Senator Adeyeye’s umbrage – Facts or fiction? (1)

In the past two weeks, a very famous video clip has gone viral. It’s the video of Senator Professor Sola Adeyeye as he waxed philosophical on the floor of the Nigerian Senate. I decided to respond to him for several reasons, notably that Nigerians being very emotional people get carried away with great oratory while ignoring to dig for the truth. And oftentimes, we are satisfied with quoting superstars even if what they propose is unworkable. At the end, such deployment of age-long biases only perpetuates and expands our existing problems as innocent youths are recruited into them.

I note that Senator Adeyeye mentioned that he had been a local government chairman in the Igbomina-speaking area of Osun State. He made the point to emphasise how local people need to take charge of running their societies. However, I noted that though he had been a local government chairman and risen through the ranks, all he can do is complain about the issues.  Nothing has changed.  What then is the value of asking people to go and start their quest for leadership from the local governments?  Chances are that his local government is no different today from what it was three decades ago. Here is the distinguished senator – whose wife is also the DG of NAFDAC, complaining about the same issues of which we agonized four decades ago. At some point in the video, perhaps having been heckled by some younger senators, he said he pitied those who were in their 50s because he had since crossed 70. Where will Nigeria’s salvation come from? Is politics all about having one’s run of political career, sorting oneself and one’s family out, and complaining about how nothing changed?

I also noticed something that spoilt the background of Senator Adeyeye’s otherwise masterful oratory; the other senators paid no mind. Senator Lawan’s face showed mild disinterest. Senator Gemade’s face showed undisguised pity.  Senator Abba Aji looked on with what could be interpreted as a tinge of disdain, while Senator Shehu Sani and a few others chatted away, exchanged banters and hand slaps, etc. This chaotic manner of conduct has become standard fare in Nigeria’s top legislature and may be unchangeable but it is totally disgraceful and a bad example to set for our children, many of whom chance on those sessions on TV. The optics we see is that the Senate is an unserious place.  Even primary school classrooms have better decorum.  I hope the legislators get the message, or perhaps this is the way we are as a people? Unable to calm down and organize ourselves for progress?

But beyond the usually unruly conduct of the Senate and our general ‘jagajaganess’ in Nigeria, one should consider the substance of Senator Adeyeye’s popular umbrage.

Senator Adeyeye says Nigeria’s constitution is the problem with the country. Is this true? I very much doubt. Usually, lawyers are the ones that think this way, but it is said that if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Men are not made for laws, but laws for men. It is also said that the more the laws, the more the crime. What we have seen in Nigeria is the unreadiness of men to obey the law. Put men in positions of authority and they immediately rise above the law. Yet, and paradoxically too, we have an unwieldy, expensive national assembly and 36 state assemblies eating the country to death in the name of making laws. Just how much law does a man, or indeed a country, need? I think it is very convenient to blame the country’s problems on an inanimate object that cannot speak for itself – the constitution – while ignoring the role men played, and continue to play, in getting us here For example, how does our national assembly reform itself? Going the way they are, will we ever have part-time legislature, or do away with one of the arms like other thinking countries are doing?  While put an omnibus burden on the constitution while ignoring to solve component parts of the problem and showing example?  Meanwhile most of those hailing Adeyeye have not even read the constitution – a constitution which tries to provide for everything under the sun albeit in futility.

In the course of electioneering I went through the 68 exclusive items that have purportedly held Nigeria to the ground. Honestly I couldn’t find up to 10 that needs to be moved to the states. These are items like Road infrastructure, Railway, Prisons, Marriages, Policing, Power generation, most of which some states have found ways to legally circumvent. The vast majority of these items of which Adeyeye speaks to painfully and evokes the emotions of millions of Nigerians must necessarily be federal affairs. I reproduce the items at the end of this article.

Of particular mention is state police. I do believe that Nigeria is now due for state policing but the premise upon which we contemplate that movement matters. We shouldn’t seek state police on the platform of amplifying our ‘differences’, but clearly on the basis of efficiency and the need to protect human lives. There is really nothing wrong for a DPO from Benue State to serve in Osun (one of the complaints laid by Adeyeye). We are all Nigerians, and indeed there are times when people who are detached from local politics of a place are able to make unbiased decisions more than sons of the soil who sometimes get swept away in the deluge of history. In the military days, they experimented with governors who were sons of the soil, then chose governors who were outsiders to a state, and some outsiders did infinitely better than sons of the soil. Mind you, local politics can even be dirtier than the national one.

I have an issue with the type of politics that the Adeyeye speech promotes, though I know him having met him casually a couple of times as an energetic, humorous, affective and dedicated individual. Perhaps fatigue is setting in as it usually does for people who grapple for long with our myriad of political problems.

Senator Adeyeye says Nigeria is not practicing federalism. I disagree. When I went in search of the meaning of federalism I discovered two things; one is that there is nothing like true federalism. Internationally federalism is defined by the country which practices it. There is therefore American federalism, Nigerian Federalism, Belgian Federalism, European Union Federalism and so on. I think we have a problem here whereby we interpret social science as pure science. Forget what you read in O’Level government textbooks. Even those countries from where these terminologies emanated are still trying to find their feet. The second thing I discovered was that at the root of American federalism was a disagreement – between the Federalists (John Jay, James Madison and Alex Hamilton) who wrote 85 articles defining the idea of federalism to mean a situation where American states come together as one force to withstand external incursion by Spain, Britain and France – in other words a stronger centre – and guys like Thomas Jefferson who espoused the brand of state independence (weaker centre) being pushed by Adeyeye and many other intellectuals especially from Nigeria’s south today. If Americans can hardly agree on what Federalism should be about, we cannot make a pure science of the matter in Nigeria.

To be continued.