In my column last week, I promised I would go into the greater details of why I said President Muhammadu Buhari should ignore calls that he should complete the job of amending our constitution, which was started by his predecessor, former President Goodluck Jonathan, in the twilight of his administration. I said I would do so in a not too distant future.
Instead, I have decided to go into those details today in spite of the fact that the elections yesterday of a new leadership of the National Assembly in total defiance of the wishes of the new ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), is a more immediate, if not more compelling topic for discussion. Those elections bode ill for our democracy, at least in my view. Certainly they suggest fears that, except for Buhari, little has changed with APC as the ruling party from yesterday’s Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) politics of self-aggrandisement and self-service.
This, however, is a topic for another day, possibly next week.
Today I’ll go into the details of why I believe Buhari should not waste his time heeding calls on him to finish the job of amending our constitution started by his predecessor. And these calls have come not only from Elder Chris Eluemuno, a chieftain of Ohaneze, whom I mentioned last week. Afenifere elders and militant Yoruba leaders like Dr. Frederick Fasehun in a two-page advert in The Guardian (May 31), and Otunba Gani Adams in an interview in Sunday Vanguard (May 10), have also made similar calls.
Perhaps even more importantly, the relatively restrained Guardian itself had made a similar call in its editorial of March 12. It argued that because, in its view, the content and conduct of the campaigns for Election ’15 were “disappointing”, the report of the National Conference “cannot but be factored into the process of governance by the next government.”
As the Americans say, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I will be the last person to argue that our Constitution is not without its flaws; it is manmade and nothing manmade is, or can be, perfect. If nothing else our constitution is fundamentally flawed in its revenue and legislative allocation among the three levels of government, to the extent that local governments can be regarded as a level of government. It is also fundamentally flawed in the way it has stood our true federation of the First Republic on its head by turning it into a centralised system in all but name.
There are, of course, other ways in which our constitution is flawed. Still, I dare say it is not as broke as its loudest critics say it is. Certainly it is not so broke that little or no good can be achieved without amending it or replacing it. I believe that in spite of its shortcomings Nigeria can be transformed into a prosperous nation under it if only we, leaders and led alike, strive to cultivate the right attitudes.
The definitive proof of this is America itself, whose constitution is universally adjudged as the most precise, eloquent and successful in the world because it has produced the most prosperous and freest democracy to date. Yet under the same constitution the country has in recent times deteriorated progressively into a gridlock between the executive and legislative arms of its central government, a gridlock that is already undermining its leadership of the world.
The difference has been a dramatic change in the attitude of its people, whereby its leaders have become increasingly self-aggrandising and self-serving while its common folks have been driven into indifference to politics as has manifested in their increasing low turnout during elections.
In other words, our problem as in today’s America is, in one word, much more a problem of attitude than of constitution. After all, no constitution in the world is, or can be, self-executing. Unfortunately it is difficult, if not impossible to legislate attitude. Ultimately, the solution to our problem therefore is to look inwards into ourselves and change our attitudes individually and collectively.
Meantime there are, needless to say, provisions in our constitutions that seem to need fixing, provisions like those of the size of our executive councils, especially at the centre, the financial and administrative “autonomy” of our local governments and the justiciability of the fundamental objectives of state, etc. However, most of these can be dealt with without having to amend or change our constitution.
For example, with the right perception the problem of the big size of our Federal Executive Council where Section 147 makes it mandatory for the president to appoint at least one minister from each state can be dealt with.
Here the problem, on reflection, is clearly more of lack of frugality in our expenditures on offices than of their numbers as is also clearly the case in our humongous and unsustainable expenditures on our legislators. After all, our federal cabinets have been more or less the same size since the First Republic if you count the junior ministers.
So far I have given two reasons why I think our new president should ignore the calls on him to complete his predecessor’s initiative of amending our constitution, namely our beggar-thy-neighbour attitude among leaders and followers alike, but more importantly among leaders, and our all too often wrong diagnosis of problems arising from wrong perceptions of the problems.
There are at least two more reasons. One is the self-contradictions of some of the recommendations. The other is the fact that the conference was convened in bad faith, composed in bad faith and was conducted in bad faith.
On the first reason, the same people, for example, who talk glibly about returning to the old autonomous regions of the First Republic, with, of course some modifications, also want at least 18 more states created out of the current ones. Similarly the same people who talk about the imperative of freedom of choice also simultaneously want power rotation and zoning entrenched into our constitution.
As for my second reason of the bad faith that surrounded the national conference, this much was obvious from its timing when the president knew he had only enough time and money to select its members rather than have them elected as should be the case, and from the way its membership was deliberately skewed heavily against Muslims and Northerners, in gross violation of the religious and regional composition of the country.
The bad faith was also obvious from the attempt by some key members to sneak in key provisions into its report that were never agreed upon by the conference and even title the reports Draft 2014 Constitution instead of amendments to the 1999 Constitution that they were.
Last, but by no means the least, the bad faith was obvious from a correspondence dated August 6, 2014 between Chinweizu, author and an unrepentant Biafran, and some key elements at the conference led by Professor G. G. Darah, an intellectual fountainhead of militants from the Delta region, in which Chinweizu urged them to regard the excision of a section of the country as their main objective at the conference.
“Excise them by talking and voting”, he said. And if excising what he called “Caliphate colonialists” from Nigeria failed, he said, “at least get a resolution passed by the Greater South majority postponing the 2015 election till after a new constitution is approved by referendum.”
That Darah and his co-travellers failed in achieving either objective was not for want of trying. In any case their attempts framed the conduct of the national conference which, above all, is why it is not worth any serious consideration.
A catalogue of yet greater errors
Last week I apologised for a catalogue of errors I made in my column the week before, only to commit even more egregious ones at the same time. It was as if, as one elder friend said to me over the phone, I needed strong coffee to keep alert when writing!
The more egregious ones last week were the years I gave of the enactment of the constitutions of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha. The first was 1988 not 1996 – by then the man had “stepped aside” by three years – and the second was 1995, not 1998, the year in which Abacha died in office.
Then there was my mix-up of homophones; words that sound similar but have different spellings and different meanings. In this case I wrongly used the word “seized” instead of “ceased” in the phrase “Unfortunately, our own federation seized…” in the last but four paragraphs of the column.
Once again my apologies.
