Tag: President Jonathan

Any constitution making for a democracy requires listening to all citizens as equal partners or stakeholders in the project at hand.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards… unlimited powers. Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.—Thomas PaineThe Rights of Man (1791)

Chief M.K.O. Abiola used to love a proverb during his struggle for restoration of his mandate after the annulment of the 1993 presidential election. The proverb goes thus in English: The goat of an old witch got lost. The witch was looking for the goat frantically and so were several members of the witch’s community looking for the goat. Neighbours of the old hag told her that she was lucky with the kind of neighbours she had, given the enthusiasm with which each of them was looking for her lost goat. The old woman replied: “I know my reason for looking for my lost goat and I know that each of the other persons looking for the goat has his or her own reason for doing so, but I may very well be the only person looking for the lost goat with no ulterior motive.”

Abiola’s proverb summarises in many ways the responses to the holding of a national conference since it was mooted by President Jonathan, and more, recently since the release of the modalities for the conference by the federal government. Responses from different parts of the country indicate that the national conference is like the lost goat of an old witch, the whereabouts of which elicited a battery of interest group actions from various parts of the community. To continue with the analogy of the lost goat, Abiola did not find his lost goat. Nigeria will have to do things right if it is to find the lost goat of its federalism. So far, the conference modalities released by the federal government leave no hope that the country is moving any closer to solving the problem that has hobbled its development since the erasure by military autocracies of the federal constitution on the basis of which the country obtained independence in 1960.

When President Jonathan suddenly announced on the occasion of the anniversary of the country’s independence in October his wish to convoke a national conference, various interest groups joined the debate about the rightness or wrongness of his decision. By setting up an advisory committee to assist him to plan the conference and in the process consult with Nigerians as citizens (not as subjects) to find out their wishes, various interest groups became enthused about the conference. Consequently, several citizens’ organisations and individuals participated with gusto at the interactive sessions with members of the advisory committee in several cities across the country. It is now not clear if the modalities released by the Secretary to Government a few days ago reflect the wishes of Nigerian citizens or only the interest of the managers of the country.

Now that the president has accepted to invite less than 110 representatives of ethnic nationalities to a conference of 492 delegates to discuss the country’s constitution, it is no longer too soon to find out whose interest the conference is designed to serve. Is the conference meant to serve the interest of stakeholders/super citizens or the interest of subjects/minor citizens? Up until the Macpherson Constitution, the colonial government prepared constitutions for Nigeria without any reference to citizens of the nations amalgamated to form Nigeria. People in Nigeria were not considered citizens then by the colonial masters but only as subjects for whom a constitution must be written by their masters or owners. Is Nigeria returning to that model over half a century after independence? Or, is the presidency adopting the political culture of giving limited suffrage to citizens without wealth as it was the case with the development of suffrage in Britain and the United States centuries ago? This question has become necessary in view of the undue weight placed by the federal government on stakeholders who range from former heads of state to military officers, former speakers of legislatures, traditional rulers, and professional bodies at the expense of the citizen’s right to choose his or her representative.

It is obvious that most of those in the category of stakeholders include those who contributed, collaborated, or condoned the re-construction of Nigeria away from the federal system of government upon which the country became an independent country in 1960. Is the thinking of the federal government shaped by the notion that it is largely the group that created the problem to be solved that can solve it effectively and that regular citizens are not central to the search for how they want to live together as diverse cultures in one country? Is the thinking in the presidency that those in power are not likely to achieve anything if they do not pander to the desires of those being referred to as stakeholders? Is it that most Nigerians at the interactive sessions with the advisory committee members indicated preference for a conference dominated by members of the nomenclatural class, referred to as stakeholders in the statement on modalities for the national conference? Or, do the modalities reflect the federal government’s unique way of responding to the country’s plurality?

Whatever the motivation for the modalities may be, there is little doubt that the relegation of ethnic nationalities to the back burner in a conference that is to work out how to make the country’s unity sustainable is the wrong way to go. The refusal by the federal government to allow regular citizens in the various nationalities elect all the representatives to a meeting to compare notes on how to make Nigeria peaceful, stable, and united may be tantamount to taking the wrong turn at the beginning of an important journey that is time-sensitive. Let us borrow the late Prof. Sam Aluko’s analogy to assess the decision to hold a national conference dominated by super-citizens or stakeholders as distinct from citizens: For a man who is going to Okitipupa from Ife to turn in the direction of Ibadan and thereafter chooses to speed up, the faster he goes the longer it will take him to get to his destination. Electing to convoke a conference of stakeholders in which representatives of ethnic nationalities are in the minority is similar to making the wrong turn and then choosing to speed up thereafter.

Any constitution making for a democracy requires listening to all citizens as equal partners or stakeholders in the project at hand. It is when choice of modalities are derived from what citizens prefer that such decisions can be deemed to be democratic, not when forces of centralism crowdout citizens’ wishes with corporatist whims. Even if the preference from the country’s managers is for territorial federalism (German type) and not for ethnic federalism (Ethiopian type), the locus of power to choose should still rest with the citizenry, not with faces of traditional or modern power or professional qualifications. There appears to be some interminable fear of ethnic nationalities in the decision to obscure ethnic representation with that of super citizens or stakeholders selected largely by the president and governors. The country has been through this route before, without being able to deal with the challenges of development and the building of a modern state.

The evidence of a conscious or subconscious effort to avoid confronting the fact that Nigeria is essentially a country made up of ethnic nationalities is a syndrome that is over half a century old and one that has put Nigeria at the disadvantage it seeks periodically to remove through a string of conferences.

To be continued