Nigerians deserve fresh constitution before 2023
The Coordinating Secretary of the National Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for SelfDetermination ( NINAS), Tony Nnadi, was in where he spoke on 2023 election and why it should not hold without changing 1999 Constitution to reflect the aspirations of different nationalities that make up the federation.
The Guardian,
YHeading to the 2023 general elections, what are your concerns and why do you think the country is not stable enough for elections? ES, the organisation I speak for, NINAS, had proposed since December 16, 2020 that the elections should be deferred, so that we can reconstruct the damaged constitutional basis of Nigeria. And that proposition didn’t just drop from the sky. We called it constitutional
force majure, because we were declaring an emergency around the question of the union agreement that has been more or less toppled since 1966 and replaced by something totally strange to our original understanding.
So, we ceased to be a federation, we ceased to be a secular union since 1966 and the 1999 Constitution that has now turned our lives upside down is what we are rejecting. And when I say “we” I mean the nationalities, the constituent components, and the owners of the sovereignties that are aggregated as Nigeria.
You know who ought to make the union agreement and who made it. We made the agreement with the 1960 Constitution and got toppled in 1966. An Illegal Federal Government emerged since 1967 and truncated the federating constitution. What I am saying is that the federation of Nigeria died in 1967 after the accidents of 1966, and so, from that point, to date, two constitutional instruments by which the union is held together and managed, have been in position, the latest of which is the one that came in 1999 under the code name 1999 Constitution.
But we all know the story of how it came; the military, by decree, imposed an instrument that toppled everybody and our sovereignty.
So you are asking for a fresh constitution?
Yes, we are asking and insisting on it. It is actually our right to insist on what we want. It is called the right to self- determination; it is inalienable, as the owners of the sovereignty that will become that Nigeria. Our signature is put on a document we never made. When you go back to Decree 24 of 1999 by which they imposed that constitution, you will see that it was just the Provisional Ruling Council ( PRC) of General Abdulsalam Abubakar that told the story of how they came about the document. They said they formed a committee that went round and people wanted a return to 1979 Constitution.
So, as the ruling Military Council, they added and subtracted from that report and put forward what they have made out to be called the Constitution of 1999 and that is how we got to where we are; a federation of four regions to 36 states that are now listed in that Constitution as the federating units. 774 local governments that must be financed from the centre every month, 68 items on the exclusive list that seize everybody’s assets; the oil and gas of Niger Delta, the port of Lagos and you now put all the guns in the hands of that Federal Government that has in turn being hijacked by an ethnic group in the country; the Fulani who are also now openly in collusion with the invading herdsmen that have been adjudged the foremost deadly terror group on earth by the global terror index, with our Commander in Chief and President, a Fulani man presiding over all of it.
And we said, we have been having elections since 1999. We had one in 2003, 2007, 2015 and 2019, what has it added to our lives, other than degeneration and you know where the country has gotten to on all indices.
And we said as statesmen, let’s put this proposal on the table, having worked out all of what will replace what we agitate, we are not anarchists. We said let us go to transition now and begin to rework the damaged constitutional basis of Nigeria. Because on the basis of this 1999 Constitution, the owners of the constituent components, the owners of the sovereignty; Yoruba can be a country of 60 million people, the Eastern side, the South south and the North can determine how they want to live.
And we have been organising since the emergence of this Constitution in 1999, you heard about PRONACO, you heard about NIM, you heard about when we went to court in 2007 to say that this Constitution was not made by us that the document is illegitimate and it cannot be basis of our union. You saw the solemn assemblies by which the constituent components told international continents, the global communities that they will no longer be willing to submit themselves to that Constitution that ruined their lives.
It took their assets, it took all the guns from them and put them in the hands of people who are determined to exterminate them and take their lands. So, it is a combination. This constitutional force majure, which we activated as a mechanism for enforcing the consensus of the majority and I am talking about solid majority that has been in excess of 80 percent of the country’s population. The whole of the South and the whole of the Middle Belt who have been at the receiving end of this invading force, we say instead of going to elections, especially now that it has been established that our President and Commander in Chief is at the centre and is complicit in the terror that we have been suffering. So, instead of elections, why don’t we branch out like South Africa did in 1990 to go to resolve this long standing issue that is taking Nigeria as already a failed state, everybody has acknowledged that.
But it has gone beyond that,
Nigeria is a poverty capital of the world and this is a country that sells three million barrels of crude oil every day, a country with the human resources. We insist that we cannot proceed to elections to revalidate and reinforce this instrument the fifth time, we have had four rounds already.
Your impression against the
President, don’t you think that that is an assumption?
Let us examine it. He is a Fulani, into cow breeding, being the grand patron of
Miyetti Allah for many years. You saw when he went to m o l e s t the late Lam Adesina, former governor of Oyo State. So if he as grand patron of Miyetti Allah, he hasn’t told us he has ceased to be, he is still, this cattle breeders association, you see them every day proudly taking responsibility for the activities of the Fulani herdsmen. This President whose sympathy is with the Fulani herdsmen and the Miyetti Allah, you saw when he went into the treasury to pull out a N100b, which he gave to Miyetti Allah at the peak of the brigandage.
That is subjective; you don’t have the fact…?
It was on national TV at the time. Everybody was looking for answers to the invasion of Fulani herdsmen. What he did as President and Commander in Chief was to examine their request. They demanded for N160b to avoid the frequent clashes with owners of farmlands.
Your group is disputing the 1999 Constitution, rejecting it outright, you need to have a legal basis to do that knowing full well that there is a process to reject, reorganise and ammend Constitution. You cannot just deny it without having a replacement there will be a vacuum, so what is your basis?
The basis is our sovereignty, Nigeria is made of lands and people that could have been countries of their own and it took a lot of discussions and agreement, meeting in the Lancaster House, agreement of 1959 from the point of motion for Independence was moved in 1953 by Chief Anthony Enaoro and it was opposed and defeated by the Northern delegation that insisted that they needed a higher level of autonomy to commit to be in union with the rest of the Southern Nigeria.
And so from that 1953, the eight points demand raised by the leader of the Northern delegation, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello became the basis of the depth of autonomy that will be enjoyed by the federating regions. And that became even the basis of becoming one political union, otherwise those three regions could have gone off into independence as different countries. You remember that they each had their Constitution; Western region got its Constitution in 1957, East followed but they did not put them together until 1959 when the North was able to put its acts together for self- governance.
It was these three Constitutions that went to Lancaster House to unionise, to federate, and to distill what they mandated the union office, which is the Federal Government. Everything was going well, you saw how the West faired under Chief Obafemi Awolowo;
E a s t faired under Chief Michael Okpara, the fastest growing economy of the developing countries of the world at the time ahead of this Asian Tigers.
Even the North didn’t fail woefully; they had their own economy and built some of the things other people were building including universities. And so things were going relatively well until 1966, when some idealistic officers felt that the politicians were doing all kinds of things and they struck.
Then by July there was some kind of reprisal coup in which things now progressively degenerated to where the union itself collapsed because people could no longer go to the other parts to discuss, they went to Aburi to try to restore the union that collapsed. And then they came back, one side rejected it and it turned to war. About 3.5 million got killed on the battle field of Biafra, so what then emerged from 1967, like I said earlier was an illegal Federal Government operating flawed Constitution, first collated in 1979 and carried forward in 1999. We are saying that we do not accept the further reinforcement of the Constitution by way of elections at this time,
NADECO fought soldiers to leave the Government House and succeeded but the soldiers dumped on everybody the Constitution they first put together in 1979. The task now is to do the unfinished business of NADECO by calling a meeting of the owners of Nigeria, which we called PRONACO. When we convened the meeting of PRONACO in 2005, it was for the purpose of getting the nationalities to decide two questions, one; whether they want to continue in the union of Nigeria and two, on what terms if majority want to continue.
It lasted for years and we had 164 ethnic delegations in attendance. We sat in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Jos, Kano and came back to conclude it in Lagos. And it was a delegate from Katsina that moved the motion for adoption of the finished product. Buhari, the President now was part of the Fulani delegation that came to that process. Abubakar, who is now Sultan was a Colonel in the Army and was part of the Fulani delegation that came. So, nobody was left out.
All the groups that were angry enough to carry arms against the Nigerian states as at that time were persuaded to drop arms. We persuaded them to believ we can fix this thing, because the Nigeria we have was imposed on us by the British. The soldiers have come in and made their own mistakes, let us now take responsibility and sit down and discuss how we can continue to accommodate everybody because nobody had security, nobody had electricity, education healthcare or housing.
So why can’t we now just within the context of our right to determine how to live in our space, it is called right to self determination.
At the time of PRONACO there was a civilian government in place ….?
We are not anarchists. I am a lawyer of many years and the people who convened PRONACO, you know some of them like Chief Enahoro, Professor Wole Soyinka, Dim Ojukwu, Bishop Gbonigi, all kinds of people across the country.
We had everybody who was involved in saying Nigeria must work well. When we announced in 2004 that we are going to have a meeting of the owners of Nigeria to decide the terms of the union afresh, Obasanjo went on national TV to say that it will amount to treason if we did that. Of course, we told him to get ready to put everybody in prison if he is the one that has become Nigeria. Nobody needed to tell him to let off the threat when he saw the kind of people that turned up from everywhere.