President Goodluck Jonathan generates both excitement and puzzlement whenever he makes speeches. While inaugurating the national conference in Abuja last week, he was at his most robust best with this fallacious supposition: “In our history as a political entity, we have experienced highs and lows but have always forged ahead. To my mind, the fact that we have weathered all storms and continued with the mission of evolving a truly national identity signifies that we are going in the right direction.” But there is absolutely nothing in what we are doing or how we doing it that shows we are headed in what the president describes as the right direction. If we were headed in the right direction, why would we need a national conference to remake the country’s template? The speech was indeed full of many other false and homiletic suppositions and propositions, disjointed efforts to stir the people with tired and worn-out phrases, not to talk of many sweeping statements the president himself, by his antecedents, never embraced nor endorsed.
Predictably, too, he all but ended his speech, which massaged the ego of the national conference delegates and listeners around the country, with the equally untrue and vexatious proposition: “We need a new mind and a new spirit of oneness and national unity. The time has come to stop seeing Nigeria as a country of many groups and regions. We have been divinely brought together under one roof. We must begin to see ourselves as one community. We are joined together by similar hopes and dreams as well as similar problems and challenges. What affects one part of the community affects the other.” Both in his past political campaigns and present disposition, including his unguarded and insistent deployment of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, Dr Jonathan evidently repudiates the ‘one community’ spirit he so facilely recommends. As proof that he and his speechwriters hardly read contemporary materials and analyses on grave national issues, he restates the false theology of attributing divine permanence to national borders, a deeply mendacious and ahistorical theology rebutted in this place several times and in many other write-ups elsewhere.
What is clear is that Dr Jonathan and his national conference delegates repose an unrealistic confidence in the conference both as a sacrifice for our national slothfulness and indiscipline and as the ultimate panacea for the woes afflicting the body politic, woes almost entirely man-made. Apart from the fact that a significant number of the conferees had before now dedicated their lives and careers wholly to the subversion of the national interest and to nurturing and benefiting from the status quo, Dr Jonathan has himself deftly appointed many delegates – though he pretends to altruism – whom he is confident will either ingratiatingly rally behind his battle cry when the need arises or are too enfeebled by ideological stasis to challenge his frequent brainstorms. Given the flattering stipend voted for each delegate, and the fact that some of them even celebrated their appointments as delegates with newspaper advertisements, the doubts of sceptics are more likely to grow and be reinforced. For in the final analysis, we are more likely to get a highly compromised constitution, in the spirit dictated by Dr Jonathan, than tackle the real problems undermining the country.
There is also the expectation that Dr Jonathan, conference delegates and many other Nigerians hope the conference will arrest the country’s dangerous march towards the precipice, in addition to providing a road map to peace, unity and prosperity. I am an advocate of sovereign national conference as a tool for formulating a framework for national coexistence and cohesion. But I have never imagined that even if that template was designed, peace and prosperity would inevitably be guaranteed. The 1999 constitution might have presumptuously claimed to be a people’s constitution, like all other constitutions before it, but that presumptuousness did not indicate that the constitution could not be redeemed by intelligent and altruistic leadership and citizenry through patriotic and substantial constitutional amendments. In his speech to the conference, Dr Jonathan makes the trite argument that a constitution is a living document needing periodic review and possible amendment. It is good that that elementary fact has dawned on him. That epiphany, it must be added, did not escape his predecessor, the highly animated but obtrusive Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet neither Dr Jonathan nor Chief Obasanjo made conscientious effort at the beginning of their presidencies to remedy the situation.
For both Chief Obasanjo and Dr Jonathan, the fact is that they think constitutional review, mechanically done through legislative work or national conference, can replace the need to devise a philosophical framework upon which the country’s government must be anchored if it is not to experience persistent disruptions or atrophy. Had that philosophical framework been devised and applied, the passion to build a great nation, one that eschews the kind of injustice rife in the land and eliminate the massive alienation and politics of exclusion undermining the polity, would have seized the hearts and minds of Nigeria’s rulers. Historians recognise this philosophical framework in Rome under the first two Caesars, Britain in Pax Britannica, the United States in Pax American (and its discredited variant, the New American Century), and Stalin’s and to some extent Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It also existed under Tito’s Yugoslavia, France’s Gaullism, Hitler’s Germany (in a perverse way), and contradistinctively in Bismarck’s Germany and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, among others.
The point is that there is a crushing and suffocating absence of knowledge-based leadership. Most Nigerian leaders have either been ordinary men or, if active and passionate, nothing more than practical men. They are not philosophical because they are unable to be. That philosophic state of being comes from the inside and is based on the depth of knowledge and understanding one has acquired. Constitution reviews do not teach, and cannot imbue, that essential quality of a knowledge-based or philosophical leadership. Recall, for instance, the drafting of post-war Japanese constitution, how Gen Douglas MacArthur all but framed it, though it was fleshed out by the technocratic expertise of men like Shigeru Yoshida. That constitution has philosophical underpinnings that have made it to endure. Recall also that the framing of France’s Fifth Republic constitution and its military doctrine, especially the now discarded Force de Frappe nuclear policy, were essentially the work of Gen Charles de Gaulle. Italy’s constitution did not have the benefit of that Gaullist touch, making its constitution often inadequate in addressing the country’s contemporary needs.
Dr Jonathan has transferred the responsibility for the making of a new constitution, as it were, to his national conference. Understandably, he has no original ideas to contribute, because his knowledge of history and politics, like Chief Obasanjo’s, is severely limited, if not obfuscated and jaundiced. Indeed, whatever the conference comes up with is unlikely to arrest the drift towards chaos, for the problems are so fundamental that this conference, not to talk of the Jonathan government itself, is hopelessly incapable of inspiring the structured and disciplined approach to national political renewal. Consider, for instance, the fact that Dr Jonathan has not ensured a legal basis for the conference. Worse, he has left the outcome of the conference open-ended, unsure whether it should be validated with a referendum or be a part of the National Assembly’s constitutional amendment process. Would this not create extreme dissonance in the system, and given the intellectual conceit and volubility of some of the conferees, would the stage not be set for a major political clash possibly ending in the deliberate or accidental extension of the electoral timetable?
A national conference may be underway and a new constitution in the works, but the country is proceeding blithely towards catastrophe with its troubles over kerosene subsidy rip-off, fuel subsidy financial abracadabra, rape epidemic, political violence, religious conflicts, pension heists, and Boko Haram insurgency, among others. There is no plan or deep thinking to fashion a way out of these symptoms of grave and precipitous societal decline. Indeed, we are in far worse trouble than we think. It is, therefore, urgent that we come to the realisation of the limits of Jonathan’s conference, and appreciate why we need to compel this government to do what is intelligently necessary in the few months it has left. Above all, there is a far more urgent need to vote a thinking government into office, or we perish.
