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Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk Dance and the National Conference: The Parallels By Nwike (S) Ojukwu
Superstar Michael Jackson was an entertainment icon who perfected the art of moonwalk dance although it was not his creation. Moonwalk dance involves an intricate and deceptive movement in which your feet move back smoothly to the rhythm of music. The perfection of the moves took the entertainment maestro to a new level in the industry. However, a careful observer of the theatrics would have discovered that while the so-called moonwalk progressed, Michael did not place a foot in front of the other. It would have been hardly noticeable if you were lost in the euphoria of Michael-mania. Michael’s moonwalk is analogous to our experience with national conferences in Nigeria. With each promise of a conference, we are deluded in our assumption that we are making a steady progress while we are deleteriously retrogressing, moving back in a seemingly harmless moonwalk.
While some Nigerians have characterized President Jonathan in unprintable and disparaging patois, others have questioned his academic credentials. I resent the disrespect for his office (although I will defend the right to the exercise of free speech), which a section of the polity seems to revel; I have particularly been concerned with the quality of his advisors. Certain revelations, like the alleged unremitted funds from oil sales levelled against the NNPC by the former Central Bank Governor, his continued insistence that the funds were missing, and the silence from Aso Rock Villa question the administrative acuity of the people around our president. Some of them seem to be bright except for the few that have made false claims on their resumes. I would think that somebody should advise the president to address the allegation transparently because it constitutes an indictment of his administration. The removal of Mr. Sanusi from office will not douse the interest generated by the allegation. My theory is that either they are selfish or President Jonathan’s cabinet has a concentration of ignoramuses that occupy the windows and corridors of power, the band of generational predators that shamelessly play on our collective intelligence.
Again, one wonders how it did not occur to any of the presidential advisors to warn the government that Nigerians would not have an open, frank, and successful national conversation if certain subjects were off limits. For years, majority of Nigerians, except the North, have felt that the country needed restructuring due to the lop-sided design orchestrated by the British Colonial Office in its bid to leave the country horridly. The Colonial Office’s oversight or probably design, led to a section of the polity’s monopolization of the leadership of the country. With the monopolization, the benefactors skillfully regimented the participation in governance by the other constituent parts. For instance, there were certain ministerial slots that candidates from certain ethnic groups could not occupy. With it also were sacrificed competence, and ingenuity from the other sides, which could have lifted the country from the ashes of poverty.
The social problems that challenge us currently have been long in coming, but the morons that controlled our government through the years did not envisage such occurrence. These problems have direct nexus to the colonial creation, which a national conversation could address amongst others. Today, the questions of high unemployment, morbidity, increased crime rate, religious violence or intolerance, corruption that seems unmanageable, make a country of over one hundred and sixty million human beings (plus or minus inflated figures that defy common sense) look small in the committee of nations. The smart religious leaders ceased the occasion to expand their membership by spewing lies founded on half-truths and distortions of the sacred texts. While the economic circumstances of their members continued to deteriorate, the religious leaders amassed stupendous wealth.
Could former President Obasanjo have been smarter than the rest of us? Evidently, he thought he was. He observed the mood of the nation and strategized that he could cease the moment to push his personal agenda for a third term in office in violation of the constitution. He took the nation on a wild goose chase. His lieutenants lied to us that he was convening a national conference. He covertly predicated his conference on the actualization of his third-term ambition. When it was obvious that the whole nation stood against such an endeavor, he balked and threw the exercise at our faces. The hopes of millions of Nigerians who felt that the conference provided us the opportunity to build a new nation was aborted, not to talk of the tax payers’ funds that were wasted in an exercise that he knew would amount to nothing. I thought that after the failure of that conference, the nation would hold Obasanjo’s feet to the fire for fraud or misrepresentation. However, like Nigerians that we are, we ignored him and allowed him to continue to write invidious letters that his presidency could not have tolerated.
Jonathan’s conference, I am afraid, is headed the same direction. The appointment of the Okurounmu’s Committee to draw the agenda for the conference was the first bad step. Immediately after its inauguration, the committee embarked on a nation-wide consultation of the so-called stakeholders. The stakeholders were supposed to be the ethnic cultural organizations, religious leaders, traditional custodians, and the political elites. At the end of the exercise, Mr. Okurounmu consulted the same people, the elites. Nigerians in their towns and villages (bloody villagers) were not stakeholders recognized by the committee. If Nigerians in their towns and villages were not recognizable stakeholders, I wonder who are. That was another bad step.
The government, in my judgment, has no business organizing this conference or any conference for that matter. My assumption is that the agreement of Nigerians birthed the federal Republic. However, I should remind us that an agreement is subject to termination. There are fundamentally two ways to terminate an agreement, the peaceful way and by a forced termination. Nigerians should rightly organize a conference when the time is ripe. By ripeness, I mean, when Nigerians would be tired of the looting of the nation’s treasury. By ripeness, I mean, when Nigerians would be tired of violent crimes and religious intolerance. By ripeness, I mean, when five million high school graduates would be competing for fifty thousand available slots in our universities. By ripeness, I mean, when Nigerians would see unemployment as a threat to national security enough to force the government to declare a state of emergency. We are not there yet. When that time comes, no one would have to convince the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) to negotiate with the Yorubas over their (Yorubas) demand for ethnic autonomy. When that time comes, no one would need to convince another Nigerian of the “fierce urgency” of a conference. When that time comes, Nigerians would be ready to pay the ultimate sacrifice than live in decrepitude. When that time comes, we would be compelled to ignore the government and sit down together at an authentic people-organized conference and talk. This would be a peaceful conference.
The other form of conference would be a “Nigerian spring.” It would be an interesting engagement and we are dangerously heading to that cataclysmic climax. With the threat of Boko Haram currently restricted to the Northern parts of the country, we still have a window of opportunity for a peaceful conversation. By the time Boko Haram overwhelms Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, Aba, or Port Harcourt, it would be too late to engage in any reasonable conversation. If a ragtag religious out-fit brazenly slaughters supposedly trained soldiers or kidnap your girls to satisfy their amorous desires, then we are building our castle on a quicksand.
I keep wondering how we could have a conference that is supposed to address fundamental questions of the structure of the nation as well as the grumblings of sections of the country with an agenda drawn by the government. I thought that the conference should start first, from the villages and towns around the country. I thought that local governments should have their conferences. I thought that ethnic groups should organize their conferences. I thought that groups would align, realign, and find common grounds before moving to the national level to articulate their positions in order to design what works for us. It is the ideas garnered from the prior meetings that should help to draw an agenda that would enrich a national conference. What emerges at the end of the conference would represent the will of the people, not the ethnic groups, religious groups, or the elites. So that when the preamble of the constitution says, “We the people”, it would actually mean what it says.
A Constitution is a living document; it is organic. It is a nation’s mission statement. It is the encapsulation of the trajectory of a people. A Constitution is a document that creates the future of a people to the extent that the framers look back at their antiquity, consider their present circumstances, and truly guided, create their future. It is not ironclad or frozen in time. That is why it is susceptible to amendments to freshen its provisions to continue to reflect the will of the people. Nigeria, and indeed the rest of the third-world countries have the unfortunate experience of adopting foreign-made constitutions. When a country adopts a foreign frame of governance, it adopts its externalities. When the pilgrims from Europe moved to the New World to escape from religious persecution and intolerance, they desired a system that would guarantee individual liberties and the freedom to practice their religion because it was that important to them. That is why in the first Amendment to the United States Constitution, religious belief is given due protection under the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses.
The history of the United States and Nigeria is dissimilar in every respect; neither do we have the same experience with England nor France. We do not have any reason adopting any of their frames of governance. While the West emphasizes individual freedom and “you are on your own” form of economics (capitalism), Africans and indeed Nigeria emphasize individual rights as well as community rights. Again, our traditional economics is based on “being your brother’s keeper.” I keep wondering again, why we cannot fashion a frame of governance that recognizes these African attributes. Why do we have to be copycats?
While I do not advocate for any particular frame of governance, I would insist that we design a uniquely Nigerian form of governance with a “cultural match”: a constitution that reflects our history, experience, and the future we envisage for our children. If it becomes similar to the Westminster model, the American or French models, so be it. Instead of wasting funds and efforts in a conference that is directionally destitute, let the funds that would be used on delegates and facilities be invested in the improvement of our schools and social services. This moonwalk dance moves is as retrogressive as it gets. In conclusion, may I remind us, like the great prophets of the Old Testament in the Christian Holy Bible would do that change is an inevitable course of event in history and that the flesh of those who stand in the way of a peaceful change would feed the inferno of a violent change.
Nwike (S) Ojukwu Doctor of Laws (Cand), University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. http://nationalconfererncengr.wordpress.com
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