TheCable

Depending on who you are asking, questions on the issues that militate against the development of Nigeria would elicit a plethora of possibilities.

The most common of those would possibly be the evil that corruption has become to the country. For a variety of reasons, principal of which is the current administration’s deliberate amplification of the dangers of corruption, a substantial number of Nigerians have come to see it as the single most debilitating factor to national development.

Now, even though the edification of corruption as the almighty challenge Nigeria has is impeachable, it is as a matter of fact, a present and existing albeit shameful feature that has nearly become a national pastime.

A 2017 report titled, “Collective Action on Corruption in Nigeria, a Social Norms Approach to Connecting Societies and Institutions, by the United Kingdom Royal Institute of International Affairs, otherwise known as Chatam House, indicated that $582bn has been stolen from the Nigerian treasury by public officials since independence in 1960!

It would sure be hard to dismiss such crime against the people of Nigeria as it is obvious that the quantum of money that has found its way into private pockets could have gone into improving the conditions of Nigerians. Yet, corruption is a human phenomenon that the whole world grapples with and that it has this crippling effect on Nigeria is only symptomatic of a deeper problem to which society has continued to fail to pay attention to.

Some other Nigerians would identify the ethnic distrust which has turned Nigeria into an everyday killing field as another reason why the country has remained a bad dream nearly 60 years after its independence from British colonialists.

Indeed, ethnic and religious schisms have caused Nigerians untold damage. It was at the root of the first two military coups that Nigeria witnessed. Each of these left a flow of blood in the country and ultimately panned into a 30-month civil war that saw some two million civilians dead and for which the three major ethnic groups still hold various levels of grudges and suspicions against one another. It is therefore understandable that Nigerians would very easily see this as a major clog in the wheel of national progress. Sadly, neither the loss of the past, nor the gloom of the present has taught Nigerians a lesson about civilisation’s respect for the sanctity of life. The territorial instinct of the Nigerian is still as primal as that of the cave man!

But Nigerians are not necessarily so primitive or backward! A country with the quality and quantity of human resource that Nigeria is endowed with should by no means manifest the country’s current level of acrimony and underdevelopment and the reality only points to the fact that there are certain fundamental issues that the country has neglected to deal with.

Whether it is poverty or nepotism and such which collegiate to breed and perpetuate evils like corruption, ethnic rivalries and violence that have become emblems of Africa’s most populace, the failure of our leaders of this country to build a country hinged on social justice is at the root of all the country’s problems.

Imagine a country where every Nigerian has equal rights, where the same law governs the poor and the rich, where everyone is able to optimise their essence, where everyone who merits is given the pride of place, where quality education and healthcare are within the reach of every citizen, where every national is free to actualise themselves anywhere they find themselves in the country and every part of the country is treated as the other.

That the failure of successive administrations to take Nigeria towards this course of social justice and inclusion is at the root of the country’s retrogression is the conclusion reached two days ago at an event at the University of Lagos, Akoka.

The event was the presentation of the “Minority Report and Draft Constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1976,” put together by Prof Olusegun Osoba and the late Dr Yusufu Bala Usman.

The story is that these two intellectuals, who lectured at the University of Ife, now known as the Obafemi Awolowo University and the Ahmadu Bello University respectively, were two of the 49 people appointed into the Constitutional Drafting Committee appointsed by the Gen Murtala Muhammed military government in 1975.

At the time that the committee would submit its report in 1976, Osoba and Usman came up with a minority draft which opposed some of the principles that the 47 other members promoted.

In what the duo called “A general report on the work of the Constitution Drafting Committee, a minority submission by Olusegun Osoba and YusufuBala Usman,” dated August 1976, they wrote: “…after participating actively in the work of the CDC for the past 10 months, we have regrettably come to the conclusion that we must commit to writing, and communicate in a durable form, our serious and fundamental disagreements with the vast majority of our colleagues on the committee and our own alternative proposals for a new constitution for Nigeria… The CDC, judging by the content and tone of its debates and by the draft constitution that the majority of its members have adopted, has failed to compose the draft of a constitution (the fundamental law for the nation) that clearly maps out for our people a new political road that should take away from the detours and blind alleys of the past towards independent, self-reliant, just and genuinely democratic national development.”

Specific fallings of the majority draft which was eventually adopted by the then General Olusegun Obasanjo administration in the opinion of Osoba and Usman were: the non-creation of the right social and political environment where a reasonable amount of democracy can flourish; entrenchment of the concentration of power in the hands of a single person, cliques or single institution; perpetuation of a winner-takes-all style of politics; lack of a clear code of guidance binding public officials to commit to prioritising the welfare of the people; lack of proper criteria for the operation of political parties to build them into genuinely national parties; lack of concrete proposal to help the people overcome the elite-generated problem of ethnic, sectional and religious suspicion, rivalry and antagonism; lack of direction on how to free Nigerians from all forms of imperialist domination and exploitation as well as the verbosity of the draft constitution which makes it impossible for all Nigerians to understand.

So, on Tuesday, the Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, Zaria, said to have been set up by the late radical Bala Usman gathered Nigerians, who should represent the true brand of progressive politics, together to present the draft produced by Osoba and Bala Usman 42 years ago! Justifying the effort, Dr Abubakar Siddique Mohammed and Mr Attahiru Usman, Director of the Centre and son of the late lecturer, were united in the conjecture that Nigeria would possibly have taken a turn for the better were these recommendations considered.

From former Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, to founding President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, Hassan Sumonu, to activist lawyer, Mr Femi Falana, SAN, who reviewed the book and current NLC President, Mr AyubaWabba, the consensus was that rebuilding Nigeria on social justice remains the only panacea to all the issues that currently bedevil the country.

And even though it is four decades after this report was written, proposals in the document are worthy of the attention of everyone who aspires to see a great Nigeria and the generality of the people who have remained slaves in their own country.

In his new introduction to the book, Osoba, now in his 80s, summarised some of the principles of the 157 provisions of the alternative draft he produced with Usman in 1976 into what he calls “minimum agenda for change” all of which every Nigerian should consider.

The first is the eradication of “state citizenship” to create a situation where every Nigerian would be legally entitled to live and work in any community in Nigeria without let or hindrance. The second is the demystification of the “colonially derived legal and judicial system,” which alienates the common man. The third is making the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policies, enunciated in Chapter II of the Nigerian Constitution justiciable such that Nigerians can legally hold their government accountable. Forth is the abrogation of all forms of immunity in the Nigerian constitution. Fifth is constitutionally ensuring that political parties have a national, non-sectional, non-religious programme of organisational activities and that they are funded by the financial contribution of individual members, none of which must contribute in any one year more than the national minimum wage for one month as well as the annual audit of the financial records of all parties.

Adedokun tweets @niranadedokun