Tony Nnadi Esq. is the convener, Movement for New Nigeria, Secretary General, Lower Niger Congress and Lead Counsel in the suit challenging the legitimacy of the 1999 Constitution.
If Nigeria is seen as a mere geographical expression, Tony Nnadi has advanced some very strong reasons in this interview by Fred Onyeka.
At some point in your struggles, you were involved in PRONACO to bring a change, at some time, the change Nigeria project came about. What platform do you use now to propagate your radical views on the Change Nigeria project?
It may sound radical to you but recently, President Jonathan at the burial ceremony of the mother of the Governor of Enugu State, in Udi, declared that the problems of Nigeria as he now sees it are traceable not to his administration that is just less than 2 years in office, but that anybody who wants to be sincere will trace the problems of Nigeria to 1914. From that 1914 to 1960, that many things actually went wrong. But from 1960 to date, many more things have gone wrong. Anybody who would solve the problems of Nigeria must go back to as far back as those times of 1914, 1960 and proceed to the present day to get at what went wrong to enable him to solve the problem holistically. Therefore, what you call radical views are just the detailed diagnosis of what went wrong with Nigeria from birth to now.
Based on that diagnosis, there will be the prescription that we need to reconstruct the foundations that were wrongly laid by both Britain and those who took over from them in 1960, for which reasons our house cannot stand today. Everywhere you look, people are doing something to show that they are no longer going to remain in Nigeria that is standing on this current foundation. I don’t see any difference between what OPC was doing some 10, 12, 15 years ago and what MASSOB started doing in the East. There is no difference between what MEND started doing in the Niger Delta and what Boko Haram is now doing in the North. They are rejecting your Nigeria as defined by the current constitutional order. I live in this society, yes there are people who are making profit from this lopsided arrangement, there are others who have fled the country to seek greener pastures and safety. There are people who have gone to seek refuge overseas but some of us say no, we are not going to run away from criminals who have turned our lives upside down. We are going to stay here and put up a fight but it has to be a structured fight. It is not a fight that guns and bombs can do, it is a fight of the brain. We have taken time to find out what the problems are and we are happy to place those findings on the table. We didn’t fold our hands to say oh, we have discovered what the problems are. We went into solving it. We called for sovereign national conference for more than 30 years. From after the Aburi in 1967, Nigeria has been in need of a meeting of its component peoples to recommit themselves to the Nigeria-project because of things that went wrong, on the form of a sovereign national conference. But those in Government Houses who had secured their place of power over the rest of the people so much as to make it into a constitution that was written exclusively by them have bluntly refused to listen to any talk of such meeting because they believe it could be a challenge to their settled position of authority. It was after we had waited for that length of time that we now decided that we must go and call a meeting of the people of Nigeria, that was what becamePRONACO. Luckily there was Enahoro still around, there was Ojukwu and all other such people all around the country who helped to mobilize the ethnic nationalities of Nigeria into a conference to decide how they wanted to live together. Our thinking then was that if we could find something that was acceptable to all of the groups across the country, we would write it down, we could try to turn it into a constitutional framework, we would take it to the stage of referendum and we would now hold it as what we want in alternative to what the soldiers imposed on us in 1999. That conference was successful especially considering the fact that we were able to persuade those who were carrying arms at that time to put aside their arms and come for the conference. From the Niger Delta alone, we had 23 organisations that were carrying arms; Asari Dokubo and all of those who later now formed MEND. We came out with a draft constitution from that conference in 2006 which we also had to take through to an informal referendum. We took it round the country for those who didn’t attend. Of course, the conference did not sit in one corner, the conference had 164 delegations in attendance. I didn’t say delegate but delegation. Yoruba, Ijaw, Efik, Tiv, Anang, Fulani, Hausa, everybody. We sat in Lagos severally, sat in Enugu, sat in Port Harcourt. Ojukwu hosted the conference twice in Enugu, we went over to Jos, went to Kano and we came back to Lagos to conclude. It was a delegate from Katsina that moved the motion for the adoption of the finished product, the final draft of the constitution that came from the committee appointed by the conference. This is to tell you that, in all of that, we were just looking for a solution that was generated by consent nay by consensus. The United States saw seriousness in what we were doing, they sent an observer mission, European Union sent an observer mission that sat with us throughout the conference until we finished, but the Government in Abuja, led by President Olusegun Obasanjo was engrossed with how they wanted to remain in office forever. They didn’t bother themselves with what we were doing. We wanted a larger endorsement of it and what did we do in PRONACO? Basically, it was those same questions the military leaders of Nigeria tried to answer in Aburi Ghana in 1967 that were placed before the larger ethnic nationality that is, do the ethnic nationalities want to continue in Lord Lugard Union? Though yes was the predominant answer, each ethnic nationality had its own condition for continuing.
Are you saying that where PRONACO stopped, Movement for New Nigeria (MNN) continued?
PRONACO was a conference, it finished its business successfully, but Movement for New Nigeria (MNN) is the larger event of everybody including, those who were PRONACO and those who were not.
What did you set out to do under the new platform?
Yes, what we set out to do was to peacefully take Nigeria from where it is now, to the new constitutional order that will be acceptable to everybody because all the agitations going on across the country are matters of mere rejections of the current constitutional order. Even the Boko Haram, whatever anybody might accuse them of, remember the bulletin they issued after their track in Kano said that they want the 1999 constitution abrogated and sharia should replace democracy. They said they don’t want Western Education (Boko Haram). So, it was clear that they were rejecting the current constitutional order. Again, when you begin to interpret what OPC meant by going to pick up arms to chase police in the whole of Yoruba region, you discover that they were questioning the subsisting constitutional arrangement that placed the internal security arrangement of Yorubaland in the hands of non-indigenes. You see MASSOB flying Biafran flags rejecting Nigeria as defined by people who never consulted them. MEND, of course made their own abundantly clear too that they want a return to that former constitutional arrangement that was abandoned in 1966 that entitled them to the ownership and control of their natural resources. All of these agitations, all of those who came into Movement for New Nigeria, both those who were in PRONACO, and those who didn’t come but now have studied the finished product say oh, this is really the answer we need. We still insist that Nigeria did not start as our project; Nigeria was a British project for their own interest and pursuit. Yes, we have been here almost a 100 years and we have gotten mixed up; there have been inter marriages; there have been inter dwellings across places of birth and all of that. We are saying it is possible to retain this union but it should not be defined in the master-servant relationship of the British because what they did was to appoint some masters over servants. They left Nigeria where the North was empowered to be in control of the country for all times.
Only recently, the lawmakers, the National Assembly made us understand that a new constitution would probably be ready in 2013. Given all you said so far, did you make any efforts to present these issues before them to see if that could form part of the new constitution?
It is a pity I do not blame characters like David Mark, poor soldier who doesn’t know any better. I do not blame Tambuwal but there are some lawyers in their midst. There is an attorney general in the country who should have explained to them that the National Assembly does not have constituent power to make constitution. What we are talking about goes beyond the mandate of the National Assembly completely. You know what a memo and article is to a company; memo and article create the company and settle the terms of the functioning of the company, it is only when and after the owners of the company have put their articles together that they hire a management team to go and run the company, guided by that memo and articles. The memo and article is the Bible, it is the supreme organ of everything. What we have in place in Nigeria is a situation where the management of a company has toppled the memo and article of the company as put together by the owners of the company and put in place of their own memo and article. That is what this current constitution is. That was what happened in 1966 when they toppled the five constitutions that defined Nigeria, and from that time started making constitution by decree to date. This is now the last of them, Decree 24 of 1999. So, we are saying that the constitution that was so imposed, so smuggled into being has now produced all of these, including the national assembly, the presidency and the three arms of government now resting on this foundation of falsehood. We are saying that it is never the business of the management of the company to write and rewrite the memo and articles of the company. It is always the business of the owners of the company. Therefore what is going on right now amounts to criminality for them to throw away the memo and articles we put in place by ourselves and put their own and now shut us out. They say we can no longer have a meeting to decide the future of our enterprise. The owners of a company can hold a meeting and dissolve their company if it is no longer working for them. If we were to make constitution by ourselves, we will not make a constitution that will give those who are supposed to be in charge of the treasury immunity. We would not make a constitution that would exclude responsibility towards the citizen in the constitution. That is what section 6, subsection 6(c) of this constitution does. The whole of chapter 2 lists all the good things the citizens, should have. Subsection 6 (c) cancels it. Meaning that those in government house do not owe you any obligation at all. If they build and school, road or hospital, they are doing you a favour. They have the spare key to the treasury in their hand by appropriation provision and they have immunity. So at what point are they going to be accountable to you?
All you have said so far suggests that even if the National Assembly comes out with a constitution next year or whatever time, it will be an imposition on Nigeria as long as there was no dialogue of address all the issues raised so far.
It goes beyond dialogue, it is a meeting that would write the document that was not in place before. It is not a matter of input from here and there. No, it is a meeting between the owners of Nigeria, those who could go off as countries of their own. Did you see the Yorubas flying their flags a few months ago? They would walk out on Nigeria and nobody is going to be able to stop them because the way they feel is the way the East feels and you think that middle belt will go to do Sharia with those in Sharia in those twelve states? no. Nigeria will dismantle if we don’t sit down to write down a document that will bind us together. We are doing everything it will take to shoot down this constitution the same way the Mandela and Co went to shoot down the apartheid constitution and if this constitution is shot down, Nigeria is gone. What we did in PRONACO was to work out an alternative of how we can keep Nigeria to the satisfaction of all.
Another fiery group-Save Nigeria Group is equally at the force front for a new Nigeria. Are you all together in this struggle?
At some point we had what we called-Change Nigeria because Movement for New Nigeria wanted to limit itself to the matter in court and the matter of disseminating Nigeria information quietly among the populace to educate them and enlighten them on these matters. That was how we came about the name Change Nigeria in 2009. We had some elements coming from some flank who came to hobnob with us for a while. They tried to turn what we were doing upside down, into electoral machinery, that is politicking and we said no, that’s not where we are going right in the midst of our discussions they turned the name into something else. Our own was “Change Nigeria” but they now said it is Save Nigeria at a time the public hadn’t quite digested the message we were bring out, so there was this mix up. Up till date, some people still think that we were involved. We are not involved right from the very day they were formed, adopting the name, save Nigeria at Sheraton Hotels in January of 2010.
Change Nigeria has nothing to do with save Nigeria.
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