Confab a success? Not so, Sir, Mr. President!
By Reuben Abati , The Guardian Online News
POLITICIANS are incurable optimists, and President Olusegun Obasanjo is one of them. He stood before God, man, and country, the other day, and declared the controversial, divisive, and aborted National Political Reform Conference, the "most successful" attempt at resolving Nigeria's problem by its citizens.
The President ought to display a better appreciation of history. Where would our President place the Constitutional Conferences that led to Nigeria's independence in 1960, the fence-mending that saved Nigeria from the evil aftermath of the civil war, the conference that produced the 1979 Constitution, and the heroic self-assertion of the Nigerian people between 1993 and 1999 which ironically produced Obasanjo as President. The President, facing an audience of presumably intelligent people also said the conference arrived at 187 decisions "in an atmosphere of full democracy and freedom". Haba!
Only a politician can afford to use these words "democracy and freedom" so loosely. What, if we may ask, was free and democratic about the Political Reform Conference? President Obasanjo needs to be reminded of three facts: one, that the Conference was imposed on the Nigerian people without a legal backing. Two, its members were selected by the President and the Governors, which means that given our political circumstances with the PDP as the dominant political party, the Conference was almost an exclusive PDP affair. Three, certain members of that Conference have had cause to protest that the entire exercise was managed in a feudalistic manner, with pre-determined outcomes.
Itse Sagay, who is in no way a frivolous man, has pointedly accused Justice Niki Tobi, the Conference Chairman, of pandering to the whims of the Northern establishment. He says: "Yes, it was lopsided handling. It was a totally pro-North handling. I was a victim of his pro-North attitude. He (Niki Tobi) made a ruling that at the plenary no member of a committee can speak on any recommendation of the committee so that you would not disagree with your committee in the public". If this is true, then, what is the President saying about the Conference being democratic? President Obasanjo also told us that the Conference was "successfully brought to an end". It is amazing how certain persons find it so easy to reconstruct history against the run of known facts. It is a matter of public knowledge, and yet the President insists on the contrary, that the Niki Tobi Conference ended in acrimony, name - calling, and open disgrace. The Chambers Dictionary that I use defines success as follows: "to turn out well, to prosper, to obtain one's wish or accomplish what is attempted". This definition is simple enough.
The truth is that the Conference did not turn out well, nor did it accomplish its objectives. It will be recalled that South-South delegates walked out of the Conference. When it reconvened, they also refused to return to it, and although they were in Abuja, they refused to attend the dinner at which the Conference report was presented to the President. They also refused to sign the document. The Conference had to be called off abruptly, because it was clear that continuing with it could only lead to the outbreak of hostilities, especially as Northern delegates, led by a loquacious Umaru Dikko, and representatives of the South-South, chose to adopt the rhetoric of confrontation and war. If there is any success to be ascribed to the Conference at all, it can only be in a semantic, oxymoronic form, what the French call, succes de scandale.
What is remembered is not the achievement of the stated objectives, but the celebrated scandal arising from two contentious issues: the principled demand of the South-South for increased derivation, and ultimately resource control, and differences over the official request for an extension of the tenure of the present government. The President and his spin-doctors insist that these two issues are nothing compared to about 185 other issues on which the delegates managed to reach a consensus. Again, not so Sir. What are those other issues? I believe that this is not a matter of statistics ( 2 against 185). Fiscal federalism and the rule of law, the two issues in contention, are of a weightier nature than the nitpicking over those other details, as they sit at the very core of the national question. These are issues that Nigerians cannot run away from: making light of the protest by the South-South (as the President did) can only mean an invitation to future conflict.
The fact that the President had to submit the report of the 19 committees of the Conference to the National Conference further indicates that the exercise ended in disarray. What is the National Assembly expected to do with reports from 19 committees? The real issue about the Niki Tobi Conference is that it has not taken Nigeria forward; rather, it has taken this country back to 1967. It has further radicalised the South-South, and driven a wedge between the Niger Delta and the North, and between the South-South and the South-West.
The misguided verbal ejaculation of Northern sopkespersons on the issue of derivation is not likely to be forgiven by the people of the Niger Delta. Also, South-South delegates are insisting that the representatives of the South-West betrayed them: they would agree to a set of principles behind closed doors, only to say something else in public! This alleged duplicitousness of the Yoruba delegates deserves close investigation but we shall not do so here. As it were, the differences that the Niki Tobi conference has thrown up at both individual and group levels, can only serve to remind us that there is a lot that is wrong with our nation and there is no demonstration yet of a determination to address the complex challenges of nation-building.
The predominant ethic is this matter, is that power is might, or that might is right; the President in dismissing the South-South as misguided, exposes a limitation in democracy, evidenced in the acceptance of the majority view as supreme, and minority opinions as ineffectual. Can nations be built when key groups are excluded and marginalised? By walking out of the Conference, and by boycotting the President's dinner, the people of the South-South are making a point with long-distance resonance. They are not bearing arms, they are not threatening to secede, but they are saying that Nigeria can carry on without them if other stakeholders would not listen to their views. The Conference, and the dinner may not be the only things that the South-South would eventually boycott: what if that region stays out of the proposed Census exercise and the 2007 elections? Would the Conference that provided them a platform for self-determination, still be regarded as largely successful from a pan-Nigerian perspective?
I believe that the President is bluffing. Faced with a volcanic Conference, he had to beat a retreat, and in doing so, he needed to save his face and that of his government. And so, he has dumped the reports of the Niki Tobi Conference on the National Assembly, with a coded advice that recommendations contained therein should be included in the amendments to the 1999 Constitution. The National Assembly is faced with a moral burden. If the wheel of democracy had been moving smoothly since 1999, and the National Assembly had been functioning well, the National Conference may not even have been so necessary. The Assembly can only consider the Conference reports in the context of its own history.
When that Conference was inaugurated, members of the National Assembly had refused to endorse it; they also refused to approve funding for it, and while the Conference lasted, they pretended as if it did not exist. Would the National Assembly now reverse itself, and begin to look at the product of an exercise whose legitimacy it had opposed? Rather than do any such thing, the National Assembly has a duty to probe the funding of the National Conference. Where did the President get the funds from? Can he commit public funds on his own outside the budget? How much was spent on the Conference? Nigerians deserve to know these details. And the report that has been submitted to it - whose version is it? Is it signed? Is it authentic? And to prevent any cover-up or manipulations, the report of the Conference must be made public, and distributed among Nigerians, to enable the rest of us debate it. The people must know what decisions have been reached on their behalf. Above all, the National Assembly must resist the temptation to be used as a rubber stamp for any hidden anti-democratic designs.
It is re-assuring for example that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Alhaji Aminu Masari has been saying that the House would not be party to any attempt to extend the President's tenure, by either two or six years as is being proposed in certain quarters. The House of Representatives is the more radical of the two legislative houses, and Nigerians can only hope that its members will find the voice and the courage to stand on the side of the people and the law. The Afenifere has issued a statement to the effect that any attempt to extend Obasanjo's rule is "extra-constitutional and suicidal". A special emphasis should be placed on the phrase- suicidal. The thinking among the professional political class is that anything is possible in Nigeria, but civil society must gird its loins afresh, rediscover its voice, refine its strategies, and serve as the counterwwight to the excesses of the polticians.
Already, the signs are disturbing. Last weekend, for example, the PDP held a rally in Lagos which was tagged "Tsunami rally", and so, PDP chieftains swooped on the state with the threat that they would "capture" Lagos for their party in 2007. The use of the phrase "Tsunami" and the President's involvement in that conspiracy is an expression of insensitivity of the worst kind. That the President appeared at that rally, and danced, was most unPresidential: As we move towards the 2007 elections, the President in campaigning for his party, or for himself, must resist the temptation to descend to the same arena as party thugs. The Tsunami disaster covering about five Asian nations, and resulting in the deaths of about 230,000 people (with 164 in Africa) in December 2004 is a continuing source of agony for many. Tsunami represents in our collective consciousness, death, loss and destruction. Six months after the incident the Tsunami is a living issue in South Asia: lives are being rebuilt, families are counting their losses, international philanthropy is being organised for the victims.
Whoever branded the PDP rally "Tsunami" must have been in a fit of brain paralysis. What he is saying unwittingly, is that the PDP is planning to bring destruction to Lagos in 2007. Little wonder, Governor Bola Tinubu and his AD supporters had to sweep the PDP evil out of Lagos in a ritual exercise that involved women and brooms. Perhaps in the thinking of the PDP apparatchiks in charge of the National Conference, what they have done and are still planning to do (maybe create more states, throw some carrots in the direction of the South-South, extend the tenure of elected officials etc), is a kind of Tsunami. But do they have any right to play politics with a global tragedy? It is a measure of their humanity.
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