By Sen (Dr.) Femi Okurounmu CON
A lecture delivered at the 2024 annual luncheon of the Government College, Ibadan Old Boys Association (GCIOBA), Abeokuta Branch on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024 at the Alake Hall, Abeokuta Club, Abeokuta.
By Sen (Dr.) Femi Okurounmu CON.
In beginning this lecture, I extend my utmost reverence to all members of the learned profession present among us and solicit their kind understanding as I shall be focusing, rather critically, on three eminent personalities from the honourable profession, namely, Chief F.R.A. Williams, Prof Ben Nwabueze, both now late, and Prof Auwal Yadudu, still very much around. The intellectual footprints of the first two of these men are very much manifest in the 1999 Constitution, while the third has made himself its most ardent defender.
Most of the contentions surrounding the 1999 Constitution have centered around the geopolitical structure of the country, the governmental system and processes, the arrangements for resource control and resource management and the distribution of powers between the central government and the sub-national governmental units.
Ironically, all of these issues had been settled at various pre-independence Constitutional conferences, resulting in various Constitutions, from the Clifford’s Constitution of 1922 to the Richard’s Constitution of 1946, the Macpherson Constitution of 1951, the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954 to the Independence Constitution of 1960 which birthed the 1963 Republican Constitution. With the 1963 Constitution, Nigeria seemed settled on a Federal, Regional system of government with multi-party parliamentary democracy and a widely acceptable revenue allocation system. Demands by ethnic minorities for regions of their own were to be further examined and could be accommodated as was indeed done, leading to the creation of the Mid-West Region in June, 1963. So, how then did these issues become, once again, matters of contention?
It all started from the coup of Jan. 1966 when the then military ruler, Gen Aguiyi Ironsi, began to make efforts to change the existing Constitution in what many believed was an attempt to achieve the dominance of his Igbo ethnic group. It will be remembered that the coup was seen by many Nigerians as an Igbo coup. It was led by Igbo officers who eliminated most of the senior military officers from the North and the West along with their political leaders,
Ahmadu Bello and S.L. Akintola. Suspiciously, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Igbo leader and the country’s governor-general, escaped the slaughter. To the irritation of many, even though the coup leaders were arrested, there was no move to put them on trial.
Even before the coup, the Igbos had occupied the most prominent positions in government which was then a coalition between the Igbo dominated NCNC and the Northern dominated NPC and in which the superior education of the Igbos gave them distinct advantages. So, Gen. Ironsi saw himself presiding over a substantially Igbo controlled federal government and, as seen by many, decided to change the Constitution from a federal to a unitary one, to consolidate the Igbo dominance. In the exercise, he found the legal luminary, Prof Ben Nwabueze, a fellow Igbo man, a very willing accomplice.
In order to prepare the peoples’ minds for a change to unitary government, Ironsi, in an address to the nation on Jan 28, 1966 asserted, without any evidence, that all Nigerians wanted an end to regionalism and promised to preserve Nigeria as one strong nation, with a centralised coordination of development and the application of merit and efficiency as sole criteria for advancement in the nation’s public service.1 In another address on Feb. 21, he indicated the need for far-reaching Constitutional reforms, attributing, again without any evidence, the problems of the past governments to regionalism.1 Then, Nwabueze went to work. He crafted a so-called Unification Decree, Decree No 34 of March 1966. The Decree abolished regionalism and federalism and brought Nigeria under unitary governance.
The Decree was very unpopular in the North and the Mid-West, with the West ominously calm. Large demonstrations were in fact held against it in the North and these needed to be quelled by appeasement meetings of representatives of the Supreme Military Council with traditional rulers around the country. Northern restlessness was driven mostly by fears that in the unified, centralised service being decreed, they would be severely handicapped because of their less advanced educational development. Also, many people across the country feared that it was the first step in the realisation of the long stated ambition of the Igbos to dominate the nation, indeed Africa. According to Tanko Yakassai, a prominent Northern leader,
‘‘The Unification Decree made other Nigerians feel as if Ironsi had come to impose Igbo domination over the rest of the country. That fear was reinforced by the fact that Ironsi was surrounded by almost wholly a group of Igbos as his advisers. He set up a caucus which was advising him on his daily activities and the entire membership of the caucus was made up of fellow Igbos.’’2
People also recollected statements which had been made by various Igbo leaders in the past about the inescapability of Igbo leadership of the black race. Typical of such statements was the one by Nnamdi Azikiwe in 1949 while addressing the Ibo state union as its president. On that occasion, he had said that
‘‘The God of Africa has specially created the Ibo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages……. The martial prowess of the Ibo nation at all stages of human history has enabled them not only to conquer others but also to adapt themselves to the role of preserver………The Ibo nation cannot shirk its responsibility.’’3
In short, it was Gen Ironsi, with the intellectual stewardship of Prof Ben Nwabueze, who began the reverse journey of Nigeria from federalism to quasi-unitarism. Although Decree 34 was later repealed by Gen. Gowon in August 1966, a large portion of it remains extant in the 1999 Constitution.
THE NORTHERN COUNTER-COUP OF JULY 1966 OF COURSE TERMINATED THE IGBO HEGEMONIC AMBITION, BUT IRONSI HAD ALREADY PROVIDED A TEMPLATE WHICH SUCCESSIVE NORTHERN MILITARY RULERS WERE TO FOLLOW FROM THEN ON, AND THAT IS, TO SEEK TO ENTRENCH PERMANENT NORTHERN DOMINATION THROUGH CHANGES TO THE CONSTITUTION. This template was not put into use immediately by Gowon, probably because of the quasi-diarchic nature of his regime with Obafemi Awolowo. From the onset of the Murtala/Obasanjo administration, however, all the Northern military rulers have invariably followed this template. Even after Murtala Mohammed’s assassination in Feb. 1976, the successor ruler, Gen. Obasanjo, a Yoruba, concluded that the beginning of wisdom for him, if he was to survive, was to follow the pro-Northern agenda of Constitutional developments, already set in motion by Murtala. What were the elements of this agenda? They are principally to have a Constitution with a strong centre, and provisions that will place the North at an advantage to always control that centre, whoever may be in power.
To give the impression that he wanted a peoples’-driven Constitution, Gen Murtala Muhammed set up a 49-man Constitution drafting committee and inaugurated it in Lagos on Sat. Oct. 18, 1975 charging it with the task of drafting a new Constitution for the country. The committee was chaired by the eminent jurist, Chief F.R.A. Williams with Prof Ben Nwabueze also one of its prominent members. What many people did not know at the time was that the committee was merely being asked to go and work to a given answer, an answer already determined by General Muhammed and his Supreme Military Council.
In his address to the committee at its inauguration, Murtala Muhammed told the members as follows:
‘‘The Supreme Military Council went further to see how some of these principles could be implemented in practice and we came to the conclusion that we require…….an Executive Presidential system of government……’’4
In like manner, the Supreme Military Council gave the committee several other concluded decisions that were to be included in their draft. So, it seems all that the Supreme Military Council needed the egg-heads to do was to put the council’s concluded decisions into a legal draft.
Even before the expected draft Constitution was ready, the regime administratively introduced several measures which they planned to incorporate, and actually incorporated into the new Constitution that had the effect of making it less federal and tuned to give the North permanent control of the centre. Under the guise of local government reform, they created 301 local governments in 1976 around the country, preferentially distributed in favour of the North and gave them a uniform system of administration. They also created new States, again preferentially in favour of the North, for the first time giving the North more States than the South. These two measures, with the States and local governments subsequently enshrined in the new Constitution, made the 1979 Constitution one that has produced the strongest centre ever in Nigeria’s history, with provisions that guarantee Northern control of that centre. Thus, what Ironsi had tried brashly to achieve for the Igbos but failed, Murtala-Obasanjo achieved slyly for the North, through the instrumentality of Southern legal gurus, Rotimi Williams and Ben Nwabueze.
I have given the background to the 1979 Constitution in some detail because the 1999 Constitution is almost a replica of it. The 1979 Murtala Muhammed /Obasanjo Constitution, having given the North enshrined dominance over the rest of the country, succeeding Northern leaders like Babangida and Abacha merely continued to further consolidate this dominance. Thus, Abdulsalami Abubakar, in his hasty hand-over in 1999, merely appointed a committee under Justice Niki Tobi to seek the opinion of some elite Nigerians as to which Constitution they would prefer between the 1979 Constitution and the 1995 Abacha Constitution. Given the highly tainted nature of the Abacha Constitution, the conference to it having been boycotted by the South West, those consulted naturally chose the 1979 Constitution. Thus, with a few amendments such as giving the centre some more powers, adding the additionally created new States and local governments, and providing that 13% of the revenue from mineral producing States be shared to the States of derivation, the 1979 Constitution morphed into the 1999 Constitution as a schedule to Decree No 24 of 1999.
Since the 1999 Constitution has become operational, its greatest defender and protector has been a Northern legal luminary, Prof Auwal Yadudu, who has taken up the role of the unofficial chief guardian of Northern interests in Constitutional matters. He played the role so well under General Abacha, whom he served as legal adviser on Constitutional matters, often brazenly usurping the functions of Abacha’s de-jure Attorney General, the late Dr. Onagoruwa. It has been Prof Yadudu’s mission to ensure that the control of the North over Nigeria, so generously provided for by the 1999 Constitution, is not in any way impaired or diluted, and he played that role excellently at the 2014 National conference.
Both F.R.A. Williams and Ben Nwabueze later became co-founders of an organisation called the PATRIOTS which has been most vocal in the agitation for a new, more federal Constitution, that would emanate from the people. F.R.A. Williams was the founding chairman of the organisation and was succeeded by Nwabueze, both of them now late. It is ironic that Nwabueze, who died late 2023 and who, as we have seen, had set in motion through Decree 34 of 1966, the country’s return to unitarism, was elaborately celebrated by the PATRIOTS touting his contributions towards the struggle to return the country to federalism.
Nwabueze later in his life, sought to redeem himself and F.R.A. Williams by admitting their error in the drafting of the 1979 Constitution. In an article in the Vanguard of March 22, 2013, he said
“Quite frankly, there are many flaws and many errors in the content of the Constitution ……. At that time, late Chief Rotimi Williams and I were so overwhelmed with this feeling, this patriotic feeling that we needed unity and the most effective way to achieve unity of the country is by having a very strong central government.… Then, what did we do to achieve our misguided objective? We took away 50% of the items on the concurrent list and gave it to the centre…… And the result is the almighty federal government, but what we discovered was that instead of producing unity, we produced disunity because of the intensity of the struggle to control the center……We destroyed what is called fiscal federalism. Too much money at the center increased the struggle for the control of the centre and the control of the money itself and that has remained the feature of the Constitution till today……… I am not sure the rectification of that error is what the National Assembly can do because so much is involved. We have to restructure the territorial basis of the federation’’.5
Perhaps in recognition of the errors of their founding fathers, the PATRIOTS have been very active in seeking a new Constitution for Nigeria. They paid a visit to the incumbent President early in August requesting the convocation of a Constituent Assembly for the purpose. Not surprisingly, they got the now standard response from President Tinubu, which is that his current priorities are with the economy. This was pretty much the same response given by him to an earlier delegation led by Pa Reuben Fasoranti on the same subject. It should have been clear to anyone that a president whose Vice is on record as having scornfully rejected the notion of Restructuring saying “Restructuring, my foot” cannot possibly put the writing of a new Constitution high on his priorities. Also, not surprisingly, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai and Prof Yadudu, themselves members of the PATRIOTS, have come out to distance themselves from the demands of their organisation, warning about any attempts to depart from the 1999 Constitution.
While acknowledging the activism of the PATRIOTS in seeking a new Federal Constitution, it is significant to note that they have failed till date to specify precisely what provisions they would like to have in a new Constitution. The 2014 National Conference convened by former President Goodluck Jonathan and which I midwifed, explored this area and came up with noteworthy recommendations that will move us nearer to federalism. For example, Nigeria will be a 2 – tier federation consisting of the State governments and the federal government. The local governments will be the creations of the State governments, who will fund them. Federally collected revenue will be shared between the federal and State governments only and the local governments will be expunged from the Constitution. States would have their own Constitutions and would have a few more powers than they currently have, including the power to have their own police. However, on the issues of regionalism as against States and the form of democratic practice, whether presidential or parliamentary, the conference chose to maintain the statusquo. This was not surprising as most delegates had vested interests in retaining that statusquo.
In concluding this lecture, I would like to touch on the perennial question of, which is more important, the Constitution or the people who operate it? My unequivocal answer is that both are very important. In our country today, both the Constitution and the people operating it are disasters, but as to which problem we should focus on first for a better society, I believe it is the Constitution. Our leaders in the first republic under a parliamentary Constitution, were much more honest and accountable than today’s rulers and our society was clearly the better for it. Today, our Presidential Constitution has helped to produce bad leaders who in turn have produced bad followers and a decaying society.
By retaining the presidential system of government in Nigeria, it is my firm belief that the 2014 National Conference shied away from performing a difficult but patriotic duty. It is not hard to see that the system is very expensive and in a corrupt, highly centralised government environment like Nigeria, amplifies and propagates corruption and leads to autocratic governance.
I agree with the former governor of Oshun State, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, who has warned that Nigeria cannot survive an Executive Presidential System.6 Also, Eric Teniola, a prodigious editor of various newspapers at different times, has this to say about the system:
“The system has given the key of the treasury to the executives, legislators and their aides to loot the treasury as they wish. The poor of yesterday have become instant billionaires all in the name of democracy. The people, I mean the people are getting poorer every day and are being made to be beggars in their own land. Our type of democracy has made mockery of hard work, honesty and procedure. Humble men of yesterday now in power in this country have suddenly turned to monsters, tyrants with abundance of wealth stolen from the treasury all in the name of the presidential system of government. Either we like it or not, this system of government is killing us. It is so wasteful and too expensive to operate.”7
Eric Teniola wrote this about ten years ago. The situation has become even worse today. Our rulers now believe they can loot the treasuries to their heart’s content and there is nothing we can do. You protest and they lock you up or gun you down or try you for treason. Obi Ezekwesili, a former federal Minister under President Obasanjo recently referred to them indignantly, in a television interview, as bandits and rascals. The system not only breeds corruption and autocracy, it elevates bad, unconscionable people into governance, the kind of people we have aplenty in governance today in our country. We are already witnessing the slide of the country into a totalitarian, police state. All because too much powers are vested in one man, the President.
In no other democratic system does the President have as much powers as the Nigerian President. In the American presidential system which our legal gurus blindly copied, the President would very much envy the Nigerian president’s wide powers. Unlike the Nigerian President, the American President has no INEC or equivalent which he can make to do his bidding, he cannot influence the appointment of leaders for the Senate or the House of Representatives and he has no monopoly over the control of the police. In our search for good governance, we need to complete the unfinished task of the 2014 National Conference. We must have a new Constitution that jettisons the presidential system and replaces it with the parliamentary which has in-built checks against corruption and autocracy. The Constitution must revisit our leadership selection processes such that governance positions will not be the exclusive preserve of the questionably wealthy and those with thuggish, fraudulent and violent backgrounds. And above all, it must ensure that the peoples’ votes actually do count and cannot be supplanted by fraudulently procured votes.
Rotimi Williams and Ben Nwabueze have put our nation on a Constitutional route to an apocalypse. Auwal Yadudu and his fellow Northern hegemonists are resolutely committed to maintaining it on that course. Furthermore, the entire ruling class also has vested interest in maintaining course so as to continue to feed their greed and corruption propensity. So, there is clearly no hope for the country under the present political class. The only hope for a better future for Nigeria is through a radical mobilisation of the citizenry, particularly the youth, not for protests or revolution, but for the establishment of a new patriotic political platform to consign the present ruling class to political oblivion. Unless all of us resolve to get involved, we shall continue indefinitely to suffer governance by the worst among us.
References.
- Teniola, Eric. History and the Future of Decree 34 of 1966. The Guardian, Sept 4, 2017.
- Tanko Yakasai, Autobiography, The Story of a Humble Life. Vol. 1, page 263.
- Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Nigeria, The Tribes, the Nation, or the Race – The politics of Independence, The M.I.T. Press, page 68.
- Address by the Head of the Federal Military Government, Commander-in-Chief of the Nigeria Armed Forces, at the Opening Session of the Constitution Drafting Committee on Saturday, 18th October, 1975.
- Nwabueze, Prof. Ben. The Mistakes Rotimi Williams and I made about Nigeria’s Constitution. Vanguard, March 22, 2013.
- Aregbesola Rauf: Nigeria can’t survive executive presidential system of government. Paper presented at the National Constitutional Dialogue organised in honor of the late renowned constitutional lawyer, prof Ben Nwabueze on Monday, March 18, 2024.
- Teniola, Eric: Why Nigerians must jettison the presidential system of government. Premium Times, May 22, 2014.