By ADETOKUNBO PEARSE
THE presidents’ appeal to lawyers to refrain from defending criminals, and his refusal to recognize the order of the court to release detained persons, indicate that he has little respect for the rule of law.
Every sector of the society has been impacted adversely in the last two years. Direct foreign investment is down. The stock market is down. The naira is at the lowest level it has been in history. Our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the lowest it has been in 25 years. Unemployment level is growing by the day.
The cost of essential commodities such as foodstuff has tripled under this Buhari administration, causing hunger and unheard of levels of poverty in the land. With Boko Haram here, Fulani herdsmen there, no one is safe. And the political climate has never been this convoluted and gloomy in peace time Nigeria. There is no real party in the country to speak of. There is no PDP, and no APC, all we have are factions such as Modu Sheriff – PDP, or Makarfi – PDP, and Buhari – Oyegun – APC, Bola Tinubu – APC, or Saraki – APC. It is the profundity of the failure of the Buhari administration that is driving the universal demand for a redesign of our polity. This demand has found a voice in the 2014 confab recommendation.
Despite President Buhari’s ridicule of the authors of the 2014 conference, and his bitter denunciation of the national conference, opposition to the idea of reorganizing the system of government as we have it now does not appear to have a large following. Nonetheless, the concern of some important personalities about the value of the idea deserves mediation. One of such people is former President Olusegun Obasanjo who in his memoir, My Watch, and at the recent funeral observances for Alhaji Maitama Sule, equated the call for restructuring with the dissolution of the Republic. Mr. Former President, nothing can be further from the truth. To reorganize is not the same as to disorganize. The purpose of restructuring is to rearrange the way government business is run in order to make the parts and foundation of our union stronger and not to destroy them or make them weaker. To suggest, as Obasanjo has done, that restructurists want to break Nigeria up into 36 countries is preposterous! No one can question Obasanjo’s patriotic credentials, but we can certainly assert that he is not Nigeria’s only patriot. Surely former president Obasanjo does not think that accomplished Nigerians such as former President Ibrahim Babangida, former Vice President Abubakar Atiku, former Chief of Defence Staff, Lt. General Alani Akinrinade, former Finance Minister and presidential candidate, Chief Olu Falaie, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, Cardinal Anthony Okojie, Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, Former Commonwealth Secretary General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, and former Information Minister, Prof. Jerry Gana, who have all endorsed the restructuring model love Nigeria less than he does!
Another outspoken critic, former member of the House of Representatives, Dr. Junaid Mohammed, was a delegate to the 2014 National Conference. According to Dr. Junaid, the Pan-Northern Delegate Forum of which he was a member at the conference rejected every facet of the conference. As he put it in his Saturday Sun interview of 22nd April, 2017, “we didn’t agree with the confab, we didn’t agree with the idea behind it, we didn’t agree with the composition of the delegates and how they were chosen, and the manner Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi conducted the affairs of the conference. We rejected the outcome of the confab long before the conference made its submission to the government”. When asked by the interviewer why the Northern delegation did not walk out of the conference and instead enjoyed the emoluments and contributed to the discussions if it had that much objection to the entire exercise, Dr. Junaid retorted that the northern delegates did not form a quorum that could decide on such action.
Dr. Junaid’s comments are quite troubling, therefore a number of interrogations are pertinent here. Does he not realize that the very notion of a Pan-Northern Delegates Forum to a national dialogue on how to improve federal government performance negates the spirit of oneness? For example, Chief Olabode George, who is from Lagos State, went to the Conference, not as a Southwest leader, or a Southern delegate, but as a Chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And since everybody from the Southwest is not a member of Afenifere, Yinka Odunmakin, the secretary of the Yoruba socio-political organization, was not representing a ‘Pan Southwest Forum’, but his ‘Pan-Yoruba organization’.
Similarly, Barrister Uwazurike was presenting his organization; Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), not Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), or Biafra Independent Movement (BIM), nor other pro-Biafra groups, or civil society groups from the Southeast area. Neither, did all the delegates from the South-south geo-political zone constitute themselves into a lobby group. Consequently one of the most prominent citizens from the zone Chief Edwin Clark, attended the confab as leader of the Ijaw nation, not as a member of some ‘Pan South-South Forum’. One can deduce from Dr. Junaid’s and the ‘Pan Northern Delegates Forum’s declaration that since they did not agree with ‘the idea behind it’ (the confab), that they went to the confab as spoilers. Why else would they have attended a three-month long assembly which, as Junaid Mohammed informs us, they dismissed from inception as a waste of time, and a waste of taxpayers money?
Dr Junaid Mohammed’s revelation that he and his ‘Pan Northern Delegates forum’ would have walked out of the conference deliberations if they formed a quorum provides another indication that they were disingenuous in their dealings with the National Conference. The excuse that the Pan Northern Delegates Forum did not form a quorum at the conference is a subterfuge. There were 492 member in total, at the convention. And by Mohammad’s own admission, 189 of them were from the North. It is common knowledge that in the internationally accepted Roberts Rule of law, 1/3rd of the whole forms a quorum. And since 1/3rd of 492 is 164, the Northern delegation with 189 members had a quorum and could have staged a legitimate boycott.
Perhaps, the real reason Junaid Mohammed and the ‘Pan Northern Delegates Forum, did not walk out of the 2014 Confab was because they recognized that the event was popular throughout the country. They knew it had intrinsic legitimacy, and that the issues discussed were of monumental significance to the heart and soul of the nation. They realized that to walk out on such an August gathering would have been tantamount to issuing a notice of the north’s intention to quit the federation.
Were the comments not coming from a man with the enormous powers of a state governor, one would have simply dismissed the rash condemnation of restructuring attributed to Governor Nasir El-Rufai in the Daily Sun of 30th June, 2017 as idle chatter.
–Concluded
Dr. Pearse is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Lagos and a Public Affairs analyst.
Firstly, he argues that the Buhari administration, and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC)