PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

In defence of NDF

ndajika01@gmail.com

The last time we met on these pages two weeks ago I predicted that the final meeting of the National Conference scheduled for August 11 was likely to end in fiasco. This, I said, was essentially because, like virtually all our constitutional conferences since 1966, it was convened in bad faith. Alas, I was almost proved right.

The proofs of bad faith were many, among which were the timing of the conference so close to next year’s general elections and the wilful and blatant imbalance in the regional and religious composition of its membership. As if these were not bad enough, some delegates close to the presidency, apparently working in cahoots with a section of the conference’s leadership, tried to sneak a document into it which contained provisions that were widely suspected to be the real object of the conference in the first place. This was towards the end of the conference.

The 102-page document purporting to be the “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones in Nigeria” contained such provisions dear to President Goodluck Jonathan and members of his kitchen cabinet like the six-year, single-term tenure for the executive arm of government and 50% of revenue allocation based on derivation, as opposed to the current 13%.

That this document was introduced in bad faith soon became evident when a motion by Is’haq Modibbo Kawu, a member representing the Nigerian Guild of Editors, and supported by former Senate President, Ken Nnamani, a delegate from Enugu State, calling on the conference’s leadership to explain its appearance forced the leadership to repudiate it.

“We,” said the chairman, Justice Idris Legbo Kutigi, as reflected in the Conference Hansard of June 30, “know nothing about the paper in circulation...We have nothing to do with it. That matter should be closed!”

When the conference resumed penultimate Monday for the final consideration of its decisions it became obvious that those intent on imposing their principal’s hidden agenda on the conference were undeterred by the chairman’s categorical repudiation of their document; in place of “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones in Nigeria”, another more daring document purporting to be “DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 2014” was included among the documents circulated among the members.

Predictably, the Northern Delegates Forum (NDF) which forced the rejection of the first document rose against the second. “We,” said its leader, former Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Commassie, Sardaunan Katsina, in the press statement it issued on August 12, “unequivocally disown it, and emphatically disassociate ourselves from it.”

The Forum gave several reasons for its rejection among which were (1) that being unelected members of the conference they were not qualified to write any draft constitution; (2) their brief was to amend the 1999 Constitution not write a new one; and (3) making 2014 the effective date of a new constitution ahead of next year’s general elections was a camouflage to legitimize a third term for governors currently serving their second term under the 1999 constitution and a way to evade the controversy that has dodged the legality of President Jonathan’s undeclared but apparent decision to contest next year’s presidential election.

To buttress their suspicions, the delegates variously pointed out that several decisions were inserted in the so-called draft that were extraneous to the conference’s proceedings. For example, they said, Section 2A in the so-called draft which approved State constitutions, as in America, was never sanctioned by the conference. Again, the conference, they said, did not approve referendum as a mechanism for adopting a new constitution because that, in itself, entailed amending the current constitution which approves for referenda only for state creation or boundary adjustments. Also the conference, they said, never approved that Section 305 on the continued validity of certain pre-existing laws, including the Land Use Act and NYSC, be deleted, as contained in the so-called draft. And so on.

Not surprisingly, the Southern delegates, along with several from the Middle Belt, responded robustly the following day to the NDF’s rejection of the so-called draft. At a press conference addressed by the leadership of these delegates shortly after the conference adjourned from its final meeting that day, John Dara, a delegate from Kwara State and Secretary of the Middle Belt Forum which he claimed consisted of 14 of the 19 states in the North, said the delegates from the sub-region were “solidly in support of the outcome of this conference.”

Nigeria, he said, “would be operated on a new improved constitution, based on the deliberation of the conference subject to the approval of the people of Nigeria.” Those who objected to the labelling of the conference’s report as a draft constitution, he said, were not controverting the accuracy of the report but were merely “not mentally prepared for the idea of a new constitution and that the reality was a bit shocking for some people.”

Yinka Odumakin, the spokesman for Afenifere, the Yoruba cultural umbrella organisation, was even more scathing of the NDF than Dara in his reaction carried by Vanguard (August 13). Members of the NDF, he said, were only trying to blackmail the conference about the draft constitution. “What they are doing,” he said, “is just to blackmail the conference by saying that the draft constitution is Jonathan’s third term agenda. That is not the truth.”

Blackmail or no blackmail, the chairman of the conference, Justice Kutigi, took the NDF’s objection to the so-called draft seriously enough to assure delegates in his closing remarks  that if there were any errors in the conferences reports they were not deliberate and that there was nothing like a draft constitution.

“What were articulated to the delegates,” he said, “were all issues agreed at the plenary session and there is nothing like a draft constitution. What we have are proposed amendments to the 1999 constitution. I repeat there was nothing like a draft constitution.”

With this, the conference somewhat surprised sceptics like me and avoided ending in a fiasco. Hopefully, the chair will submit a report to the president tomorrow afternoon which has accurately captured its decisions.

If it does so, many people may dismiss the NDF as a bunch of attack dogs that cried wolf where none existed simply because it wanted the status quo to remain. That would be grossly unfair.

A Daily Trust story last week which said the chairman claimed his brief in his letter of appointment from the president was to produce a new constitution suggested bad faith on the president’s side, assuming the story was accurate. I have read and re-read the president’s speech when he inaugurated the conference on March 17. Nowhere in the 56-paragraph, 2,574-word speech did he explicitly ask the conference to give him a draft constitution.

The closest he came to doing so was in paragraph 46 where he commended the National Assembly for proposing an amendment to the current constitution that would allow for referendum as a mechanism for adopting a new constitution should the need arise.       

“Let me,” he said, “at this point thank the National Assembly for introducing the provision for a referendum in the proposed amendment of the Constitution. This should be relevant for this Conference if at the end of the deliberations, the need for a referendum arises. I therefore urge the National Assembly and the State Houses of Assembly to speed up the Constitutional amendment process especially with regard to the subject of referendum.”

Surely it would be an act of bad faith for the president to even merely imply something in public only to explicitly declare it in private, assuming, that is, that was what happened. Sources close to the chairman said he has been critical of the Daily Trust story as a gross misrepresentation of what he had said which was that the president had asked him in his letter to go well beyond merely making recommendations, as had been the case before, and propose ways and means by which its recommendations will be implemented.

Assuming he was misrepresented by Trust, it should be obvious to anyone with even only half an eye that someone somewhere was trying to exploit his belief in the sincerity of the president to make mischief with the conference reports. This much was clear from the way John Dara and Company have tried to defend the so-called draft constitution as quoted above.

The man says the northern delegates did not controvert the content of the so-called draft when indeed they quoted chapter and verse where it contained gross misrepresentations of the conference’s decisions. Not only that, he went on to gloat about what he called “the reality” of a new constitution that those opposed to it would have to live this.

Justice Kutigi has insisted that the conference reports were merely proposed amendments to the 1999 constitution. That being so, to label anyone of them a draft constitution and even give the year in which it will take effect is a gross misrepresentation of what it is. After all there is everything in a name.

In any case you don’t have to be an expert in English grammar to see that the difference between DRAFT CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 2004 and DRAFT PROPOSALS TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, 1999 is not mere hair-splitting. Even an idiot can see that the second is, by far, a more accurate representation the conference’s brief than the first, to the extent that the first is accurate at all.

Isn’t it then strange that many of those, like Dara and Odumakin, who like to dismiss the 1999 constitution as one not written by “we, the people” are the same ones who would vehemently support another drafted by hand-picked government nominees who have nowhere near as much legitimacy as the elected majority of those who drafted the 1979 constitution which, really, is what the 1999 constitution is, give or take a few amendments?