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Democratic Alternative Points To Way Out Of The Yar’adua Constitutional Trap By Abayomi Ferreira There is so much noise in the press and at informal discussions in Nigeria over the absentee and sick President Umaru Yar’Ardua. Many of the contributors give their own conjectured views on the way out of the constitutional mismanagement in which the country is wallowing. Most of the conjectures do not address the issue to be solved. Certainly, the president is not working for very obvious reasons. The entire world is aware that he is ill somewhere in Saudi Arabia. He is not on an official duty to the kingdom. He has gone to seek medical care to return to good health. Those who have been loud in commenting on the negligent situation have called for his resignation. Some have called for an interim government. Some have even called for military coup de etat! They are all wrong. There is a constitution. The president, his kitchen staff, his cabinet members and his party members are all acting wrongly. But their collective wrongdoing can be corrected. The country will not derive any benefits or advantage from any extra constitutional actions. The confusion would become more complex, more confused. The trend would be towards an irreversible state of anarchy from which the lot of millions of Nigerians would become intolerably worse. This country cannot afford the dire consequences of such actions and process. The President of the Senate has called for prayers. Thus David Mark is aware that Musa Yar’Adua is ill and out of the country. He has even received back the supplementary budget bill that the sick president signed into law on his sick bed. They are all in the same political party. The manipulators that are euphemistically described as kitchen cabinet are all in the PDP. All those including the cabinet members who have been speaking to Yar’Adua by phone and have told us that he had been watching football are all in the PDP. If he can sign a bill, he certainly can sign a simple letter telling the heads of the legislative houses that he is away to seek medical treatment. On that basis, the appropriate Section 145 of the 1999 Constitution will be invoked to make Goodluck Jonathan continue with governance. He is already doing some of the work: presiding over weekly cabinet meetings, awarding contracts, making statements on selected issues. He should be empowered to go the whole hog and run the government. When his colleague recovers and is back in Nigeria, a simple letter to the heads of the legislative houses will return Yar’Adua back to office. The point really is that the solution to the present confusion is to return to constitutionality and not conjure up some extraneous steps that will not last. The Democratic Alternative knows very well that it really does not matter whether Yar’Adua or Jonathan or Mark or Bankole is performing the functions of President; the present PDP government has no answer to the problems of development of Nigeria. The programme of privatisation, deregulation and downsizing that the government is carrying out at the behest of the International Monetary Fund IMF and the capitalist giants that run the world market will not make life better for Nigerians. It is serving the interests of international capitalism. It is indeed against the provisions of the 1999 Constitution. The issue is that they should carry on and Nigerians should be wiser next year and remove the PDP and similar political parties from power.
Dr Abayomi Ferreira President, Democratic Alternative |