By Jide Balogun
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President
Goodluck Jonathan
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President Goodluck Jonathan’s decision
to establish the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue
(hereafter referred to as the “Dialogue Committee” or “the Committee”) has
generated a lot of reactions, some positive, others negative, yet others,
somewhere in between. The Federal Government justified its action by
highlighting the multiple challenges facing Nigeria as a nation, and arguing
that only open dialogue offered a way out of the abyss in which Nigerians
currently find themselves.
A number of Nigerians, among them,
reputable citizens, civil society big-wigs, university professors, and, of
course, discredited politicians, have also thrown their weight behind the
decision. One politician was quoted as claiming that “The move for national
dialogue is …based on a popular notion that ‘it is better to jaw jaw than to
war-war’, especially in a democratic setting.” Another observer cataloged all
the problems facing Nigeria and concluded that these problems would not go away
until the Dialogue Committee got to work. Only enemies of progress, the
observer continued, would object to a national dialogue at this stage in
Nigeria’s history.
Unfazed by what appears a
well-orchestrated plan to line the people behind the Dialogue idea,
critics of open-ended dialogue have dismissed the exercise as at best, a
charade meant to divert attention from weighty political questions, and at
worst, a cynical and calculated attempt to whip up mass hysteria and stoke
ethno-regional antagonism. They find the timing of the dialogue particularly
suspect. Why, they pointedly ask, has National Dialogue suddenly become a
panacea for Nigeria’s myriad afflictions?
Why did the President of Nigeria not
think about organizing a national conference immediately he took over the
mantle of the country’s leadership in 2010? Why did he wait until dissidents
within his own party, the People’s Democratic Party/PDP, began to raise
troubling questions about the party’s record on internal democracy, and, more
personally threatening, to demand that the President perish the thought of
serving as the party’s flag-bearer in the 2015 presidential election?
True to form, attention of Nigerians
has since shifted from substance to ad hominem and from rational
contestation to plain name calling. Instead of focusing on the case for or
against, and/or the options open to, another Presidential committee, the two
sides of the dialogue divide have been raining curses and abuses on each
other. Advocates of national dialogue fired the first salvo. They
labelled their opponents reactionaries, obstacles to change,
pseudo-progressives, etc. In the hurry to score a point, the Dialogue
supporters curiously defined ‘progress’ to mean its exact opposite–that is,
looking backwards and holding tenaciously to the past! This is my reading of
the commentary by one commentator.
Wondering whether the likes of Asiwaju
Bola Tinubu should not stop parading themselves as progressives, this apologist
for dialogue challenged the APC leader to reconcile his present opposition to
the Dialogue Committee with his previous stand on the same subject. If Tinubu
was a staunch advocate of dialogue under the Abacha regime in the 1990s, why is
he now performing a somersault and opposing Jonathan’s Dialogue Committee? What
kind of politics is that? Politics without principle, Tinubu’s critic lashed
out.
Since he and I have never met, I do not
consider myself competent to hold brief for Tinubu or defend his views. Still,
I cannot help wondering if his critics are not deliberately misrepresenting his
position, or worse still, comparing the incomparable. Based on my, albeit,
limited, knowledge of the history of the struggle against the military in
Nigeria, I can say without fear of contradiction that what Tinubu and his
contemporaries stood for decades ago was a Sovereign National Conference/SNC.
They did so at a time when the SNC appeared as the most effective method of
changing corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Whether it was in the Republic of
Benin, the Republic of Congo, or Mali, the SNC was the mechanism adopted by
leading opposition figures to wrest power from sit-tight rulers and,
supposedly, to return that power to where it belonged—the custody of the
People.
However, the SNC, which worked in the
1990s–when constitutional methods of changing African regimes failed–is not in
the same class as the National Dialogue Committee established by an incumbent
President and for reasons that are not entirely clear. The critics of the
dialogue idea fear that like its predecessors, the Dialogue Committee would go
from one urban area to another listening to a vocal and politically engaged
public, going through the motion of recording various shades of opinion, and
submitting a report which would basically leave things as they have always
been. The Committee would thus go the way of its predecessors–the previous
talking shops–with nothing to show for the amount of time and money expended on
it.
Even on the assumption that the
Dialogue Committee is a reincarnation of the Sovereign National Conference
dreamed of by Tinubu and other progressives in the 1990s—and I still hold that
the two contraptions are different–it would be retrogressive, nay, irrational,
to embrace the new arrangement blindly, obstinately, and without questioning
its applicability to Nigeria’s current circumstances. In any case, the SNC
might have dislodged military autocracies and one-party regimes for a while,
but its democratization energy ebbed over time where no conscious efforts were
made to involve the People in the design, construction, operation, and
oversight of key governance institutions.
The SNC power fizzled out where the
People did not play an active role in the constitution making process. One
merely needs to follow the trajectory of two countries (Mali and the former
People’s Republic of Congo) where SNC brought instant results but failed to
anticipate other challenges down the road. In the two countries, the dialogue
component of SNC lost steam as soon as soon as power changed hands. It took
additional (in the case of Mali, drastic) measures to halt the drift to
anarchy.
When it comes to Nigeria, the
marginalization of the People in the constitution making process is the issue
that ought to be addressed. If truth be told, no Nigerian regime has ever
allowed anything remotely similar to the SNC to take shape, let alone encourage
the People to dictate broad constitutional directions. As I point out in The
Route to Power in Nigeria (originally published by Palgrave-Macmillan, New
York in 2010, and soon to be released in Nigeria by Malthouse Press), the elite
rarely trusts the People sufficiently to allow the latter to shape its own and
the country’s destiny. The Dialogue Committee is a clear vindication of this
position. The establishment of the Committee represents yet another attempt at
pre-empting a long-felt demand, the demand for a people-driven constitution.
Right from independence, through the
military era, to the current civilian dispensation, the terms of Nigeria’s
‘social contract’ have always been dictated by the elite, particularly, the
ruling clique. It does not matter whether it is the series of London
constitutional conferences preceding the attainment of independence, the
Constituent Assembly convoked by the military in 1978 (albeit, with a fair
cross section of the Nigerian society participating in deliberations), the
national conference that gave birth to the Abacha regime’s ‘five leprous
fingers’ and left the regime’s ‘self-succession’ dream undisturbed, or the
national political conference established and carefully stage-managed by the
Obasanjo regime in 2005.
The practice to date has been for a
vocal public to have its say, leaving the elite to have its way. If President
Jonathan had had his way on return to office in 2011, the presidential term of
office would have stretched from four to seven years. Strange as it might at
first sound, he might have had his way. If he had set up a committee or
convoked a national conference to “advise” him on this ‘minor’ constitutional
issue, he would have succeeded in elongating his tenure without much ado.
And now the government has set up the
Dialogue Committee to “advise” him on every subject under the sun. Beside
encouraging the people “to keep talking”, the proponents of the National
Dialogue idea have not explained how the latest experience would be different
from the preceding ones—that is, how the Dialogue Committee would hand the
People the opportunity they never once had, which is the opportunity to decide
how they wish to be governed. Will the dialogue end with a constitution that
the majority of Nigerians could rightly call theirs?
Will that constitution provide for
checks and balances in the true sense of the term, or would this be another
case of checks/cheques repeatedly bouncing for lack of account balances? What
safeguards can dialogue provide against ballot stuffing, box snatching, willful
alteration of results, intimidation of opponents, and statute-barred litigation
of polling outcomes? Will dialogue liberate public institutions from the
over-powering influence of federal and state executives, political godfathers,
and strong wo/men?
When could Nigerians expect the
Inspector-General of Police’s deputies to perform their constitutionally
mandated functions without looking over their shoulders for partisan political
‘guidance’ or for ‘instructions from above’? How will the Dialogue hold corrupt
officials accountable? Above all, is dialogue the cure for bigotry and
intolerance—the type that Nigerians witnessed when Colonel Nyiam nearly
assaulted the Edo State Governor just because the Governor exercised his
God-given right to express an opinion?
I for one do not expect the Dialogue
Committee to accomplish a tiny fraction of what is expected of it. In other
words, I am not the one imposing all those impossible obligations on the
National Dialogue Committee. It is its supporters who are using the mechanism
to promise Nigerians what they know the Committee cannot deliver—which is
heaven on one of the most hate-filled corners of the earth.
The way the Dialogue Committee backers
are going about it, one could be forgiven for assuming that dialogue is answer
to Nigeria’s myriad problems–the magic bullet that the country needs to survive
and prosper in an environment characterized by hate, distrust, and widespread
cynicism. Just come to think of it, talking randomly is the last think that
Nigeria needs to bounce back to sound health from what is, to all practical
purposes, an advanced stage of malignancy. What the patient needs is the
physician’s honesty of purpose, not another talking shop, much less
cynicism.
And cynical is what the dialogue
formula is. The initial composition of the Dialogue Committee betrays the
sponsors’ underlying cynicism. A committee which is established for the purpose
of promoting cross-fertilization of opinions should not, at any time,
include those who are not genuinely committed to two-way dialogue. A member
that has already made up his mind who belongs in Nigeria as against who should
be ‘expelled’ should never have been shortlisted for, much less appointed
to serve on, such a committee.
Yet it took a public outburst to draw
attention to the presence of the dogmatic committee member, Col. Tony Nyiam.
The Colonel might have tendered his resignation in deference to public opinion,
but the damage has already been done. His confrontational attitude became the
lightning rod for all that is perceived to be wrong with the dialogue idea—or
the smoke signal which the Dialogue Committee’s opponents gleefully cite to
make and strengthen their case. Rather than vindicate him and help the dialogue
cause, the Colonel’s letter of resignation made things worse. The letter
confirmed his bigotry.
It is legitimate to ask what is the
alternative to the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue?
In my humble opinion, Nigeria’s interest would be best served if the
latest in the litany of presidential committees is totally de-linked from the
Presidency. Instead of a committee advising the President, it should,
with appropriate changes in composition, be reconstituted into a Constitution
Review Commission.
Preferably, members should be duly nominated at the local
government level. Those elected at the local government level would constitute
an electoral college to vote for one of them to serve as their state’s
representative on the Constitution Review Commission. Each state electoral
college would further collate submissions from local government for onward
transmission to the Commission.
If the present constitution has no
place for plebiscites, the Constitution Review Commission’s first order of
business would be to recommend that the National and the State Assemblies
debate a motion for a constitutional amendment shifting the center of Nigeria’s
constitution-making gravity from the government to the People. Thereafter, the
Review Commission should be mandated to work with the People of Nigeria on a
new constitution. The Commission should enlist the services of experts in
constitutional law, political science, public administration, policing in
federal jurisdictions, and federal finance. These experts should assist the
Commission Secretariat in analyzing submissions received from local government,
state, and national interlocutors.
If the Constitution Review Commission
is to answer to the People and not just to the Presidency, its report and
recommendations should be submitted to the People for ratification. In plain
language, any draft constitution produced under the Commission’s auspices
should not be deposited on the President’s desk but be tendered for public
debate prior to its approval/rejection at multi-level plebiscites—that is,
plebiscites conducted at the local government, state, geo-political, and
national levels.
To entrench the idea of citizen
participation in governance, any revised constitution should contain provisions
for the conduct of periodic referenda on sensitive issues—e.g., remuneration of
political office holders, revenue allocation formula, state creation, excision
or merger of local government areas, privatization of state enterprises,
leasing of public facilities/assets to private concessionaires, Nigeria’s
participation in “coalitions of the willing” to effect regime change in other
African countries, stationing of foreign bases on Nigerian soil, and public
private partnership contracts.
As I argued when commenting on the
Yoruba Assembly convened in Ibadan in August 2012, a viable social contract is
one which affords the People the opportunity to indicate how they wish to be
governed, and contain provisions on how to hold the state Leviathan accountable
for the exercise of sovereign powers. The message is thus clear: the future of
Nigeria hinges on the active engagement of the People in the constitution
making, legitimization, and review processes, not on endless talk.
Professor Balogun is based in Canada.
He is former Director-General, The Administrative Staff College of Nigeria and
former Senior Adviser at the UN Headquarters, New York.
Follow
him on twitter @balogunjide1
Source: http://balogunjide.net
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