Those who believe that a Constitution, however flawed, or a law, however unjust, must be followed and obeyed in every particular UNTIL amended or changed, do not know enough about the human spirit nor about democracy.
The US Constitution, when it was written and adopted in 1789, defined African-Americans (blacks) as “chattel” (i.e. as objects, personal property on the order of cattle, clothes or cutlery). For purposes of census body-count it regarded a white person as one whole person and a black person as “three fifths of a person.” It denied voting rights to all white women as well as to white men who owned no property.
When, seven decades later, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, won the civil war and gave citizenship and voting rights to African-Americans, the pro-slavery losers struck back viciously. First they murdered Lincoln; then they terrorized and murdered blacks for the next 100 years, passed numerous laws in their various states stripping blacks of their newly-won rights, and tagged onto the national Constitution various clauses reducing blacks to a status as low or lower than their former slave status.
It took 70 years of determined protest and litigation by blacks and liberal whites to detach those clauses and reclaim citizenship rights for blacks. Indeed the stuggle had to move from the Supreme Court into the streets. Martin Luther King, Jr., the 26-year-old leader of the street protests, enunciated it as a cardinal principle of democracy that every good citizen owes a moral obligation to themselves and their nation to refuse to obey a flawed constitution or an unjust law.
It was through such extra-legal protest and resistance that African-Americans regained their right to vote and be voted for, their right to live anywhere they liked, eat in any restaurant, sit anywhere in a train or bus, send their children to any school they chose, and generally move around unmolested as free citizens anywhere in the country.
What lessons does such US constitutional history hold for us in Nigeria who decided in 1979 to adopt a version of the American Constitution and “presidential” system of governance?
The first lesson is that a constitution as flawed as our current 1999 Constitution cannot and should not be followed at all, let alone “in every particular.” It was in recognition of its glaring faults that in 2011 a national committee was set up to review and amend it. The committee submitted its report in June 2013; after that, the matter died.
Those who drafted the 1999 Constitution, and those who voted to approve it, may well have had a hidden agenda—not to serve or save Nigeria but to destroy it by exploiting its many loopholes and absurdities for their personal, ethnic or regional interests and against the national interest.
Those who have refused to implement the proposed amendments, or at least to put them to a national plebiscite vote by the entire citizenry, must be regarded as equally culpable as the original drafters and approvers.
General Buhari and his party campaigned on a platform of “Change”—and won the presidency. Change, as we the electorate understood it, was not just a superficial change of personnel or party from PDP to APC, but fundamental changes from things done wrong to things done right or done better.
The first right thing Buhari and APC needed to do was to implement the amendments proposed by the Constitution Review Committee—or, failing that, to submit them to a nation-wide plebiscite vote. Operating with the un-amended 1999 Constitution renders the current administration as culpable as their predecessors.
Our interest is in getting things done right. Consider IMMUNITY—one of the glaring faults of the 1999 Constitution which would continue to hold sway. President and state governors would continue to be immune from prosecution for whatever illegal acts or outright crimes they commit as long as they are in office. This means that while in office these democratically elected public officers operate as tyrants, dictators, totalitarians, lawless and above the law, “untouchable.” What, then, makes them different from the men who ran Nigeria for 30 years as military Heads of State, military governors, military this, that and the other? Men who delighted in scornfully and sadistically reminding us “bloody civilians,” whenever we demurred or complained, that “this is NOT a democracy!”? Is the same arrogance of power acceptable simply because the governor is not in military uniform? Does absence of military uniform equate to democracy?
You don’t have a gun pointed at your head—which is a real improvement. And you may write or talk all you want in the public media and no one clamps you in detention or “invites you for a chat” on a Friday afternoon. But is that ALL the “change” we voted for???
Everyone knows that prevention is better than cure. If you are made to stand helpless while your treasury is looted (the 1999 Constitution ties your hands, provides no legal basis for restraining governors and making them answerable WHILE they are spending public funds), don’t you look rather stupid when you try to run after them AFTER they leave office to get them to account for monies they “allegedly” stole?
A country run on such backward constitutional principles cannot stand.
• To be continued
Onwuchekwa Jemie
