No one seems to like the 1999 constitution very much. Not the executive branch; and not the legislature. President Olusegun Obasanjo led the first charge against it soon after he assumed office on May 29, 1999. He decided to review it. Review was an inelegant euphemism for trying to rewrite the country’s supreme law that had not even been tested. As the principal defender of the constitution, he probably believed he had to make some inputs into a sacred document he was obliged to defend. It made some sense.
Obasanjo set up a constitution review committee headed by Yusuf Mamman, our former ambassador to Spain. Yusuf left the committee and Clement Ebri, former governor of Cross River State, stepped in to finish the job. No one knows exactly what became of the report of the review committee. What is known is that the constitution was neither reviewed nor amended on the strength of the report of the review committee.
The obsession with panel beating the constitution into a more fanciful shape has been turned into a national political ambition. The most determined attempt to take out all its wrinkles was the joint national assembly committee headed by the then deputy president of the senate, Ibrahim Mantu. The committee did a thorough job. It proposed some 118 amendments. Our supreme law must be full of wrinkles.
The committee worked amidst well-grounded suspicions that Obasanjo was behind its work and that the primary objective of the amendments was to insert a new clause to give him a third term in office. A groundswell of opposition to the tenure elongation vaporized all the 118 proposed amendments on the floor of the senate. The third term ship foundered on the reef of its proposed clause. Obasanjo did not get his wish. But such was the passion and sentiment against the third term agenda that the baby suffered the same fate as the dirty bath water.
The constitution has not been sitting pretty. In 2010, it suffered the indignity of something called the doctrine of necessity. An amendment was imposed on it in a hurry in a calculated political response to arguably save the presidency from the manipulations of power hungry men and women in the corridors of power.
The national assembly has made several other attempts since then to amend the constitution. Ours is a country obsessed with the perfect constitution as a democratic ideal. We have had more constitutions than all the African countries put together. Still our democratic credential rests on pillars of mud. It is not the constitution, stupid.
As you read this, some fresh proposed amendments are before the state houses of assembly. I do not know the full extent of these proposed amendments. The national assembly never fully let on. We picked up only bits and pieces in the course of the scrappy debates in the national assembly.
However, two of the proposed amendments stick out like pain where it irritates. One is a proposed autonomy for local governments; the other is the retention of the so-called immunity clause. These two items have featured in almost every roll call for constitutional amendments since 1999. Both excite the public, pro and con, because they have sadly been raised to the status of big national issues.
I have heard good and well-reasoned arguments advanced for local government autonomy. Apparently, the majority of the state houses of assembly are not persuaded by these reasoned arguments. Twenty-three of them have thrown out the proposed autonomy. The number is one short of two-thirds – 24 – stipulated by the country for an amendment to pass or fail. Is the proposal fighting for its life? Do not bet on it. We have not heard the last on it. If, and when, the national assembly debates the report of Jonathan’s constitutional conference, the nth in the endless but fruitless search for a perfect constitution, what to do with the local government system will again have its big day in the market square. Keep your fingers crossed.
The proponents of the local government autonomy stand on good grounds that invite some sympathy for their cause. In a fundamental sense, this is not about good governance at the grassroots level. It is about a rescue operation of a battered system that now poorly serves the cause of grassroots development and democracy.
As I see it, the proposal has two important components. The first is to rescue the local government system from the crass illegalities and constitutional breaches perpetrated by most of the state governors. These have a long history going all the way back to the second republic. Throughout the life of that republic, no state government conducted local government elections because a) many of them were not sure that opposing political parties would not make inroads through the elections and b) the institution of caretaker committees created an avenue for political patronage. These committees became the third tier in the political reward system. If you missed being a commissioner or a special adviser, you landed in the coveted chair of the local government chairman.
Nothing has changed since then. State governors reluctantly conduct local government elections but make sure there is a hiatus of between six months and one year between one local government election and another. The gap is filled with the unconstitutional tenure of caretaker committees. The constitution has no provision for caretaker committees in the three tiers of government. Just as in the case of federal and state governments, it is the intention of the constitution that towards the end of one local council tenure, an election should be held to either renew the mandate of the characters or else replace them.
Given the degree of manipulation by the state governors, local government elections are pathetically worse than farcical. As in the other two tiers, so it is in the third. The local governments are run entirely at the whims and caprices of the state governors.
The second component of the proposal derives directly from the first: many of the state governors are happy to have turned the local governments into their political fiefdoms where they plant and nurture their breed of political thugs. In many of the states of the federation, the state governors impose jobless men and women plucked from the societal back woods, as local government chairmen. And there is no point in putting this delicately: many of the state governors steal the local government funds through the local government joint accounts committees.
I venture to say that in 90 per cent of the states, the state governors starve the local governments of funds. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance, thought she could force the governors to publicly confront their itchy fingers by publishing the monthly share of each tier of government from the federation account. It has not stopped the state governors from freely helping themselves to the local government fund. The selected chairmen are only too grateful to warm their chairs – and do nothing.
The proponents of local government autonomy believe that the best practicable solution to the problem is to free the local governments from the iron grips of the state governments and thus allow them to be run in accordance with the best practices in the concept of grassroots administration and good governance.
(To be concluded)
