A bad workman, the English say, always quarrels with his tools. So has it been with Nigerians since their first and most thoroughgoing 1960 Constitution, which was amended in 1963 to remove the British Queen as their head of state and create a fourth region, the Mid-West, out of the original three that had emerged from the 1914 amalgamation of the country by its British colonial masters.
So unhappy were we with the 1960 Constitution, which took decades of public debates all over the country and constitutional conferences at home and in the UK to arrive at, that we threw it away lock, stock and barrel, at the first opportunity we had to reconsider it. This was beginning from October 1975 when the military that had truncated our politics in 1966, citing corruption and inequity by politicians, inaugurated a 49-man Constitution Drafting Committee under the late Chief FRA Williams, to give the country a new blueprint for its governance.
Chief William’s CDC was embroiled in controversy from the word go when the late Malam Aminu Kano, the enfant terrible of Northern Nigerian politics, accused the man himself of bowing to the “soft subterranean influence” of the military’s dictation for a change from the British Parliamentary model of democracy to the American presidential system. This was at a national conference on the CDC’s draft constitution in March 1977 at the Kongo Campus of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
An incensed Chief Williams threatened to sue Malam Aminu Kano if he did not withdraw his accusation. The malam refused. Instead, he called the chief’s bluff and wrote a letter to the editors of New Nigerian, which had exclusively published the story, in which he repeated his charge and said he had “grown too old in the politics of Nigeria and generally of Africa to avoid equivocation or sycophancy and to know the difference between political consistency, which is hard to maintain, and political acrobatism simple to operate.” After the New Nigerian published the letter in a front-page story on April 4, 1977, the great, much celebrated lawyer never followed through with his threat.
In the end, the malam’s charge was born out when the country replaced the First Republic’s Parliamentary politics with the Presidential for the Second Republic in 1979. Barely three months into the fifth year of the Second Republic, the military re-intervened in our politics when it overthrew President Shehu Shagari from office on December 31, 1983.
This time the military ruled for 16 years; three years longer than was the case with the first intervention. During those 16 years we had four military governments. Except for the first one under General Muhammadu Buhari, which was short-lived, each initiated its own constitutional conference that, in turn, came up with a draft constitution. Only the last draft the administration of General Abdulsalami Abubakar bequeathed to the country in 1999 became the supreme law of the land. It was essentially the same as that of 1979.
When General Olusegun Obasanjo, who gave us the 1979 Constitution, returned as elected President in 1999, he initially resisted all calls to have a new one. Critics of the old one had argued that its claim of being one by “We the People” was a fraud, if only because the unelected military exercised veto over its enactment.
Eventually Obasanjo changed his mind and initiated a conference in 2005. His motive soon became obvious when he abandoned its report after the National Assembly rejected its amendment that would have removed the two-term limit for the executive arm of government.
As it was with the godfather, so it turned out with the eventually estranged godson; President Goodluck Jonathan initially rejected all calls for a new genuine “We the People” Constitution, only to change his mind in the run-up to last year’s general election. That was enough to question his motive. Definitive proof soon emerged when, first, he blatantly rigged the composition of the conference against the sections of the country he apparently saw as his enemies and did nothing to right the wrong even after he publicly promised to do so, and, second, when, even more tellingly, he threw its report into the dustbin following its rejection of his oft-stated wish for a five- or seven-year one term limit for the executive arm of government.
Of recent there has been loud calls to resurrect this report and implement its recommendations lock, stock and barrel. Some of its advocates even see it as the antibiotic against the myriads of Nigeria’s problems. For example, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an old guard, dyed-in-the-wool “Awoist”, says the only way President Buhari can end the country’s various cries of marginalisation is to dust the report up and implement its recommendations, especially with regards to the much-bandied around phrase, “restructuring the country.” If only the president would be sensible enough to do so, he said in effect in an interview in the Sunday Vanguard of February 7, “The question of Boko Haram will be solved; the question of Biafra will be solved”! Just like that!
Another, but not-so-dyed-in-the-wool, “Awoist”, Chief Olu Falae, seems to agree with Adebanjo that Jonathan’s Conference ’14 report is the panacea for Nigeria’s problems because of its provision for “restructuring” the country. In an earlier interview in Sunday PUNCH of January 24 in which he attempted to clear his name as Chairman of the Social Democratic Party for his role in the so-calledDasukigate, he said he collected money for his party in exchange for its support of Jonathan’s presidential bid only on five conditions, top of which was that the then ruling party “must be prepared to restructure Nigeria from this unity system, and the best way to do that is to fully implement the report of the National Conference 2014.”
All such grand talks about “restructuring” Nigeria are, of course, not without some merit. Our Constitution gives too many things to the central government to do, and, with it, too much fiscal power. Similarly, the executive arms of government at all levels are in a position to cow – and often do so – the other two arms with not much difficulty.
However, the problem of those who talk so much about restructuring Nigeria is that they are, at best, vague and, at worst, possibly, even probably, dishonest. Vague, in the sense that when you press them on how to restructure the country, they often talk only about reducing the country’s 36 states into its current eight putative regions of Northwest, Northeast, Northcentral, Southwest, Southeast and Southsouth, and conveniently overlook the latent but real resistance such a move is likely to provoke, never mind the loud, even if senseless, demands for even more states.
As for the calls for restructuring being possibly, even probably, dishonest, the proof lies in the fact that at each and everyone of the constitutional conferences we have had since 1978, whenever it came to the emotionally charged issue of “Resource Control”, which is the heart of true federalism, the same advocates of restructuring always ran with the hare in the afternoon, only to hunt with the hounds in the night, in a manner of speaking.
This fact was attested to unequivocally over 10 years ago by Professor Itse Sagay, the well-known constitutional lawyer, at the end of Obasanjo’s constitutional conference in 2005 when, in an interview in The Guardian (July 25, 2005), he said, “The Southwest betrayed the Southsouth. There is no question about that. It was a clear deliberate betrayal…We will agree – Southsouth, Southwest, Southeast and Middle-Belt. We had a forum chaired by a Southwesterner throughout.”
Nothing changed between Obasanjo’s conference and Jonathan’s. Indeed, if anything changed at all it was for the worse because the godson’s conference was even more skewed in favour of the South than the estranged godfather’s. So an alliance of the South and the Middle-Belt could have given the Southsouth what it wanted if all the members of the coalition were sincere about their commitment.
Let’s face it. The alliance was not sincere, and could not have been, because its members, like everyone else in the country, knew their regions’ lives almost literally depended on oil, most of which came from offshore. And as long as oil remains the source of more than 90 per cent of public revenue, the Southsouth would be unrealistic to expect honest support from its apparent friends in its quest for complete ownership of oil other than that produced onshore.
Fortunately, there is enough oil revenue, even now that its price has almost totally collapsed, to bring about the balanced development a true federation needs to thrive, and still make allowance for the depredations its producers suffer from, if only we would all reign in our greed.
As a manmade instrument, all constitutions can always be improved upon. However, the problem in our own case, as one has said again and again on these pages but would never tire of repeating, is far less our Constitution, with all its shortcomings, than our bad faith in using it as the framework of our politics.
We must keep this in mind as our National Assembly embarks on yet another expensive, but perhaps useless, round of constitutional amendment, which started last month when the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Honourable Yakubu Dogara, inaugurated a 50-man committee for that purpose.
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