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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Power shift and all That
I have said it on these pages over and over again but the most recent acrimony between the North and South of the country over so-called “power shift” in 2007 justifies reiterating the point that the basic problem of Nigeria is not its Constitution, important though it is. The basic problem is the bad faith of our political leaders. Their words it seems, is their dishonour, so much so that one relies on them at his own peril.
The most obvious manifestation of their bad faith is the Nigerian Constitution itself. Writing a constitution is essentially an act of mutual trust among the people of a nation. After all, a document is, in the end, only as good as the faith with which its provisions are observed. This, I believe, explains the slimness, simplicity and provision of the American constitution. The 39 gentlemen who drew it up in 1787 under the leadership of George Washington, the country’s first president, concerned themselves only with making general statement of principles because they apparently trusted each other and generations to come to keep faith with those principles.
Time has proved their faith and approach right. For, in over 200 years, the American Constitution has had only 26 amendments. Because of this good faith and right approach, a constitution drawn up by representatives of the original 13 states has fostered the growth, by addition, of these states to 50, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
The contrast with the Nigerian Constitution cannot be sharper. Where the American Constitution is slim, simple and precise, the Nigerian Constitution is big, complicated and wordy. Whereas the original American Constitution contains only precise statements in seven Articles on the composition and powers of the three arms of government, the Nigerian Constitution contains eight longish chapters that often dwell on petty details – such has been the mutual suspicions with which our politicians have regarded each other.
The results, first is that the Nigerian Constitution is no less than ten times the American in volume. Second, since 1978, i.e barely 18 years after our independence, the Nigerian Constitution has recreated the country into a “federation” by division and sub-division, rather than by addition, and has thus created a monstrous center. Third, not only did we change our constitution in 1978 from parliamentary to presidential, since then we have used every successful military change of guards to further amend it – and we have had no less than three successful changes of military leadership since 1985 including General Sani Abacha’s mysterious death in June 1998. And now, barely six years after the last amendments, the ruling class of politicians has proved themselves even more flippant than the soldiers in their wish to further amend the constitution. It is pretty obvious to everyone by now that in doing so their concern is self-perpetuation rather than good governance.
If our political leaders have demonstrated apparent bad faith in drawing up our constitution, it should not surprise anyone that they have been acting with even greater bad faith over just about every other political deal they have struck among themselves.
And, I am afraid, the principal culprit in these acts of bad faith is President Obasanjo himself. On at least three occasions the president has apparently struck deals only to repudiate them after he has achieved his aims. First, was the political deal the president swore he never struck with the Northern political leaders in order to become president in 1999. This was in the heat of the first serious threat to impeach him after barely two years in office. The Northern political leadership, he insinuated, were spearheading the impeachment because he refused to sign, let along grant, its list of “selfish” demands back in 1998 that would have allegedly left other regions at serious disadvantage.
Next, came the deal the president was speculated to have struck with his own South-Western kinsmen in 2002 for the support they had denied him in 1999 in return for which the ruling PDP was to stay clear of the region in the governorship race against the region’s dominant party, the Alliance for Democracy. The AD apparently kept its end of the bargain by not fielding any presidential candidate. It paid dearly for doing so; it was routed by the PDP in all but one of the six states in the zone.
Finally, the president has since equivocated over a deal in 2002 for the presidency to return to the North. Whereas in the case of 1998, the president categorically denied striking any deal with the region, this time he says the region has misinterpreted whatever deal there was on power shift.
Over three years ago former American President, Bill Clinton, gave a lecture at the ECOWAS Secretariat on “Democratization and Economic Development.” In the course of that lecture, he said, among other things, that “The essence of democracy is not just winning power legitimately, it is also knowing when to let go” (emphasis mine). This was on September 24, 2002. Coming so close to the 2003 general elections and against the background of the attempt by the ruling PDP to rig the Electoral law of 2002, Clinton, in speaking these words of wisdom, must have had those in power in mind, including our president. Over three years on it seems Clinton’s advice had only fallen on deaf ears, what with self-perpetuation being the primary motivation for the on-going attempts to amend our constitution.
Since the president’s equivocation about power shift, at least two former PDP Chairman, Chief Solomon Lar and Chief Audu Ogbe, and the president’s former political adviser, Professor Jerry Gana, have issued statements at various times saying there was a firm decision by the party to allow the presidency to shift back to the North in 2007. It is instructive that all three are from the much wood Middle Belt
As if in support of Lar, Ogbe and Gana, the Daily Trust of December 21 published a one-page letter dated August 5, 2002, by Chief Tony Anenih, the president’s fixer-in-chief, to the then party chairman, Ogbe, in which he said that power will shift back to the North in 2007. Anenih has since confirmed the authenticity of the letter by a rejoinder he sent to the paper blaming Ogbe for a purported breakdown of the deal because Ogbe allowed two candidates from the North to contest for PDP’s presidential ticket against Obasanjo.
Anenih’s rejoinder is obviously an attempt to justify his own repudiation of a deal he was a principal participant in, a repudiation very much evident from (1) his remarks in mid-2004 that only the president alone can decide who succeeds him in 2007 and (2) his active participation in the recent Southern Leadership Forum in Enugu where the region’s political leadership threatened to break up the country if the North insists on power shift.
The big lesson from all this is that power shift, or power rotation, or whatever name you call it, is not a solution to our political problems. On the contrary it can only compound and deepen those problems. The assumption behind it was that political leaders will implement it faithfully. Any illusions about the accuracy of this assumption must have since dissolved as the North and South square off over the correct interpretation, if not the very existence, of the deal. However, were they to even implement it faithfully it is still a bad deal because zoning and democracy are contradictions in term.
At least one important institution in the country seems to have absorbed the big lesson that zoning is a problem not a solution. Last Monday, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) of the 19 Northern States issued a communiqué at the end of its last quarterly meeting for the year in which it denounced the notion of power rotation.
Personally, I can only say “amen” to that. Over a year ago I made pretty much the same remarks on these pages. In my column of July 4, 2004, titled “Much ado about power rotation,” I said, among other things, that “Contrary to what both its advocates and those complicit in it think, power rotation cannot guarantee stability, peace and security.” With the political tension created in the land by the squaring off of the North and South over the issue, it is obvious that I was far from being wrong.
As I said in that article, it is indeed truly tragic that at a time when insecurity, poverty and hunger, among other problems, have become so pervasive in the land, the political class would preoccupy itself, not with finding solutions to these problems, but with where the next president must come from.
If nothing else, this preoccupation is one more proof that the problem of this country is not its constitution, but the bad, very bad, faith with which our politicians have behaved. In one word, the problem is attitude, more than anything else. And until this attitude changes for the better, one can only hope and pray that the American warning that Nigeria will become a failed state in 15 years does not happen sooner or later.
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