Category: Tuesday

Benjamin Obi Nwabueze, the great jurist and peerless legal scholar whom I once referred to on this page as “our own Lord Dicey” – after the celebrated English jurist and constitutional theorist who popularized the concept of “the rule of law…” died a fortnight ago, aged 94 years.

He was greatly admired for his forensic brilliance, his forthrightness, his mastery of expository writing, his prodigious scholarly output – some 34 books, not counting journal articles, monographs, public lectures, reports, and pamphlets – stand in his name.  He could be dismissive and cutting, but urbaneness was his default setting.

Nwabueze’s was a life of the mind and of engagement, whether he was domiciled in the academy as a professor, or outside it as a consultant on diverse subjects, and as a public intellectual.  He was a driving force in the national policy discourse.

He once told me with a glint in his eye how practising lawyers throughout Anambra State and legal scholars from the universities in the neighbourhood had converged in Enugu to hear him address the High Court in an important case in which he was representing one of the parties, and how there was hardly any room for the throng in the hallowed chamber or in the precincts.  That was a measure of his stature at the Bar, and his influence on the practice of law. 

His influence on lawyering and jurisprudence went far beyond these shores.  His treatises on constitutionalism, social justice, and the rule of law are cited with approval throughout the English-speaking world, particularly in the Commonwealth, a relic of British colonialism encompassing more than 50 nations.

His legal scholarship earned him and our Taslim Olawale Elias the rare distinction of the LL.D the University of London’s highest accolade in the field, appropriately called a senior doctorate, to separate it from the Ph.D.

Nwabueze went home knowing that generations of students across the globe nurtured and weaned on his erudition, his devotion to the cause of justice, and his professionalism, will keep alive the causes he championed with great eloquence and passion throughout his distinguished career,

In those fields and more, he was a beacon.  He was more:  He was without question a monument.  But the politics of ethnicity often got in the way of his advocacy and scrupulous adherence to the highest principles he espoused whenever he tried to deploy his great learning to finding solutions to Nigeria’s problems. This failing reduced him to something less than a model.

In no area of his public life was the gap between principle and practice more jarring than the positions he took during the annulment crisis that shook Nigeria right down to its fragile roots and ramifies with each passing day, and on issues relating to ethnicity. 

The political programme that was supposed to culminate in the election of a president under a new Constitution had reached a dead end.  After eight years of tinkering, detours and revisions, it had lost its momentum. 

The two official political parties had become so indistinguishable from each other that some media commentators called them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”  There was so little public input in their formation or nurturing that some opinion-makers called them “test-tube” parties.  The year 1993 offered Babangida the last chance to save the transition.

Read Also: Ngige mourns Nwabueze, Uwechue

A Transitional Council, comprising some technocrats and former political office holders, many of whom Babangida had spent much of his seven years in office banning, unbanning and re-banning from political office was the vehicle he confected to give the transition a new momentum.  Its charge:  to complete the transition agenda within nine months and clear the path for a democratically-elected government

From a sense of duty, Nwabueze came out of semi-retirement to serve as Secretary for Education.  I wrote him on the occasion, stating that I was unsure whether to congratulate him or commiserate with him.  His reply was gracious.   I was not alone, he said.  He had already accepted the offer, and the challenge was to make the most of the opportunity.

For more than four decades, I had admired Nwabueze from a distance, principally from his books and his public lectures.  So, when it fell to me as editorial page editor of The Guardian and chair of its Editorial Board to arrange the Guardian Lecture for 1989, the organizing committee and I settled on Nwabueze as the presenter, given the twists and turns of the transition.  He had left his last job as Secretary to the United Bank for Africa in controversial circumstances during the Shagari era, and had been out of public circulation.

He received us warmly and accepted the invitation on the spot when Guardian editor Emeka Izeze and I delivered it to his home in the Lagos suburb of Isolo.  With Babangida as the chair of the occasion and designated keynote speaker, and Nwabueze as the anniversary lecturer, the occasion generated greater public interest than usual, and for weeks thereafter, the keynote address and the lecture remained the subject of animated public discourse.

Babangida abused the occasion to chastise those he called “victims of dogma of varieties of Marxist/Socialist orientation alternating cyclically between half-truth and the sparing use truth about any government and its well-intentioned programme.”  Nwabueze vigorously rejected the notion of the military as custodians of the state and keepers of its conscience.  And he made a powerful case for constitutional government based on the rule of law.

The occasion did much to revive Nwabueze’s career as a public intellectual on the lecture circuit and made me feel that I had an obligation to ensure that he suffered no loss of reputation from Babangida’s beguiling invitation, as many had before him. That was why I wrote him, convinced that Babangida’s invitation and indeed the entire Transitional Council scheme was yet another stunt in a catalogue of stunts.

It was the same reason that impelled me to advise him to postpone the launch of two books to mark his 60th birthday at a time when virtually all the public universities – for which he held ministerial responsibility – were shut down because of a dispute over pay and conditions.  He reasoned with me that going ahead with the launch would be a public relations disaster.

Citing no coherent reasons, Babangida annulled the presidential election that the Transitional Committee was supposed to guide to a smooth takeover of power.  Two weeks after the election, Babangida abolished all the instrumentalities of the transition programme that had been eight years and N400 million the making.

Concerned that Nwabueze’s reputation and public standing might be damaged by what was going on in Abuja, I sent him a note expressing my fears about where it was leading and how it might end.

Despite his busy schedule, he replied promptly, lamenting that events had taken a turn that nobody expected, and that the only thing left to us was to pray!

I was expecting him to resign. Unbeknownst to me and doubtless to countless other Nigerians, he was busy helping Babangida draft and perfect the legal instruments consecrating the annulment. 

He stayed in office apparently unperturbed that, of more than 106 decrees Babangida churned out between January and August 1993, not more than two were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for information.  Its members had learned of the annulment from the news media like other Nigerians

He remained in the Transitional Council, not caring that his name and reputation were being taken in vain, without corresponding adherence to the values he had espoused in his long and distinguished career.

Nor did Nwabueze stick with his “lawyer’s case” in support of the annulment.  He availed himself of the opportunity to settle ethnic scores.  Outside the Yoruba areas, he wrote, most people who voted for MKO Abiola in the South did so to end the North’s monopoly on power.  The annulment was therefore seen in the South, rightly or wrongly, as lending aid and comfort to the North’s monopoly on Presidential power

The monopoly of the presidency by the Muslim ethnic group of the North has as its correlate, Nwabueze continues, “the ambition of the Yoruba to monopolize other positions in the federal establishment.” That ambition, he continues, poses a serious danger to the good government and unity of Nigeria.

The Yoruba may seem nice and friendly, but “they have no sense of fraternity with other groups in Nigeria when it comes to federal appointments,” according to Nwabueze.   “They see nothing wrong in monopolizing all positions in federal establishments, from messenger to chief executive.  To them, that is as should be, the natural order of things.  Any other non-Yoruba in their midst in such an establishment is considered an intruder.  Yoruba becomes a medium of communication in which government business is conducted.”

Continuing his ethnic baiting, Nwabueze said June 12 made Nigerians outside the Yoruba West fearful that after two terms – or eight years – of a Yoruba president, many federal establishments would have become thoroughly “Yorubanized.”

“The Yoruba,” Nwabueze warned darkly, “must make up their minds whether they really want the various ethnic groups to continue to be together under a federal arrangement with its implication that federal appointments should be equitably distributed among the component groups as equal partners in the federal union.  They must give up their monopolizing ambition, for it is subversive of true federalism.”

It is almost as if, in his mind, the Yoruba are the trouble with Nigeria.

In contrast, Nwabueze says of his Igbo kinsfolk that they are “truly a democratic and fair-minded people, always prepared to concede to others the right to share equitably what belongs to all.  Their sense of fraternity and fairness always inclines them to consider others in the matter of federal appointments and the distribution of common benefits.”

Even when articulated by the usual ethnic warriors, this kind of jingoism is reprehensible. 

When espoused by the nation’s pre-eminent legal scholar, an intellectual of global stature, leader of a public-spirited and well-respected group that calls itself rather portentously “The Patriots,” withal a person who should rightly be regarded as an elder statesman, at a time the Yoruba were under siege and fighting for their place under the Nigerian sun and the country was teetering on the brink of violent dissolution, it would be courteous to call it perfidious.

Finally, if it is true, as Nwabueze once said, that “the happiest day” of his life” was the day he met Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Igbo separatist movement IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, whom many even among the Ndigbo regard as a charlatan and a demagogue, we must be thankful that he channelled and sublimated his inner turmoil to bequeath to his compatriots and to the world at large a dazzling portfolio of intellectual and professional achievements.

Hail and farewell.