Geoffrey Anyanwu, Awka
Traditional ruler of Nnobi in Idemili South Local Government Area of Anambra state, Igwe Modum Nick Obi, (Omenyili), has said that developments in the country have made giving constitution role to the traditional institution a necessity.
Eighty-year-old Igwe Obi who is Nigeria’s chattered gas engineer, said the nearness of the monarch to the common person and his daily duties of overseeing the domain which gives him wider knowledge of the goings on in the community more than those in the government makes him the first point of call at the grassroots.
He told Daily Sun that the “Traditional institution, unfortunately in the Nigerian Constitution appears not to have any role, but a traditional ruler is the person really closest to the so-called common man or common person. To a traditional ruler, they will bring all sorts of cases, you will judge. They will bring all manner of problems for you to solve. This is one aspect. The other aspect is the security aspect. The young people these days; because of recession, because of lack of employment or lack of opportunities, tend to go astray. So, it is the monarch, the traditional ruler who is closest to them. He tries to tell them not to go astray. We try to say, can you do skill acquisition so that you have something to fall back to.
“So, the job of the traditional ruler is so encompassing and so challenging and then they think that you are a mini bank. People come to you to say, my brother, my sister, my daughter has this, has that, wants to go to school, is coming from the hospital and things like that and you have to attend to them.
“Some prominent traditional rulers are saying this, that there should be a role for traditional rulers. It should be in the Constitution. Well, the military didn’t seem to want a role for the traditional rulers but it’s so important now because when you talk about Boko Haram and the rest, it is the monarchs who will now try to do something.”
He however, berated monarchs who engage in partisan politics and those who go cap in hand at the corridors of Government Houses for one favour or the other, noting that their actions belittle the high position of the institution.
Insisting that it is wrong for a traditional ruler to play partisan politics not withstanding that man is a political animal, Igwe Obi said, “You see there are different types of traditional rulers. I don’t want to denigrate anybody but they try to make it look like the traditional ruler is an arm of the government which strictly, we shouldn’t be or we are not. But, you know, he who pays the piper dictates the tune but clearly in this day and age of hardship and the rest and then it’s not just traditional rulers. I was reading something the other day; I was a Students Union activist in the United Kingdom and we fought against the political parties and then it was the NCNC, Action Group. We made it a rule that if you are going to hold any office in our Nigerian Union of Britain and Ireland, that you must not belong to any political party. This is because if you belong to any political party, your views will be jaundiced.
“Then, the military didn’t do much favour to Nigeria; the military bastardized everything in Nigeria. We had very active student unionism, the NANS locally. The first thing they tried to do was to buy over the active unionists. They even extended it to both the Nigeria Labour Congress and everybody. So, it’s not just traditional rulers, it’s just the whole system and then if we don’t reclaim those things, we cannot have freedom or independence; we cannot have democracy because if you don’t have dissenting voice, you cannot have democracy. Democracy is based on dissent. Everybody cannot agree to the same thing. So, yes, what you said is true. The government is supposed to come to the traditional rulers but I have said enough.”