To Recap

“Centralization, in short, has been the bane of the nation – on any level you choose – and nothing will answer the necessity of a harmonious relationship and development of its parts other than a severe curtailment of the control of the Centre over the functioning of its parts” – Wole Soyinka

One of the unique revelations I experienced in the course of the year was a positive unmasking of my friend, Dr Wale Babalakin. He is widely known and acknowledged as an achiever in the private sector of the Nigerian economy and in the legal profession. He was the guest speaker at the annual reunion lecture series of the Government College, Ibadan, alumni, to which he invited me. As his friend and associate it wouldn’t take you long to recognize his habitual pride and passion for his alma mater. On several weekends he plays the generous host to his GCI cohorts at his palatial residence in Victoria Island. Given this pedigree I only needed to put two and two together to account for the role he was appointed to play on that occasion-or so I thought.

Wale is uncommonly generous and plays the larger than life philanthropic benefactor to people. I was a member of the Presidential delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 (in New York) but was only able to join in at the tail end of the conference-which coincided with the Xmas break. On learning I was going alone and would thus spend the yuletide season away from my family, he insisted on sponsoring my entire household to go along with me. Beyond looming large in the Nigerian capitalist elite bracket; and enjoying preferment as a foremost Nigerian lawyer, there is yet an additional feather to his cap that has gone largely underreported.

Given the prevalence of cronyism in the elevation of supposedly deserving Nigerian lawyers to the privileged class of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN-the annual conferment of the silk, are routinely met with public cynicism. In this circumstance, having a father like retired Supreme Court Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin can become an albatross, especially if any instant assessor of Wale, does not probe beyond the surface. Once you do, the conspicuous meritorious continuity from his academic exploits will readily stare you in the face. A guy who took a PHD in law from Cambridge at the age of 26 years cannot be culturally predisposed to the notion of being a beneficiary of unmerited promotion. I was about to be emphatically confirmed in this belief.

The citation of his academic background and progression from every step on the ladder-from secondary school to the attainment of doctorate in law was strewn with laurels and can be mistaken for the citation of a Nigerian National Order of Merit, NNOM awardee. If he had followed through on a lifetime academic career, he was well on course to taking a chair in the law faculty by the age of 30. In the event, the path he did not take would deprive the academia the complement of a potential academic prodigy. And if I had not thus been schooled on his academic profile I would have been taken aback at the quality of his presentation. As it were and at the end of the lecture, all I could murmur was I expected no less.

Yet (and albeit a worthy subject of tribute on his own merit) this column today is only tangentially about Wale. I have only employed him as a worthy departure point to attempt a snap recapitulation of the most topical subject matter of the year. Come the audience participatory session of commentaries and reflections from the floor, he roused a nagging indignation in me. The topic of his lecture was the potential utility of law to spur Nigeria into breaking out of the vicious cycle of underdevelopment; the instrumentality of the law and the legal profession to the resolution of Nigeria’s development crisis. In his formulation of Nigeria’s crisis, he spoke about the unrealized potential and deficiency of the legislature, especially at the state levels, to hold the executive arm accountable; and how this inadequacy had been compounded by the deteriorating quality of lawyers and judges.

In response to the inevitable question on the prescriptive utility of restructuring to resolve Nigeria’s development crisis-he went the way of the status quo escapist ploy of giving the dog a bad name in order to hang it. He snorted that the proponents of restructuring are not serious-to the extent that no strategy had been articulated for its realization! This is another variation of a familiar defamation and trivialization of the restructuring advocacy and if I had not been familiar with his good faith-indicated in a relentless quest for a way out of the Nigerian morass, I would have felt massively offended. Yet those of us who are perplexed at the barrage of the many willful (and some inadvertent) obfuscation and obstructionist take downs of restructuring must not tire of grappling with this challenge. The stock response of the preponderance of the deniers is that they don’t know what restructuring means because proponents have different versions. And my simple response is that why don’t you start by supporting the version that makes the best sense to you?

‘Still there are categories of Nigerians who express confusion at what the restructuring agenda basically entails. There is the category of those who are genuinely ignorant and suffer short attention span; there is the other category which feigns misunderstanding and deliberately conflates its meaning and import; and then there is another one which presumes to debunk the agenda from the standpoint of superior knowledge and understanding’.

Let us proceed with an acknowledgement of the inherent hindrances. First is the military rule syndrome. In the experience of Nigeria’s political history since 1966, all alterations to the constitutional framework had been undertaken and enforced by military dictatorship. The experience has conditioned us to the culture of escapism and delegation of responsibility. Many like me, would have pondered-Wont it make my life easier if the military dictatorship that plunged Nigeria into this constitutional morass can likewise reset the country? In our institutional memory, all it takes is ‘I General Sani Abacha; Joshua Dogonyaro, in consultation with other patriotic colleagues and taken cognizance of the overwhelming desire of Nigerians, hereby announced the dissolution of the 36 states structure with immediate effect’….. .We are yet to live down this syndrome and learn to courageously and commonly address our challenges without subconsciously ceding responsibility to the ‘muddle through’ philosophy and diktat.

Complementing this syndrome is an incurably defective constitution that reads more like a death trap (a pact unto death) rather than a living document. It excessively rewards those in power and assures them of severe deprivation should they be reasonable enough to contemplate reform and remedy. Thus, they are totally without personal incentive to seek meaningful constitutional reform except the occasional echo of the populist musings of regional constituencies. Those who jeer at us to follow the laid down constitutional procedure to secure the restructuring policy know what they are saying. This sense of despair has become self-perpetuating and has alarmingly resulted in hand wringing self-pity and transferred aggression of people like Wale.

A Restatement

For the umpteenth time, restructuring simply means a restoration of the constitutional framework that the people of Nigeria gave us in 1960. Relative to the independence constitution all other so called constitutions lack legitimacy and authenticity. I will substantiate my citation of the independence constitution as the authentic will of the Nigerian people by proposing that no other set of Nigerian leaders personified the will of their political constituencies better than the trio of Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamidi Azikiwe who led the Nigerian delegation to the London constitutional conference. Second, only fundamentalists demand an undiluted return to first principles and since I am not a fundamentalist I can only propose the independence constitution as a guiding constitutional framework not as a wholesale replacement of contemporary political order.

The joke really is on the deniers of restructuring. At this stage anyone expressing confusion on what this subject matter entails is either being dodgy, wooly or just seeking a reinvention of the wheel. There are no less than two comprehensive working documents on the review of the constitutional structure of Nigeria in the public domain. The most significant is the report of the 2014 constitutional conference convened by Goodluck Jonathan government. Other than the name of the convener, I have yet, to come across any plausible logic against its utility as a draft constitution

Supporting Excerpts

“An excessively powerful center does not equate national unity. If anything, it has made our unity more fragile, our government more unstable and our country more unsafe. We must renegotiate our union in order to make it stronger. Greater autonomy, power and resources for states and local authorities will give the federating units greater freedom and flexibility to address local issues, priorities and peculiarities. It will reduce the premium placed on capturing power at the center. It will promote healthy rivalries among the federating units and local authorities. .In short it has not served Nigeria well, and at the risk of reproach it has not served my part of the country, the North, well”-Atiku Abubakar

“Southwest governors yesterday lamented that the splitting of the Old Western Region into six states robbed the people of their spirit of oneness and hampered the pace of socio – economic development.The six governors – Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun), Akinwunmi Ambode (Lagos), Abiola Ajimobi (Oyo), Rauf Aregbesola (Osun), Ayo Fayose (Ekiti) and Rotimi Akeredolu(Ondo), expressed this sentiment at a meeting in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, during a regional meeting”

“First, in any country where there are divergences of language and of nationality- particularly of language- a unitary constitution is always a source of bitterness and hostility on the part of linguistic or national minority groups. On the other hand, as soon as a federal constitution is introduced in which each linguistic or national group is recognized and accorded regional autonomy, any bitterness and hostility against the constitutional arrangement must disappear. Secondly, a federal constitution is usually a more or less dead letter in any country which lacks any of the factors conducive to federalism”- Obafemi Awolowo