We need a constitution for the varied peoples of Nigeria. But we need the varied peoples of Nigeria first. That is the conundrum in the search for a document that will tell us how to engage ourselves. But what we are looking for is not a constitution, but a formula for success.
I recall years ago when Hilla Liman was the leader of Ghana and the country was in a constitutional ferment. The thick-set man with a professorial air purred: “No document, no constitution can govern a people if the people are not ready to govern themselves.”
So while we have debated, sparred, issued petitions and memoranda over how to shape our new laws, we should consider whether what we have will redound to a society of legitimate hubris, the sort that produced the United States of America after contentious hours of cerebral exchanges. Or the French constitutions from republic to republic even as Charles de Gaulle saw his ego bruised. Or the British whose unwritten model continues to marvel although the country had to see itself decline. It was once the empire where the sun never set but now a shrinking island. Its finest hour came in the era of the man who coined the phrase with his courageous growl: Winston Churchill in the Second World War
But no one can doubt the conjuncture of the two requirements in today’s Nigeria. We have a fractious people, debating the most trivial obsessions with as much zeal as the earthquake matters. These tell us that we are as far apart as we are close. We also need a template that will make these heterogeneous challenges worth the sweat and blood of the past few years.
If the Niger Delta States seek one thing, and the Southeast neighbours seek another in the midst of a rampaging North, what shall we say of the Southwest cousins who are working out a coherent document of internal engagement? This tells us that we are not discussing as yet other important ingredients of this formula: how do we educate our children to engage a technological world where even a cutting-edge nation like the United States is feeling left behind? How do we get our healthcare into a high gear where its brightest do not have to travel abroad to be doctors and its sick cannot get cure unless they travel abroad? Most of the country is not covered by infrastructure development even when the extant ones are in a state of terminal decay.
We produce a lot of food but most of it rots away while we go to a foreign country to launch an export product – palm produce – that we once taught others how to seed.
We are still in the early days, in the morning of Genesis where to identify anything we have to point because many things in Nigeria do not have a name yet, to adapt Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
So what is the constitution going to do for us if we are not ready to do it on our own? We have been calling for a truly federal state, for fiscal discipline, for the extirpation of corruption, for the rebirth of education, for a return to the agrarian glories of the palm oil days, the cocoa boom and the groundnut pyramid. We do not do these with any sense of togetherness but only with a sort of wistful impotence.
The northerner wants oil in the Chad for revenge as much as the oil-laced Niger Delta denizen basks and gloats. But for us to have a true constitution we must be aware of who we are and how we relate to the others. We have not done a good job of that yet, except the Southwest that has come together with its integration strategy. The South-South will have to do something, but it has a greater challenge than the South west, the north and the Southeast, which enjoy greater degrees of cultural symmetry. In the Southsouth, the people are not one, in spite of the impression given outside. Contiguity does not amount to homogeneity. Given the histories of inter-ethnic conflicts and suspicions in the region, sometimes the relationship of the groups reminds one of playwright Jean Paul Satre’s famous quote: “Hell is other people.” It will take a personage of Obafemi Awolowo’s image to construct such an alignment in the region. The concept of the South-south as a region is still arbitrary, just as Okoi Aripko described Nigeria as a mere geographical expression. Goodluck Jonathan does not have the moral heft or charismatic aura to do that because he thinks more like a Bayelsan than a South-south faithful.
The North did well in that front in the past, but only as a hegemonic project. The ebullient Governor Babangida Aliyu, as leader of the Northern Governors’ Forum, is investing his region with a sunny look while pushing positions that bring the North together as a force. Outside the Northern Governors Forum, the North has become fractured and it requires an outsize figure like the Saudauna to string the various tendencies together.
The Southeast has the potential but only the potential. Its elite have lofted a mercantile opportunism above the practical good of an industrious race. Not long ago there was little outrage when some of its leaders dared to sell its presidential rights away of a bridge that was their right any way. That was when President Goodluck Jonathan remembered that his middle name was Azikiwe. It seems to me that only the memories of the civil war draw the Igbo together and that is a tragedy. But the people suffer month after month from the ravages of another civil war, which comes in the way of slow lynching.
The Southwest provides the best example. With the exception of Ondo State because of a Judas governor, the rest of the Southwest is framing what is truly a formula for success. It wants to work together in the areas of infrastructure, trade, education and seeks autonomy rights within a federal structure. Where I differ with them is their call for a parliamentary system. The problem with presidentialism is not its expensiveness. Corruption suffocated the First Republic. A corrupt people cannot ennoble a good system, and vice versa. It is what we bring into the system that will make it what it becomes.
That brings me to where this article begins. Is it the society that makes the law or the law that makes the society? The society makes the law so that the society can become itself.
When constitution monger Abbe Sieyes wanted to fashion a constitution for France in the Napoleonic era, the dictator wanted to insert many clauses that would make him a czar of France. Sieyes theSn asked Napoleon: Do you want to be a king then? We reject the present constitution because the military made it. Constitutions do not come out of vacuums. Prophet Isaiah wrote about the connection between law and experience: “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because the light is not in them.” There is no law without a testimony and vice versa. We need to see episodes of our lives in the law before we can make it work, or else it will set us up for rigmarole.
“The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people,” asserted Benjamin Franklin in the high noon of the American Revolution. The 13 colonies saw themselves as different countries. But under the charisma of George Washington, they framed a constitution. They saw themselves in it. Even at that it was not perfect. The people lived with it and have made several amendments, fought a civil war, accommodated the minorities and women, Catholics, etc . That is because they loved the country before they loved the document.
So as we contend to make a new law, we have to show if the document is just a theatre of war or a way out of Golgotha.
