Daily Independent (Lagos)
Y. Z. Yau
10 October 2008
opinion
Two weeks ago when the National Assembly members were disagreeing on how to use the sums of money they have set aside for the work of the Committees on the Constitution Review, civil society organisations in the country were strategising on how to ensure that this time around, a constitutional reform is carried to its logical conclusion. Meeting in three different back to back forums, the civil society organizations attempted to harmonize their positions on various issues and to cart out an agenda of engagement with other stakeholders that will galvanize the country towards a participatory constitution making.
The first forum was convened by the Alliance for Credible Elections (ACE) under the auspice of the Civil Society Election Reform on 23rd and 24th September at Rockview Hotel Abuja. Prior to the meeting, ACE along with its partners had conducted a series of consultative meetings with various groups such as journalists, religious groups, political parties, business organizations and professional organizations and came up with a provisional report on what were the positions of civil society on the electoral reform. This report was tabled at the meting and debated. As the debate progressed at the meeting, it became obvious that from the perspectives of the civil society groups, no meaningful electoral reform can take place without a concomitant constitutional reform. This conclusion therefore not surprisingly led to subjecting the constitutional reform process into an intense discussion.
The discussion on the constitutional reform started at this meeting was carried over the next day to the meeting on Civil Society Position on Constitutional Reform which was organized jointly by the Citizens Forum for Constitutional Reform (CFCR) and Coalition for Change (C4C) using the platform they instituted for that purpose, the Constitutional Reform Dialogue Mechanism (CRDM). The two-day meeting provided the groups with the opportunity to resolve some knotty issues that arose from the earlier meeting. One of those issues was in fact definitional: are we to go for constitutional reform or constitutional review?
While in terms of the contents that civil society would want see address in a new constitution for Nigeria, there was no much disagreement among the participants, how to get the new constitution was the problematic. For those who pushed for constitutional review, they argued that there is the need to ensure that the process is not aborted mid way as was done in the previous attempt. To avoid this, there is the need to push for issues on which there has already emerged a clear consensus. The proponents of this position argued that loading the process with issues that have been termed contentious would make it impossible to arrive at a national consensus and therefore make it impossible to amend the constitution. They argued that what Nigeria needs is a piecemeal approach to constitutional reform.
On the other hand, there were those who questioned the legitimacy of the constitution and see constitutional reform not so much about the content but on the procedure and processes that would result in the constitution. They argued that the present constitution was handed down to Nigerians by the military as such is illegitimate and you cannot review an illegitimate document. The only path of honor is to create a process in which Nigerian will give themselves a new constitution. How this is to be done is perhaps not clear as even within the camp of people in favor of constitutional reform there are different views.
On one hand, there were those who demanded for a national sovereign conference as the platform that can create a mechanism for the articulation of a people's constitution. On the other, therefore are those who think that even thought members of the National and State Assemblies are products of an illegitimate constitution, they could still be given the task of providing the basis for the constitutional reform process in which case, they can handle all the necessary processes that can lead to a new constitution. This includes creating a mechanism for the establishment of the people's constitution drafting assembly, the facilitation of nationwide consultations and meetings and the organization of a national referendum for the citizens to validate whatever constitution that may result.
The last forum was a conference on the last general elections organized by the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) on 26th and 27th with the theme Direct Capture /Mandate Protection in the 2007 Election. It was meant to assess the strategies used by citizens to defend their mandate (where this happened) and to identify the various atrocities politicians used in subverting the peoples mandate, aptly called direct capture of votes (DCV). The very concept of DCV, echoing Prof. Maurice Iwu's Direct Data Capture (DDC) machine summarized exactly what happened in 2007, which was that politicians simply (directly) captured the votes rather than allowing citizens to freely vote and for the votes to be counted.
While the conference was not specially meant to articulate position on the electoral reform or constitutional amendment, all the presentations ended with suggestions on how to improve the conduct and credibility of elections in the country. Inevitably these suggestions connected with the earlier submissions at the harmonization meetings. This of course was not surprising since, there were significant overlaps in the participants of the three events. But it also illustrates the saliency of some keys issues that Nigerians have generally agreed to.
I came out of the meeting with the feeling that while the demand for constitution reform is popular, getting a constitution reform is not going to be easy. And this has nothing to do with the inability of Nigerians to reach consensus on even the most contentious issues. It has to do with the nature of the political class we have, which does not believe in either democracy or elections. To the extent that the present anomaly in both our constitution and the electoral law allows them to truncate the wishes of the people, they would continue to play the gallery with the issues and when the hour of action come, they will prevaricate. The only guarantee we have against such prevarication is to mobilise Nigerians to insist that this time around we shall not be taken for a ride.
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