by Kayode Komolafe

Beyond that, there is a deep conceptual confusion about what the agenda of the conference could ever be. Some have even said the collapse of public education, the gross underdevelopment of healthcare system, the decay of infrastructure and several other problems of Nigeria are to be resolved in the national conference.

Since President Goodluck Jonathan set up a committee to prepare the ground for a “national dialogue”, some of the reactions to the move in Abuja have seemed to ignore the tempestuous history of the advocacy for a national conference. This represents a huge deficit in the discussions. Some of the positions taken so far should remind one of what the Catholic Bishop Hassan Mathew Kukah once said about the public sphere in Nigeria: the conduct of public debates here is akin to that of a company in which reference is never made to the minutes of the last meeting in its board room. Issues are brought up at a meeting as if the company has just come into existence.

So if the discussants of the moves by the President could just look back a bit it would not be difficult to see if the Jonathan national dialogue will ever serve the purpose for which strident calls have been made for a national conference especially since 1990.
A lot of integrative developments have taken place in the evolution of the Nigerian nation; it is no use pretending that we are dealing with a non-existent tabula rasa. Yet, even some public intellectuals speak as if Nigeria’s various ethnic and religious groups are meeting one another for the first time in 2013. The fact of history disproves this notion.

This moment certainly calls a lot of clarification. And that is why the history of the advocacy for a national conference is supremely relevant in the circumstance. To be sure, there has always been a definite purpose for a national conference: it is to provide an answer to the National Question. That should encapsulate the agenda of the any national conference.  Now, as a category the National Question has specific political and ideological contents.

  It is certainly not   an empty political sack in which you can put all the problems of Nigeria as some contributions to the debate appear to suggest. In any case, it is practically inconceivable that a conference can ever be staged to address all the social, economic, political and even cultural problems of this country. The question should also be posed contextually. In Nigeria today, the National Question is about how the ethnic, regional and religious groups should relate in a nation in which social justice, equity mutual tolerance constitute directive principles of state policy. Concretely, the National Question is about the structure and the issues of the Nigerian federalism.

It is noteworthy that over time some respected enthusiasts of national conference have formulated the question like this: the agenda of a national conference is to ask if Nigerians wish to be together and how to go about it. There is a lot that is problematic about such a formulation still finding proponents 100 years after amalgamation. Such a formulation obviously obliterates the memory of identifiable integrative forces. Meanwhile, in the present circumstance, the greatest achievement of such a conference will be to make an enlightened input on the extant issues embodied in the National Question into to the making of a people’s constitution.

Talking about context, when the radical lawyer and former president of the Nigerian Bar Association, Alao Aka-Bashorun, and others attempted to hold a national conference at the National Theatre in August 1990, the context was different from Jonathan’s Nigeria of 2013.  The regime of President Ibrahim Babangida, which stopped the conference, had aborted a coup four months earlier.

In the statement of the coup makers some states were  “excised” from the country. The profiles of the coup leaders reinforced the reading of ethnic undertones into the tragic incident. Political sensitivity and tension under the military regime was palpable. The regime itself was managing a long-winding transition programme about which political antennae were raised across the country. In managing the transition programme, Babangida was mindful of the National Question. From his own perspective, he attempted to provide an answer.

To do so, he found a tool in a component of the transition programme. For instance, as part of the transition programme the 1989 Constitution was made for the expected Third Republic. A Constituent Assembly headed by Justice Anthony Nnaemezie Aniagolu debated a draft constitution for a year in Abuja and later presented a clean copy to Babangida. During the inauguration of the Assembly on May 11, 1988, Babangida said inter alia:  “I should also state categorically that the Assembly should not indulge itself in the fruitless exercise of trying to alter the agreed ingredients of Nigeria’s political order such as federalism, presidentialism, non-adoption of any religion as state religion and the respect and observance of fundamental human rights”.

Babangida was certainly right to say 25 years ago, for example, that the federalist principle should be presumed a settled issue in building a Nigerian nation. It is, therefore, hardly a mark of progress to be imagining that in 2013 that the question could be if federalism is an option. The question should be how to make the federal structure more productive and equitable. However, since then some proponents have been pushing the position that all issues in the National Question should be taken afresh.

The calls by the opposition for a national conference became more strident during the regime of General Sani Abacha. Again, in that context, national conference was to be part of a crisis-resolution mechanism. It was a major demand of the political forces arrayed against Abacha. The crisis itself resulted from the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election won Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola. The election   was to be the climax of the Babangida transition programme. Abacha responded to the call for a national conference by setting up the 1995 constitutional conference. It didn’t take time for people to see through the manipulation and that the conference was Abacha’s tool.

Although President Olusegun Obasanjo never pretended to be an advocate of national conference, sovereign or otherwise, the advocacy continued throughout his tenure. His constitutional conference of 2005/2006 was the handy tool; the denouement, however, came with the failure of the campaign for him to have a third term in office.

So, the first lesson of history to learn is that the moves by past administrations to respond to the National Question have been less than politically sincere. And there is a lot to be curious about how Jonathan suddenly became a convert to national conference. The curiosity is heightened by the fact that the National Assembly dominated by his party has in the last few months expended a lot of time and public resources into the review of the 1999 Constitution. The public was made to believe that the exercise would, among other things, answer the National Question.

Beyond that, there is a deep conceptual confusion about what the agenda of the conference could ever be. Some have even said the collapse of public education, the gross underdevelopment of healthcare system, the decay of infrastructure and several other problems of Nigeria are to be resolved in the national conference.  Yes, the National Question vertically affects Nigerians. However, the issues of poverty, ignorance and disease more fundamentally affect the people horizontally. The scourge of joblessness ravaging the land makes no exception of any ethnic or religious group. The hopelessness of the youths who are in the overwhelming majority in the population is not defined along ethnic or religious lines.  These socio-economic issues embodied in the Class Question are not veritable items on the agenda of any national conference.

It is impracticable to resolve these material issues of existence in any national conference.  They are issues of governance. So the issues should be prominent on the platforms of political parties, which should canvass policy alternatives about how to solve the problems. Credible elections are the avenues for the people to decide on which policy options they prefer in solving the problems.  How to wage war against poverty in this land and confront the social plague of youth unemployment is not a matter for one conference no matter the nomenclature.

Let free and fair election decide which party has the best approach to the problem.  Meanwhile, people are probably confusing staging, for instance, a technical summit to harvest ideas on funding tertiary education with a national conference which has a specific purpose.  What a serious political elite should be thinking about is how to build ideologically defined political parties that could craft competing programmes on how to solve these problems in a united and just nation. In fact, some of these issues can only be ultimately   resolved by class struggle.

It is probably recalling the point made by this reporter on this page sometime ago in this debate: “That is why some contributors to the debate posit that the unity of the country should be assumed and the task should be how to make it work. In any case, as Edwin Madunagu puts the matter with mathematical clarity, Nigeria is not simply the arithmetic sum of the 450 or so nationalities. Yes, Nigerians belong to ethnic and religious groups. Yet, by the reality of their material existence they also belong to classes.

They are not just Ijaws, Tivs or Kanuris. They are also farmers, workers, employers, students, women, businessmen, contractors, importers, professionals, unemployed, and billionaires and destitute. So the interests to be defended are not only ethnic, regional or religious. A national conference may tackle the fault lines of religion and ethnicity.  However, it is not clear how it would abolish poverty which is the Number One problem facing the majority of the people”.

There should be no confusion about the purpose of a national conference.

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Read this article in the Thisday Newspapers

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija