1979 Constitution: How Nigeria derailed

Why successive administrations failed to chart the course of social justice and inclusion was the fulcrum of the discourse at a book presentation in Lagos last week. The tone of discussion at the event suggests that the document, which was suppressed for 42 years, contains answers to most of the problems bedeviling the country today. Deputy Political Editor RAYMOND MORDI reports.

Forty-two years after it was suppressed by the Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo-led military regime, the Minority Report & Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1966, has been presented to the public in Lagos. It is co-authored by Dr. Olusegun Osoba and Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman, historians who lectured at the Obafemi Awolowo University (then the University of Ife) and the Ahmadu Bello University several decades ago. They were part of the 49-member Constitution Drafting Committee set up by the late Gen. Murtala Mohammed to come up with a new constitution for the Second Republic. The committee was headed by the late Rotimi Williams (SAN).

A Minority Report became necessary because Osoba and Usman disagreed sharply with the recommendations of the 47 others. It was meant to be submitted to the Gen. Obasanjo-led successor military regime, following the assassination of Gen. Mohammed on February 13, 1976. But, in the words of Dr. Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, “they were attacked by the police when they attempted to organise a rally to launch it”. Dr. Mohammed is the Director of the Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training (CEDDERT), publishers of the Minority Report.

“At that time, the government did not want the public to know what was in the document; they didn’t want it. A majority of the members of the Constituent Assembly also didn’t want it released,” he said.

Interestingly, the 42-year old document remains valid for Nigeria’s socio-economic development, given the current problems facing the country. Though Dr. Mohammed admits in the foreword to the book that enormous changes have occurred in the last 42 years that have rendered some sections of the draft constitution obsolete, “it remains a useful reference material for those interested in writing a genuine people’s constitution”, as the reviewer, Mr. Femi Falana, aptly puts it.

The CEDDERT director said the trajectory of Nigerian society described in the document moved rapidly forward during the period which the document remained anathema,  thereby “exacerbating the levels of inequality in the society, increasing transfers of wealth to the few members of the elite; increasing levels of lawlessness on the part of political office holders and government functionaries, including the judiciary, the armed forces and police; increasing the levels of vacuousness of political parties’ ‘ideology’, and vastly increasing the amount of money required to participate in politics and run political campaigns.”

The above scenario, he added, “accompanied by an unbelievable level of corruption, means that changing the present-day Nigerian society is a far difficult task than the authors originally envisaged.” Mohammed also quotes Dr. Osoba as saying that at the time they were writing the document, they had felt that the society could be reformed by implementing a constitution with appropriate provisions “to create a more just and equitable system”.

Mohammed said it became imperative to revisit the report because major issues raised in it are still valid for some of the problems facing the country today. He said: “For example, the issue of social justice inserted in the 1979 Constitution and subsequently the 1989 Constitution (the right to education, the right to health, security and so on and so forth) is a concession to the efforts of Osoba and Usman. But, there are no provisions to make them justiciable. You can’t take your governor to court, because he has denied you education, stole the money and did not build schools. You can’t take anybody to court, because he failed to build hospitals or hospitals have been built but he has failed to equip them; you can’t take anybody to court because he has failed to protect your life. Yet, we vote money every year for security.

“Look at what is happening all over the country. We are now facing all the things these people (the two authors) wrote about and warned us about 42 years ago. Take the issue of citizenship. We have a simple definition of citizenship in the report. Now we have two: citizenship of Nigeria and citizenship of a particular state and this clash has led to series of conflicts in this country.”

Owing to the amorphous definition of citizenship in the constitution, the director said thousands of people have died in conflicts involving so-called indigenes and settlers in places like Plateau State, Taraba State and elsewhere in the country.

However, in the light of what has transpired since, Osoba believes that change can only be brought about today by overthrowing the existing order and through enforcing a democratic constitution.

His words: “The people who have vested interest in change have to struggle bring it about. The rulers of Nigeria don’t have vested interest in change, because they are okay with what is going on now. So, they don’t want any change; they want things to remain the same. The people who have vested interest in change are the classes that are shortchanged by the system.

“If the truth must be said, it can only be done by overthrowing the existing order; there is no other way. In fact, all the nations of the world who stand tall and proud have at one point or the other in their history witnessed a revolutionary transformation. They have removed the filthy hands of looters from their treasury and put their treasury in the hands of reliable and honest working people.

“There is need for unity in the struggle. You cannot have unity on the basis of lip service; paying lip service to development to unity. The ruling class has ruined everything. They’ve ruined the educational system; they’ve created an alternative educational system for their children, private education, which most people cannot afford. There is no ambiguity about it, continuous struggle is the only solution to our problem; not restructuring.”

Osoba said restructuring is a recurring lie in the lexicon of the Nigerian ruling elite, because they insist that it is what the country needs to cure all its political, economic and social ills. He said: “Let us understand that restructuring as proposed by some members of the Nigerian ruling elite is a blatant lie; we cannot make any progress with it. Why do I say it is a lie? When they say restructuring, they never define what they mean by restructuring. But, if you watch their body language and watch their behaviour, in relation to the Nigerian people, you can guess that what they mean by restructuring is either creation of more states, so that everybody would have a state at his backyard that he can exploit to his heart’s content and to the denial of his rivals and competitors.

“That was why in 2014, when former President Goodluck Jonathan convened a National Conference, one of the most important recommendations they made was that Nigeria should have 18 more states. This is after it has become clear that proliferation of states in Nigeria has almost reduced the country to bankruptcy, because of the high cost of administration. Politicians also extract huge sums of money from the treasury, by way of looting and through what they call security votes.

“For instance, security votes came to the fore after the 1979 Constitution. Before then, security votes were small and minimal. It was clearly for security and it was subject to auditing. But, today everybody in the executive arm of government gets security votes and they are not subject to auditing or verification. So, that’s one reason why they want restructuring; to create more states and more opportunities for politicians to get access to the treasury and remove money with impunity.

“Furthermore, when they talk of restructuring, their primary concern is resource control. This is more peculiar to the oil-rich states. They want total control of the resources found in their territory, particularly oil and gas. This is ostensibly for the benefit of the people of that region. But, in reality, if you look at what has been happening in the last three/four decades, the oil-rich states get an additional 13 per cent allocation, but most of them are bankrupt. The 13 per cent and the other revenues that they get from the centre are removed by the ethnic notables in that state. Similarly, the allocations of the other states that are not oil-rich are also hijacked at the top.

“So, for the past four decades, the rich has been getting richer and the poor has been getting poorer. Even in poor states like Osun and Ekiti, their rulers are not poor. All the states in Nigeria produce many more millionaires among the ruling class and many more paupers among the masses of their people. That is what we call scandalous wealth in the midst of abject poverty.

“When you talk about restructuring, you are only talking about sharing power or wealth horizontally among states ethnicity and region. You are not talking about sharing power and wealth vertically from top to bottom; from the top guns to the downtrodden masses and that is the critical form of restructuring, if we are honest about doing restructuring. But that has never come up in the lexicon of restructuring in Nigeria.”

The historian singled out Obasanjo as the most important single factor in the chaotic system of governance that has developed in Nigeria from the enactment of the 1979 Constitution and the inauguration of Shehu Shagari’s government on October 1, 1979 to date.

Indeed, speaker after speaker at the event emphasised the fact that the problems bedeviling the country today could have been nipped in the bud, if Obasanjo had accepted the report and made it part of the constitution.

Attahiru Bala Usman, son of the late co-author, also said the Minority Report will add value because there were many things that were thrown out by the soldiers that foisted the current flawed constitution on Nigerians. He said the report is now published with a new introduction to bring it to the knowledge of the public and to make it available to members of the National Assembly; so that Nigerians can talk about it.

Usman said: “We are going to give this to all members of the National Assembly, civil society groups. The same way people struggled for Nigeria’s independence, the same way people struggled to abolish slavery, the same way other people are going to struggle to improve this democracy.”

The President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Dr. Biodun Ogunyemi, said the significance of the publication of the Minority Report 42 years since it was suppressed by the same ruling class that remained in power till today “is that truth and humanistic ideas do not die”.

He added: “It is also that we must constantly examine the development of patriotic popular struggles in our country towards learning from them, towards bolstering the faith of our people in the struggle for their own liberation and the liberation of Nigeria. Triumphs, defeats and lulls are, throughout the history of popular struggles, in the nature of things: there are big and small, but cumulative gains”

The President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Ayuba Wabba, said Nigeria has not made progress, because of the faulty foundation on which governance is based. “That is the uniqueness of this occasion,” he said, adding that not many people want to stand with the masses because of pecuniary gains, “but the two scholars have stood with the masses of Nigeria”.

Wabba said the primary purpose of governance is the security and welfare of the people and that since government cannot take care of the security and welfare of the people, governance has failed.

Former Governor Balarabe Musa of the old Kaduna State said the Minority Report harped on genuine federalism and total liberation from imperialism. For Nigeria to move forward, he added, the Minority Report should be examined. He asked Obasanjo to apologise to Nigerians for rejecting the report, which would have helped to improve the country tremendously, by making leaders accountable to the people.

Musa said: “The Minority Report historically can be said to have arisen out of the experiences of the Nigerian Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) of the British Colonial Administration and the First Republic of Nigeria, the Nigerian workers organisations, students unions, Academic Staff Unions of Universities (ASUU), civil society organisations etc.”