Guardian

The National Assembly is expected to give Nigerians a new constitution before August next year, if the Senate timetable for amending the grund-norm is anything to go by. According to a 16-month and 11-point timetable, of which four points have been treated, a bill for the amended constitution will be passed by the state Houses of Assembly in July 2013. Already, a 48-man Senate Constitution Review Committee (SCRC), which started the public hearings between November 15 and 16 throughout the six geo-political zones of the country, is expected to continue the public hearing this January with a retreat to aggregate public views and inputs leading to drafting of the amendment bill in February 2013. But a renowned constitutional lawyer and senior member of the Bar, Mr. James Ezike, in this encounter feels that the exercise will be another wild goose chase that will not address the nation’s numerous problems.

ON his opinion about the current attempt to amend the constitution by the National Assembly, Ezike, who had been one of the known faces in election petition cases, is of the view that the National Assembly lacks the sovereignty required for the much talked-about Peoples’ constitution.

According to him, it is an exercise in futility, save for the personal benefits that would accrue to lawmakers such as sitting allowances. This, he said is happening because Nigerians have fundamental problem.

He said: “Let me explain once more that the National Assembly is not sovereign. It is the people of Nigeria that are sovereign. It is contained in Section 14(2) of the 1999 Constitution as amended.  And the Supreme Court had said this so many times in the past, particularly during the Shehu Shagari era in various cases such as the case of the Attorney-General of the Federation v. The Attorney General of Bendel State and the case of the Attorney General of Bendel State v. Uwaifo.

For the avoidance of doubt, let us look at the history, the reason why the National Assembly keeps on making the mistake of feeling that it is sovereign. It is because the British Parliament is sovereign. The British Parliament is sovereign because when it was fighting with the King of England and defeated the King, it became sovereign because at that material time in British history, the British judiciary was very corrupt and you know that corrupt people could not fight, so they surrendered to the British Parliament.

It is not a virtue that the British Judiciary is not as strong as the American judiciary. It is as a result of the inability of the British Judiciary to fight for itself that it found itself surrendering to the parliament and, therefore, the British Parliament became sovereign. It is necessary to say this because the Nigerian National Assembly had kept repeating that it is sovereign. Nobody in the United States will come forward and say that the Senate and the House of Representatives are sovereign. Let me dramatise it.

In the Burma Oil case, the Burma Oil, which was a British firm won a case up to the House of Lords, now called the Supreme Court. And the case was that the British Army destroyed its installations in Burma to stop the Japanese from taking them over during the Second World War. When the judgment was given, the amount was so prohibitive that the British Parliament said, “we don’t accept it” and it passed a law against the judgment of the court, the highest court in the land. That was the consequence of the conquest of the judiciary because the British Parliament is sovereign. Now let me speak on the decision of the Nigerian Supreme Court relating to the 180 days. The Supreme Court tells us that the words are clear. It is mandatory and, therefore, you can’t change them. I don’t want to go to what has been argued but let us look at it this way; in this country, during the dying days of the military regime, there was a case involving Sani Abacha and Gani Fawehinmi, the Supreme Court in a split decision held that because of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Nigeria was bound to uphold human rights. This is only an aspect of the international laws; the Principle of conflicts of law to the effect that when there is a conflict between the laws of a nation, including the constitution and the international law, what prevails is the Principles of International Law. I just told you that the British Parliament is sovereign but it still surrenders to the Principles of International Law, particularly to the Treaty of Rome, which is equivalent to our own African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights. That charter gives us the right to fair-hearing and you cannot stop a man from arguing his case because somebody has put into a constitution a municipal matter that you must conduct and finish your case within a period of 180 days. I said, “that constitution made by the military and amended by the National Assembly is inferior.”

On the argument that members of the National Assembly are elected representatives of the people who hold sovereignty, the constitutional lawyer said: “that they lack the power because they are not sovereign. The first interview I granted to The Guardian, I still stand by it. Namely: we have to break the mould and start to build Nigeria. The National Assembly cannot do it for us. If you want it to do it, it will do it in its own style and image for its own benefit. How do we do it? Let me answer by saying that the British has no monopoly in the formation of nations. General Olusegun Obasanjo said something that struck me when Ibrahim Babangida was in power. Obasanjo referred to the Yoruba people in the Republic of Benin. “Why can’t they be in Nigeria or whatever? Why can’t the Hausa in Chad be part of it? Why can’t the Nigerians in Chad, who share the same ethnic and ancestral origin with those in Nigeria be part of it?” That was what our people failed to argue in the case involving Bakassi, but the White judges maintained the boundaries created by the White men. The people who argued at The Hague should have told them that those people who were part of Cameroun had their origin from here.

On how it could be achieved, the revered lawyer said: “We have to give the people in Nigeria their freedom, we are a homeland, America is a melting pot, Nigeria is not a melting pot. As we speak, the people of Catalonia in Spain want to go, Scotland is also thinking on the same line. Europe has broken down to different entities. Remember we used to have one Holy Roman Empire. Why are we not learning from these things? No matter how small an ethnic group is, like Saro Wiwa said, “recognise it and work with it and give it its freedom.”

“Everybody will be happy and you will have a system that works. But for some people sitting in Abuja and saying that they want to amend the constitution, it is a joke because it does not work. The military had tried it and failed, it fought a war about it by centralizing and it did not work.

Nigeria needs something like a confederation.

When asked who should be on the driving seat of allowing people get their freedom, Ezike said: “it is the problem of leadership. All those who have pretended to be leaders have no idea what it is all about, whether they are military or civilian, they lost historical opportunities.

Let me say that if we do not do this, we will end up like the Soviet Union. Nobody is going to fight; you just wake up one day and find out that there is no country like Nigeria since there is no leadership. Please do not blame Goodluck Jonathan for that, he is more of a victim than any other person. It is the people who thought they could capture power.

“Right now, I don’t see any hope in the future from the people who are emerging.

When asked if President Jonathan can do something about it, Ezike said: “the President can do something about it but will not do such things. Reason, because, I don’t think that when Jonathan was born that he aspired to lead Nigeria. I once told you that people do not become leaders by accident except in Africa.

“Unfortunately, after the death of Justice Teslim Elias, the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, mentoring stopped. I was one of those he mentored when I was in the university, people like Bolaji Akinyemi and the late Felix Okoye were all mentored by Elias but the people never had a chance to do anything. Do we have people like that anymore? Our rich people do not even understand what mentoring is all about, that they have to balance the society. If there is no balance, there will be chaos. Right now, all the rich people are supporting the government of the day. In other words, everything has swung to one side, when it swings to the other side, there will be a crash.