A (brief) history and moral of constitution making in Nigeria since ’66, By Mohammed Haruna

Next Monday August 11, the National Conference will reconvene for the final consideration and signing of its report. The prospect that the conference will have a happy ending looks rather bleak. And the reason is the same old one that has marred virtually every constitutional conference in the country since 1966; a dubious hidden agenda of self-service by the conveners.
When President Goodluck Jonathan made a u-turn from his long-held rejection of a constitutional conference and suddenly announced early this year that he would convene one, there were widespread scepticisms, even cynicism, about his decision. Many, including this reporter, concluded it was to divert public attention away from his dismal performance and, at the same time, execute a Machiavellian sectional and self-succession agenda against the foreground of next year’s presidential election.
Once again, it seemed the lesson that no such hidden agenda has succeeded since 1966 when the country’s first military regime sought to perpetuate itself, has been lost on those in power.
Back in 1966, the first military head of state, Major-General JTU Aguiyi-Ironsi, set up a Constitutional Study Group under late Chief Rotimi “The Law” Williams barely a month after he came to power in January. However, even before the panel could settle down to study anything, the general took the unwise advice of a power-hungry cabal he had surrounded himself with and promulgated the Unification Decree in May which turned the country into a unitary state under his jackboots. This led to his overthrow and assassination in July.
Colonel Yakubu Gowon, who took over, set up an Ad Hoc Conference on Constitutional Proposals essentially to manage the crisis of his succession in the face of strong objections from Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military governor of Eastern Nigeria, who was nominally his senior. The conference ended in fiasco in Aburi, Ghana, with each side accusing the other of bad faith in implementing its decisions.
The disagreement eventually led to a three-year civil war that ended in 1970. After that Gowon announced he would end military rule in 1976. He changed his mind in 1974 when he not only said in the year’s Independence Day broadcast on October 1, that 1976 was “unrealistic”. He also failed to give a new date that was realistic.
This led to his overthrow in July 1975. In his first Independence Day broadcast on October 1, the new head of state, Brigadier Murtala Mohammed, announced a five-item, four-year transition programme, the central pillar of which was a new constitution for the country. In February 1976 some disgruntled elements in the army tried to overthrow his regime but failed. However they succeeded in assassinating him in the process.
Despite this assassination, the new regime headed by Lt-General Olusegun Obasanjo kept faith with General Mohammed’s transition programme and ended thirteen years of military rule by handing over power to civilians on October 1, 1979. However, this was not before it had executed its own agenda of changing the country’s constitution from the parliamentary model bequeathed to it by its British colonial masters to an American-type presidential model in which the centre became all-powerful.
The wisdom of this change, intended to check the country’s old centrifugal tendencies, has since become debatable. As Professor Ben Nwabueze, SAN, the country’s foremost constitutional lawyer who also played a central role in drafting the 1979 constitution said in a recent interview in Sunday Vanguard (March 20), this change seems to have led to the exact opposite of the framers’ good intentions.
“We took 50 per cent of the concurrent list of matters (in the old constitution) and merged them to the exclusive list,” he said. “We also went to the residual matters, took almost 50 per cent and put it in the exclusive list. We took so many other things…It turned out that putting so much power at the centre was an invitation to disunity…The struggle for control of the centre with all that power led to disunity.”
Whether the change was wise or not, the new presidential system under President Shehu Shagari lasted only 51 months. His ruling National Peoples Party (NPN) had boasted that there were only two parties in the country; NPN and the military. Meaning, it could never lose any election to its civilian opposition. It went on to gratuitously rig the 1983 election – chances then were that it could still have won fair and square – so massively the military felt compelled to pick up its gauntlet as the only opposition party and threw it out on December 31, 1983, barely three months into its second term.
The regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari which took over from Shagari said initially that a return to civil rule was not its priority. Less than two years after he came to power he was overthrown by his army chief, Major-General Ibrahim Babangida, in a bloodless palace coup in August 1985.
Babangida, in turn, ran the longest transition programme in the country’s history and in the end was forced to “step aside” in August 1993, leaving behind his army chief, General Sani Abacha, ostensibly to back up the interim government of Chief Ernest Sonekan he had cobbled together to remedy the huge constitutional crisis his inexplicable cancellation of the 1992 presidential election, apparently won by Chief MKO Abiola, had created.
Instead of backing up Sonekan, Abacha obliged very convenient calls from several so-called progressives for the overthrow of what they dubbed Babangida’s “contraption”, and sent the former UAC mogul packing in November 1993. But rather than hand over power to Abiola, as the “progressives” foolishly believed he would, the man predictably kept the power to himself.
Five years after he overthrew Sonekan, the man tried to perpetuate himself by swapping his khaki for mufti through a political sleight of hand in which all the five political parties his electoral commission had registered in the course of his transition programme, nominated him as their presidential candidate. However, before any elections could hold the man died a mysterious death.
He was succeeded by his chief of defence staff, Lt-General Abdulsalami Abubakar who, ironically, he had pencilled down for sacking on the day he (Abubakar) became head of state. Wisely, the new head of state refrained from stretching his luck and ran the shortest transition programme in the country’s history, lasting all of only eleven months; dutifully he handed over power on May 29, 1999 to a civilianized General Obasanjo after he had been pardoned for his conviction over a coup attempt against Abacha for which he has served several years of a life sentence commuted from death sentence, and after he had won the presidential ticket of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party which was essentially a two-horse race against Shagari’s Vice-President, Dr Alex Ekwueme.
Obasanjo served out his two terms of four years each but soon forgot the lesson of his regime’s good faith during his first outing as military head of state in 1976; he sought a third term half way through his second. Not only that, reminiscent of NPN’s boast during the Second Republic, his party said it will rule Nigeria for the next 50 years, if not for ever.
Obasanjo’s third term agenda failed so miserably that today virtually all those who aided and abetted him have been denouncing him. Surprisingly (?), the loudest denunciation has come from his onetime minister of information and political adviser, Professor Jerry Gana, a permanent resident in the country’s corridors of power.
His former principal’s constitutional conference of 2005 came to grief, Gana said in an interview in Daily Sun (April 16), because the man was “greedy”! “I was,” he said, “the political adviser at the time and I happened to be one of the conveners…But just because of the issue of third term which was not part of what we recommended Obasanjo abandoned the whole thing. It was irresponsible, it was not proper, it was unfair…It was painful; it was an act of greed.”
This, Gana said in the interview which I am not aware he has repudiated, was something President Jonathan has assured Nigerians he will not contemplate with his own national conference. “This president,” he said, “has said no Nigerian must come back and do this again. He told us…by the Grace of God this time around your recommendations will be implemented.”
Gana is not alone among President Jonathan’s men who say they believe in his good faith. Senator Femi Okurounmu, hitherto a champion of Sovereign National Conference and chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee which recommended the shape and circumscribed terms of reference of the current national conference, is another.
“I think,” he said in an interview in the New Telegraph (March 17), “this administration, in all fairness, has tried to show it has no hidden agenda and I can say that as the chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Conference that if the government has a hidden agenda, I would be privy to it.”
As we all now know, the newspapers have since given the lie, a big, big lie, to repeated denials by the president’s men that he had no hidden agenda in convening his own national conference. A 102-page document with presidential imprimatur written all over it, has since surfaced at the conference purporting to be the “Terms of Agreement of the Six Geo-Political Zones in Nigeria.” This was reminiscent of the document Obasanjo’s men tried unsuccessfully to sneak into his 2005 conference in order to give him a third term.
As with Obasanjo’s document, this one too has come with malicious intent towards one section of the country. It also contained the six-year, single-term tenure we all know is so very dear to our president.
If I have bored you with this longish recap of the history of constitution making in the country since 1966, I am terribly sorry. But I thought the recap was necessary to make its moral apparent; virtually every constitutional conference in this country has come with a hidden agenda by its convener and virtually all of them have come to grief.
I have no doubt in my mind that, as members of the current one reconvene next Monday, this too shall come to pass because it too was never convened in good faith.