Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu’s admonition on the floor of the Senate, this week, to his fellow political actors against actions capable of provoking another military truncation of democratic governance in the country, a scenario which he considers not improbable, has at least served two useful, even if unintended, purposes. First, it has compelled the military to reassure the country of its commitment to democracy, loyalty to the Head of State and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and its institutional fidelity to its constitutionally stipulated role of protecting the territorial integrity of the polity. We will recall that in May, last year, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Tukur Buratai, felt sufficiently concerned to publicly warn soldiers to steer clear of politics in the light of information he claimed to have that certain individuals had been approaching some officers and soldiers for political reasons.
Secondly, it has given an opportunity for individuals and groups within civil society including lawyers, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Trade Union Congress (TUC), Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Ohaneaze and Afenifere to reiterate the readiness of Nigerians to resist any form of military intervention no matter the weaknesses and shortcomings of our current democratic practice. A cardinal lesson of our political history is that persistence in the practice of democracy, notwithstanding inevitable challenges, problems and crises, is the only path to systematically incremental political development even though the process may be slow, seemingly chaotic, fractious and arduous. The illusion of the military as political messiah has been shattered forever and military intervention no longer an even remotely feasible option in Nigeria.
Intense and passionate debate, Open and acrimonious disagreement and contention as well as ceaseless disputation are necessary and inevitable ingredients of a viable and vigorous democratic system even as is witnessed in the most advanced democracies. The imposed peace of the graveyard, which military dictatorship claims to guarantee is not only detrimental to development, it also contains the seeds of future instability leading to the path of national disintegration. Even then, Ekweremadu’s warning must not be dismissed lightly. Yes, military rule may not be an option. But when an elected governor behaves no better than a military dictator and demolishes a Senator’s house for partisan political reasons while hiding under the guise of enforcing urban planning laws or Senators are prevented from visiting their constituencies in Kano and Kogi States, for example, or acts of political intolerance, aggression and violence pervade the polity, democracy is clearly endangered.
When political actors brazenly disregard the constitutions both of their parties and that of the country with impunity and provoke resentment and bitter opposition through the arrogant and unrestrained deployment of power, as is the case with Governors Nasir ‘el Rufai and Yahaya Bello in Kaduna and Kogi states, respectively, something worse than military intervention is being invited – a descent to indescribable and uncontrollable anarchy. Democracy can only serve as the best option for the peaceful resolution of disputes and crises that are unavoidable in an open, free and complex plural society like ours when political actors faithfully adhere to what Professor Billy Dudley describes as the ‘constitutive and regulative rules’ of the game. That I think is the essence of Ekweremadu’s warning even if he could have framed it differently.
It is for the same reason that Afenifere, Ohaneze, ACF, NLC, TUC, ASUU as well as several lawyers have vehemently denounced Ekweremadu’s comments on the possibility of military intervention if political actors do not moderate their behavior that this column has consistently opposed the call in some quarters for a jettisoning of the extant 1999 constitution and a regression to an overly romanticized 1963 constitution or one untested variant or the other of regionalism. No matter the challenges confronting Nigeria today, the country has experienced considerable political development over the last 19 years of unbroken civilian rule. The successful democratic and peaceful transfer of power from an incumbent to an opposing political party in 2015 shows that the country is gradually moving from being an essentially illiberal democracy towards being a genuinely liberal one. Yes, there is a long road to travel in this regard but truncating the present process and jumping back to 1963 or leaping in the dark in pursuit of some fanciful but unrealistic experiments in regionalism cannot be the option.
Some have dismissed the 1999 constitution as a military creation and imposition, which does not truly reflect the will of the Nigerian people. Indeed, the late legal luminary, Chief Rotimi Williams, who was a member of a socio-political pressure group, The Patriots, was of the view that the phrase ‘We the People’ that prefaces the constitution is a fraud because the document is not allegedly the product of the collective will of the Nigerian people. If the General Abdulsalam Abubakar regime that handed over to the new democratically elected government in 1999 had done so on the basis of the 1995 draft constitution engineered by the regime of General Sani Abacha or the earlier 1989 draft constitution drawn up under the Babangida regime, I would have understood this point of view. The 1989 and 1995 constitutions, although drafted with considerable civil society input through national conferences made up of selected eminent Nigerians, had their credibility and integrity tainted by the regime perpetuation schemes of the two dictators.
That is probably why the Abdusalam Abubakar regime accepted the recommendation of the Justice Niki Tobi Constitution Review Committee, which it had set up to review past constitutions and make recommendations, that the 1979 constitution with appropriate amendments was preferable to the 1989 and 1995 draft constitutions. The Abubakar regime thus handed over to an elected civilian government in 1999 on the basis of the 1979 constitution, which was drawn up under the Murtala/Obasanjo regime, with slight amendments. The 1999 constitution is thus virtually a carbon copy of the 1979 constitution. Can the 1979 constitution be regarded as a military imposition? That would surely be a misleading and rather shallow reading of the genesis and subsequent evolution of the 1979 constitution. It would appear that the Murtala/Obasanjo regime itself was conscious of the intellectual deficiency of the military as regards the task of constitution-making.
Thus, according to the eminent political scientist, Professor Alex Gboyega, in selecting members of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) to draw up the proposed new constitution for the Second Republic, the regime placed premium, in the words of General Murtala Mohammed, on “our learned men in disciplines considered to have direct relevance to Constitution-making namely – history, law, economics and other social sciences, especially political science and eminent Nigerians with some experience in Constitution-making making were brought in to complete the spectrum”. Let’s face it. Constitution-making is an essentially elitist, not a populist, enterprise. I cannot be expected, for instance, to discuss constitutional issues with the depth, perspicacity and authoritativeness of a constitutional lawyer or a Professor of history or political science.
Yes, the sanctioning of a constitution by the majority certainly enhances the document’s legitimacy. But it is understandably always a small intellectual elite with the requisite technical knowledge that will be the ultimate determinants of its substantive content. This is probably why the trio of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, authors of ‘The Federalist Papers’ had such an immense influence on the promotion and ratification of the United States constitution.
Headed by Chief Rotimi Williams, the CDC was made up of some of Nigeria’s brightest and best brains although it was observed that there was no woman on the committee. The draft constitution proposed by the CDC was subjected to a three-month public debate tagged ‘The Great Debate’ on the platform of the defunct Daily Times, which at the time circulated close to half a million copies nationwide and contributions to the debate later published in two volumes. The draft proposals were then considered and ratified by a Constituent Assembly headed by Justice Udo Udoma and made up of members elected, directly or indirectly, on the platform of the local government councils as electoral colleges. True, the military made about 17 insertions into the final document forwarded to it by the CDC. But there was absolutely nothing preventing the succeeding civilian administration from expunging these military insertions if that was the will of the majority of Nigerians.
As I said earlier, the 1999 constitution is basically a reproduction of the 1979 constitution. There is no doubt much that is wrong with this constitution that promotes excessive centralization of power at the centre. But throwing the entire document away and starting a new experiment de novo after 19 years of unbroken civilian rule under its provenance would be most prodigal, which is why this column supports ongoing, even if too long delayed, efforts to amend the constitution to decentralize greater powers, responsibilities and resources to the states and local governments.
Even then, decentralization can be ultimately dysfunctional and counterproductive if you have ‘democratically elected’ executive tyrants and virtual monarchs like Nasir ‘el Rufai, Yahaya Bello, Rochas Okorocha, Nyesom Wike or Ayodele Fayose in power in the states. It is obviously the behavior of political actors like these that prompted Ekweremadu’s controversial comments on military intervention. As I said earlier, however, a greater danger than military intervention, if our political actors continue on the path of impunity, is a descent to total anarchy.
