed to sit in the document
but that is like giving it a place to stand to contest Republicanism
which speaks across all ethnic groups to all Nigerians. Without being a
retriever of grand universal values, the House brings to centrality the
miniscule selves and parochial provincial moralities which tend to be
inward-looking and will burst their nature, truly get denatured, when they are
uprooted and have to accommodate larger moralities. Better one chief than many
is the law of all traditional rule. By turning the chiefs away from their
individual traditional turfs and making them playthings of supposed national
projects, we would be detracting from,
not enhancing their place; creating
grandeur that beggars effectivenss.
#
Let us not forget the habit of the
colonizer who invented traditional ruler-ships for republicans to belong
to, and destroyed the civility of many
well-groomed and humane patriarchates by linking them to a supposed national
grid called indirect rule. It bears
emphasis: it was a case of paying obeisance to a disfigurement of tradition. It
was and has been favoured by many
well-to-do Nigerians who want not to be mere citizens but lords over fellow
citizens. The attendant implication is
that it involves zany creation of
royalties all over the place that have displaced rationality in public life,
encouraged undue Bigman reflexes, and multiplied corruption and impunity in our
society. Deceive ourselves, as we might, most of the traditional ruler-ships,
although not all, happen to be extracts from the slave-hunting ethic that preceded
but were simply normalized by
Lugard in the name of indirect rule. Unfortunately, it is not royalism
of the old traditional types that we are confronted by but one that has been
radically flawed by Lugards indirect rule
system. In a lot of ways, they were instituted to destroy genuine royal
authorities in favour of ones that allowed easy subjection to colonial logic of
the protectorates. A revamped house of chiefs, even if with a purpose that is
supposed to transcend the enumerated lapses will have to be based on trying to get a new generation trained to embrace the glories of actual
slave societies that had become rampart all over Nigeria, with slave-hunting
wars mounted by near and distant neighbours well beyond Frederick Lugard’s
amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorate in 1914. The
still-ongoing disposition of many chieftaincies
is to live up to the supposed glories that reserve a benign morality for
self and a pernicious one for the other. It is no use presuming that they are
being brought together precisely to eliminate the perceived features. Although not a full fledged
legislative body, it will merely be interfering with the place of the regular
legislature and getting in their way. Why frame
all of them together in a supposed national role when in fact they are better
off minding their citizenship of distinct cultures.
It was time to recall that some
traditional rulers in the past used closeness to colonial power and to the
military in power to corner a sense of entitlement that takes so much from
institutions in society which we all ought to support away from the worshipful
approaches that a National House of chiefs must sustain. As they are bolstered
these days by ex-Governors, Generals, and Permanent Secretaries, and Professors
retiring into royalism, they tend to appear modernist but that is the real
catch. The more they play the game the
less valuable they are. The awe of traditions is not about aping modernity.
Essentially, stools are necessarily
schooled to look inwards and to acquire
living space in a zero-sum manner. Some , having acquired greater-society
ambitions for royalism do actually
forget that the value of tradition is that it does not always have to move with time which is why the centrality they
seek is against the times, and against
the spirit of freedom that the people
need in order to compete in the modern global setting. As a subtext, let
me note that the kind of national
ambitions that the house of Chiefs could provide happen to be very strongly
antithetic to the disposition of minority ethnic groups. They get roped into an
evident trade union of traditional rulers in a way that enhances the place of
the individual but reduces the self-regard of the nationality to which they
belong. For many minorities, as in the first Republic days of Regional House of
Chiefs, it would be more a means and a theme of slow pacification that goes
beyond the defence of tradition. Its
standards of grandeur are necessarily based on hidden polemics of what Ken Saro
Wiwa called internal colonialism. Many
of the chiefs that still have respect for their own people should know that
joining the trade union, which is really what it amounts to, is learning to
accept the overlordship of so called majority ethnic groups. What minorities
have been saved from by creation of states which has given them protected
geographies for the development of their cultures will just be thrown away for a mere coin that is not as good
as bronze. It can bear some emphasis:
the relationship between traditional rulers of majority ethnic and minority
ethnic groups., it is a good recourse
as tourism for many chiefs from minority
ethnic nationalities; but it turns into a case of living in a fool’s paradise
when it is realized that national role
playing is no more than theatrics, individual self-aggrandizement for chiefs. It amounts to self-abnegation for their people
in the long term. Admittedly, it may be
considered a thing of value by those who
believe that a trade union of traditional rulers, as organized very
effectively since General Sani Abacha’s
era, is good for the chiefly
exchequers. But is it good for the traditions, the communal sense, that they
are supposed to mind? Beyond its place as a means of primitive capital
accumulation, it is merely a place for
playing up competitive and distracting
ethnicity, a majority ethnic group trick for
mobilizing the country away from the advances that have been made
towards a commodious Federation by many ethnic groups. The truth is that
identities do not have to large or small to matter. And chiefs who are up to protect them should
learn not to denature them by over-ambition.
Let it be faced squarely:
chiefly cultures are ethnic cultures.
These days some get so ambitious. They want to export it. Some in the name of
identity protection would not bow to chiefs outside their natal domicile. They
want to live outside their indigenous areas but worship only in the traditional
shrine. A house of chiefs merely could seek to correct this behaviour but it is
not constructed do so in Nigeria. Better
that they feed into the national grid as
elective, not compulsive fixtures. They need to move in ways that give a
wholesome sense of occasion to communities. Left at this level, of the ethnic
and language groups, as they largely have been,
the informality enables them to
interact with their people within a communal sense of occasion. They tend In
such circumstances to have respect that
is also respect for their people. It is
devalued when they are made to jostle with outsiders to the
community in ways that sap communal self confidence. It is for this reason that it is always
preferable to leave traditional rule outside the modernist principle which is
based on a larger sense that was never anticipated by the local syndrome of
rituals tied to local history. As for the relationships that the whole
community must build with other communities, it is certainly a matter covered
by the basic law of the land in terms that are within the purview of the
National Assembly; even as presently constituted. A traditional ruler does not
have to like the political party in his domain but as a matter of realism,
whatever needs to be dealt with at the level of formal law-making is the
province of the elected member. Traditional rulers who will not do business
with the member elected by his people can await the turn of another political
party, but it is an unnecessarily provocative stance for a chief to want to
strike out on a political line that his people oppose. Properly speaking, he
can guide his people but not go against a decision that the people have
reached. Part of the power of a traditional ruler lies in this informality.
Those who wish to exercise political gumption are welcome but they must jump
into the fray and boil of partisan politics. In the 21st century,
that is where the representational principle finds its niche beyond the
informality that ought to remain the source of the authority of chiefs. The cost of giving chiefs an
institutionalized role in the constitution is that they draw citizenship into a
cul de sac that they cannot move society out of within the principle of hereditary entitlements that will always
mark their presence. At a time when the status of an indigene is being
re-defined in terms of a decade of residency, it negates the national ethic which we are
supposed to be building if a House of Chiefs is superimposed upon the liberal
notion and principle that removes citizenship
from being hostage to birth and ancestry.
Every
ethnic or language group that wishes to have its chiefs jostling beyond the
community is actually not asking for a traditional ruler but an ambassador of intrigue. In the first place, Chiefs that
mind the affairs of their people should have so much to do if they are
genuinely interested in their communities. There are grand issues of a
fundamental nature such as providing support for the generation of proper orthographies in languages and dialects in the domain of a
chief, keeping the history of the people in good writ, encouraging the
translation of great knowledges of the world into the languages of the people,
and supporting museums and antiquities
and genuine researches into the way
indigenous knowledges have advanced or not advanced. Tourism these days is trade and industry.
But it is first and foremost culture.
True, all these task areas are , properly speaking no longer jobs to be reserved for traditional rulers but performances for well funded universities and
government departments. At a time, when
the university idea in Nigeria is under pressure from traditional rulers who
think that the indigenous status of lecturers should be what grants
professorships rather than the high standards that are universally native to
the idea of the university, it would be a tragedy to over-play the need for an
over-seeing role for traditional rulers in the areas of knowledge
production. Even the ambit of today’s
knowledge and culture industries , institutionalization has gone gone beyond
the ken of chiefdoms. But this is because
it is impossible for an institution based on a hereditary principle to assert a merit principle without going beyond
itself. Making them go beyond
themselves, in other for it not to happen in the full glare of that denaturing,
it should be a pursuit that relies more on the informality that has always been
part of its strenght.
In
the twenty first century, a house of chiefs is a misnomer because it clearly
says that some citizens are more important than others. Those who wish to ride into the future on the
basis of such a code may not know that they are hiding a major explosion for
children yet unborn to deal with. If free education, free health and full
employment are being given to the people and you are telling them, at the same
time, that some people have rights that they cannot have, wait for it, it will
be worse than Boko Haram when it explodes. In the way that all the powerful
traditional rulers have cornered the military/political complex in the country
to create a House of chiefs for
themselves, other citizens will be obliged to mobilize across the divides to
create roles for freedom-loving and
equity –oriented citizens in the civic space. The point is that we are likely
to have more and more children who demand for money from the national treasury
to be devoted to giving every child a chance in the world. It is something that
should concern the senate. Otherwise the senators should be asked what problem they want to solve with a House
of Chiefs that cannot be met by the Senate and House of Representatives based
on universal adult suffrage? Since we all know that no ethnic groups, or may be only one in three
hundred, recruit leaders by universal adult suffrage and balloting, it pays not to clog the future with a chiefly
search for grandeur, beloved of colonial dividers and native military
dictators, which openly undermines democratic promptings in the national
culture.
Language and civic culture
I wish to argue that one of the great
misses in our constitutional history is the poor mind devoted to issues of
language. The senate simply follows the historical cue, Or queue, if you like.
It is interesting that the senate is not providing for all Nigerian languages
to be treated as national languages, each in its domicile, as they do in China,
India and South Africa, federal nation-states that have no shame about their nationalities
but have the good sense to let each stay within traditional turfs without
bidding to traverse ethnic boundaries in the pattern of the slave-raiding and
slave-owning societies smashed, but unfortunately re-configured for the
colonial estate by British guns? Evidently, the new National House of Chiefs,
if allowed, and I hope not, will expand the power to achieve old games of
internal colonialism on the pretence that they want all the chiefs of the
nationalities together in a supposed
national role. It is no good.
What a free people need to play up are not offices based on birth, but one that
secures individual citizenship, allows
every language group, to be declared
national languages in the face of a lingua franca that does not impose disabilities
in matters of citizenship.
I do not imagine for one moment that
it is an easy matter to resolve. It
happens that in the discussion of nationalities, these day, some people count languages whilst others are
satisfied with ethnic geographies. We do also know that some language groups in
Nigeria are not in territorial formation and have therefore been making special
demands on every nationality they encounter in the country. Relating tongues to
governance principles across
political geographies has its
problems. One enlightening encounter
threw a little more light on it for me when Kole Omotoso, author of JUST BEFORE
DAWN, the biography of Nigeria in faction, delivered the occasional lecture at
the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. He gave a helpful lead in which he has it that “The
number of individual languages listed for Nigeria is in total 529. Of these 522
are said to be living languages and seven are dead languages. Of the living
languages 22 are institutional, 80 are developing while 358 are vigorous, 20
are in trouble and 42 are dying. Incidentally, the not-so-well presented
minority report of the Okunrounmu National conference committee, authored
by Solomon Asemota, Esq, SAN, states in section 3 that “There are 389
identifiable Ethnic Nationalities in Nigeria”. His definition of a nationality
problematic simply from taking one significant example. He treats all the nine sub-groups in Edo as
distinct nationalities. The surprise is that the same principle that makes this
possible is not applied to either the Yoruba or the Igbo which are treated as one undifferentiated
nationality. Whether they have a
different language twist that could very well be regarded as a dialect in the
sense in which Esan and Etsako are registered as Edo nationalities, is not
considered.
What makes the issue quite germane to
the current discussion is that taken through to the matter of representation,
which is where even a role for traditional rulers has its place, the language question opens a wide vista,
quite old hat, but so eminently inexorable.
Translated into political terms, the first clamant question is why in
Nigeria there has been such disrespect for languages although love of culture
is trumpeted by all the warlords and pillars of society at the drop of a head
gear. From the stand point of how it impinges on the work of the National
conference, the isssus come home to
roost in the reality of languages groups
that are marginalized or unrepresented in crucial matters because they have
been ousted from their own turf by political gerry manders. I take it from hard
fact that the Ekiti a sub-group of the Yoruba, large enough for a fraction to
have formed a state in the southwest has another fraction in the Middle Belt
which has been agitating to join its southwestern siblings for a century. What
it does show is that it is not even enough to know the groups to be
represented; it matters what the groups to be represented wish to be
represented for. The PRONACO model constitution has had a cause in this
regard make a principle out of it: as in
the position taken by Awolowo in the
forties until his death, the fair and proper thing is that people of the same
language group should as much as possible be domiciled in the same state
province or local government as the case may be and as Ken Saro Wiwa
opined, states need to be created in
such a way that ethnic groups should be self-governing and have in the language
of current discourses resource control as a factor in their lives. Alone or in
a group of other nationalities, this
supports the case for the Gbagyi to have a state of their own. It
requires that the Ekiti in the Middle Belt and the Ekiti of the Southwest
should be in one state. If the ijebu have a state of their own, and the people
of Anioma, Nupe, Kanuri, Tivi and others have states of their own, they would
be better able to benefit from the
demand that every Nigerian language should be declared a national language.
At least, each should be accorded its
place in its own territorial formation, a protective and protected geography
which can attract a cultural policy richer than is possible for those who are
marginalized in their own stories.
Cultural policies relating to language and culture are clearly easier to
design for a people with ethnic contiguity if not homogeneity.
There are many well-meaning people
however who think that it s this is laying too much emphasis on ethnicity,
supposedly a divisive factor,. But it need not be. What should be considered
are the altercations that that are
generated when minorities of one group are rammed together with a majority of
another. Or so many minorities are rammed together in situations where they
share affinity with people of close
contiguity. If those with any
homogeneity can be put together why have them divided between different
states? Is it to comfort ethnic
competitors who have powerful people in government who act to block the
possibility of having their presumed opponents together? This is an issue important enough for an
ethnic nationality to wish to have
representation at the National conference.
This of course does not exhaust the reasons why a language or ethnic
group may want to be represented. Having a cause to register needs to be
distinguished however from mere elite desire to be present at a happening. Whether represented or not, it ought to be
possible for the unrepresented to be heard and to have aspirations met. A
country in which only a direct representation brings communal aspirations to
realization must be considered more than
due for a national conference.
In any case, what counts is the
picture of Nigeria that emerges in
country with the kind of language policy that we have been trying too sketchily
to put down. It should be one I believe in which a Fulani in a Tivi village, or
a Yoruba in a Fulbe-speaking local government, should want to speak the
language of the locality instead of wanting to impose self and language on the
host culture. The development of every language as a national language implies
that local governments be so modernized that universal adult suffrage and
rigorous merit should determine who represents the people at all levels; by the same token, traditional ruler-ship, freed from greater
Nigerian ambitions, must be truly traditional without impinging on the right of
every child and adult, irrespective of birth and origin, to enjoy
education, medicare, full employment and
old age pension. Primary schools should
teach the language, folktales and cultural features, of the local government as
a means of entry into other Nigerian languages and cultures including English,
the official language of instruction.
Nigerian universities, in every state, should be empowered to engage in
researches that do justice to cultural literacy at all levels. Hence,
translation industries, translating great works of science and literature into
our indigenous languages should be encouraged. Quite a new Nigeria is bound to
emerge which, granting opportunities for
each language to gain self-confidence on its own, can do away with the old
parochialism that lacked common morality because it had no sense of common
welfare.
No question about it: the idea of Nigeria as a
multi-ethnic and multi-language state in which all languages are national
languages, each in its own domicile, is good for the defence of diversity. The English language remains the national
official language for the foreseeable future, as it remains the language that
unites the whole country. But it is the respect we have for individual
languages that removes the fear and resentment that have so far blocked genuine conversations across ethnic boundaries. Talking about conversations, ours must be the
only country of its size in the world in which translations from one indigenous
language to another is non-existent, and translations into indigenous languages
from English, the official language, is done only for political and religious rostrums. In a
country of free education, as we hope Nigeria will now become, a more
knowledge-oriented country can be imagined in which English is better spoken
without indigenous languages being neglected and sentenced to banal
orality. The bottom-line is that
traditional rulers who want to mind their people’s interests in a governmental
manner, beyond their localities and provinces, should be advised to run for
elections and go into the Senate or House of Representatives. At a time when some Nigerians are demanding
that one chamber is enough to do the job of law-making, why
encumber the nation with a third chamber? And if Nigerian senators do not have
the skills to work out how to build a country of such cultural freedom, they obviously need
help. And, if the delegates to the National Conference do not have the
broad-mindedness to include such breath of freedom as a feature of our common,
shared, future they need to be told that they are taking us back into the past.
This is because a shared future of
genuine interactions, cannot be created by superficial agglomerations of ethnic
warlords in a National House of chiefs, that is bound to have a pecking order,
multiplying areas of ethnic competition,
and revamping parochial philosophies of zoning. Let the chiefs mind
their individual ethnic turfs and save the country the added bickering arising
from unnecessary ethnic ranking. We need
to learn that it is not by an arithmetic of ethnic cultures that we build a
common nationality for Nigerians. What was always needed is coming on apace
with ongoing and unstoppable pursuit of common welfare programmes not just
justiciable but serving as a means of
generating core Nigerian values that
all ethnic and language groups can plug into with pride. Of course,
having such values is reason enough to propose a proper constitutional coverage for
ethnic groups to self-governance at local government, provincial or a
state levels without the distraction of national ambitions such as having them
gather in a symbolic show of unity in a National House of Chiefs. In any case, such a House merely amounts to
institutionalizing what works best as an informality. A meeting between
traditional rulers from different geo-cultural ends has more meaning when it is
informal than when it is formalized and begins to partake in the pursuit of
policy decisions and executions that royalism in a multi-ethnic, republican
setting can never perform with the proficiency that the Senate and House of
Representatives were designed for.
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