Law Mefor
The Nigerian nation still staggers due to the weight of its voiding phantom formation. Many options have been tried, including coercion or force, in the attempt to steady the edifice but none seems to be working. Example is the Nigeria-Biafra war, hitherto thought to be the ultimate, but is now known to be a futile or poor option to steady a drifting polity.
From the country’s chequered experience, it is clear that building a nation is not feasible before the nation is fully formed. Nigerian leaders realised this only recently when the chicks were readily coming home to roost, leaving its over 200 million chicks virtually stranded.
Igbo Leadership Development Foundation (ILDF), a pan-Igbo socio-political group currently pushing for a Nigerian President to come from Igboland, is organising a debate on the national unity principles of Federal Character, Restructuring and Rotation of Presidential Power in Nigeria. The body is convoking the debate on March 5, at Sheraton Hotel, Abuja, in conjunction with Gregory University, Uturu; Centre for Int’l and Advanced Professional Studies, Lagos; New Generation Leadership Development Foundation Abuja; and World Igbo Summit Group.
This coalition believes that only a symbolic gesture of reconciliation can enact national unity. The shooting battles of the Nigeria-Biafra war ended 50 years back but the war still rages on, as seen in uneasy calm echoing from both sides, re-iterating a war derision meta-phrase that one may win in battle and still lose the war.
The Obasanjo-led government, recognizing this and the lingering tension and energetic waste it constitutes against national unity and development, set up Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, popularly called Oputa Panel in 1999, to investigate human rights violations during military the rule era from 1984 to 1999. The commission, worked towards unifying the communities previously in conflict but specifically it did not work on the Nigeria-Biafra war as a main target.
Unsurprisingly, the Oputa Panel ended and achieved virtually nothing, with the many principal actors staying away from its proceedings. Those who attended only rehashed sad old memories and reopened healed wounds.
Compared with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa after 27 years’ incarceration, the Oputa Panel was insignificant. Nigerian nation has been grieving 50 years over a needless war, which has made ruse of the ‘No victor no vanquished’ verdict proclaimed by Yakubu Gowon after cessation of hostilities.
Surely, no nation can move forward without healing its fractured socio-scape and moving its components together as one indivisible whole. As the Igbo say, onye-ji-onye-na-ani ji-onwe-ya (a person holding another to the ground holds his own self also). The only advantage he enjoys is being atop of his victim. He too cannot move an inch unless he first lets go the other person on the floor. That is the case of Nigeria since the war ended: it is an oxymoron that must be disposed of first before the nation can move forward.
In this context, one can appreciate the national debate being convoked by the coalition. It aims to enact national unity and show how real equity is feasible by putting in perspective its identifiable essentials, namely, Federal character, Restructuring and Rotation of Presidential Power.
Federal character is a beautiful containing policy in the nation’s Constitution since 1979; it is for carrying along all segments of the country. The principle is breached by successive Nigerian governments with a recklessness and impunity that heighten cries of marginalisation and make the centrifugal forces impact the polity with an ever-increased vortex of fury.
Equally, restructuring has been made a buzzword recently. Those who first deployed the term may be the ones who brought the devil into it that makes it emotionally so charged. But in any case, restructuring is simply the return of the nation to a truly federal system as negotiated by the nation’s founding fathers when departing colonial Britain was leaving our shores.
Practically, in federations, power is shared between the federal government and federating states. But in the 1999 Constitution, like many others before it after the civil war, the Federal Government has powers in over 60 areas while states have concurrent powers in about 16 only. What concurrence here means is that the Federal Government equally has power to legislate in the areas allowed states while retaining top-heavy powers to legislate exclusively in the over 60 areas and even override the states in their own 16 areas of jurisdiction. This makes Nigeria practically a unitary state, federal only in name.
Factually speaking, most powers stimulating real growth and development are tied up in the exclusive list. Electricity, railways, ports, security, etc, are all tied to the Federal Government, which has not been able to live up to those constitutional duties.
In summary, restructuring is simply the return of the powers taken from former regions to the states.
Compared to growth and development of Nigeria both at the centre and the regions in the First Republic when federalism was practiced in Nigeria, the nation is actually in stasis under the current unitary arrangement. Then, the Eastern Region’s economy was adjudged the fastest growing in Africa. While the Western Region was able to establish a TV station before some countries even in Europe and the Northern Region led Africa in the area of agriculture. While pressing the nation, development is put under arrest, giving room for insecurity, corruption and poor subsistence economy to thrive.
Nigeria adopted the federal system after independence in 1960 to assuage the fears of domination expressed by over 200 ethnic minorities. To allay such fears and give everybody a sense of belonging, the ‘Federal Character Principle’ was inserted in the 1979 Constitution.
Hence, the 1979 Constitution states: “the composition of the government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in the government or its agencies” (Section 14 (3) of the 1999 Constitution).
Deriving essentially from this constitutional proviso, since the office of the President of Nigeria is indivisible, the only way Federal Character principle can apply thereof is by rotating the presidential post. And this has wisely been the practice since the return to the present democratic dispensation from 1999 to date.
It is, therefore, the hope of the conveners the Great Debate that a national discourse will ginger unity, equity and amity. In other words, the clearest path to the nation’s unity is equity and fair play in the implementation of federal character by extending it to the office of the President of the country through just rotation.
To ILDF, therefore, rather than dwell on a Nigerian President of Igbo extraction as some groups do at the moment, are talking of reconciliation, national unity and equity. They hope that it will be found strategic and refreshing.
•Dr. Mefor, a forensic/social
psychologist, writes from from Abuja