That the definition of the political reality of Nigeria by the North is starkly different from that of the South indicates that the division in the country is very deep.
President Jonathan’s most recent statement on the national conference he proposed about two weeks ago has almost thrown the idea back in the ocean of doubt that had characterised the efforts of those who tried the idea before him. More importantly, the president has himself applauded Senator Bola Tinubu as an infallible analyst of Nigerian party politics and as the prophet whose assessment of Jonathan’s presidency must not be missed. The worrisome part of Jonathan’s assurances to his visitors on the occasion of the just concluded Muslim festival is his taking back with the left hand what he offered with the right hand just two weeks ago.
While several commentators on the announcement of a committee to work out modalities for a national conference “to provide a platform that will reinforce the ties that bind the country’s many ethnic nationalities and ensure that Nigeria’s immense diversity continues to be a source of strength and greatness,” have, despite their awareness of the problems with governance of the country in the last four years, been pleading that the message be separated from the messenger, President Jonathan himself assured Nigerians on the last day of this year’s Eid-El-Kabir that it is more appropriate to conflate the message and the messenger. What an easy way for a ruling president to confirm the prescience of his opposition leader!
But the emphasis today is not on President Jonathan’s attempt to pre-empt a committee he set up only fifteen days ago nor to castigate him for quickly confirming Senator Tinubu’s fears. He will not be the first president in recent times to make nonsense of his advisers. President Olusegun Obasanjo said when he was swearing in his Special Advisers a few years ago that he did not appoint them because he wanted to take their advice and that they should always remember that he was under no obligation to take their advice. The advisers still accepted to be sworn in, even when the person who appointed them told them upfront that the game was over. President Jonathan does not have the brusqueness of Obasanjo, but by announcing his intention to send the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly as part of items for amendment, he too has shown that he is ready to do the job of the committee whenever he chooses to do so. The purpose of today’s piece is to let the president and his advisers know that opting to send the outcomes of the national conference to the legislators that have been talking about amending the 1999 Constitution for over two years is a quick way to abort the conference before its due date.
It is necessary to discuss the implications of following President Jonathan’s new route to “providing a platform to reinforce the ties that bind the country’s many ethnic nationalities and ensure that Nigeria’s immense diversity continues to be a source of strength and greatness.” To believe that the national assembly, as presently structured, can transform conference outcomes to amendments during the life of the current assembly is unrealistic. The assembly has not been able to agree on items that grew up within its chambers in over two years; it is not likely to be able to digest new constitutional provisions arrived at by a conference that may not include members of the national assembly.
In addition, the national assembly itself is part of the problem that a national conference is to address, particularly the lop-sided nature of the House of Representatives in favour of the North, the site of the longest and loudest opposition to calls for sovereign national conference or a constitutional conference to craft a people’s constitution. This approach is, as I said in a recent book: Federalism and the Yoruba Character, similar to attempting to cure drunkenness with more drunkenness. Nigerians have since its inception challenged the accurateness of the census upon which the proportional representation that created the current national assembly was made. Leaving the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly to ratify is making the conference to be dead on arrival, as people say in popular language.
Given the vitriolic nature of opposition from the North to calls for sovereign national conference or constitutional conference, expecting the current national assembly to ratify any recommendations from Jonathan’s national conference is over-sanguine. For example, some northern governors have been reported to refuse to send people from his state to any conference. Some leaders from the North have started singing war songs, to counter calls for national conference.Pundits from the North have argued that our constitution is not the problem and that it is the people that use the constitution that need to be upgraded. Just as President Jonathan was assuring his visitors that the final destination of the conference outcomes is the national assembly, the spokesman for the most authoritative socio-cultural organisation from the North Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) said unapologetically: “The ACF does not believe that the problem with Nigeria is the structure of the country or the pattern of governance….For now, we do not have any position to present to them [the Advisory Committee] because we did not ask for a conference in the first place.”
On the contrary, Ohaeneze Ndigbo has agreed to meet on Saturday to produce a position for the Committee’s visit to the former Eastern Region while Chief Reuben Fasoranti’sAfenifere and the Afenifere-Renewal Group have completed position papers to take to the Committee’s first meeting in the former Western Region in Akure. That Nigeria is a divided country does not need the expertise of rocket scientists to decipher. Two of the three regions that agreed to go into one Nigeria at independence in 1960 are ready to send delegates to attend the preliminary fact-finding meeting of the Committee set up by President Jonathan with spokespersons for federating units, the unity of which the proposed conference is designed to reinforce while the third region has already announced a boycott.
Offering to send the outcomes of the conference to the national assembly on the same day that ACF indicated its intention not to be bothered by any zonal meeting in Jos or Minna, can possibly be interpreted to mean an attempt to assure the North that there is nothing to worry about. Everybody in the country knows that without any cooperation from northern members in the national assembly, there can be no two-thirds to alter one sentence in the current constitution, even after years of conference deliberations. That the definition of the political reality of Nigeria by the North is starkly different from that of the South indicates that the division in the country is very deep. And this situation should worry anyone that cares about Nigeria. The claim that President Jonathan has not suggested any No-Go areas is countered by his most recent decision to use the national assembly, a body that has, like the country’s 774 local governments, grown out of decades of political re-designing of Nigeria by military dictators. Given the new confusion created by the president’s latest decision, it is advisable for president Jonathan to let his advisory committee members give him some advice on how to proceed. Pre-empting the committee in any way is likely to dampen the spirit of the millions of Nigerians who want a platform to provide ideas that can reinforce the ties that bind Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities together over the years and ensure that the country’s immense diversity becomes a source of strength and greatness for the parts and the whole of the ‘Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
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