National Conference: Is this what we really need?



Agitations by individuals and groups, especially from southern Nigeria for a Sovereign National Conference over the years have put pressure on the President to cave in. On 1st October, 2013, the President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in his independence speech agreed to set-up a committee to look at the modalities of organizing a National Conference. For many, the conference is the only panacea to the litany of woes plaguing the country. The belief is that there is need for all sections of the country to come to a roundtable to discuss the continued existence of corporate Nigeria. With over 300 ethnic nationalities and close to a 1000 distinct languages and dialects, those who hold that view consider the entity called Nigeria as a fraud. These calls are as diverse as the people making them. Some of the calls are as genuine as those making them, while some are as fraudulent as the people making them.
The calls initially were for a Sovereign National Conference, but realizing the implications of having one – a SNC involves resignation of all elected officials, the advocates for SNC resorted to a National Conference or Conference for Ethnic Nationalities. Whatever names the conference might be called, Nigeria’s problem has never been who governs it, but the problem lies in how it is/was governed. It is true there are a lot of tensions in the land and it is not wrong to organize a conference that can address some of these problems, but after the conference what else? Can the conference change the way our politicians govern us? Will it solve the problem of unemployment? Does the conference have the legal power to change the fact that our leaders come to power through fraudulent means?
Historically, the elite have a common goal of keeping the masses away from seeing the actual picture, and Nigerian elite are not different. Any political analyst in Nigeria knows that the struggle for power in Nigeria has been the struggle between elite (whether from the minority or majority). And for any “democratically” elected leader to organize a National Conference, or suggest the conduct of one is like casting a vote of no confidence on the country’s democratic institutions.
The fact is that, the collapse of values and institution, corruption and bad governance by the ruling People’s Democratic Party is what brought us to where we are today. And instead of addressing this, the nation is thrown into confusion again by organizing another jamboree with a different name. The mutual suspicion occasioned by primordial differences which did not start today was heightened by the present mess we found ourselves in the last fourteen years under the PDP’s bad governance. Since 2008, the lingering security problems, kidnappings and dwindling economy created fears among Nigerians that the center can no longer hold.
Every zone in Nigeria today, including the Niger-Delta region, which is the greatest beneficiary of this republic is crying marginalization, even with a sitting President. Each nation has been faced with similar problems at a time in its history. Countries like Britain, Portugal, Spain, France and Soviet empires, many did not survive it and today they are known with different names; India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia are just few countries that went through turbulent times and came out either reduced in size or got another name entirely. Recently, we are living witnesses of the crises in Arab world – Libya, Syria and Yemen etc.
The major problem with Nigeria is not whether we adopt federalism as a system of government or unitary, the problem lies with the levity and rascality with which we are dealing with Nigeria and as Professor Bolaji Akinyemi once said, we run the risk of losing total control of events and we run the risk of events in Nigeria controlling us. The Nigerian elite in the last 14 years have abdicated their responsibility and fiddled with the future of this country. Corruption, open stealing of public treasury is what characterized the leadership of this country from the Federal, States and Local Governments. Whether in legislature, judiciary and the executives, the headlines are the same and what was left of the rest of the country is abject poverty, crime, insecurity, diseases and collapse of public institutions.
Groups like the MEND, Boko Haram, the gang of kidnappers, bandits in different parts of the country have come to the conclusion that the leadership cannot be trusted to advance and protect their interest, and unfortunately other avenues that are supposed to give them voice are weak. The political parties are nothing but a group of like minds that come together to exploit them. And as Professor Akinyemi said, National Conference or Dialogue can and will never solve our problems, unless “we really begin on a journey of honesty and stop the politics of self-deception”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Professor Abubakar Roko and Nigeria’s Broken Promises

In 2017, some self-appointed prophets of the Nigerian economy the #AljanunKasuwa as we call them, declared or was it a prediction [?], that private universities would dominate higher education by 2022. They were wrong — not because public universities thrived, but because they collapsed differently. Their collapse was not from market competition, but under the crushing weight of elite indifference, broken leadership, and a state that no longer invests in its people. Today, the Nigerian public university is not just underfunded, but a symbolic of a much deeper national failure. The collapse of the social protection scheme if at all it existed. To be a worker in Nigeria is to live without guarantees. There is no reliable health insurance. Salaries come late — if at all they come, they last only a day and cannot cater for family needs. Pensions are a cruel joke. To teach, nurse, be a journalist, or even serve as a civil servant is to walk a tightrope between duty and destitution. We are ...
Read more

"Bokonnan duk Shirme ne": A Dangerous Narrative That Risks the Future of Northern Youths

  In recent years, a dangerous narrative has crept into public discourse: that acquiring “skills” is more important than earning a degree. On the surface, it sounds practical. But peel back the layers, and it reveals a deeper, more systemic threat—one that risks derailing the aspirations of millions of young Nigerians, especially those from Northern Nigeria who already face significant barriers to education. Recently, a video surfaced on social media showing the Governor of Bauchi State, Alhaji Bala Mohammed, Ƙauran Bauchi dismissing Boko as "Shirme". I am not sure of the context, but as a governor and one of the leading voices in north east, I was disturbed watching the video. Let us be clear: the problem in Northern Nigeria is not a surplus of educated youth or university graduates—it is the very absence of access to quality education in the first place. Insecurity, poverty, child labour, early marriage, and fragile public institutions are the real culprits keeping children...
Read more

June 12: Our New Democracy Day

Today is June 12, a date stamped in the memory of Nigeria’s democratic journey, not just as a calendar memorial, but as a symbol of what proponents of the day see as a day of deferred justice and recurring betrayal. I still recall my fierce argument in 1993, as a young student in Bauchi, with a close friend, an ardent supporter of Bashir Tofa and the National Republican Convention (NRC). I was aligned with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), drawn to the progressive promise of the leadership of the party and MKO Abiola, who we felt represented the ideals of the party. I was too young to vote, but I was politically conscious. We saw it not just as a matter of political affiliation, but a generational choice between the suffocating status quo and the faint stirrings of national rebirth. After Abiola’s victory, my friend told me bluntly “They won’t hand power to him.” I asked why. He had no logical answer, only a quiet certainty rooted in Nigeria’s political DNA. He was right. The June 12 ...
Read more