LETTER TO MY COUNTRYMEN: THIS CONFAB MUST SUCCEED…A Rejoinder By Law Mefor On 10th of March, 2014, Vanguard newspaper published what one Atedo Peterside, a delegate to the National Conference called “Letter To My Countrymen: This Confab Must Succeed”. In the said letter, Mr. Peterside took ample time to lampoon the Chairman, Senate Committee on Constitution Review, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, members of the Committee and indeed the entire National Assembly, irresponsibly and callously calling them Kleptomaniacs and so on. He also wrote them off as failures, individually and collectively, and regarded their effort as Legislators to amend the 1999 Constitution as pretentious. Atedo Peterside’s letter dwelt a lot more on disparaging the person of Ike Ekweremadu particularly as if he has an axe to grind with the Deputy Senate President, and by so doing, he lost track and entirely derailed from the presumable objective of what otherwise should be a very important missive to Nigerians. Peterside wrote: “ I feel sorry for Senator Ike Ekweremadu because it appears nobody is really interested in joining issues with him on anything, including even his favoured six-year single …. 170 million Nigerians at home and abroad have conspired to ignore him and his Committee”. Unsure whether Ike Ekweremadu is a patriot or not, the letter writer claims the reason Ekweremadu and National Assembly are ignored is for what he called the harsh reality that no idea can capture the imagination of his countrymen unless it has four important attributes: 1) Right Message; 2) Right Messenger; 3) Right Place; and 4) Right Time. His invectives included an extrapolation of his communication theory by stating that Ekweremadu and indeed the National Assembly do not have the right message neither are they the right messengers and of course the hallowed chambers the Legislators occupy are not the right place to discuss the Constitution of Nigeria nor now the time ripe for it. Peterside’s letter veered off irretrievably when it went further to portray the National Assembly as the problem besetting the nation. To him, “500 Federal legislators … each pay themselves more than President Obama and conspire to avoid disclosing exactly how much they each collect from the Federal Treasury under various guises… and so nobody trusts the National Assembly to properly address issues like the huge cost of governance which threatens to strangulate the Nigerian economy over time”. Atedo Peterside cuts quite a pathetic image for pointing out that the essential differences between National Conference, which many call a jamboree and the National Assembly, is financial propriety and probity where each including himself as delegate will in measly 3 months collect N12 m as sitting allowance, apart from other perks. The manifest unawareness or pretension exhibited by Peterside on the workings of Government and deliberate lies and falsehood make his cause irredeemable and incurably defective. To begin with, he falsely stated it as a fact that National Assembly members fix salaries and other entitlements more than that of Obama for themselves. Whereas the statutory organization responsible for the fixing of salaries and allowances of the members of Government including the National Assembly is Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, which is an executive body. Peterside also talked about parasitic parastatals that must either be merged or shut down as recommended by the Orosaye Committee, to save N123bn annually. He falsely again claims that “ it will not happen because these agencies have their “protectors” in the National Assembly” and called the Lawmakers thieves. Hear him: “Who will save the nation from this unholy coalition of kleptomaniacs?” As a way of showing what depraved lie this is, all the Parastatals are each a creation of the Law and what this means is that for any of the Parastaals to be merged or shut down, the law must first be amended. It is however true that it is a legislative duty to amend laws or enact new ones. But laws of this nature need to originate from the executive since it was the President that set up the Oronsaye Committee and should be the one to issue White Paper on it and propose the necessary amendments, showing which Parastatals should be merged or scrapped. Checks show this hasn’t been done as the President is yet to forward any Bill to that effect to the National Assembly. Yet Peterside blames the National Assembly for what is clearly an executive lapse. Peterside also blames the National Assembly for the nation gravitating towards a two-party system with the aim of increasing polarisation, which, to him, however does not affect the Legislator’s collective personal and/or pecuniary interests or the gigantic remuneration that the legislators pay themselves (to use his exact words). One wonders the role the Legislators have played in the formation of the G7 Governors and in the decamping of five of them to the APC. One further wonders whether it is no longer in the Legislature that the decamping was halted, first in the House of Reps where the Speaker Aminu Tambuwal refused to recognize the APC as Majority Party in the House of Reps, to give room for the courts to adjudicate on the suit concerning it. This was quickly followed by Ike Ekweremadu’s and David Mark’s refusal to read the letters of defection for the same reason. Despite these visible patriotic efforts, Peterside still blamed the National Assembly for defection. Finally, Atedo Peterside drew what appears to be a battle line between the National Assembly and the National Conference by declaring most recklessly: “Some of us aim to use this National Conference to build a grand coalition against all of you and what you stand for” . Herein lays the reason for this rejoinder. One seriously hopes that the National Conference is not populated by too many Petersides otherwise the Confab is headed for disaster. Peterside, at best, is misguided and worse still, may be truly ignorant. Either way, his position on what should be the right posture of the National Conference is erroneous and dangerous. People like this who, through means best known to them, found themselves as delegates to this all-important National Conference, have shown they do not even understand the aim of the Confab, let alone the inherent problems warranting it. This explains, at least in part, why they now see the National Assembly as the problem of Nigeria and seek to make a scapegoat of the Legislature. To assist such people to gain perspective, let it be emphasized that Nigeria’s problem is structural and the defects have their taproots in the foundation of the nation, going back to Colonial times. To ignore such reality and dwell on the surface is playing to the gallery and a certain recipe for disaster. It is tantamount to raveling in inconsequential irrelevancies, a costly distraction from the real issues. A basic understanding of the Constitution clearly shows that the National Assembly alone cannot amend the 1999 Constitution. Fact is whatever clause it proposes for amendment must receive concurrent affirmation of 24 States’ Houses of Assembly. The very nature of the 1999 Constitution, deliberately made to be rigid, does not allow for any easy amendment. In the past, there were amendments that passed the National Assembly but failed in States. An example of this is the Amendment for financial autonomy of State Legislative Assemblies. State legislators voted against their own independence! Is the National Assembly to blame for this too? But the question delegates should ask is: why is the National Assembly not able to achieve appreciable amendments as desired by Ike Ekweremadu and his Committee? Apart from the structural imbalances of the Nigerian Federation, the 1999 Constitution is deliberately made to work against democracy, by unnecessarily vesting too much power in the Executive Arm, in the Center and in the Governors, to the exclusion of the people. As it is, there is no Residual List in the Constitution, which is exclusively reserved for the States. Whereas there exists a very long list of Exclusive items reserved for the Federal Government alone, you have less than half of items on the Concurrent List, where both States as federating Units and the Federal Government can both legislate. This means that Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution is by far more unitary than Federal and this is not the making of the National Assembly. At State level, because the Governors are handed absolute powers with both the Legislature and the Judiciary tied to the apron strings of the Executive, the Governors and the President live like Czars and the Executive Arm steal more money than can ever be stolen at the Legislative Arm, at Federal or State. For the avoidance of doubt, the State Assemblies are not on first line charge and the same for the State Judiciary. It means both arms must wait for the Governor to release funds when he pleases. In practice we can all see how successive Governors have exploited this lacuna deliberately created in the 1999 Constriction to emasculate the other Arms of Government and democracy in their States. Worse still, the Constitutional Provision of a Joint State and Local Government Account, with Governors as Chairmen of the Committees, has also effectively handed over to the State Governors the LGs as well, thus cutting off the grassroots completely. Such are the imbalances and Constitutional constraints besetting the country and the Governors have equally used the Nigeria’s Governors Forum to block whatever amendment that seeks to free Arms of Government in the States and give them financial freedom. Such are the issues that should preoccupy Delegates, not name calling. The challenge before the National Conference is therefore not addressing the failings of the National Assembly as Peterside falsely think since the Federal Legislature cannot amend the Constitution alone without the concurrent affirmation of at least 24 states on each proposed amendment. The problem is therefore systemic and the factors that have made it so are alive and waiting to confront the National Confab. Peterside ought to know that many of the framers of the unworkable 1999 Constitution and architects of the dangerously skewed and dysfunctional Nigerian polity, which the Confab is expected to address, are also members of the Conference and their mission there could well be to defend the status quo and not to change it. His concern then ought to be how to navigate such entrenched interests working against true federalism, national unity and social justice. It is not Ekweremadu or the National Assembly that made it so. The framers of the 1999, themselves no less Nigerians, who hoisted on the nation a polity, that is unitary in a clearly federal environment, do not want true federalism and the real job of the Confab is covert such people. Such delegates who have failed to see where such problems are, fail to see that such people are working even harder today, to thwart change. Such characters are even going to try to truncate the Confab and or its outcome if care is not taken. In this classical case of misplaced aggression and misplaced priorities by some delegates, it is rather fatal that Peterside, looking in the wrong direction, may end up like the proverbial fowl that left the knife that killed it, to make face to the cooking pot. More importantly, any Delegate that does not see that the National Confab needs the cooperation of the National Assembly is not fit to be called one. In fact both Institutions need to work closely together and share experiences to enable the Confab to be guided to a safe ending. May be Atedo Peterside and his ilk do not know; Ekweremadu , David Mark and an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly, support the idea of Confab. Mark called for it severally at the enary. All some of them have expressed as worry is how to give it a legal backing so that some misguided Nigerians like Peterside do not lay its outcome to ruins by shooting it down in court. A candid advice: the Confab does not need to incur the wrath of the members of the National Assembly and its leadership needs to caution its belligerent members to desist from such wanton recklessness of insulting the Legislature. It may not take more than a simple motion challenging the labeling of the Legislators as kleptomaniacs and the problem spills from there. Once such happens, then, it will be the beginning of the end and the next will be return to status quo ante and everybody coming to grief. We can avoid this by reining in the Petersides of this National Confab and suspend them if need be, to give way to full inclusiveness which the task ahead demands. May God Almighty, all knowing, see this Confab through. • Law Mefor, Forensic Psychologist, author and Journalist, is National Coordinator, Transform Nigeria Movement, Abuja; Tel.: +234-803-787-2893; e-mail: lawmefor@gamil
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 15:25:21 +0000
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