In an investigation lasting months, this newspaper found that between 2011 and 2015 the 53-member House of Representatives
Ad-hoc Constitution Review Committee, and its 49-member counterpart in the Senate in the 7th National Assembly, withdrew N3,250,000,000.00 and N4,500,000,000.00 respectively to purportedly execute the fourth alteration of the Constitution.
It is not immediately clear how the lawmakers spent the outrageous funds but insiders say a huge chunk of it was pocketed by members of the committees in what one source described as ‘unprecedented naira bazaar’ by a committee of the National Assembly” -Premium Times.
In “My Memo To The National Assembly On Review of The 1999 Constitution’ dated 10 December, 2020, I reminded the Honourable members, who are about now again setting out on another fruitless journey, of what Nigerians think of any amendment of the 1999 constitution in particular.
I wrote:”The constitution you are setting out to review has been variously described, but because of space constraint, let us restrict ourselves to how Chief Bisi Akande, former Osun state governor described it. According to him, “the 1999 Constitution is Nigeria’s greatest misadventure since Lugard’s amalgamation of 1914. It breeds and protects corrupt practices and criminal impunity in governance. It can never be beneficially reviewed, and the ongoing piecemeal adjustments, or amendments, can only completely blot out the essence of national values and accelerate the de-amalgamation of Nigeria. All the angels in heaven cannot make that constitution work for the progress of Nigeria. It should be scrapped as a bad relic of military mentality”.
The new one reminds Nigerians of the profligacy which accompanied the exercise under the leadership of Ike Ekeremadu and Emeka Ikedioha when funds appropriated for the exercise were still being withdrawn from the national treasury long after the exercise had been done and dusted.
This is one profligacy, among many others, which yours truly had believed that the administration of President Bola Tinubu would not permit, past ones being nothing but fraud.
However, once they have become our worshipful ‘majesty’ since the Bukola Saraki days, and President Tinubu probably believes that he is estopped by the principle of separation of powers from intervening nothing, not commonsense, not the country’s present economic miasma, largely a consequence of
the same National Assembly looking away when President Muhammadu Buhari and then CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele conscientiously ruined Nigeria, would.
While conceding the peoples’ helplessness about it, let me bring to the National assembly’s attention – so that the entire exercise won’t be a total loss – what a former Senator (when senators were properly so called in the 2nd Republic), believes should now constitute the ideal constitutional framework for a multi – ethnic country like Nigeria.
What this means in essence is that I am taking off again today, exactly from where I left last week, when I urged President Bola Tinubu to set in motion the process of restructuring Nigeria. Incidentally, I am not alone in this, as leaders of the Southern and Middle Belt Forum and others, have recently called on him to implement the 2014 confab report as well as revisit the recommendations of the APC Committee on Power Devolution. For the attention of the National Assembly, therefore, I once again, as is fast becoming my wont, go back to one of my myriad of past articles on the subject of restructuring Nigeria, namely, that of 24 January, 2010 titled: ‘At a Time Like This’.
It reads thus:
“I haven’t a scintilla of shame expropriating the above title which Professor Tunji Dare gave his article of Tuesday, December 29, 2009 in this newspaper, for mine which will, in this piece, be edited for space.
Time and again, the North has shown that its interests are not exactly coterminous with that of Nigeria. On many occasions it has treated with disdain, things that would have redounded to our mutual interest, whilst holding, tenaciously, to things aimed at achieving short term regional advantage. A good example is the fate which the Obasanjo political conference suffered as a result of the North’s fastidious opposition to the demands of Niger-Deltans, which requests are now being feverishly delivered via the Amnesty programme, after it became obvious that oil money, to spend ‘yanfu yanfu’, was no longer as guaranteed as previously assumed.
My honest suggestion is that Nigeria should begin a phased-out decentralisation in a manner that is structured, and properly interrogated, to ensure peaceful coexistence.
We have such a long shared history that, difficult as the process may be, we should be able to avoid going back to our atavistic ways, the type that led to the 30-month civil war.
As a result of observed differences in the level of development between the South and the North prior to independence, the North wisely postponed assuming a self-governing status whilst both the East and the West proceeded apace.
In our current circumstances, I am proposing a process which we need not dub Sovereign, since that word gives some people the jitters, but a process which will painstakingly discuss a return to Confederacy; one in which every federating unit will have fiscal independence while contributing to the Centre for common services, and with a clause as to how a part can exit the Confederation.
The United Nations General Assembly has in September 2007 adopted the fundamental right of all peoples to freely determine their political status, as well as freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
This novel approach should guarantee that, unless a part deliberately sets out to forment trouble, none will arise.
Rather it will enable each part to develop at its own pace, as well as, create institutions that are most suitable for its peoples e.g. Sharia in the North or additional Local governments in the South.
This arrangement should reduce insecurity and limit it to certain areas as each federating unit would be able to, unlike now, institute policing arrangements it considers most suitable to its security requirements. It will equally reduce the humongous amount of money that goes into fighting insecurity especially in the Northern states where it goes back to a decade and a half. Each state/ region will then be able to devote substantial portions of such funds to improving education, health, road infrastructure etc.
It doesn’t get more annoying than when a Northern leader, who couldn’t breathe a word throughout the Buhari years, now tells us “that Northerners will soon revolt; we can’t pacify them again”.
What blackmail!
The ’cause célèbre’ for these musings was the thought provoking letter I received, this past week, from distinguished Senator (Professor) Banji Akintoye, now resident in the U.S.
This, therefore, is my reaction to the letter in the strong belief that Nigeria, not just Yoruba land, can achieve the envisaged results in a planned, gradual and peaceful manner.Afterall, Yugoslavia has proved conclusively, post Bros Tito, that separation needs not be bloody or violent.
The senate of the likes of Professors David Oke, Banji Akintoye and Pa Jonathan Odebiyi (1979- 83) will go down as the golden era of the Nigerian senate because that was when, with an indefatigable party leader like Chief Obafemi Awolowo, every UPN parliamentarian knew that his/her mandate was service, and more service, to the nation and to the people.
Senator Akintoye’s letter to me read as follows:
‘Dear Femi,
Though I have not communicated with you for a long time, I have not lost contact with your writings. The president of Ekitikete USA and Canada lives in the same state as I do, and he is diligent in ensuring that I read much of what transpires in the debates on the Ekitipanupo web-board. After reading what you wrote recently on the meeting that gathered at Ikenne on Jan. 14, (that was actually Palladium’s) and what some others wrote on Obasanjo and the loss of coherence among Yoruba leadership, I cannot resist intervening.
First, I can’t resist expressing my appreciation of your powerful writings. And that is not only because, as works of literature, they make very admirable reading, but also, and in particular, because they portray you as someone committed to very high ideals of society, governance, leadership, and development. In you, the Ekiti character, further uplifted by the best that education can provide, has produced an inestimable gem. I am simply proud of you.
In our culture, when our elders call a younger person aside to commune with him, they want to urge him to do something. So, what do I want to urge of you? The foremost is that you must never let yourself be drawn away from the honorable positions that you now hold. And, no matter how tough or even painful the situation may become, you must never quit. I urge you to consider this. Our people say that the greatest harm that an enemy can do to a man is to force the man to turn away from, and abandon, his real concerns and keep chasing the enemy.
For those of us who sincerely lament the disaster (the disorientation, even the dissoluteness) that has befallen the Yoruba nation in the hands of OBJ, isn’t it time we begin to spend more of our time on seeking real answers to the future and destiny of the Yoruba nation, and less on bashing the enemy? In fact, shouldn’t we side-step the enemy and strike for new solid substance? Are we right in assuming that the future and destiny of the Yoruba nation resides inevitably with Nigeria? How many countries in today’s world contain within its border such large ethnic nations as are in Nigeria, all of them subject to, and sharing, one sovereignty? Even Britain, the creator of Nigeria, is now in the process of being broken up by the ethnic nations in it. The Irish (with the exception of the small province of Northern Ireland) broke away not long ago and established the Republic of Ireland. Northern Ireland has been a pain in Britain’s neck ever since. The Scots and the Welsh have also been struggling for separate countries of their own, and following the elections of 2007, Scotland is now quite close to establishing a separate country for itself. The Welsh have set up a Commission to develop the Welsh language as their national language and chosen one of their towns as the capital city of their own country. The movement of independence for ethnic nations is spreading all over the world. You are a historian, and you surely know about the breaking up of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, of India at independence, and the countless ethnic national struggles going on in our world. I have waited and waited for somebody to make a hint of these things on the Ekitipanupo board, and it has not happened. Meanwhile, a few days ago, someone sent me an email to which two interesting letters were attached – and I wondered how much of Ekiti’s superior contribution is in what these letters are saying. Femi, I have watched the tone of agony in your writings – agony about the wholesale disintegration of order, ethics, and accountability in Nigerian affairs, and the sucking of the Yoruba nation into that horrendous mess. You represent the best of our products. Please shake yourself. I attach the two letters that made me decide to send this email.
Accept my very best wishes.
The man who proudly calls himself your teacher.
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Banji Akintoye.
Unfortunately, those letters are not for this space.
However, what I want the National Assembly to take from Prof Akintoye’s letter is the inevitability of power devolution in Nigeria, or in any multi – ethnic country. Enough then of this unitary arrangement by which over two hundred million people are held down against their wish. Enough of this suffocating federal knee on the neck of the federating units. There’s absolutely no need for this seeming dictatorship in which a state police commissioner must first get clearance from Abuja before he could take orders from a state governor.
The disrespect shown to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State, by a police officer, during the governor’s visit to the Magodo estate over a lingering land crisis in the area, still rankles and would not go away in a hurry.
It is an unpardonable misnomer that there are as many as 68 items on the exclusive legislative list, on which only the federal government has authority to act, in a country that describes itself as federal.
But much more importantly, if an elderstatesman of Professor Akintoye’s standing wrote all these in 2010, a whole 14 years ago, and Nigeria, rather than improve since had, indeed, degenerated very badly, particularly in the 8 years spanning 2015 – 2023 when insecurity defined our country more than anything else, then the views expressed here regarding power devolution must be, for the members, the urgency of now, and should constitute the raison detre of whatever amendments you hope to see go through.
The National Assembly must wake up and serve Nigeria for once.
