The 1999 constitution is not a perfect document. No Constitution is any way. The major issue in constitutions is usually the operators. The civility in Britain coupled with the high strength of their Institutions ensures minimal or no dissension even in a situation of unwritten constitution. Britain operates the parliamentary system. America with a different Presidential system operates their own constitution with same level of success. The amendments on the American constitution is very few in a period of about two centuries. Elsewhere in the advanced world, other systems thrive and their constitution have never been known to impede their development.
Constitutional crises is essentially African. It is for us to find out reason for this. Some scholars tend to think that what Africa needs should gravitate from monarchical totalitarianism to theocratic dictatorship. Some even try to garnish it as benovelent dictatorship. Our leaders in the past, obviously more educated than the current crop of leaders thought deeply about our Constitutional challenge and tried to offer documented solutions in their various books. Awolowo was right that Nigeria is a multi nation of complex linguistic configuration and therefore is better a confederation.
Zik in his later years perhaps out of frustration proposed diarchy (army/civilian rule) for Nigeria. All these are important because without a proper glue for the nation, no constitution can operate well in Nigeria. The various Constitutional conferences we had in Nigeria including the constituent assembly and later day conferences all almost ended in fiasco but merely managed to consensus not based on reality but on trade offs. See the mess we made of state creation at the last conference. It is very unfortunate that by the rhetorics of activists most of who are not very informed about Constitutional matters, the current 1999 Constitution as amended has been severely disabled.
This is unfortunate because what indeed is disabled are the operators of the Constitution who are excelling more in impunity. For instance, the same constitution that granted executive immunity provides for impeachment of the executive on grounds of gross misconduct. That our legislators have no liver to provide the checks and balances in the Constitution should be blamed on them and not the document. Revenue accretion and disbursement patter is clearly stated in the Constitution but there is so much abuse in the process of appropriation. Executive rascality in often contravening this Constitution is never challenged either by national assembly or the state governments.
Almost all the landmark cases in this regard occurred in the past with Lagos taking the lead in advancing jurisprudence in this regard. Apart from general citizen focused provisions in the Constitution, the hallmark of this constitution is chapter 2 – Fundamental Objectives and Directive principles of state policy and Chapter 4 that deals with fundamental rights of citizens. The label of injusticeability of chapter 2 is without foundation. Democracies like India have long departed from thinking that socio economic rights are not justiceable. In any case, that they are not justiceable does not mean that Government should abdicate responsibility. What it rightly means is that the rights are automated and should draw from the wealth of the nation. To often give the alibi of financial constraints is the height of irresponsibility by the operators of our constitution.
Why will somebody seek to be elected if you have no plans to attend to socio economic rights and yet all manifestoes that will come out in a few weeks time will be full of promises on the same socio economic rights. On the fundamental human rights provision in the Constitution, the major problem we have is institutional enablement. The supreme Court has done well by giving us clear enforcement procedure but most unfortunately, it is people in Government that breach the fundamental right of the citizens the most. What ever be the case, it is crazy and rather unconscionable for any person to call for suspension of Election until a new Constitution is heralded.
A Constitution birthed in vacuum of government is not the best. The best we can do is to elect people who have a desire to give us a people’s constitution. The convocation of a conference imbued with sovereignty for purpose of writing a new Constitution will be rancourous at this time. The other suggestion of interim Government is an invitation to chaos. We have gone through this route before with Abacha and Shonekan and and are still suffering the consequences. We shouldn’t contemplate it again. What ever we couldn’t do in the past 7 years of Buhari’s rule should be passed over to the next regime or republic.
Paschal Emeka Egerue.
