Our educated elite, often driven either by greed for power or appetite for mischief, are the scourge of our nation. This was perhaps why Obafemi Awolowo took one look at his colleagues in the run up to independence and concluded that ‘given a choice between Nigerian educated elite, the traditional rulers and the colonial masters, Nigerians would choose in reverse order because with the latter, Nigerian are assured of justice.”
The death of Prof Ben Nwabueze, one of our most celebrated constitutional law scholars, last week at the ripe age of 94 provides another opportunity to once again examine the travails of Nigeria and Nigerians in the hands of those who were supposed to be the nation’s pathfinders.
From the onset, our challenge as a multinational and multicultural society was how to fashion out a federal constitution whose essence is ‘unity in diversity’ (Preston King 1981), using ethnic groups as building block as opposed to geographical diversity. To tackle the challenge, our founding fathers and the colonial masters embarked on various pre-independence constitutional re-engineering efforts culminating in the 1922 Clifford Constitution which introduced elective principles that encouraged formation of political parties, the 1946 Richard’s Constitution which promoted national unity by bringing together the north and southern Nigeria for greater participation in the discussion of their own affairs for the very first time since 1923; and 1951 Macpherson constitution which introduced House of Representatives with regional representatives of 68 members from the north and 34 each from the west and east.
There was also the Oliver Lyttleton 1953 inspired London Conference that institutionalised federalism and regionalism, 1954 Lagos Conference which recommended the regionalization of public service and judiciary and resources allocation based on derivation, the 1957 London Independence constitutional conference which granted self-government to the west and east and recommended the setting up of the 1958 Willink Commission to look into the complaints of minorities’.
Despite these giant strides in constitutional development, the first republic collapsed because of constitutional crisis initiated by a segment of the elite who in an effort to outfox each other contrived the military coup that dragged our ill-equipped and less educationally endowed soldiers into politics.
In power, they developed a messianic complex. And limited by the nature of their training, the military command structure, and handicapped by their little knowledge of how to manage society, their antidote to what they perceived as excesses of the strong regions was a strong centre even in a multi-ethnic society. Regarding themselves as custodians of a constitution abused by the political elite, they assumed they could fashion out a vision of a new and better society. We have since been moving in circle because the closer they moved towards that vision the farther the vision receded.
One man that could have prevented the tragedy of May 1966 was Professor Ben Nwabueze. He was one of Nigerian most accomplished students of society. He has been described as a constitutional colossus, an accomplished intellectual who according to Professor Williams “dazzled everyone by the amazing fecundity of his mind and imagination, the sheer forensic brilliance of his argument, the dialectical rigour of his submission and the rousing aplomb and finesse with which they are put together.”
Unfortunately the brilliance of Nwabueze, credited with the drafting of military unitary Decree 34 that in one fell swoop frittered away the gains of 44 years of constitutional engineering by our colonial masters and our founding fathers, did not reflect positively in the affairs of Nigeria or that of his Igbo people who have had to pay huge price for Ironsi’s 1966 folly.
If the first republic collapsed because Nwabueze and his fellow Nigerian leading elite’ greed for power, their role in frustrating efforts to return to “Nigerian path to freedom” through other constitutional reforms since the seventies have not been any less treacherous.
Gowon’s 12 state structure based on major ethnic groups aligned with Obafemi Awolowo’s concept of state creation as a philosophy for development and unity in diversity, but that changed with the 1975 take- over of power by Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo who immediately foisted a 19-state structure without rhyme on the country.
It was to get worse with the country increasingly becoming federal only in name but unitary in reality especially with Ibrahim Babangida’s creation of eleven states (Akwa Ibom and Katsina) on September 23, 1987, and Abia, Enugu, Delta, Jigawa, Kebbi, Osun, Kogi, Taraba and Yobe on August 27, 1991. Abacha’s with the creation of six additional states: Ebonyi, Bayelsa, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Gombe and Ekiti, in 1996, took the total number to an unwieldy and unviable 36 sates.
A journey through memory and by his own admission shortly before his death, Nwabueze admitted he was closely linked to the nation’s self-inflicted tragedies. His intervention in 1966 led to the July 1966 revenge coup, the attendant pogrom on the streets of northern cities and the civil war in which his Igbo people paid heavy toll.
His advice to Babangida according to Prof. Omo Omoruyi’s “The Tales of June 12” led to the annulment of MKO Abiola’s pan-Nigeria 1993 mandate and the foisting of interim contraption by Babangida and Obasanjo on the country as well as Abacha’s five years’ war against Nigeria and the Yoruba led NADECO opposition.
It is also on record that with Nwabueze as Abacha’s Minister of Education, Nigerian universities were shut down for about nine months during which lecturers received no salaries. And as Abacha’s confidant, he was also said to have made some inputs into the 1989 constitution often dismissed as Abdulsalami’s Decree 24 that has made the country ungovernable since the beginning of the 4th republic.
Nwabueze equally admitted that as a member of the Constitution Drafting Committee set up by the military government in 1978, he was not “only a member but chairman of one of the sub-committees that produced Chapter 2, the fundamental objectives and one of the cardinal flaws in the constitution is the concentration of powers in the centre.”
With no lesson learnt from the 1966 forced unity fiasco, Nwabueze claimed he and his colleagues at the Constitution Drafting Committee were so overwhelmed with “this patriotic feeling that we needed unity and the most effective way to achieve unity of the country is by having a very strong central government”.
For this reason, he claimed they “took away 50 per cent of the items on the concurrent list and gave it to the centre…We looked at the residual matters, these are matters exclusive to the states, we took a large part of it, close to 50 percent; we took it away from states and gave to the centre and the result is the almighty Federal Government”.
Prof Ben Nwabueze, the nation’s most celebrated constitutional scholar, more than anyone else knew that the concept of ‘an almighty federal government’ in a federal set up was an aberration.
He was the chairman of The Patriots, a group of eminent Nigerian citizens. He was a Nigerian elder statesman and ‘a constitutional colossus loved for the sheer forensic brilliance of his argument’. Back-tracking on some issues he once held dear did not diminish his standing among those who literarily worshipped him. Interrogating the end of his many crusades that brought only disaster to Nigeria and his Igbo people is therefore not designed to spoil the joy of those who believe he was beyond reproach but merely as record of history.