The call for a proper Nigerian constitution reminds me of a recent essay.
I read a short piece by Senator Babafemi Ojudu about Abuja, and he repined at the city’s lack of soul. It also reminds me of an American who met me at the Denver Press Club about two decades ago and was glad to tell me he had just visited Nigeria and Abuja especially, but wondered about the city.
He did not find a “there, there,” my own words and apology to Gertrude Stein.
He wanted to say that the Nigerian capital city was a “synthetic place,” I supplied the phrase, and he agreed with me. And I quickly interjected, “just like Washington.” Washington, like Abuja, is a manufactured city.
It reminds me of a sprawling essay written by Time magazine’s essayist Roger Rosenblatt titled: Washington in which he lamented its lack of vitality. I cracked up at the assertion that if you ate in any of the American capital’s restaurant, you would think all the meals were cooked from the same kitchen.
I disagree with Ojudu’s assertion about Abuja’s lack of soul. It has, but it is a manufactured soul. What he wanted the city to have, a museum, a theatre, et al, do not make a city a natural. It is akin to what a Russian novelist coined such phenomena. Nicolai Gogol called his famous novel and masterpiece “dead souls.” Ojudu was looking for the dead among the living.
Abuja has a soul, like Washington, where people backstab, make deals, grab power. It is a city where politicians bicker, political parties scheme, protesters churn, technocrats undercut. Friendships are contractual. Foes are superficial. Deals light up faces. Losers recoil with revenge. If that is a soul, there you have it. President Truman said of Washington, “if you want a friend, buy a dog.”
Cities are born out of their own logic, out of history, little villains and heroes, out of a human effort to make it historic. They are natural and not the genius of human artifice.
They can grow out of war like Ibadan, out of commerce like Lagos, like a melting pot, like New York or London. They develop their own attitudes, their own language, their own fears, their own pride. By language, I mean a distinct way of expression, phrases, accents, inflexions, etc. They have all these as their own quintessence.
A fear in Lagos is not like a fear in Calabar. That is the nature of a city with a soul. It may be a cruel soul, a pervert soul, a joyful or even placid soul, but it is a soul built over generations and capable of evolution.
No one can defend a city like Abuja, except soldiers. But a city like Warri can throw up volunteers because they are not defending the buildings or markets. They are defending themselves, their history, their heritage, something vital and intangible and irreducible.
The same logic goes for the framing of a constitution. From those obsessed with a new law, I wonder whether they want to manufacture a Nigeria. Some are saying we need to have a parliamentary sort, as if we never had it. Some are calling for a regional style, as if the country never lived and never almost died in it. Some are saying let us have more states, some are saying let us blend the states.
They are only clutching at straws. Just like a revolution, it does not go to a place. The place goes to it because it is immanent in the people. As Benjamen Franklin wrote about the American Revolution, “The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people.”
It is not a constitution that goes to a people. A people go to a constitution. The problem is that there is no such thing as a Nigerian soul, and it is an amalgam of souls.
We have no temple or bivouac. Not pot of life. And to make a law, we must know how to blend those souls into one. The truth is it cannot be naturally done. It has to evolve, and what we should do rather than belabour our minds to make the law, we should make a people.
This is the frustration about law making in Nigeria. We want to make a law like the United States, but we are no nation like that. The U.S. may have a presidential system, but we are not the same people. We do not have the same history or culture. They run a system of consensus, we of heterogeneity.
They don’t have to haggle over faith, when they say God Bless America.
They agree on what God to invoke. They have one language, even though they have a multiplicity of accents. The south is different from the north, but they negotiate their kinship.
The issues raised sometimes hint at amnesia. Take the call for a parliamentary system. What did we have at independence? The Westminster model from Britain. We had a raucous house, and the sort in the Medieval Poland defined as “divinely ordained confusion.” What did we get in that republic? Civil unrest, state of emergency in the western region, riots and crippling strikes. In the end, a civil war with bloodlust over which we lost the republic.
We have 36 states, and the outcry is the cost. Yet some want more states just because they want to be governor, senator or legislator.
The present status of states suffocates them out of leverage. But others want to federate some states to cut cost. Will that not create old overlords? Will the Ekiti want to subject themselves to those who edged them into minority roles in the old western region? Or state?
These are the complications we continue to grapple with in the search for a document. If we do not have faith in our neighbour, how do we give that faith to a piece of lyrical prose in a constitution? A document does not work without faith. In the garden of Eden, there was only one law, and it fell belly up between two people.
The United Kingdom does not have a constitution written but they live on precedents and conventions, and they have survived as a model of a willing people for centuries, if through wars and social turmoil.
It happens through heroes in history. Lincoln did it in the time of slavery. Garibaldi for Italy, Bismark for Germany. Lee Kwuan Yew blended the Chinese, Malays and Indians into a patriotic and cultural symmetry, so much so that when a Chinese leader visited Singapore, he was disappointed that the Chinese did not see anything special in him. Lee had made tribe irrelevant over a generation of fairness.
The Bible often tells us that the difference between the Old and New Testaments is the letter of the law. The spirit of the law gives life. We are still obsessed with the written law, not the one in the heart. Like in the law on circumcision, where the New Testament says we should circumcise the foreskins of our hearts.
Writing about his country Türkiye, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk narrates, in his breathtaking novel The Museum of Innocence, the story of a young man who loses the love of a woman, and spends every evening in the family home where the girl lives with the husband. But he cannot marry her.
Rather he steals little things from the home, like spoons, pens, pillows, and enough to furnish a full home. He has everything about the girl’s home but the bride herself.
The girl is the soul of his quest, but he has everything that identifies with the girl but not the girl. That is why a constitution can say everything about us, but not say us, not encase our soul. We have to give soul to document. It cannot take it from us.
Just as Awolowo said of IBB’s manoeuvres in his cynical quest for democracy, it is “a fruitless search.”
