By whatever name the attentive public chooses to call it, restructuring is going to rank high on the national discourse until it is addressed forthrightly. But there is a formidable obstacle in the way: the National Assembly, which has never missed an opportunity to assert that the power to alter or revise the Constitution or write a new one rests with the legislature.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, told State House Correspondents in Abuja last week that, based on the Constitution, The National Assembly has the last say on the matter, no matter how loud or insistent the agitation and clamour for change.
President Muhammadu Buhari has also said that constitutional review belongs in the province of the National Assembly, though not exclusively. He has insinuated into the process the National Council of State, an advisory body that has no defined role under the Constitution and meets at the president’s pleasure.
This is a misapprehension that can only compound matters.
But both Dogara and Buhari have unwittingly identified a major roadblock to restructuring Nigeria.
The letter of the Constitution, it is true, vests the National Assembly with the power of review and revision. But we must never forget the Constitution’s origins. Conceived in secrecy and fashioned in unseemly haste, it was foisted on the nation by an exhausted military regime whose legitimacy at its departure was at best dubious.
The Constitution’s preface, “We, the people. . .” is a solemn lie, according to the best authorities.
In its financial transactions, the National Assembly has been as transparent as a brick wall. Nobody knows how much its members have elected to pay themselves. But the indications are that their self-assigned compensation is obscene compared with what obtains in the world’s most prosperous nations. Placed in the national context, it is downright unconscionable.
More often than not, the Assembly is on vacation. Even when it is in session, the rate of absenteeism is high. The financial cost to the nation is so huge that not a few thoughtful Nigerians have proposed replacing the present House with one whose members serve part-time, as in the First Republic, and abolishing the Senate outright, as the Republic of Guinea has done with great benefit to its exchequer but without loss in the quality of law-making.
This kind of arrangement may well be canvassed when the constitutional review gets underway.
Is it conceivable that a self-dealing National Assembly that has “the last word,” according to Dogara, will approve a measure, that will effectively terminate the outrageous compensation its members enjoy – N29 million a month, according to one account they have denied but not refuted with facts and figures?
As my colleague Ropo Sekoni remarked in his September 15, 2017 column for this newspaper, “A legislature that is afraid to disclose to citizens what it pays itself does not have the credibility to write a new constitution.”
When the National Assembly deliberated on a raft of proposals emanating from its own committees the other day, it rejected on the threshold a call for the devolution of powers, a measure designed to retrieve Nigeria from the centrally-administered state it had become and set it firmly on the federal path on which it was founded.
If the National Assembly could be so hostile to devolution, a central issue in any serious effort to review the Constitution, there is no reason to expect it to do little more than tinker with a document demanding comprehensive revision, if not wholesale re-writing.
On the other hand, in keeping with its propensity for self-dealing, the National Assembly approved proposals that would confer constitutional immunity on its principal officers and also bestow on them membership of the National Council of State.
The All Cross River Nationals Front has furnished another reason why the National Assembly cannot be the proper forum for restructuring the country. In a communiqué issued on October 6, 2017 at the end of its meeting in the Cross River State capital, Calabar, the Front declared that it was time to have “precise and free discussions” on the articles of association among the different peoples of Nigeria, “with all options open for discussion.”
More to the point, it stated that the machinery for negotiation cannot lie with the National Assembly “because of the imbalance in representation structured into the National Assembly by various military regimes.”
This imbalance, it should be added, accounts for the fact that Kano State has more than twice as many entrenched Local Government Areas (44) as Lagos State (20) which officially has roughly the same population as Kano State.
The path to a new Constitution, then, is blockaded unless the constitutional clause vesting the National Assembly with the power to amend that foundational document is rendered inoperative. The pre-eminent legal scholar, Professor Ben Nwabueze, has suggested suspending that clause to clear the way for a body with constituent powers to write a new constitution, while the National Assembly busies itself with making laws for the governance of Nigeria.
But will a self-dealing National Assembly assent to such a proposition?
Absent such an assent, however, efforts to give Nigeria a new constitution will grind on and on, through the state assemblies and back to the National Assembly. The task cannot be completed in the life of the Eighth National Assembly, nor perhaps even in that of its successor.
But unless the controversial clause is suspended, the task cannot begin in sound earnest, and the Nigerian state will stagger from political crisis to deeper political crisis.
From Himself the Igodomigodo, Osahon (Patrick) Obahiagbon
“My dear big brother:
“Let me seek your imprimatur to asseverate ab ovo, how anatomically mollycoddled I always feel whenever you have found the time out of your perspicacious, percipient and intellectually hieratic ensconcement to find out what could be spinning in my encephalon, on our nation state, in your hebdomadal cerebral lucubrations.
“Am in caboodle concordance with your very good self, Professor ltse Sagay and others who have didactically lampooned, serially lacerated and pooh-poohed the sodom and gomorrah that the National Assembly has become.
“For me really, what is even more of the moment and deservable of mental pabulum more than the humongous lucre has to do with what I stigmatise as the picaninny legislative chicaneries, parliamentary makossa gymkhana and pachucoism preponderantly striding the National Assembly on matters pro bono publico that I find myself most times asking the question: cui bono the National Assembly?
“I have always pertinaciously held the view that Nigeria’s democracy cannot be more elevated, dignified, ennobled and salubriously disposed more than its representatives and it’s up to the high priests, oligarchs and hierarchs of our respective political parties to put in place a party nomination configuration that will manacle all political gladiators, carpetbaggers, philistines and vacuous narcissistic epicureans who have no business in the sacred precincts of parliament either at the state or national level.
“Unless and until a sifting process is put in place we will continue to be saddled with political jokers, opportunists ,and jobbers and little wonder also that a resort to muscles, brawn, hiceps and biceps rather than grey matter are frequently deployed in the various hallowed (now becoming hollowed) chambers across the country.”
Even if I had not named my friend and aburo Patrick as the author of the foregoing correspondence, the attentive public would easily have divined his identity.
Every sentence, if not every word, is a dead giveaway, stamped as it is with his trademark hyperpolysesquipedalianism.
Nobody does it like His Magniloquence.
