Earlier this month, this newspaper, the Daily Trust, convened yet another of its highly-celebrated and nationally-acknowledged Annual Dialogue. The newspaper’s array of speakers for the Dialogue was a tongue-in-cheek statement hidden only to the uninitiated. With Yorubas, Igbos and South South each represented by some of their most powerful voices, the newspaper chose to invite only one speaker from the whole Arewa; Professor Attahiru Jega.
If there were one person who could speak for sensible people, it would be my teacher, Prof Jega. He speaks sensibly and logically. Alas! Nigeria is not a platform for sense and logic; it is a podium of abuse and vitriolic. But since my teacher has since cut into politics by declaring for the poor PRP (with our hope of a 2023 run for the presidency), the scene will look so very interesting. And Jega didn’t disappoint – he spoke sensibly and logically to Ohanaeze’s and Oodua’s myopic micro-nationalisms.
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So Daily Trust has indicated that it is that season again – the season of “abuse our father and we abuse your ancestors” or, as 2023 approaches, the nation is back in the trenches of agitations and counter-agitations, blames and counter-blames. As if the insecurity situation bedevilling us today is not enough calamity, Nigeria’s nationalities always choose the time ahead of presidential elections to, as is said, overheat the polity. And it will get interesting – and more heated – as time goes on.
It was surprising – it must be admitted – that former President Goodluck Jonathan, who himself had convened a grossly-lopsided National Conference back 2014 (and which he tarried from implementing in the vein hope of winning the 2015 election), spoke like a nationalist and not as a loud-mouthed representative of a region with micronations (South South). Two reasons perhaps explain that: One, Jonathan has already been president, and therefore had to act ‘presidential’; Two, there are insinuations that 2023 presents an opportunity for him to reinvent himself and run for his elusive second term again, perhaps as an APC candidate. Permutations.
But this is the time this nation needs people like Prof Jega to continue to talk legibly, sensibly and logically. Although that, in itself, is a problem – Nigerian politics, as said earlier, has no sense, and no logic. And in fact, it is not even legible or fathomable. Our politics is a function of the proverbial Hausa “Kule-Cas”: You say Kule and we say Cas! Ping-Pong of abuses; fire for fire. Luckily for Arewa, the likes of Jega may never go down the lane of fighting dirty. But 2023 leaves a lot to the imagination.
So the thesis of this Column today is that, as Daily Trust has blown the trumpet, it is time this president – Muhammadu Buhari – call the bluff of Oodua, Afenifere, Ohanaeze, IPOB, South South and all original and artificial agitators by convening yet another national conference. Without it, the remaining two years of his presidency would be on the proverbial tenterhooks. These ‘ethnic jingoists will not let him be – and they will not let us be to tackle our hunger and penury and insecurity ‘in peace’.
President Buhari has two distinct advantages on this matter of yet another national conference: one, it is very likely he will not be gunning for a third term (a purported action which truncated Obasanjo’s Conference and left it stillborn); and two, he is completing his second and final term (the angling for which also killed the Jonathanian Experiment of 2014, despite all the apparent injustices contained therein). Buhari should give us a similar opportunity to vent our anger and abuse our mutual ancestors, at the end of which an election would likely take place in 2023, and we all take a break until another time.
Back in 2017 (when 2019 looked a decisive year), those same masquerades were all over the place, agitating and clamoring and screaming, as usual. The ruling APC, which officially boycotted the 2014 Confab when it was in opposition, had seen it right to set up a Restructuring Committee under Kaduna Governor Nasir el Rufai. That report is still extant, but has never been formally adopted by the party that set up the committee itself, the APC. Now is the time to take that report and test it at yet another confab. That way, we shall be left alone to mourn our kidnap and corona victims in relative peace.
One thing about Nigeria is that, until the time comes when we really fight it dirty or else mutually agree to go our separate ways (and may Biafra be free), it will be nearly impossible to agree on anything. For example, the instrument of the National Assembly should be adequate to help us restructure this nation but, in a situation where every Senator who has not been Governor hopes to become one, and every Governor wants to retire to the Senate, you cannot get anything right. If, say, our consensus as a nation is to ‘scrap’ the Senate (and which is generally evidentially so) and reduce the money-guzzling numbers of the House of Representatives, expect self-interested opposition from those chambers. So a confab should be it.
All what this nation and its nationalities – as interpreted by this Column – is asking for is that this democracy is alien to us. We should sit down, and stand up, and do the needful by restructuring. So many things are not right if, 21 years down the line of this experiment we are still lamenting the same things as where a president should come from, resource control, self-determination, state creation, return to regionalism and other primary issues we should have since resolved. Makes one feel that Nigerian leaders and politicians can never produce a Lee Kuan Yew or a Mahathir Mohammad, or even a Donald Trump.
For the umpteenth time, this Column repeats what it stands for in the agitated-for Nigerian political restructuring: a five-year single term for president and governors; unicameral legislature with one representative per one million population; equitable power-sharing; a real national development; etc.
Only a Buhari-convened National Conference can help us achieve that. And our Man at the Dialogue – Professor Attahiru Jega – should firmly lead us there. Or we tarry till 2023.
“Oh God of creation, direct our noble cause…!”
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