THIS CONFERENCE MUST BE DIFFERENT! by Odia Ofeimun

 

Odia Ofeimun (PHOTO: ADA DIKE)

  “This conference” according to Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, Governor of Edo state and former President of the Nigerian Labour Congress, “will not be different from any previous conference.” I strongly disagree. I wish to assert the contrary: that this conference will be different; it will provide defining moments beyond all the shenanigans of the past; it will buttress ideas that were injudiciously outlawed from previous conferences; and it will enlarge the room for creativity beyond and above what was possible before. Even if there is some alchemy that can prevent it from taking place - in these days of mismanaged university strikes and purloined gubernatorial elections -  whoever succeeds in achieving such a negative feat will have to carry the burden of making it happen again, sooner rather than later.  Or earn opprobrium that will never cease.

I take it that the political skills needed to make  such a difference are actually within the grasp of the Comrade Governor and other skeptics like All-Progressive Congress leader, former Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who, in my view, should be prevailed upon to reconsider their positions and to join in the boil of the discussions. Especially now that, their party, the All-Progressive Congress, APC, has arrived at mega status, they must be assumed to have a broader position from which to make a difference. They have had enough experience in and out of office to appreciate the actual workings, as well as the dysfunctionality, of the Nigerian polity. So, even without gruelling research, they know how to navigate the issues. Specifically, for the Comrade Governor, who has only so many years left of his two-term tenure - he must be deemed to know that, if he misses this opportunity offered by the conference, he risks running out of time to make his input from the position of an incumbent. To boycott or postpone it, in the hope that a different political  arrangement will emerge that is better for his ken than the existing one, is to make constitutional reform too subordinate to partisan promptings in pursuit of political power. As for the other APC leader, Major General Mohammadu Buhari, he has had a historical baggage of being, once upon a time, too strait-laced against such a dialogue  in his pursuit of draconian change. He owes his many followers, and the whole country, a responsibility not to want to repeat the past in a way that could find many incumbents in his party joining or leading demonstrations for constitutional change, only after their tenure in office.  So to say,  the strategy of complaining ever so loudly about how the Federal Government and its agencies are taking more than their fair share of power and resources, while rejecting the chance to confront it as a solvable theorem, is not good enough.  Similarly, any  gloating over the failure of past conferences which offers no chance to brace alternatives, can be seen as a genuine bid to escape the rigours of serious debate.

Let me be upfront with the fact that I am not, by any chance, a prophet. Nor I’m  I a publicist for the Okunrounmu Committee that was set up by President Goodluck Jonathan to source modalities for convening a national  conference in the way that Nigerians would want it. I am merely one among perturbed Nigerians who, especially since the annulment of the June 12 1993 Presidential election, have invested a lot of passion into evolving superior arguments, and mobilizing bias, against precisely the kind of national conference that will go the way of all the previous ones. It is clear to me, from my interaction with other equally passionate Nigerians, that there is no better means of taking Nigeria seriously, at this time, than a national conference. The urgency of the issues demand the use of every opportunity that offers itself to dredge for, and fine-tune, answers that have been hedged and degraded by successive governments in our history. If any hidden agenda is discerned as accompanying anyone’s, including the President’s, commitment to the conference, the point is to build capacity against the implied ambush and to turn it into a reason for moving the conference from mere shadow to a viable enterprise.

Anyone who watched, on television, the clip of pent-up emotion at the meeting of the Okunroumu-led National conference Committee in Benin city, where the Comrade  Governor performed his nay-saying, would agree that the matter has gone beyond business as usual. It was precisely because the Governor imputed wrongly that this was an occasion for old-style grandstanding, that he ran afoul of the crowd at the meeting. Sad, it was, that he encountered the gung-ho discretion of a member of the panel, who had to resign, and who should have been thoroughly briefed beforehand to remonstrate with all citizens, including powerful Governors, in a language that is suavely parliamentary. Not shouting matches! The Benin incident gave a clear indication however that shouting matches will diminish as more and more Nigerians realized that scorning or dismissively upbraiding the idea of a dialogue is like throttling the throats of the majority of Nigerians who always wanted a national conference.

To join in denying or pooh-poohing  the wish of the majority is to compound the disappointment that many have felt especially since the failed National Political Reform conference organized by President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. That conference ended without a formal report. The result is that disappointed Nigerians, are now, battle-ready to stem untoward eventualities. They cannot be distracted by the possibility that President Goodluck Jonathan may be holding a national conference only as a means of deceit, or diversion. Nor are they unduly  harried by his presumed lack of sincerity and capacity to make good his commitments. They do not want to give up the great expectations and efforts that they had put into bidding for it. This is especially the case, as there isn’t, in the foreseeable future, a realistic alternative to the answers that they have found and would like to share with other Nigerians in a context that allows a proper negotiation  to be consummated  – that is, if negotiation is what it must take.

Arguably, it was because of such Nigerians that President Jonathan,  obviously did not need to be too pushy about setting out a clear  agenda. He had to leave it to the Okunrounmu Committee to try to pool  things together. All the better for a process that was not supposed to have “no go” areas. Even the no-go about the unity of the country must be seen, in this respect, as a matter of pooling energies in a goal-oriented manner rather than let sass and vitriol overtake a necessary project. In essence, Okunrounmu Committee’s job and its envisaged outcome in a formal national conference, had to be just in accordance with an unstated doctrine of necessity. It chimes with the zeal of those unafraid that their answers to the National Question will be tested under the fire of vigorous debate; those who  cannot afford to wait for the ground to be pure-science-perfect before seizing any day available to make their stand known; and, those who think their ideas are germane and viable enough to bear scrutiny.  Irrespective of whether it is a sovereign national conference, a mere national conference, a conversation, a dialogue or a deal of whatever stamp, those with ideas that cannot pass muster are  the ones expected to bow out in the face of superior argument. This is the way things are supposed to work in a democracy. It is  the reason that the very idea of a national conference has refused to die. Although very much knocked about, sidelined, backhanded out of the way, and then taken up, manhandled and aborted on the corridors of power, it has, like the mythical phoenix, returned again and again, each time more insistent than the last. It has now been roaded in a way that some strong body of opinion consider unexpected.  Still, may it be stated, and very quickly, that it was not unexpected by those who took President Goodluck Jonathan seriously enough to give him due credit for the attention he was paying to constitutional reforms.

The odd part is that the nay-saying has come from political leaders who had whipped up the country to a frenzy about the need for a conference. To be fair to them, they wished only for a conference that would be sovereign and not merely national. Their efforts for more than a decade, added up to the pressures that  caused President Jonathan, following Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Yar’adua, to stand for constitutional reforms of a nature that obviously has not registered well with the agitators. Quite intriguing is that the reasons that they have given for opposing or doubting the value of this particular conference, are actually among the best that one can have for jumping into the bandwagon of the national conference proposition. As I hope to make clear in this intervention, all the reasons being advanced by the nay-sayers  deserve to be accommodated as contributions to the impending debates because they raise questions that cut into the fears of majority of Nigerians who are however  bent on seeing that something good will come out of the current exercise.

Of all the reasons being advanced against the conference, the most upfront and oft-aired  is that the President never supported the idea until he suddenly turned around to switch on the Okunrounmu wand. This reason is, however, quite a figment of the sheer refusal by many strategically placed Nigerians to look at and participate in what was going on all the while. Those who allowed themselves to believe that President  Jonathan was clueless on all questions were mouthing their unbelief with too peculiar a smirk to pay attention. They took no pains, except in a highly formalistic manner, to follow the many steps being taken in pursuit of constitutional reforms.  Too stricken by the clueless washerword, they turned their backs on the whole process of constitution-making and refused to take it seriously. The ruling People’s Democratic Party, as a party rather than as executive and legislature, stood impervious with too strong a sense of entitlement to advert attention to it. Political parties of the opposition, obdurately in my view, failed to mark the grounds being covered and could not intervene where it would have been most deft to do so. Seduced by some kind of calamity physics, they appeared only to be waiting for things to fall apart rather than hold together. They could not see that the President was not running away from but was running with the idea of a National conference that many of them had all along spearheaded. 

The leader who has been most categorical about his misgivings and who must be thanked for unwittingly rousing a virtual national movement behind the idea of the conference is, of course, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu himself. The former Governor of Lagos State and national leader of the All-Progressive Congress, has acknowledged in a backhanded kind of way that he was indeed following the steps being taken by the President although he never expected those steps to be well-meant or pursued to logical conclusions.  In the statement that he made on his return from recuperating abroad, he averred  that the President opted for the “wiser and more cost-effective line of action when, in November 2011, he inaugurated the Justice Belgore Presidential committee on the Review of Oustanding Issues from Recent Constitutional conferences”. The President, according to him, appointed many eminent personalities to the Committee. After the Committee’s report on July 11, 2012, the President constituted a Cabinet committee, with the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, as the Chairman, to report within three weeks. Then: “Under the President’s watch and directive, a presidential retreat was held for Civil society organizations and professional groups at the Banquet Hall, of the State House, Abuja”. The Deputy Speaker of the house of Representatives,  Mr. Emeka Ihedioha, the Chairman of the House Committee on constitution Review, stressed the fact, at that retreat, and in the presence of President Goodluck Jonathan, “that the target of the legislature was to complete the constitution amendment process by June 2013.” When that process was actually completed, all the principal drivers in the National Assembly began to deliver reports to the public in a way that was, agreeably, parliamentary. This means that even while so many were talking about the cluelessness of the President, so much was actually happening that was being kept at arms length by those who should have been most enthused by, even if critical of, the process. Although the public has been kept in the dark about the Belgore Report, the minders of the amendment process in the Senate and in the House of Representatives kept faith with the public. So much work they have done to enable any concerned citizen to follow the pattern of the reconstruction of a new constitution in the light of the old! The usually unbowed and proactive media across the country have performed fairly admirably, in my view, and have enabled  all who are genuinely interested in the process to know how different is the work that has been done by the sitting National Assembly. The pity is that it simply has not registered with political leaders who sneer, rather than engage the work that has been done. This explains why among the reasons expressed for not running with the idea of the national conference is that there was a previous national conference whose report was never made public and which President Jonathan should have returned to. This position, taken by the Bishop of Sokoto, Hassan Mathew Kukah, Secretary to President Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference of 2005 is rather understandable because he does admit that he was ‘on top of his job’ and so cannot be expected to disavow his charge. But to have  Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, also demanding that President Goodluck Jonathan should simply have gone for the 2005 Report say something about transformations in Nigerian politics which should, on its own, inspire a national conference.  I think it is good to advert attention to it.

Rooting for Previous Conference Reports

Under normal circumstances, in a democratic society, the steps so far taken in pursuit of a new constitution would have been regarded as necessary, if not sufficient. First, whether to amend or  completely revamp the basic law of the land, ought to be regarded as firmly within the primary competence of the  national and state Assemblies. Unfortunately, the fourth republic never managed to pass the test of a people’s republic because it did not emerge from a people’s constitution. Consequently, the assemblies have been  generally viewed as mere contraptions, with a plethora of damaged mandates, painfully stomached by the people as some contingent means of removing military dictatorship from centrality. What rankles is that the military had compounded the situation by imposing a constitution which was not even made known until a government had been emplaced through a format of electoral frauds.

Not to forget: the originating fraud was set by General Ibrahim Babangida’s endless transition  which grafted, instead of letting develop, a two party system. He described the parties as one a little to the left the other a little to the right. The constitutions and manifestoes and even office designs of the two political parties were imposed by military fiat. After the dictatorship’s annulment of the June 12,1993 Presidential election, and the collapse of the interim sortie under Chief Ernest Shonekan, the process, as thumbed by General Sani Abacha,  produced a much-boycotted confab that yielded a five party option.  Bola Ige,  the assassinated former Attorney General of the Federation, very promptly and appropriately described the parties as five fingers of one leprous hand. All the parties soon proved him right by rooting for the dictator, General Sani Abacha himself, as sole Presidential candidate. By the time General Abdulsalaam Abubakar entered the fretwork of elections that took place outside any  known constitution, and even before many Nigerians saw the fraudulence in the elections, the Fourth Republic had become one to be stomached only as a means of getting in place a transitional government whose primary duty would be that of giving the country a new constitution. Or so the opponents of military rule supposed. Unfortunately, once in office, nothing could persuade the Born Again President Olusegun Obasanjo to do more than make the motions without a genuine move in the right direction. When he stirred, the constitutional reforms  that he put on the road were proactively vitiated by a much-damned third term agenda that almost gave Nigeria a civilian dictatorship by constitutional fiat. The worst came when the conference was boycotted by South South delegates who had been told by an opponent in the debates that if the inhabitants of the Niger Delta felt too incommoded by the oil prospecting and exploitation in the place, they should consider evacuation, or being evacuated, in the national interest.

The fiasco that attended the OBJ Constitutional reforms never allowed Nigerians to forget however that  the military had imposed the 1999 constitution but proceeded to say that we the people enacted it. This has continued to be held against the current Constitution.  Too many Nigerians, there are, with one stolid objection to the constitution:  that it lied when it said that we the people enacted it. This time, they want everything, therefore, to be done beyond mere amendments in order to redraft and remove the military overhang.  Even if it is merely to repeat the same provisions in so many different words, many consider it a must-do, in order to be able to say we gave it to ourselves. Except that the objections to the constitution, on this ground, are more than just about symbolism. Many are based on fundamental objections to certain provisions of the constitution which cannot be altruistically altered unless a fundamental rethink of the whole constitution is consummated.  Otherwise, there are truly contentious issues such as the wish by some powerful constituencies to (1) repeal the Presidential System contracted in 1979 in favour of a return to the parliamentary system that was saacked by the first military coup of 1966; (2) reverse the assault on Federalism that began with the declaration of a state of emergency in the western region in 1962 and was entrenched by military takeover which created a quasi-unitary structure forever crying for redress. There are other issues which, to the credit of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his associates, are spoken about within the need to uproot the ugly legacies of the past.

 Again, not to forget: as Governor of Lagos state, he had a long-drawn battle against impositions by Federal power which denied Lagos state her due revenue allocation from the Federation account.  He has expressed resentment of the fact that the Federal government controls more revenue than the 36 state Governments and 774 local Governments in the Federation. IN 2001, his bid to create, and he did create, Nigeria’s first Independent Power Project, the first public/private sector partnership in the production of electricity, was frustrated by the over-lordship of the federal government as derived from Exclusive powers that the constitution still allows. He recalls: “It was only after much difficulty that the Federal government allowed the take off of the first phase of the project, which is today generating between 260 MW  and 360 MW from Ikorodu”. Besides, too well known is his disdain for a Federal system of government in which a Governor may be called the chief security officer of his state but only the Federal Government can control the police. In spite of a Supreme Court ruling in AG Anambra Vs AG Federation, in which the powers of Governors to give orders to the police was affirmed, it has been held in abeyance. Why should a tier of government not have a means of securing itself?  Add this to the other bone of contention which resides in the exclusive powers of the Federal Government to make laws for the establishment of, and among other things, the running of railways. All Lagosians still rue the day that the metro-line in Lagos was decoupled as a Federal-guaranteed state government policy. Much indemnity had to be paid to externalities after the coup led by General Muhammadu Buhari  reached the decision to pay for the metro-line  not to be established. 

In the face of so many outstanding issues, it is not safe logic to argue that there is nothing new to add to the constitution or that all that need to be said have been said. Evidently, there is still so much to be said and so much said that has not been done.  This is one reason to be mindful, but circumspect, in my view, of the position of the Bishop of Sokoto, Hassan Mathew Kukah, Secretary to Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference of 2005, who is quite convinced that “it is going to be really hard-put to come up with the kind of report that will surpass the report that we produced at the National Political Reform Conference”. His views, as I shall soon show, actually yield more of a rationale for an urgent re-confabulation than it appears on the surface. As he relates it to the Vanguard on March 3, 2014:   “Every President comes with his own ideas about what he is going to do…….“ every President and governor has to come and do something different”  and “everybody has to come with his own pet project” leaving us “all stumbling and fumbling without a collective sense of narrative and clear vision of where we are heading…”. In a country that is therefore unable to “distinguish between individuals and how institutions  are built”, he  believes the problem that cries to be solved is that  there is no appreciable change in political behaviour.  Not even the moral restraints of the religions that Nigerians profess and confess, and the “clear instruments of restraints such as the judicial processes, the Police and the courts”, have managed to make a difference to behaviour in Nigerian public life. “We are”, he argues “…… not heading to anywhere” in terms of effectuating constitutional provisions, and obeying the law. Although “everything has literally been provided for in law”,  and we have ended up with an “encyclopaedia of laws” ….” with one of the biggest constitutions as a document that nobody is accountable to”, the country is still virtually not functioning as it should. So, for him, to make Nigerians accountable within existing basic law and constitutional profile, appears to be so much more the problem. Hence, his stand: that  “it is impossible to build a nation by just assembling good people” or merely  “having people gather for a national conference”.  Without a sense of history, expertise, commitment and moral discipline, he does not see what difference the drawing up of  a new constitution can make. As he sees it:  “The kind of freshness that you require from a transition never happened in Nigeria”; so that the key players in the system are still the same old elites, unchanging; with the result that  “in the next ten years about 90 percent of the Senate is going to be made up of former governors for whom the Senate is gradually becoming a place of abode”.  As  gerontocracy and corruption, and patronage by President, Governor, and traditional ruler, continue to over-determine critical personnel in the polity, including the delegates for national conferences, he wonders, and most Nigerians would agree with him, that something beyond the usual, something different, ought to be done.

Interestingly, Bishop Kukah does not quite claim that Obasanjo’s National Political Reform conference addressed the issues that he has flogged, and should, for this reason, be adopted.   He throws in a clanger concerning the unavailability of the report of that conference. Rather melodramatically, he tells the Vangaurd: “The greatest tragedy is that the Secretary to the Government of Nigeria cannot tell you where the report is. The President of  Nigeria cannot tell you where the report is. The Heads of Service cannot tell you where the report is. The cabinet office cannot tell you where the report is. This is why I keep saying that Nigeria is like a pilot flying without a black box”.  Except that, a question does arise: what are Nigerians supposed to do, if the report, which he says future constitutions will be hard put to surpass, remains unreachable?   And, since none of those who have had access to the report can tell, or have told, fellow countrymen and women what is so truly non-pareil about the Political Reform Conference, how are Nigerians to price what they have not seen above what they are determined to give to themselves? 

The truth, all the same, is that even if the 2005 report were to be found, a bare-knuckle demand for President Goodluck Jonathan to adopt it cannot be met without  a process, similar, we must presume, to the ongoing one. Rationally, no President would just pick up such a report and ask his People to adopt it, even if he were a dictator.  Especially for a report that has had such a chequered biography, it would require a people’s revalidation. If there are aspects to it that are wonky enough to put the back of people up, all the more reason to follow the route that should normally have been taken to turn it into common property. The short of it is that no  previous  exercise in constitution making, no matter how outstanding, could just have been chosen  and adopted by the fiat of the President of Nigeria. Nor should  the say-so of the leader of opposition or the chest-beating of the Secretary of the National Political Reform Conference be taken on its own terms. Unless the expired conference of 2005 was going to be recovened to finish its job, the redress could only come from another confab.  Besides, after the much that has happened on  constitutional reforms since 2005, nothing can remove the fact that the Political Reform Conference Report, is now just one among many attempts at a Constitution which must  enter a basket of wishes that includes other contending documents. Among the many that simply cannot be backhanded out of the way, are the two un-reconciled  drafts between the Senate and the House of Representatives and the PRONACO model constitution that some Nigerians, rightly or wrongly, consider a superior document to the Obasanjo Political Reform Conference Report. Quickly, it is worth recalling in this connection, that the PRONACO constitution was based on the stand of ethnic nationalities in the country. The late Chief Anthony Enahoro, mover of the first motion for Nigerian independence in 1953, and Professor Jadesimi Akande, SAN,  former Vice Chancellor of Lagos State University -  she who had braved  plenty of tear gas smoke during the struggle against military misrule -  was a great inspirer of the Pronaco pitch, as was Professor Wole Soyinka, the 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.  By bringing ethnic nationalities into contention for space in the Nigerian political system, they broadened the base for  a choice of constitutions. Also, they posed a challenge, such as the Belgore Report is presumed to accommodate, concerning the matching of contending documents, for purposes of reconciliation.  The question is: why luxuriate in the terms and textualities of only one out of several contending documents?  The answer is that any pressure for  a selection, or poaching if you like, must approximate a dialogue, a conversation, a conference, sovereign or supine. Or call it what you will.  Nigerians, who have no access to the documents may be forgiven if they take refuge in the credo of the philosophers who say the unexamined life is not worth living.  A  draft constitution that has not been seen or subjected to serious analysis, with its exemplariness amply demonstrated, deserves no enactment. 

not to allow hidden agendas pre-determine or over-determine how the rest of us must speak out for the kind of Nigeria that we want. Unless we are afraid to take our country seriously, the point is to use the conference to put our hopes for the future on the agenda and speak for the kind of Nigeria .

Good enough: the President did not just want to pull the answers out of his own resource control hat but insists that the process of legitimation and ownership of the outcomes must begin with allowing contributions from all Nigerians to determine the  agenda.  Even if someone has  found an answer that the rest of us can affirm without a quibble, the fair deal is not to assume it before the proof.  At any rate, the OBJ confab Report happens to be just one out of many failed conferences whose deserts we need not gloat over but pool and harness. Although all the conferences are not all of equal good, it still couldn’t have been smart political gumption to want to choose one out of the lot because each may have had some thought of value, still usable, that is not in the others.  The smarter thing to do is to be sure that something of great  value is not being thrown away in the process of making a division. This is an important statement, worth repeating, in that the least valuable of the constitutions could have had something, truly good, that the best of them  never had. In actual fact,  the least democratically endorsed of the conferences, the Sanni Abacha confab, was so massively boycotted and taunted for being a mere run of third elevens, that it was not supposed to be of any value. Still, it managed to yield some creativity that has boosted the lexicon of the 4^th Republic. Many Nigerians can recall that until Alex Ekwueme’s embroilment in that Abacha confab, it was not part of the lingo of our Republic to talk about the six geo-political zones.  There may still be other such ideas scattered between the various conferences, which ought to be harnessed. And, there may be  lessons to learnt if only in the negative sense of being forewarned; after what is known about  a country like Yugoslavia which set out  on the road to ultimate disintegration by taking each of her six geo-political zones more seriously than the country to which they all belonged. It warns  us that, carried too far, some ideas lead to a form of rotational civil war. The short of it is that, reaching out for all the usable ideas in the history of constitution making in our country and taking a measure of what must be scooped, harnessed or jettisoned is a way  to produce a constitution superior in fit and reasoning to the existing one.

Everything taken together, the golden rule about visiting earlier ‘attempted’ constitutions is not so much to help the President or members of the National Conference to choose one. It is about being sensitized to what ought to be added up,  as memory aid, or model constitution, and improved upon. In the history of constitution making in Nigeria, the most famous model constitution in this connection has to be the draft constitution which the Constitution Drafting Committee  CDC, inaugurated by the Murtala/Obasanjo military dictatorship, produced in 1978. The  CDC was made up of appointed experts, jurists and constitutional philosophers in order to avoid the mayhem of letting the electoral process produce any-comers, hurrah candidates, and educated touts without the requisite know-how. The drafting of a constitution is not after all  a job for mere joiners.  This was the reason that Obafemi Awolowo rejected his appointment to the CDC  apart from saying he was not an expert and was not used to being appointed by radio. It turned out that the draft which emerged from the committee was literally based, on his book, Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution, which he wrote while serving a ten year prison term for treasonable felony. It was the real spine of the work done by the 49 wise men after he, the 50^th, refused to be a member. The draft owed so much to that little book that it was a very immodest Awolowo who had to crow about how he was not exactly plagiarized but, lifted  without acknowledgement.  If Nigeria were a place of strict memory, the 1979 Constitution deserved, properly speaking, to be described as the Awolowo/Obasanjo Constitution  although the framers of the Constitution did not run with all the ideas that the author considered germane to their project. The bottom-line is that what the CDC eventually delivered for  transmission to the elected Constituent Assembly became the model or, more properly, the father of all the constitutions we have had in Nigeria since 1979. I should add that we have been having sundry agitations over drafting another constitution, each time a new government comes to power, because the suasions of Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution were improperly absorbed. Such that: every constitutional crisis in the country has been like a wake-up call to finish the unfinished job of the 1979 Constitution.

I might as well add that this is not the point, or the place to go into the fullness of the ideas that were either short-changed, truncated or simply abandoned by the CDC and successive constitution makers. Suffice it to note that the practical implications of the omissions and negative commissions of that military-gaurded exercise of 1978 are still so much with us. Every attempt at a new constitution has tended to flunk the necessity finish to the unfinished job. Perhaps, one of the boldest efforts, outside statutory or governmental promptings, that has been made to complete the job, is the Pronaco model which decidedly represents the ethnic nationalities as the constituent units of the Nigerian Federation. Modifiers there may have to be to the work that the PRONACO has done. But it is certainly the only people-driven option that may well be called a model constitution. It would be surprising if it did not enter the basket of drafts that the National Assembly has considered in the process of amending/drafting what well be a model for the National Conference.  Surprising is a word I would use because the PRONACO DRAFT and the Senate copy of the current reforms have similar tropes on the necessity to make the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State policy, which was Awolowo’s masterstroke, justiciable. Taken seriously, the process of matching the good and the necessary provisions in the model constitutions needs to be quite creatively elective in this manner.  As far as can be seen,  there is no reason why the method employed in 2014 should not  be an improvement on the past; especially, now that the interest shown by the President and the National Assembly have traversed the commitments of several  civil society organizations, and special commissions like the Belgore Commission.  What may  be unforgivable is to allow the contrived  mystery surrounding many of the reports to remain a mystery unexplained.

I suppose at this point it is fair to pay due respect to one great activist of the cause of having a truly well thought out draft constitution before convening a National Conference. I am referring to Professor Ben Nwabueze who has participated in the search for a model constitution since the end of the First Republic. He participated in the 49 man Draft Committee that Murtala Mohammed/Olusegun Obasanjo set up in 1978 to draft what became the 1979 Constitution. This season, although unable for health reasons to accept his appointment to the current National Conference Committee, Professor Nwabueze  will not be deterred from making his contributions. He has taken the easy-to-support position that a Constituent Assembly with a model constitution  will do better than one that could lose focus by re-arguing the old questions from scratch and with a high risk of self-distraction. To help out with the process, Professor Nwabueze, with the help of a Committee set up by The Patriots,  offered to grant his report to the deliberations of the Okunrounmu Committee. A good offer or bequest, one might say. However, it is certainly easier to accept his rationale for having a model constitution presented to or by the National Conference Committee than to accept his wish that the Federal Government should adopt the work of the The Patriots Committee as a virtual stand in for the whole exercise. It requires no special pleading to see that Professor Nwabueze’s over-confident faith in his own powers as a constitutional expert has overtaken his most challenging principle which is to make the people’s constitution a function of collective will. The point is that The Patriots Committee may produce the best draft constitution in the world but it would still be no more than a one-sided choice that simply must share a common basket with others. Even if President Goodluck were to choose to turn The Patriots’ ‘good job’ into the draft that the National Conference or Constituent Assembly must take as the working document, it would not wash as a document with authority; it would be just one memo among many. The bottom line is that the report of The Patriots committee is one more memorandum added to the basket of other memos and drafts that may be submitted to it.

In effect, the great value of Professor Nwabueze’s proposal is that it sensitizes Nigerians to the imperatives of a model Constitution whose existence must precede the sitting of the National conference or Constituent Assembly. That is: it reminds us that the basket of constitutions in Nigeria’s historical repertory must be reduced to a managed unit, a formal document, a model constitution, that  must be presented to the country for interrogation  and re-interrogation before possible adoption.  Frankly, not to have produced such a model is to have wasted the best shot of the current process.  Otherwise, making it a part of the necessary haggling, debates and negotiations that would be going on at the National Conference, is imperative for enhancing the quality of the final document and  turning it into common property. It is all about the ideas that great minds  have thrown up and people are able and willing to pool for the purpose of straightening out the complex problems that have confronted us as a country. To be fair to ourselves, we need to accept that a Committee of experts ought to be a part of the process of producing a Constitution. Americans went for their best minds. We, too, have great minds, that may yet be outed by the current process. We may well take them on board in the manner that the Americans cadged upon the best minds  to craft the best that is possible. Deserving every admiration today, they sought out  great thinkers and publicists who were able to achieve a language of resounding inspiration that has thrilled and empowered not only Americans but all humanity across the ages. Their constitution, which is quite a classic of the genre, is a fundamental social compact derived from great arguments and debates lodged in what are today described as Federalist Papers. They were the means of prior mobilization of consciousness before and during the great convergence of the people  to give themselves a constitution. To think of it: if those thinkers thought their opponents unserious, simple-minded absent-minded or clueless, they did not submit to the dross of what they thought. They went higher-minded and so left a legacy that political leaders across the ages have emulated as a way of taking their own countries  seriously.

As for the worldly-wise assumption that it is  not the  constitution but the attitudes of its operators that need attention, let me simply note that no  one has yet found a way of turning operators into angels. It is precisely because operators are not angels that we need constitutions in the first place.  For forms of constitutions let fools contend; what ever is best governed is best is an old aphorism that makes sense only in a country that has never had a formal constitution.  Otherwise, it happens to be true that bad constitutions can make good people go bad; or make bad people get worse.   Good constitutions, on the other hand, seek to guide and make people better. They instrumentalize restraints on appetites and bad behaviour. They point governance in life-affirming directions. And, where human foibles are particularly dense and difficult to move by simple clauses, good constitutions, yes, good ones, may spell things out at length, at the risk of amassing a wide-bodied constitutional document that taxes patience. No question: in truly bad situations, insufficient wording of constitutions could insinuate disabilities by leaving too much room for discretion and hedging. To get the right balance, the job of constitution-making, calls for hard headedness and creativity.

In  Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, the surprise is that up till the moment of the announcement of the Okunrounmu Committee, no serious analysis of the process and outcomes of the various attempts at constitution making  had been properly done by the great thinkers in our midst. Nor have the Secretariats of any of the political parties in the country adverted serious attention to the matter. Wittingly or unwittingly, their silence presents attempts at constitutional reforms as a governmentalized affair of the legislature and executive. In particular, the ruling People’s Democratic Party, sitting pat with an engrossed sense of entitlement and self-obsession, has been unable to look beyond its factional scuffles. Opposition parties, on their own, have allowed the constitution making process to appear secondary to the workaday gladiatoring for this or that office; as if they consider the acquisition of power, even within the current shabby conundrum of an un-restructured polity, more important than tackling  the constitutional obstacles to good governance.  The process has been treated with the kind of popular indifference that has been visited upon the  celebration of the Centenary (1914-2014), making Nigeria look like a country with only distracted minds in government and opposition. Indeed, both events have suffered similar snide dismissals without attracting genuine and serious assessment as to how the country has travelled in one hundred years. Or ought to go in the next. It is shocking that the penchant for nay-saying , without a demonstrated capacity to  propose alternatives to the positions of the government in power, has yielded a poor quality of decision making  across Nigeria’s political culture. It might well be said that culpable indifference is being serenaded as a virtue. 

 This is why it is important that there be model constitutions to reduce the sheer dross that might arise out of submitting to the debilities in the political system.   And by the way,  a model constitution serves more than just the purpose of helping to build up focus and guidance. It should  be seen as a means of reducing the time that ought to have been devoted to re-inventing the wheel. Three months of deliberation rather than the wasteful venture into one year or eighteen months of haggling and jousting, as some people have suggested, should be considered enough. This should rule out the highly distracted proposal made by the current deputy President of the senate, Ike Ekweremadu who imagines that the lifetime of the current governments in the Federation ought to be extended, against the  provisions of the constitution, in order to allow ample time for deliberations. He says “I believe  that the way it could work is, now, people have been elected for four years, let everybody complete the four years tenure for which he or she is elected. And then, through the doctrine of necessity, or a sort of jurisprudential approach, do some kind of transition of two years in which case, the present occupiers like the President and state governors, who are competing their tenures, maybe, will now do another two years that would end in 2017. You can see that those who are fighting the President, their complaint is that if the President gets  his second term, when they are gone, he will start to chase them. So if we all agree that that is a way to solve the problem, after two years, both the President and other Governors will now exit, I believe that the fear would not be there and there would not be much pressure on the polity”.

This is a case of overdone prudence if not prostration to the culture of derailment which, thank goodness, is not on display in the  draft/amended constitution that both houses of the National Assembly have produced in the current session. One ought to ignore  Ike Ekweremadu’s evidently alimentary plea but for the fact that it offers a chink of insight into the thinking at the apex of  decision-making  at the National Assembly. Is the country being alerted to the possibility that a national project so fundamental to moving out of current doldrums may be derailed by corrupt people on the corridors of power who would rather drive the nation to ruin than face justice?  Coming  from a stalwart of the National Assembly who is literally a prince of the very process that he appears to be knocking sideways, it is a warning that there are hurdles to jump and that drafting a good constitution may be quite a  threat to some people in whose interest it isn’t for solutions to come home to root.  Still, given that the end of the tenure of most incumbents is on the clock, any attempt to make the process go beyond the three months promised could create a nauseating credibility gap  between members of the National Conference and the country at large.  I think the job already done by the National Assembly is too much an advance for such  evident  retreat to be entertained. Rather than have tenure elongation, the new constitution should provide for a process of transition.  Tenures that are not ended by the commencement of the  new, may be covered in the manner  that gubernatorial terms delayed by unresolved cases at the election tribunal may be accommodated.  This indeed would be a true test of whether what one hopes will be a form of shared sovereignty between the National Assembly and the National Conference  can  function in a law-governed format. It is also in this regard a test of the viability of the constitutional reforms in the year of the centenary celebrations. We must remember that the high point of the recent centenary celebrations was the honouring of  military dictators in the same breath as leaders who came to power through elections.  This is not good enough; in the year of a national conference that is supposed to provide a platform for the celebration of democratic values.  Not Good Enough?  There are commentators who think that, as with his supposed volte face on the question of the national conference,  President Goodluck Jonathan’s  is so so intent on his candidacy for the 2015 Elections that he is reaching out in a bid to bag the influence of former military dictators.  This is Another way of saying that he has a personal dilemma to resolve that the National Conference is speaking to.

The GEJ Dilemma; Nigeria’s Nightmare

There is a sense in which a President who has refused to go by any rule of thumb and has chosen to throw the matter of constitutional reforms into the boil of a national conference in an election year, is a risk taker. If he once opposed a more draconian version of such a conference, he ought to be seen as having a genuine dilemma.  It means there is a dire necessity to be served that  he knows he cannot postpone. In essence, those opposed to the holding of a National conference cannot, in fairness,  be accused of  far-fetching when they claim that the President is seeking to use the holding of the Nartional Conference to get out of a logjam.  Let’s face it: It is too evident for words that there has been a logjam in his political party.

At the core of the logjam, is a private arrangement in his ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP, which its supporters consider to be superior to the provisions of the Nigerian  constitution.  It touches on President Jonathan’s presumed signing of an agreement that zoned the Presidency of Nigeria to the  North; at least for eight years. It is argued, in line with the zoning formula, that he was not supposed to take the slot allotted to the North in the family  arrangement under which he emerged as Vice President to Alhaji Musa Yar’adua, a northerner from Katsina, who unfortunately died without completing  his term of office. President Jonathan insists that he never signed any such agreement but Governor Babangida Aliyu, Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum, claimed he signed.  Jonathan’s presence at the meeting where the zoning formula was agreed upon is taken as the imperative of his commitment to it.. Although the national constitution allows the Vice President to succeed the President in such circumstances, his northern opponents raise the family arrangement above it to the effect that only a Northerner should  have emerged to complete Yar’adua’s term.  After the cross country uproar, fired by the Save Nigeria Group, which induced the so called doctrine of necessity that enabled him to become President,  they claim he was not supposed to attempt to run on his own steam.  But he ran and won. The error of running for that election which he was not supposed to run for, or win, has now been compounded, in the eyes of the defenders of the zoning formula, by his seeking to have a second term as President.  Seven Governors  out of  23 ,  threatened to leave the PDP, and five actually left, because he would not abdicate his right to run again. Incidentally, the five who carried out their threat including  Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State,  a Governor from the south south zone where President Jonathan hails from, have since joined the All Progressive Congress, and have taken with them a host of legislators in the National Assembly.  With the APC in what seems an unstoppable barn-storming, a virtual rampage, across the country, and with sundry defections to it from the PDP,  President Jonathan is deemed to need a secular wand that can halt what is threatening to be a runaway victory for the APC opposition in the coming elections.   How does he stem the  revolt in his party and confront the larger national constituency which has been made to believe that he is incapable of delivering the dividends of democracy?

President Jonathan has an even more discomfiting challenge. This one comes from former President Olusegun Obasanjo who has sided with the supporters of the zoning formula. Obasanjo, the illustrious mentor and predecessor, first PDP President in the 4^th Republic,  has declared that President Goodluck  Jonathan was allowed to do only one term and no more. An intriguing element is added by the fact that in his eight years in office as President of Nigeria, Obasanjo, an Owu from Abeokuta in the Southwest, was also constantly berated  for signing an agreement with the North that he reneged upon. As President,  Olusegun Obasanjo claimed that   he refused to sign the secret agreement that required him to bow to the wishes of the North.  Professor Jubril Aminu, stalwart of the Arewa group that negotiated with him,  has insisted that he signed the agreement. The odd part is that no one has said that Obasanjo was not presented with such an agreement to sign. The question is: why should there be a secret agreement, supposedly to make a Nigerian President perform only as the North wishes, each time a southerner has a chance to become President? How talk about living in one united country if we are hedged in by such underhand manipulation in favour of a geo-cultural cabal?  These are rhetorical questions. But they dredge communal memory  in the face of events,  such as the annulment of the June 12, 1993 Presidential election which was won by MKO Abiola, in what is generally described as the freest and fairest election in Nigeria;s history. The annulment of that election was carried out by  the military dictator, General Ibrahim Babangida, and his presumed Khalifa, or successor, General Sani Abacha pursuant to the interests of  northern echelons within and outside the army. Although Ernest Sonekan, an Egba Chief was inserted in an interim capacity  as  Head of State to mollify  outraged Yoruba groups,  it was with the death of General Abacha, Sonekan’s nemesis, and Obasanjo’s jailor,  that the northern establishment found the man that the  North could trust enough to hand over power to. Obasanjo fitted the bill in the course of General Abdusallaam Abubakar’s minding of the  transition to civil rule in 1999. In like manner, Goodluck Jonathan was supposed to have fitted the bill of a mild-mannered denizen of the oil-rich Niger Delta who would serve as  Vice President to a northerner and help to douse the flames of militancy spurting from guerrillas who were fighting against what Ken Saro Wiwa, the judicially murdered writer and Ogoni leader taught  Nigerians to describe as internal colonialism.

Surely, against such a background, and the opposition by a northern group to his candidacy, who would not agree that President Goodluck Jonathan a personal dilemma.  Except that the dilemma has an evident northern coloration when it is considered that some readings of the ongoing Boko Haram violence in the North East of Nigeria see its escalation as a way of giving President Jonathan a virtual hammer to swallow for breaking the power code in the ruling PDP. True or false,  the fact that  the five of seven Governors who successfully carried out the threat to cross from the ruling PDP to the newfound All Progressive Congress have advertised their open commitment to the search for a Northern candidate for 2015  cannot be ignored.  Besides, their movement from the People’s Democratic Party, has the logic of implying that strategic offices in the new party, especially the Presidency, would be reserved for  them. Indeed, without self-consciousness as to the parochialism underlying their cause, the Governors have made the President’s commitment to the family arrangement within the PDP appear the standard by which the whole country should go. The hard part is that as they criss-cross the country in search of allies, they seem, wittingly or unwittingly, to be insisting that their aggrieved sense of entitlement is superior to the constitution of the country. This logic suggests  that  the APC, the mega coalition being put together,  also has it as a primary dilemma to deal with the zoning conundrum.

To this extent, it follows that what may appear a Goodluck Ebelo Jonathan dilemma is actually not such a personal problem as one might think as first flush.  In a manner not so peculiar, it points to the existence of a fractured national psyche which  fosters a howling myth that says a northern leader who submits to the pleas of a southern suitor runs the risk of being seen by a large segment of the northern electorate as a betrayer while a southern leader who parleys with a northern leader must convince the masses that he is capable of the higher standard of public provisioning that they are used to.

 The national dimension of the problem  points to how the President’s personal dilemma is also an impersonal one that he ought to try to resolve not only for his party but for the whole country. Evidently, it includes but goes beyond the standpoint of his presumed ambitions for the 2015 Presidential elections, which opponents regard as his underlying rationale for pushing for a national conference. The real snag is that In the face of organized groups in the North, such as the Arewa consultative Forum, which extra-legally arm-twists political leaders and openly brags about watering down the mandate of every Southerner that has become President in the Fourth Republic, it is difficult not to feel that this is a dilemma at the heart of national politics and that  it touches on the integrity of the whole political system. In a Federation, which many have wished to construct on the principle that no side ought to be so powerful as to possess an over-bearing veto over others, it has  posed a serious question as to how the political system can be restructured to allow for a more balanced order. The grouse of marginalized minorities and disadvantaged majority ethnic groups in both the North and the South may sometimes  get shrouded in niceties but the heart of the matter is that the geo-political sense of entitlement sustained  by the northern mafia/cabal has been over-advertised to the chagrin of those seeking to build a sense of common nationality across the country. It is as if some people have no faith in the country and therefore cant find the patience to wait a turn in any arrangement because they have no faith in a common/shared future.  The history of the past hundred years offers no comfort  either; especially when it is realized that the amalgamation of North and South in 1914 was based on the need for the buoyant south to cushion the northern deficits. It was a case of internal colonialism under British auspices. In the first Republic, the  south provided the personnel for running state departments but all the strategic projects were placed in the North:  the railways extensions, military installations, a hydro-electric power dam, and an iron and steel industry.  In the military era, river basin authorities, became a means of meeting the same hegemonic fiscal profile. The civil war affirmed the pattern when the Northern pursuit of unitarism overtook federalism after an initial northern revolt  in 1966 against the unitary system  imposed by the coup makers of January 1966. A quasi unitary system was thereafter adopted as a national standard in a manner that ensured the dictatorship of the North over the country beyond the fact that Nigerian Heads of Government were mostly northerners and they exercised dictatorial powers to service northern hegemony. Every attempt at change, whether through the creation of states or change of the revenue allocation formula merely reproduced the extant structure. This was how come restructuring became the one-item agenda of the many disadvantaged groups since the annulment of MKO Abiola’s victory and the death of ken Saro Wiwa.  Somehow, the latter’s civil approach  lost its aura.  This led to the emergence of sundry militia groups in the Niger Delta  pursuing the same cause. The choice for the country became one of either a  permanent state of civil war, as was becoming the norm across the Niger delta or an  agreement to restructure the system, remove the lopsided colonial overhang, on the basis of ethnic self-governance. This was what Saro Wiwa  asked for because he believed that hegemonic groups were destroying the identities of many ethnic groups, neutering them in order  better to exploit them In the name of national unity. After his death,  opposition to military rule was conflated with opposition to northern power. The demand for a conference, the democratic option that had marked Saro Wiwa’s , struggle, was overtaken by militia groups, the uncivil  alternative, aimed at creating  a system of  devolution of powers that would remove the hegemony of one region over the central government  and  the power of the central government over  the states, whether in a military or civilian era.  One powerful notation in this struggle, which Saro Wiwa claimed he based on Obafemi Awolowo’s theories, was that every ethnic group, no matter how small  could and should be self-governing within the Nigerian Federation. By the same token, all the resources in the territorial formation of every ethnic group should be the responsibility of that ethnic group from which taxes are paid to the central government. It was the fear that powerful interest groups dominating the country would not allow any such agreement to hold water, that led Saro Wiwa and many in the ethnic nationality movements across the country to demand a sovereign national conference.

The demand for a sovereign national conference seemed at first only a bargaining position from which to bid for military exit from power. But it soon turned out to be so  fervently  taken to heart by sundry groups that a need arose to match the theory to the actual necessity to restructure the lopsided Federation. The controversial edge to the demand  is that it is not only linked to the necessity for devolution of powers from the central government . It is based on a redefinition of federating units, not in terms of states created according to the whimsies of military dictators but ethnic nationalities and language groups as originally proposed by Obafemi Awolowo in the forties in his book Path to Nigerian Freedom and re-stated in the sixties in Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution. True, restructuring for Saro Wiwa was a drift towards the confederal while Obafemi Awolowo never shifted from his Federalist perspective. Both were agreed  however that restructuring should return self-governance to  carefully delineated ethnic groups in territorial formation whose pre-colonial mandates were dismantled by British guns; and whose  post colonial dispositions have been assaulted by the internal colonialism of fellow natives.  The real news  has always resided in the fact that Awolowo who never stopped demanding states based on ethnic groups has upheld the most insistent plank for linking all the nationalities together through common welfare programmes. Along his line of thinking, and in  order to formalize a basis for a more equitable Federation, a virtual national movement of ethnic nationalities emerged, especially in he nineties, which was boosted by champions of the June 12 struggle after the annulment of the Presidential election of 1993. The indeterminate possibilities of this movement, along the North /South divide led to compromises on all sides that must explain why   Olusegun Obasanjo was removed from prison to become President of Nigeria. All opinions agree that it was a sop for the aggrieved Yoruba over the June 12 annulment. By the same token, the Niger Delta was being placated when Goodluck Jonathan was nominated as the Vice President to President Umaru Yar’adua. It was a case of mollifying the much marginalized oil-producing  Niger Delta  which continued to account for more than 80 percent of the national income.

On the face of it, what may be termed  the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan Dilemma, or the GEJ Dilemma, for short, is not difficult to grasp as a factor of the lopsided geo-political architecture that has fractured national psyche and given rise to the invidious manipulation of geo-cultural Mafiosi and cabals. It happens to be an architecture full of terrible imbalances and incongruities. It has raised  fear and distrust on a ritual basis. So  many serious-minded Nigerians agree  that it has not been  good for the North because it has not been good for the country as a whole. It has given rise to unheeded demands for mending; healing; recasting, and restructuring  of the national frame. Its markers have been quite vicious:  as evident in attempts by the North to catch up with the south, to halt the south, or simply destroy the advantages of the south in order to even up. It has witnessed crude attempts at truly invidious rotation of offices, barring southerners from strategic political offices, allowing unqualified northerners to overtake truly qualified northerners, not to mention the suborning of opportunistic southerners.  It has been quite a bone of contention in the negotiations within and between Nigerian political parties across the decades. As noted, already, even the APC mega coalition that has just been put together to confront the PDP is already saddled with it as a primary dilemma. Incidentally, the harshness of the dilemma has had a populist myth attached to it. It posits that if the southern leader agrees with a northern leader, he has to worry about placating the masses of ‘his’ people who have always demanded different standards of public provisioning. And, if the northern leader submits to pleas by the southern suitor, a large segment of the northern electorate will need  to be mollified against seeing it as a betrayal.  In the face of organized groups in the North, extra-legally arm-twisting  political leaders and openly bragging about watering down the mandate of every Southerner that becomes President, it was indeed time to look at the structures that have always permitted such a sense of entitlement.  It  has made President  Jonathan more right than wrong in bidding for a national conference that can give northerners and southerners  a sense of a common/shared future.  Whoever knows Nigeria and believes that this country has a future should very well have seen that it was impossible to have a President come from the Delta who would risk failing to accede to the demand for restructuring which President Umaru Yar’adua, a keen man of northern extraction, had begun to address so pointedly and fervently, before his demise!

Let’s face it: such a conference handled aright, would  cause many politicians to shed brickbats and grandstanding in order to confront real issues. Those who love sheer waffling for electoral effect  would need to be induced to think, for once, in ultimate rather than transient terms. Irrespective of political persuasion, and what we might think of  delegates appointed to the National Conference, the dilemmas to be faced are so real that reality wont be able to lie against itself.   Even if the delegates chose to interpret their mandate as that of laundering the President’s image and wishes, the gravity of the issues  to be resolved have too implacable a persistence that every attempt to deviate from core issues would be  always like when a third term agenda was roaded that ruined the unique historical opportunity offered to President Obasanjo by the National Political Reform Conference.  Thus the key issue, and what must count most is that hidden agendas are not allowed to pre-determine or over-determine how we speak out for the kind of Nigeria that we all want. Unless we are afraid to take our country seriously, the conference offers another opportunity to put our hopes for the future on the agenda. Good enough:  the President did not just want to pull the answers out of his own resource control hat but insists that the process of legitimating ownership of the outcomes must begin with allowing contributions from all Nigerians. The truth is  that no ideal situation exists for that to happen. No ideal situation is ever really likely to emerge that leaves all and sundry ready to have a go at a no holds barred kind of conference. Since no one has yet found an answer that the rest of us may affirm without a quibble, the responsibility to work hard at  an agenda for the achievement of common standards of perception and action must be seen as primary and imperative.  No gloating over the failure of past conferences can be treated as a fit contribution to the debate. It calls for the continuation not an abandonment of dialogue.

It posits a goring irony: in the sense that opponents of a national conference, whom we must continue to thank for rooting the idea in popular memory, are the ones refusing to gloat over the inexorability that their efforts have occasioned.  Although so many of them may be lining up to disavow the turn of events, the truth is that they had done too much that is praiseworthy to inscribe their demands as imperatives. Their stand on the question, however, deserves to be subjected to due interrogation and re-interrogation until raised to a plateau of understanding, from mere metaphor to solid ritual.  As such, while they must take the praise for rooting the ideas which they are appearing to disavow, they deserve to be made  responsible for disjunctions in their own advocacies that have sort of wrong-footed their capacity to participate in the current outfitting for a national conference. One disjunction that easily comes to mind, and which cannot be left alone because of its influential dredge of charisma and sensationalism, is the notion of and demand for a sovereign national conference which has been rested but does need to be properly laid to rest.

Sovereign National Conference as a Dead End.

The most frequently asked question about the Sovereign National conference has always been what does it mean, and what are the modalities for achieving any of its meanings? Because neither the meaning nor the modalities were ever properly spelt out at any time by its protagonists, the snippets of information and the rather outlandish concepts that shot up led to more questions. Such as: do they mean it or are they merely using it as a means of bargaining with opponents and those whom they need to beat at a power-shift game? These questions, not rhetorical at all, indicate how  advocates of a sovereign national conference were perceived because they were never really clear about what they meant and how they wanted it. This is one reason that  President Goodluck Jonathan’s presumed opposition to the idea of a sovereign national conference must not be equated with a supposed opposition to constitutional reforms.  A national conference simply pursues a legacy that passed from his two predecessors, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Umaru Yar’adua with the latter being unable to actualize his approach due to ill-health.

What is inscribed as Jonathan’s  volte face or change of heart simply falls into the earlier acceptance of the idea of a non-sovereign national conference such as made possible the holding of the National Political Reform Conference under President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The hard fact is that while campaigning for a sovereign national conference, the  protagonists failed to anticipate it in relation to the mechanisms for realizing it. They failed, for instance, to engage sovereignty as it  must be encountered in the process of a genuine authoritative design of a people’s constitution.  The dictionary meaning of sovereign as one possessing supreme power and authority in a state, lacking external control, obviously impressed them a lot. To organize a conference with such a pre-possessing thresh was a goal so attractive because it implied the removal of the overhang of military dictatorship which had been the bane of the political parties and the national conferences held in the past. It happened that the national conferences held under military auspices had their reports tinkered with by the military minders before promulgation. It was in order to avoid this ugly past in line with the pursuit of a future full of  freedom of speech and association that the agitators embarked on their campaigns.

I need to insert a little autobiographical detail at this point because  I played some insignificant role in moving Bola Ige, as Minister of Justice of the Federation, towards the necessity to purge the word sovereign from the appellation of the conference. Over the NADECO years, I had mounted several personal missions to debate with him and to argue against the absolutely dangerous and unprofitable implications of calling a National Conference sovereign in a country like Nigeria. Once, at a Law School event, seeing him together with Papa Abraham Adesanya, the leader of NADECO, I made a pitch for it. It was something to smile about when, down a couple of years, many members of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, to which the Attorney General belonged, began to see him as a turncoat because he de-emphasized the word sovereign after he joined the government of President Obasanjo as Minister. I saw Bola Ige’s change of emphasis as realism against the romanticizing of sheer political affray.  

Nonetheless, the notion of sovereignty inherent in the demand for a conference always pointed to an ultimate status, a classical denial of half-way houses, in pursuit of an All or Nothing viewpoint. Sovereignty for many proponents of a national conference has remained implacably unitary and indivisible. A sovereign national conference, according to their lights, could only be a factor of all the people massed in a direct relationship to a goal, or cause. Power automatically becomes` authority. At its most insistent, it is simply People Power, not based on mere representation but a direct assertion of a common stand and purpose by all the people. Truly romantic.  This, in my view, was always the source of error. It brooked no possibility of renegotiation once the imprimatur of authority was stamped by the massed populace. Sovereignty so structured was believed to work only as direct democracy; with all the citizens of a polity massed into one fist of  morality, conscience and common purpose. A more liberal notion may allow the mobilized mass to choose or elect those who will speak for the people. Whatever they say is taken as immutable law. Besides, no existing government was supposed to  interfere with choosing delegates for the conference, or impose no-go areas, or tamper with the outcomes. 

One convert to the idea of a sovereign national conference, Auwalu Hamisu Yadudu of the Faculty of Law at Bayero University, Kano, writing for Leadership Sunday on 27^th October, 2013, has done quite a yeoman’s definition of such a sovereign conference which I find too seductive to pass without something of a judicial notice. His writes: “We call upon the National and State Assemblies to, as a matter of utmost urgency, undertake steps to amend the constitution to recognize the convocation of an SNC with full executive and legislative powers. Various provisions of the existing constitution should be amended to “temporarily” suspend relevant sections and chapters dealing with the exercise of executive and legislative powers at Federal and State levels by an Act of NASS which also spells out the procedure to be adopted by the SNC during its deliberations and the specific steps to take to subject the new constitution to a referendum for final adoption. To give effect to the convocation of an autonomous SNC, as envisaged above, it should follow that current holders of executive and legislative offices at both federal and state levels must relinquish all such powers immediately upon the coming into effect of the Act referred to above. This is necessary to avoid giving the incumbents any undue advantage in influencing the SNC , which has perennially been the bane of constitution-making exercise in the past”.

It is fair to quote Yadudu at length because most supporters of a sovereign national conference tend to follow the pattern of his reasoning even when they differ on details.  The bottom line is that a sovereign national conference, in this conception, is possible only where a coup, a mass uprising or the willing abdication of an existing government, has made it possible. After the people have taken over as a conference, a demonstration, or a coup, no government is considered morally efficient enough to stand up to it. Rather it commands all bureaucracies and governments.  All previous constitutions, laws and by-laws become subject to its dictates.  This reasoning is endorsed by our other legal luminary, Professor Benjamin Nwabueze, who argues that “It is a contradiction, both in ideas and in terms, to demand a Sovereign National conference when a sovereign government is still in place and in control; you must first displace and emasculate the latter as was the case in the eight African states of Benin, Togo, Congo, (Brazzaville) Niger, Mali, Chad, Gabon, and Zaire, in the period 1990 and 1993.” Very close to the skin is the case of People Power in the Republic of Benin, our next door neighbor, often touted for its success. It happened when Mathew Kerekou  agreed to let it happen. He bowed to the will of the people, abdicated, and lived through the tenure of an elected successor and survived to fight a democratic election that brought him  back to power after an interregnum. Generally, those who demand such People Power, with a Kerekou cut, have imagined President Jonathan going by such an example.  Except that the successful examples neither  exhaust the possibilities nor can they be truly invoked as exemplars of the form.

The many historical exemplars that can be fished for support include the classical models usually invoked -  the French and American  Revolutions. Distinguishing between the two allows for differentiation between SNCs that choose leaders and those that elect delegates – a fact that may well explain why the French incidence of People Power led to terror and the American one produced a liberal democracy that has lasted more than two hundred years. To think of it, more recent exemplars of an SNC, beyond the French overseen cases in Africa, are to be found in the jasmine revolutions that swept North Africa in recent years. All of them unfortunately ended up the same way.  Begun as a massing up of people into one fist of power, the jasmine revolutions moved from mob-ocracy, some form of rule by demagogues to one primed for liberal democracy but unable to rise above old habits of People Power. All of them left civility in the hands of some closet Messiah or Machiavelli who had to navigate eras of elective violence that have taken time to abate. This, definitively, suggests that the means appropriate to the removal of a military dictatorship cannot, or should not be equated with the instruments for the delivery or redesign of a polity that already has a means, an electoral means, of actually changing governments. The latter, puts some weight on the necessity to evolve a law-governed process rather than follow  the format of  draconian rule in one fell swoop. In essence, while the draconian approach to sovereignty requires the emasculation of an existing government, the alternative fore-gathers a process of popular sovereignty that can only be circumscribed through representation of the same form and source,  in popular sovereignty! This has to be based on moving as close as possible to an existing basic law or constitution. It cannot be annulled by a mere mob. Genuine change may be deemed to have taken place only if you do not require another mob to change what one mob had made possible.

The short of this is that a mob that wishes to go beyond existing law to exercise  legislative and executive power ought to be firmly distrusted until it has produced a constitution  on the basis of which it wishes to operate.  Even if the leaders of a sitting government agree to abdicate,  it must be seen as unpatriotic and downright irresponsible to grant leeway to any group, simply because it happens to be vociferous, or armed enough to remove a government that the majority of  the people voted for. The grounds for allowing such a removal or sacking of a government must itself be law-governed or it is anarchy being coveted in the name of change. In effect, those who wish for a revolution but have no patience for the rule of law, may be accused of despoiling the basis for trust between prime movers and the masses who need to be empowered to exercise work-a-day political gumption. That is to say, beyond merely humiliating real or imagined opponents, there are huge and complex particularities to be met in order for a national conference to be possible and amenable to the goals of freedom whether or not an existing government is sacked or simply asked to step aside or collaborate in being pushed sideways to allow issues of sovereignty to be confronted and resolved. Those who see issues of sovereignty as purely unitary and outside a divisible and shared or sharable format are the ones who may feel uncomfortable in such circumstances. Strictly, the idea of an elected government agreeing to collaborate in solving  such a problem is already a sign that there is a general consensus about the seriousness of the situation. Distrust for a government arising  either from a lack of probity in its origins, a lack of integrity in its operations as a legislative or executive organ  or simply a lack of faith in its existing disposition as a representative of the people is what is being asserted and accepted when such a collaboration exists. I would see it, properly speaking, as an agreement to guide the route to genuine democracy without conceding to anarchy or submitting to fear of failure. 

In this connection, it is worth repeating that members of an elected  National Assembly or a revolution-induced Constituent assembly which insists on exercising work-a-day routine power, as if things were normal,  ought to be roundly distrusted in terms of their capacity to offer a long-term view of national possibilities. Until they have, by a conjoint arrangement,  drafted and sought approval for a constitution in accordance with which the governance  may thereafter be carried on, a country that gives away authority without seeking guarantees is giving away too much. There must be specified, quite early in every such arrangement, how a government can emerge, be maintained or sacked in order for the word sovereignty to be meaningful. This is a basic minima for a modicum of stability in the drive for change in a troubled society. What ought to provide grounds for ceding sovereignty to any group is the fact that it has been elected to draft a Constitution. If however they have not been elected, but appointed or cannot be elected because of debilities un-cleared in the way of normal everyday politics, then the route to a genuine popular disquisition and eventual approval of the constitution must be stated.  Sovereignty, so to say, is not just about an election but following the law that governs the process. If as happened with Obasanjo’s National Political Reform conference, a hotchpotch of appointees and sundry cronies  were roped into the process, it merely added a Presidential commission, a mere technical service, to the making of a constitution. What devalues the process is if the product of the appointees and even elected groups is not subjected to debate and approval by the  elected representatives of the people for whom the constitution is being drawn up. The sheer need to have a properly elected, not merely selected or appointed body, to service the interests of genuine electors is simply to avoid too strong a smell of the government of the day, or an over-determination by any power, or principality, that could impugn its integrity.

To believe in an election in the Nigerian situation however requires a prior assertion of governmentality. It amounts to granting leeway for a legislative process that ante-dates the National conference. This, in my view, is an interesting concession for any advocate to make who uses the Sovereign Word. In 1998, a similarly contentious situation arose after the death of General Sani Abacha when the new military bosses grew quite diffident on realizing that  no one could trust the military hierarchy to play the umpire in the transition to civil rule. Some form of legitimate authority beyond issuers of decrees was being considered which would be acceptable to pro-democracy groups that, unfortunately were divided on how to proceed. As it happened, NADECO stalwarts did not want to see the military playing determinative roles. Except that they had no notion of how to constitute an umpire for the job.  One group asked for a virtual conclave of NADECO elders in concert with  selected elders from all the six geo-political zones. Another group, a more radical flank, with which Gani Fawehinmi was identified, insisted on a normal electoral commission without saying how and who could legitimately set it up. The unanswered question, during that season of distrust of military dictators was: who will set up the electoral commission and within what  kind of transition process?  In the end, by not agreeing with the NADECO elders, the  radicals voted for a military solution by default. The soldiers, already well-primed, simply played the sovereign and handed down a constitution that we all now rue. I suppose the same thing is happening today in the debate over a role for the National Assembly. 

The National Assembly, and the National conference

All things taken together, what is most challenging about the current debate – to go or not  to go to the National Conference; to amend or have a new Constitution - is that the popular indifference to constitutional issues, amounting to a form of self-forgetting,  has been allowed to overtake necessary responses to the work of the National Assembly. By the way, both the Senate and the House of Representatives had virtually completed their constitutional review processes and were merely waiting to reconcile their reports when President Goodluck Jonathan made his supposed volte face.  It follows that those who have been discussing the role that the Assembly could play, without considering the work it had already done, are either shadow-boxing or hyper-inflating their right to ignore the reality on the ground. All the same before looking at the work done, it is important to note  that it is only by going with the suasions of  advocates of a sovereign national conference that the National Assembly becomes completely irrelevant. Unless the advocates are able to constitute a power of their own, and the 4^th  Republic is vacated through abdication, or some such emergency -  a patently unnecessary expectation in the present circumstance -  it will have to be accepted that only the National Assembly can provide the rational and necessary basis for electing or appointing people to the National Conference.

Outside the presuppositions of a sovereign national conference, only the current national Assembly can serve as the repository or depository of the decisions of any national conference because it is only within the laws made by the National Assembly that elections  or appointments into the National conference can be within the law. To be strict, this gives powers to the National Assembly which many canvassers for a sovereign national conference cannot abide because it would give the actually existing legislatures the power to amend the new constitution. This is a matter of logic that only a revolutionary situation may upstage.  What would be illogical, in my view, is for the National Assembly  to have no say about a process that it has to mid-wife. This is where the bone of contention is.  As it happens, an actually existing government that  decides to be a participant in national renewal through constitutional reforms  does need to shed some governmentality in other to involve civil society and a rather re-defined sense of the people. I think that President Jonathan’s appointment of a National Conference committee was supposed to do this.  It was the idealistic thing to do if only to go beyond the Assembly’s seeming pursuit of re-drafting/amendments  of the constitution as an internal memorandum on the corridors of power.  In a way, it was the closest thing to a puristic approach. Left to its logic it could have spelt the necessity for popular participation through electoral choice of delegates.  But a genuine purist approach? Just like the sovereign national conference  is for the people to choose their representatives, free of selectorates; that is, without the load of government appointees to contend with, and no post-facto amendment of the constitution after the National Conference shall have finished its  job. The minimalist definition of sovereignty on which it is based is supposed to set the legal framework for the job to be done and for the outcome to be promulgated as the basic law of the land. And, without undue interventions by any principality or power. 

Unfortunately, the situation had long been trumped by  factors in the Nigerian situation which advised against a purist’s approach.  Professor Nwabueze realized that this was unavoidable. Hence, stepping down from the position of radical champions who prefer existing governments to abdicate and submit to a sovereign conference, he, who for many decades had been in the forefront of garnering efforts towards a law-governed process,  simply could not imagine it without the necessity for the National Assembly to pass an Act that specifies the modalities for the national conference to take place. Until this is done, he believes the implied exercise of sovereignty would  stand on shaky ground, without muster, thus creating grounds for  supposedly authoritative interveners to tamper  with the ultimate decisions of the conference.  Standing on the platform of The Patriots, Professor Nwabueze has deployed a pressure group warrant, shared with PRONACO, to insist on there being no intervention once during and until the constitution is passed to the people in a referendum. Somehow, unlike the classical view of People Power, which requires  an autodidactic approach by the massed populace, Nwabueze’s law-governed approach prefers an electoral process to determine representation.  It is a popular approach from which there ought to be no reason to  dissent. Except for the clamant reality: that it is simply not possible to have a truly free and fair electoral process that can  represent the sovereign people of Nigeria in 2014. It has to be faced that one reason that many had agitated, all the while, for a sovereign national conference is the necessity to have a way of starting from scratch.  From scratch?  Yes. Because no method of representation can be truly fair in a country where there has been no dependable census, and hence population is indeterminate, or based perennially on gestimates. This happens to be a country in which there is no proper voter’s roll; and the electoral commission is unready for the urgent task.  At short notice even if the federal government did not have a problem with purse-strings. What exists is a situation of  historical gerrymandering that has witnessed a semblance of civil war in the  creation of regions and states; with marginalized or under-represented minorities jostling with disadvantaged majorities to scrape for recognition at the behest  of veto-wielders. As will be made obvious presently, it does not matter which criteria are employed to determine representation. Using existing state governments as constituting the units of the Federation is like building on the injustices that ensured that many minorities could not have protective cultural geographies of their own as states until the civil war broke the jinx but by allowing the whimsy of the militariat in office to determine who got what and where. Rather than follow the lines of ethnic geographies,  as so many advocacies have pursued it, the power of state lobbyists and agitators, highly dependent on knowing the warlords who can  have tended to over-determine the day. Such that like colonial officials in their scramble for Africa we still have fractions of  the same and contiguous ethnic groups in different states. If it ogles or attracts tribalism to create states along ethnic lines, what makes it better to put people of different ethnic groups together in the same state while those with whom they have affinities are scattered in other states. The latter approach  makes for the true crucible of tribalism as people of different ethnic backgrounds grate against one another instead of having a formal conversation at the level of culture or affinities deriving from other elements of shared history, . Nor is it much better whether the count of local governments is used. The almost arbitrary creation of local governments according to Federal fiat has made a habit of incongruity  between one state and another.  Not a fair basis for representation.   Both the number of states created and the local governments that go with them are determined by exogenous factors, more applicable to the struggle for ascendancy between regional hegemonies struggling to have more representation than the next geo-ethnic, or geo-political competitor. The tendency if for some states to have                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            local governments whose number is meaningful outside only as part of the struggle at the at the Revenue Allocation Commission.

 Isnt this why those who have used the same electoral system to get to power  have agreed not to rely on it in the bid to get delegates of the right calibre?  I think so. And, I think It is a case of consensual appreciation:  that unless care is taken, thugs and hurrah dirty jobbers rather than people of intellect and civic responsibility may become the chosen; not because the people want them but because they are better at purloining the process of recruiting leaders and spokespersons. Surely,  a process that allows everyone to blame the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission for cramming the Constituent Assembly with third elevens and outright misfits, could be psychologically satisfying to critics waiting for failed conferences. But better to avoid the blame game by inserting an element, not so populist, that allows the best hands in the country, through a reputational assessment, to join with the products of popular  associations.  The issue is therefore not about choosing the purist approach and going home to sleep. There is no purist approach to pick in 2014 across the Nigerian situation. It is a telltale of how distractedly we have travelled in the past one hundred years that it  is almost like being in 1914.

It is about making-do with  the role of facilitator, or half-way house, that the National Assembly can play, without turning it into a scheme of overarching sovereignty in the hands of the government in power.  This has always been the source of fear and worry for supporters of a sovereign national  conference who, when push comes to shove,  do accept the idea of  allowing the National Assembly to play a role. Of course, to have always distrusted government involvement and control of the process is about  fear; the fear  that  governments are known to have about losing control. Recently, it showed  in the refusal  by  President Jonathan to wait for the Okunrounmu Committee to report the views of Nigerians before embossing the role of the National Assembly as the eventual recipient of the national conference report.  The same factor led to the jettisoning of the electoral path whose mounting costs advised against elections and yielded the resort to nominations and appointments of delegates. Consequently, the  whole process has been left  open to justified accusations of over-determination by the Presidency.  Still whatever is the case,  the two issues – the intervention by the National Assembly and the handpicking of delegates -  need to be separated for clarity of treatment in order not to lose sight of the purpose of not only having a people-oriented constitution but one that emerges in a law-governed format. 

I would hazard an intermediate conclusion at this stage to the effect that if the National Assembly does not set a legal framework for it, the National conference will remain essentially a mere Presidential commission.  I do not need a lawyers say-so therefore to express the philosophically germane position that the existing sovereign, whether damaged or not, acknowledged or not, has more rights than the unknown sovereign of the future. We cannot wait for the sovereign still hidden in the belly of time before responding to the existing representative of the sovereign people of Nigeria. If the existing National Assembly is responsive to and responsible to the atmosphere of popular distrust of its powers, it  will have fulfilled its duty by laying a basis for the interrogation and re-design that the National Conference is supposed to pursue as a basis for future mandates. From the standpoint of the desired non-interference of the government  (legislatures and the executives) in the process of drawing up the constitution, the great offence, would have  to be taking  refuge in an electoral process, so distorted by purloined census figures, improper voters’ roll and an unready electoral commission. The result could actually be worse compounded. Or, should the President have waited to fix the distortions before continuing with the constitutional reform project? Certainly, not.

What cannot be downplayed is that it is the extant debilities in the Nigerian situation which we need constitutional reforms to remove that also stand in the way of creating the instruments  for removing them.  This is  why there is no law-governed alternative to the necessity for the National Assembly and the State Assemblies to make laws for the order and good governance of Nigeria while the process of constitution-making goes on apace.   Damaged as we might claim its mandate is, the National Assembly has been making laws that we  obey in spite of the fraudulence that we all decry in terms of the emergence of the 4^th Republic. Properly, therefore there can be no gainsaying its power to set the stage for a national conference if only for the purpose of enhancing its own work and the  public’s ownership of the eventual outcome. Since the National Assembly had already written its own constitution,  and it can therefore be said to have  a position against which, and within which, or beside which, the National conference must perform, it follows that In  a matter of strict procedure, the National Assembly ought to have the power to wish that a forgotten item be inserted in the Constitution, or that a major omission or misfit in the provision be corrected. There ought not to be a legal or constitutional disability preventing the Assembly from re-presenting a matter for discussions by the National Conference. Should the national Conference or a Constituent Assembly disagree with the National Assembly, it merely provides a  basis for an appeal to the ultimate sovereign: the people. This is when the imperative of a referendum, which so many have canvassed as a finale of the process, must be invoked.

A referendum should however be deployed sparingly because it is only after  people have exercised the gravity of thought and spelt out all due provisions, that a referendum has a place. It is not a cure-all. It makes a lot more sense however if the issues involved demand a Yes and No kind of answer. All the chips will have been allowed to fall where they must in arguments and debates marshalled in carefully and painstakingly ironed out provisions. Those who want a referendum as a cure-all without going through the grueling maul of arguments and debates get a democracy of mobs. Such a democracy dissipates itself whenever the particularity of an action  has to be aligned to abstract provisions. Hence the proper way to go is to ensure that in pursuit of right or popular causes the terms of engagement are properly defined rather than taking refuge in transient and, profitless grandstanding. I repeat:  before it gets to the virtual adjudication by a referendum, it ought to be understood that the National Assembly can intervene after the Constituent Assembly or National Assembly has done its job. It  is too timid an attitude to insist that the body that literally mid-wifed  the process, should not be allowed to intervene at the end of the process.  Past experience should tell us that there are actually instances when second thoughts exercised by guidance groups, such as the military, have saved the people from suicidal proclivities. So to say, not everyone of the interventions of the past were as bad as the regimes that made them. 

So far, it has in my view performed a patriotic duty by re-drafting or amending, as some would argue, the constitution of the Federal Republic.. if the National Conference so wishes, the re-designed/amended  constitution may be pooled in a basket of other constitutions for the purpose of enhancing the quality of the current exercise. This is not even a novel proposition considering that it already happened under President Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference. Necessarily, a constitution that must last needs the input of a proactive populace whose ownership of the final document should begin with  conversations, between the present and previous exercises.  There is no use hedging: the hard realities of the Nigerian situation demands a spelling out of the modalities through which the goals of a truly national conference could be attained.

 The promoters of the cause should not consider it enough to have pent up rage and fervor to deal with those whom they consider anti-people. Anger is not enough. The Americans realized this. Hence they took the pains to produce what, today, are called  the Federalist Papers. They did not want to come to power before letting their fellow countrymen know what is, or should be, in store for all.  They had to conscientize themselves so as not to act blindly into the future. They proved it that describing the future, in good detail, must be at the heart of the exercise. And, they were lucky. They could afford to have a rather short statement of self-evident ideals as a constitution because the ideas of their founding fathers had already become common property for a sizeable body of the people. Unfortunately for Nigeria, the  founding fathers whose positions are fairly well known are not on the ground to rouse a stand. It boils down to not merely harping on the formula of one man one vote, or sacking a colonial government,  but reasoning out ways  of putting a government in place as a genuine meeting of minds rather than a stop-gap akin to a military coup or a mob installation. The lesson we must take from the history is about pooling a body of ideas, in serious programmatic terms,  for a democracy of free peoples.

The more the people involved, the better for the process. The sang is this: since an election is certainly not on, and only associational nomination of people and appointment of delegates by the Presidency is in order, it leaves room for perpetual doubting of the document that will emerge.  In essence, it cannot be called a constitution until it has gone through a process akin to the one prescribed by the existing constitution for amending the constitution. It may not satisfy the yearnings of the majority of Nigerians who want a constitution  of a particular distance from the military overhang. Nor would a referendum at the end of the process truly represent a corrective. But in my view it would be a fair description in itself of the bad situation in which Nigeria has been steeped and which, in the first place, created the necessity to amend  the constitution or draft a  new one. Realism does dictate why for instance even in the best of times Nigeria cannot have a proper census, a meaningful voter’s roll and therefore a fair election. The very reasons that a sovereign national conference is impossible are the ones that make everyday electoral politics a nightmare. If the 1999 election was based on a fraud that the military perpetrated, there is no guarantee that any one that takes place today will be any better.  The short of it is that it is impossible to represent a country that cant count, and has a history of using highly incongruous impressionism  to determine  what exists. Thirty six states created by the fiat of dictators cannot be used as a basis for representation in a positive sense. The number of ethnic groups in Nigeria have never been officially verified at any time in one hundred years. In fact, there appears to be a taboo against attempting it as the fiasco of census counts have proved. The sheer drive of elite self-selection has become the rule in a way that would make even the notion of a constituent assembly a joke but for the fact that having been so used to approximations, people acquiesce in the results that emerge. In a computer age, with biometric possibilities that could lay the matter to rest, partisan politics and  geo-ethnic disruption masterminded by warlords of regional and ethnic groups have made it impossible to build the kind of bureaucracies that could do it right. In this regard, it may well have to be admitted that the format of the National Conference  is not to be judged by the form of representation that has driven it.  It is more about how the final document, in sync with what has been attempted already by the National Assembly  can be turned into a means for making the right pre-requisites possible. To demand a people’s constitution when the people cannot be counted as involved is truly a misnomer. 

The question is what manner of decision-making can be envisaged in the circumstance which is acceptable to all?  Experience of past conferences suggests that if decision making is consensual, the sharp differences that exist could predispose the conference to stalemates on truly fundamental issues, as happened with the National Political Reform Conference in 2005?  If it is based on a simple majority or two thirds majority as the case may be, it raises the question of who the represented are in a situation where there was no election and the groups handpicked cannot be adjudged truly representative of the society.  In the circumstance, if we admit that the best minds on the matter may not emerge from an electoral process based on the shenanigans associated with the electoral machines in our climes, the one proof of transcendence of the debilities that cannot be changed is that a document emerges from the National conference which is superior in thought and applicability to what we have seen before.

Beyond this is that  the draft committees could get absent minded or over-zealous or even vindictive in a way that challenges the National Assembly to take a second look before a referendum. Those who do not allow for this possibility are refusing to agree that even a silly National Assembly elected by a corrupt electorate can spot a damaging provision or that members of the public may spot a dereliction that needs urgent attention before passage into a people’s constitution. In my very well considered opinion, allowance must be made for this. Even if the National Assembly chooses to play a spoiler’s role, it is still quite within its rights as a body constitutionally empowered to mind the process of law-making. A national Assembly was not elected to re-draft even if it can amend the old constitution. But in the event that a constitution is being drafted during its tenure, its power to amend the constitution cannot be completely annulled. One possible scenario, not the worst, is that it may discover incongruous provisions in the new draft  constitution that it may not have had a chance or even the presence of mind to point out during the deliberations at the National conference.  Should this happen, the temptation would objectively be strong for the National Assembly to seek to play a role similar to that of the military dictators, from Olusegun Obasanjo to Abdusalaam Abubakar, who tampered with the draft constitutions before promulgation.

The fear of this happening under a democratic dispensation should however be no cause for panic. This is because it can only happen, in the context of a National Assembly that, by nature, is not like  a military set up. Procedurally, the National Assembly must debate its own objections to provisions in the draft constitution openly before it can alter a clause.  Since the two arms of the National Assembly  had already drafted their own constitutions at the beginning of the process, they can easily be seen to be acting too much as  judges in their own cause  if they seek to make an amendment after the work of the National Conference. Thus,  should there be a fundamental disagreement between the National Assembly and the National Conference, it brings forth, so arguably, the circumstance so much anticipated or dreaded, of a common claim being made between two facilitators of national sovereignty. The difference between the two merely creates the rationale for a referendum. Democracy is as easy as that. If people are not unnecessarily contrary or even when they are, there is no escape from going to the people,  the ultimate arbiter. There is no need to split hairs over whether the ‘sovereignty’ of the National Conference has primacy over and above the amending powers of the National Assembly. In the present circumstance of a hand-picked National conference, the National Assembly, much put down, has primacy. Both must be deemed however  to be subject to the ultimate rationale of the sovereignty of the people exercised in a referendum. The choice between a Constitution  with amendments proposed by the National Assembly, and the other without such correctives, even if indeed there are flaws that could be disruptive of stable government, should be seen as part of the risk of democracy.  Having to decide this in a referendum would be the ultimate test of how we value the institutions that we create for good and bad times.

Once modalities for arriving at the ultimate people’s constitution have been dealt with in this manner, we come upon the substantive issues at the heart of the constitution itself. It is about what the constitution provides for, and what programmatic relevance they have for moving Nigeria from its current state. This is also about assessing the constitution not just as the basic law but an imagined way of life and a means of creating national identity and development. I dare say that for many Nigerians, the supreme goal is to have a constitution that will not merely hold the national cow for a few to milk. To achieve this without regressing to the structural defects in the national architecture, that is, without entering the civil war syndrome built into Nigerian politics since 1914, is the real challenge. Taking 1914 as the year when foreign and internal colonialists entrenched the corruption and impunity that has become a way of life for all Nigerians, what kind of constitution will help remove the debilities in 2014? 

The National Assembly and the Constitution Review

Although not completely unimpeachable, because there are many rough edges and unsavoury peccadilloes buried in the work that they have done, much of trhe work done by the National Assembly, as revealed in the media,  has proved to be quite commendable.  In no particular order, the Constitution produced by the Senate provides, among other things, for the following: – stripping the President and Governors of immunity from criminal liabilities while in office; granting autonomy to local governments; making social welfare programmes like free education and free health justiciable; separating the office of the Attorney General from that of the Justice Minister; Splitting the office of the  Accountant General of the Federation who now serves a five year tenure and  creating another office for the Accountant General of the Federal  Government who serves for four years; making all Nigerians indigenes wherever they have spent up to ten years outside their places of origin; a constitutional role for traditional rulers in a National House of Chiefs; moving items like the railways from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent List; allowing for independent candidates in elections to break the monopoly that political parties have had over recruitment of leaders; all  revenue by any federal organ, agency or entity to be fully appropriated and  no expenditures without proper appropriation;  budgets of such entities as the CBN, NNPC, NIMASA, Customs and Excise etc now to be laid before the National Assembly; and the elimination of the States Independent Electoral  Commissions, SIECs, if only to ensure that governors no longer have overbearing impact  on their tenure and effectiveness.

With a little more interest shown,  those agitating for true federalism ought by now to be nodding or snapping at the skill with which members of the Assembly packed or failed to pack the Concurrent List with so much that used to be in the Exclusive List. They, who have been the main champions of constitutional change, ought to be alerting the country as to how crudely, cavalierly, or  valiantly, and craftily, if not intelligently, the good work has been done. Or not done. We ought, by this time, to be debating fine points  that are in agreement or not in agreement, with preferred ideals. Also, it was time to have started grappling with the rough hewn nature of the controversy buried by the Senate  the answer to Mahmoud Mamdani’s famous question:  how long does it take for a stranger to become an indigene? Surely, there is quite a snag in  the fact that citizenship based on culture has been very cavalierly mixed up with citizenship based on law. Until the full acre of the Senate report comes out this a controversy awaiting its day. All the same, I would argue that it removes nothing from the fact that the senate has  done a far reaching job that  is fully backed by justiciable  welfare programmes  which should require the Federal government to shift coupons, at citizen’s rate, from one state to another as population shifts from one state to another.  This should remove the ugliness of quota systems and federal character overkills that have made nonsense of the agitation for such welfare provisions. At a time when  internal migrations, organized by shadowy dirty jobbers, in the wake of Boko Haram have caused enormous security scares in various parts of the country, the full implications of the indigene clause in the Senate’s  draft  should by now have been receiving re-examination in public discourses. There is, in my view, one related controversy that the Senate may have unwittingly dragged Nigeria into, and from which much heat may be generated into the future.  This concerns the insertion of a National House of chiefs in the Constitution. I  intend to address it in the context of the status of indigenes, ethnic representation and the role that the Fundamental Objectives and the Directive Principles of state Policy play in ameliorating the worst cases of ethnic competition and animosities. To start with let me simply note at this stage that it is a matter on which taking a position ought to be the concern for all who believe that all Nigerians must have a  common, shared future.

It would seem on the surface that those who are enamoured of a National House of Chiefs are not aware that the implication of having it is to change the whole mould of the constitution as it exists.  It does not require trumpeting to assert the definitive attack  that it constitutes upon the Republican essence of the current Constitution. By providing a role for traditional rulers on a national scale, in a National House of Chiefs, it impugns the provisions which proffer non discrimination on grounds of birth sex and religion.  Chiefly-power is about discrimination on the basis of  birth and sex and religion.  It comes down to the same level as the support for child marriage which the senate has projecteered  in the name of empathy with religious codes. The insertion of a House of Chiefs is  however worse than the marriage booboo;  because it has the implication of making the issue of birth and place of origin, a trying displacer of  equal rights for all citizens. A number of provisos it might necessitate to deodorize it once it is allowed to sit in the document  but that is like giving it a place to stand to contest Republicanism which speaks across all ethnic groups to all Nigerians. Without being a retriever of grand universal values, the House brings to centrality the miniscule selves and parochial provincial moralities which tend to be inward-looking and will burst their nature, truly get denatured, when they are uprooted and have to accommodate larger moralities. Better one chief than many is the law of all traditional rule. By turning the chiefs away from their individual traditional turfs and making them playthings of supposed national projects, we would  be detracting from, not enhancing their place; creating  grandeur that beggars effectivenss.  #

Let us not forget the habit of the colonizer who invented traditional ruler-ships for republicans to belong to,  and destroyed the civility of many well-groomed and humane patriarchates by linking them to a supposed national grid called indirect rule.  It bears emphasis: it was a case of paying obeisance to a disfigurement of tradition. It was and has been  favoured by many well-to-do Nigerians who want not to be mere citizens but lords over fellow citizens. The attendant implication is  that it involves  zany creation of royalties all over the place that have displaced rationality in public life, encouraged undue Bigman reflexes, and multiplied corruption and impunity in our society. Deceive ourselves, as we might, most of the traditional ruler-ships, although not all, happen to be extracts from the slave-hunting ethic that  preceded  but were simply normalized by  Lugard in the name of indirect rule. Unfortunately, it is not royalism of the old traditional types that we are confronted by but one that has been radically flawed by Lugards indirect rule  system. In a lot of ways, they were instituted to destroy genuine royal authorities in favour of ones that allowed easy subjection to colonial logic of the protectorates. A revamped house of chiefs, even if with a purpose that is supposed to transcend the enumerated lapses will have to be  based on trying to get a new generation  trained to embrace the glories of actual slave societies that had become rampart all over Nigeria, with slave-hunting wars mounted by near and distant neighbours well beyond Frederick Lugard’s amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorate in 1914. The still-ongoing disposition of many chieftaincies  is to live up to the supposed glories that reserve a benign morality for self and a pernicious one for the other. It is no use presuming that they are being brought together precisely to eliminate the perceived  features. Although not a full fledged legislative body, it will merely be interfering with the place of the regular legislature and getting in their way. Why frame  all of them together in a supposed national role when in fact they are better off minding their citizenship of distinct cultures.

It was time to recall that some traditional rulers in the past used closeness to colonial power and to the military in power to corner a sense of entitlement that takes so much from institutions in society which we all ought to support away from the worshipful approaches that a National House of chiefs must sustain. As they are bolstered these days by ex-Governors, Generals, and Permanent Secretaries, and Professors retiring into royalism, they tend to appear modernist but that is the real catch.  The more they play the game the less valuable they are. The awe of traditions is not about aping modernity. Essentially,  stools are necessarily schooled to look inwards and  to acquire living space in a zero-sum manner. Some , having acquired greater-society ambitions for royalism  do actually forget that the value of tradition is that it does not always have to move  with time which is why the centrality they seek is against the times, and  against the spirit of freedom that the people  need in order to compete in the modern global setting. As a subtext, let me note that the kind of  national ambitions that the house of Chiefs could provide happen to be very strongly antithetic to the disposition of minority ethnic groups. They get roped into an evident trade union of traditional rulers in a way that enhances the place of the individual but reduces the self-regard of the nationality to which they belong. For many minorities, as in the first Republic days of Regional House of Chiefs, it would be more a means and a theme of slow pacification that goes beyond the defence of tradition.  Its standards of grandeur are necessarily based on hidden polemics of what Ken Saro Wiwa called internal colonialism.  Many of the chiefs that still have respect for their own people should know that joining the trade union, which is really what it amounts to, is learning to accept the overlordship of so called majority ethnic groups. What minorities have been saved from by creation of states which has given them protected geographies for the development of their cultures will just be thrown  away for a mere coin that is not as good as  bronze. It can bear some emphasis: the relationship between traditional rulers of majority ethnic and minority ethnic groups.,  it is a good recourse as  tourism for many chiefs from minority ethnic nationalities;  but it turns  into a case of living in a fool’s paradise when it  is realized that national role playing is no more than theatrics, individual self-aggrandizement  for chiefs. It  amounts to self-abnegation for their people in the long term.  Admittedly, it may be considered a thing of value by those who  believe that a trade union of traditional rulers, as organized very effectively since General Sani Abacha’s  era,  is good for the chiefly exchequers. But is it good for the traditions, the communal sense, that they are supposed to mind? Beyond its place as a means of primitive capital accumulation,  it is merely a place for playing  up competitive and distracting ethnicity, a majority ethnic group trick for  mobilizing the country away from the advances that have been made towards a commodious Federation by many ethnic groups. The truth is that identities do not have to large or small to matter.  And chiefs who are up to protect them should learn not to denature them by over-ambition.

Let it be faced squarely: chiefly  cultures are ethnic cultures. These days some get so ambitious. They want to export it. Some in the name of identity protection would not bow to chiefs outside their natal domicile. They want to live outside their indigenous areas but worship only in the traditional shrine. A house of chiefs merely could seek to correct this behaviour but it is not constructed do so in Nigeria.  Better that they feed  into the national grid as elective, not compulsive fixtures. They need to move in ways that give a wholesome sense of occasion to communities. Left at this level, of the ethnic and language groups, as they largely have been,  the informality  enables them to interact with their people within a communal sense of occasion. They tend In such circumstances to  have respect that is also respect for their people. It is  devalued  when  they are made to jostle with outsiders to the community in ways that sap communal self confidence.  It is for this reason that it is always preferable to leave traditional rule outside the modernist principle which is based on a larger sense that was never anticipated by the local syndrome of rituals tied to local history. As for the relationships that the whole community must build with other communities, it is certainly a matter covered by the basic law of the land in terms that are within the purview of the National Assembly; even as presently constituted. A traditional ruler does not have to like the political party in his domain but as a matter of realism, whatever needs to be dealt with at the level of formal law-making is the province of the elected member. Traditional rulers who will not do business with the member elected by his people can await the turn of another political party, but it is an unnecessarily provocative stance for a chief to want to strike out on a political line that his people oppose. Properly speaking, he can guide his people but not go against a decision that the people have reached. Part of the power of a traditional ruler lies in this informality. Those who wish to exercise political gumption are welcome but they must jump into the fray and boil of partisan politics. In the 21^st century, that is where the representational principle finds its niche beyond the informality that ought to remain the source of the authority of chiefs.  The cost of giving chiefs an institutionalized role in the constitution is that they draw citizenship into a cul de sac that they cannot move society out of within the principle  of hereditary entitlements that will always mark their presence. At a time when the status of an indigene is being re-defined in terms of a decade of residency, it  negates the national ethic which we are supposed to be building if a House of Chiefs is superimposed upon the liberal notion and principle that removes citizenship  from being hostage to birth and ancestry.

Every ethnic or language group that wishes to have its chiefs jostling beyond the community is actually not asking for a traditional ruler but an ambassador  of intrigue. In the first place, Chiefs that mind the affairs of their people should have so much to do if they are genuinely interested in their communities. There are grand issues of a fundamental nature such as providing support for the generation of  proper orthographies in  languages and dialects in the domain of a chief, keeping the history of the people in good writ, encouraging the translation of great knowledges of the world into the languages of the people, and  supporting museums and antiquities and  genuine researches into the way indigenous knowledges have advanced or not advanced.   Tourism these days is trade and industry. But it is first and foremost culture.  True, all these task areas are , properly speaking  no longer jobs to be reserved  for traditional rulers but  performances for well funded universities and government departments.  At a time, when the university idea in Nigeria is under pressure from traditional rulers who think that the indigenous status of lecturers should be what grants professorships rather than the high standards that are universally native to the idea of the university, it would be a tragedy to over-play the need for an over-seeing role for traditional rulers in the areas of knowledge production.  Even the ambit of today’s knowledge and culture industries , institutionalization has gone gone beyond the ken of  chiefdoms. But this is because it is impossible for an institution based on a hereditary principle to assert  a merit principle without going beyond itself.  Making them go beyond themselves, in other for it not to happen in the full glare of that denaturing, it should be a pursuit that relies more on the informality that has always been part of its strenght.

In the twenty first century, a house of chiefs is a misnomer because it clearly says that some citizens are more important than others.  Those who wish to ride into the future on the basis of such a code may not know that they are hiding a major explosion for children yet unborn to deal with. If free education, free health and full employment are being given to the people and you are telling them, at the same time, that some people have rights that they cannot have, wait for it, it will be worse than Boko Haram when it explodes. In the way that all the powerful traditional rulers have cornered the military/political complex in the country to create a House of chiefs  for themselves, other citizens will be obliged to mobilize across the divides to create roles for freedom-loving  and equity –oriented citizens in the civic space. The point is that we are likely to have more and more children who demand for money from the national treasury to be devoted to giving every child a chance in the world. It is something that should concern the senate. Otherwise the senators should be asked  what problem they want to solve with a House of Chiefs that cannot be met by the Senate and House of Representatives based on universal adult suffrage? Since we all know that  no ethnic groups, or may be only one in three hundred, recruit leaders by universal adult suffrage and balloting,  it pays not to clog the future with a chiefly search for grandeur, beloved of colonial dividers and native military dictators, which openly undermines democratic promptings in the national culture. 

Language and civic culture

I wish to argue that one of the great misses in our constitutional history is the poor mind devoted to issues of language. The senate simply follows the historical cue, Or queue, if you like. It is interesting that the senate is not providing for all Nigerian languages to be treated as national languages, each in its domicile, as they do in China, India and South Africa, federal nation-states that have no shame about their nationalities but have the good sense to let each stay within traditional turfs without bidding to traverse ethnic boundaries in the pattern of the slave-raiding and slave-owning societies smashed, but unfortunately re-configured for the colonial estate by British guns? Evidently, the new National House of Chiefs, if allowed, and I hope not, will expand the power to achieve old games of internal colonialism on the pretence that they want all the chiefs of the nationalities together in a supposed  national role.  It is no good. What a free people need to play up are not offices based on birth, but one that secures individual citizenship,  allows every language group,  to be declared national languages in the face of a lingua franca that does not impose disabilities in matters of citizenship.

I do not imagine for one moment that it is an easy matter to resolve.  It happens that in the discussion of nationalities, these day,  some people count languages whilst others are satisfied with ethnic geographies. We do also know that some language groups in Nigeria are not in territorial formation and have therefore been making special demands on every nationality they encounter in the country. Relating tongues to governance principles  across political  geographies has its problems.  One enlightening encounter threw a little more light on it for me when Kole Omotoso, author of JUST BEFORE DAWN, the biography of Nigeria in faction, delivered the occasional lecture at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. He gave  a helpful lead in which he has it that “The number of individual languages listed for Nigeria is in total 529. Of these 522 are said to be living languages and seven are dead languages. Of the living languages 22 are institutional, 80 are developing while 358 are vigorous, 20 are in trouble and 42 are dying. Incidentally, the not-so-well presented minority report of the Okunrounmu National conference committee, authored by  Solomon Asemota, Esq, SAN,  states in section 3 that “There are 389 identifiable Ethnic Nationalities in Nigeria”. His definition of a nationality problematic simply from taking one significant example.  He treats all the nine sub-groups in Edo as distinct nationalities. The surprise is that the same principle that makes this possible is not applied to either the Yoruba or the Igbo  which are treated as one undifferentiated nationality.  Whether they have a different language twist that could very well be regarded as a dialect in the sense in which Esan and Etsako are registered as Edo nationalities, is not considered.

What makes the issue quite germane to the current discussion is that taken through to the matter of representation, which is where even a role for traditional rulers has its place,  the language question opens a wide vista, quite old hat, but so eminently inexorable.  Translated into political terms, the first clamant question is why in Nigeria there has been such disrespect for languages although love of culture is trumpeted by all the warlords and pillars of society at the drop of a head gear. From the stand point of how it impinges on the work of the National conference,  the isssus come home to roost  in the reality of languages groups that are marginalized or unrepresented in crucial matters because they have been ousted from their own turf by political gerry manders. I take it from hard fact that the Ekiti a sub-group of the Yoruba, large enough for a fraction to have formed a state in the southwest has another fraction in the Middle Belt which has been agitating to join its southwestern siblings for a century. What it does show is that it is not even enough to know the groups to be represented; it matters what the groups to be represented wish to be represented for. The PRONACO model constitution has had a cause in this regard  make a principle out of it: as in the position taken  by Awolowo in the forties until his death, the fair and proper thing is that people of the same language group should as much as possible be domiciled in the same state province or local government as the case may be and as Ken Saro Wiwa opined,  states need to be created in such a way that ethnic groups should be self-governing and have in the language of current discourses resource control as a factor in their lives. Alone or in a group of other nationalities, this  supports the case for the Gbagyi to have a state of their own. It requires that the Ekiti in the Middle Belt and the Ekiti of the Southwest should be in one state. If the ijebu have a state of their own, and the people of Anioma, Nupe, Kanuri, Tivi and others have states of their own, they would be  better able to benefit from the demand that every Nigerian language should be declared a national language. At  least, each should be accorded its place in its own territorial formation, a protective and protected geography which can attract a cultural policy richer than is possible for those who are marginalized in their own stories.  Cultural policies relating to language and culture are clearly easier to design for a people with ethnic contiguity if not homogeneity. 

There are many well-meaning people however who think that it s this is laying too much emphasis on ethnicity, supposedly a divisive factor,. But it need not be. What should be considered are the altercations that  that are generated when minorities of one group are rammed together with a majority of another. Or so many minorities are rammed together in situations where they share affinity with people of close  contiguity.   If those with any homogeneity can be put together why have them divided between different states?  Is it to comfort ethnic competitors who have powerful people in government who act to block the possibility of having their presumed opponents together?  This is an issue important enough for an ethnic nationality  to wish to have representation at the National conference.  This of course does not exhaust the reasons why a language or ethnic group may want to be represented. Having a cause to register needs to be distinguished however from mere elite desire to be present at a happening.  Whether represented or not, it ought to be possible for the unrepresented to be heard and to have aspirations met. A country in which only a direct representation brings communal aspirations to realization must be considered  more than due for  a national conference. 

In any case, what counts is the picture of Nigeria that emerges  in country with the kind of language policy that we have been trying too sketchily to put down. It should be one I believe in which a Fulani in a Tivi village, or a Yoruba in a Fulbe-speaking local government, should want to speak the language of the locality instead of wanting to impose self and language on the host culture. The development of every language as a national language implies that local governments be so modernized that universal adult suffrage and rigorous merit should determine who represents the people at all levels;  by the same token,   traditional ruler-ship, freed from greater Nigerian ambitions, must be truly traditional without impinging on the right of every child and adult, irrespective of birth and origin, to enjoy education,  medicare, full employment and old age pension.  Primary schools should teach the language, folktales and cultural features, of the local government as a means of entry into other Nigerian languages and cultures including English, the official language of instruction.  Nigerian universities, in every state, should be empowered to engage in researches that do justice to cultural literacy at all levels. Hence, translation industries, translating great works of science and literature into our indigenous languages should be encouraged. Quite a new Nigeria is bound to emerge which,  granting opportunities for each language to gain self-confidence on its own, can do away with the old parochialism that lacked common morality because it had no sense of common welfare.

 No question about it: the idea of Nigeria as a multi-ethnic and multi-language state in which all languages are national languages, each in its own domicile, is good for the defence of diversity.  The English language remains the national official language for the foreseeable future, as it remains the language that unites the whole country. But it is the respect we have for individual languages that removes the fear and resentment that have so far blocked  genuine conversations  across ethnic boundaries.  Talking about conversations, ours must be the only country of its size in the world in which translations from one indigenous language to another is non-existent, and translations into indigenous languages from English, the official language, is done only for  political and religious rostrums. In a country of free education, as we hope Nigeria will now become, a more knowledge-oriented country can be imagined in which English is better spoken without indigenous languages being neglected and sentenced to banal orality.  The bottom-line is that traditional rulers who want to mind their people’s interests in a governmental manner, beyond their localities and provinces, should be advised to run for elections and go into the Senate or House of Representatives.  At a time when some Nigerians are demanding that  one chamber  is enough to do the job of law-making, why encumber the nation with a third chamber? And if Nigerian senators do not have the skills to work out how to build a country of  such cultural freedom, they obviously need help. And, if the delegates to the National Conference do not have the broad-mindedness to include such breath of freedom as a feature of our common, shared, future they need to be told that they are taking us back into the past. This is because a  shared future of genuine interactions, cannot be created by superficial agglomerations of ethnic warlords in a National House of chiefs, that is bound to have a pecking order, multiplying areas of ethnic competition,  and revamping parochial philosophies of zoning. Let the chiefs mind their individual ethnic turfs and save the country the added bickering arising from  unnecessary ethnic ranking. We need to learn that it is not by an arithmetic of ethnic cultures that we build a common nationality for Nigerians. What was always needed is coming on apace with ongoing and unstoppable pursuit of common welfare programmes not just justiciable but serving as a means of  generating core Nigerian values that  all ethnic and language groups can plug into with pride. Of course, having such values is reason enough to propose a proper constitutional  coverage for  ethnic groups to self-governance at local government, provincial or a state levels without the distraction of national ambitions such as having them gather in a symbolic show of unity in a National House of Chiefs.  In any case, such a House merely amounts to institutionalizing what works best as an informality. A meeting between traditional rulers from different geo-cultural ends has more meaning when it is informal than when it is formalized and begins to partake in the pursuit of policy decisions and executions that royalism in a multi-ethnic, republican setting can never perform with the proficiency that the Senate and House of Representatives were designed for.