A member of the House of Representatives (Odukpani/Cross River) and erstwhile Nigerian envoy to Ethiopia, Ambassador Nkoyo Toyo, says Nigerian women can decide their fate if they participate in active politics. She spoke to TUNDE AKINOLA on the developments in the constitutional review process in the National Assembly.

THERE are some burning issues that necessitated the review of the 1999 Constitution (as amended); how far has the House of Representatives gone with the process?

When the debate on the Constitution amendment first started, some of the major questions were state police, state creation, the issue of council autonomy, citizenship; whether the immunity of the governors should be removed; the issue of tenure and other issues that caught the attention of the media.

In the past one year, the National Assembly has been working on all of these issues. In the case of the House of Representatives, what we did was to generate some critical questions for each lawmaker to take to his or her constituency.

Lawmakers went to their constituencies to organise civil societies, political and religious leaders with other stakeholders and handed over the questions to them to put them across to Nigerians at the grassroots and see what they have to say about them. A lot of people came out for this exercise in many constituencies.

On state creation, the question was whether to make the process of creation simpler because right now, it is very cumbersome and we have a lot of people clamouring for state creation.

Some people said we should have state police or make the governors to control the Commissioners of Police at their various states while the national order is maintained. But a lot of people objected to this suggestion because majority of Nigerians could not trust the governors with such powers.

On the issue of citizenship, we asked questions on what should happen to people who are not indigenes and some people said they do not want to share their indigeneship with anybody while some people some people said if one had lived in a place for many years, he should be treated equally.

For instance, if my grandparents and parents were living in Lagos, although I am from Calabar, after about one or two generations or 10 or 15 years of living there, I should automatically become a citizen or be treated as a citizen with equal rights as every indigene in the area.

What we did was to get the answers that came from all the 360 constituencies, including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), analyse them and the answers were used to generate questions as well as responses within the constitutional reform.

What they did was to use the answers from Nigerians to draft positions. With the drafted positions, we went for a retreat to see if the language of the drafted positions matched the expectations of Nigerians.

There were other issues like dividing the portfolio of Minster of Justice from the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF). We also went to the Exclusive List in the Constitution, where some items — not too many — were moved to the Concurrent List.

Do you think creation of states is in need at this particular point in time?

Well, if they did not say whether we need state creation or not, Nigerians asked for it. What they asked is to make the provision simpler. The other questions is, even if it is simpler, can people still get the states created?

I personally believe state creation will be a big distraction at this point we are because even with the ones we have are very difficult to manage. I think what we need is adjustment of constituencies.

For example, if a constituency is indigenous to a particular area and it is in two different states, what we need is to adjust the community into one state instead of keeping them in two different states. These are purely issues of boundary adjustment and not necessarily the issues of state creation.

What about the question of council autonomy?

I must tell you that we spent a lot of time on that particular question at the constitutional conference. What engaged our minds was how to write the provision into the Constitution. — not just saying the Joint Account, but the one that says if the councils are to get their money directly in a way that is not influenced by the state.

They should also match that tier of government with responsibility so that they do not see the money as freebies they can use for whatever they like. It is not enough to give them the money but we had to outline how the councils should be and their functions.

We debated how to create the tier of government with state responsibility for its resources, but at the same time obligated to use those resources for the development of people at the lowest level.

Nigerian women decried marginalisation during the public sessions across the country; how has the House addressed this issue?

Unfortunately, the results that came from the 360 constituencies in Nigeria showed that Nigerians do not want any provision for women in the new Constitution.

What we have been able to appeal to the committee to do is to look at Section 42, which addresses the issue of discrimination and say that any action that is taken to address the existing discrimination should not be seen as discrimination. We can, therefore, go out and do some specific things for women in order to improve their status in the society.

The same provision allows us to do things like amnesty, and special interest for people who are disadvantaged through one means or the other. Government can take special steps to address the situation of their discrimination.

Last year, the President had five items of budget provision for women and some people said it was against the Constitution; that it was not right to single out women to have some things in the budget.

But that provision in Section 42 makes it possible to do things for special interest groups and should not be seen as discrimination because they have already been discriminated by their conditions and we need to bring them out of the situation.

I think if we have such provision in the Constitution, we can go to the political parties and use affirmative action and other strategies to strengthen the position of women within the Nigerian polity.

It is a sad thing that the Nigerians still do not understand the importance of having a strong constitutional provision that says affirmative action should be taken to support women’s disadvantage in the society.

Where we got it right is under citizenship. We have now said a woman can claim the citizenship of her husband or her birth, provided she does not maintain the two. We are not allowing dual citizenship.

At every point in one’s life, one must belong to one community or the other. To that extent, we have recognised the problem that came with the Judge from Abia State, where she had lived with her husband for 14 years but for the purpose of her appointment as a Judge of the Appeal Court, questions were raised. So, that issue has been addressed.

Could you say this present administration has been fair to Nigerian women?

The executive has appointed very high-profiled women in high positions. But I think we need women in more elective posts like the National Assembly.

Personally, I think one of the worst places to talk about gender these days is the National Assembly; everything we come up with is always thrown out.

The other day, some bills came up on citizenship of women and breastfeeding and so on but they were thrown out. The one on violence against women took a lot of canvassing and persuasion for it to be retained to the level it has been now.

It has got to the level of public reading and public hearing; so, we are hoping that that one will be passed irrespective of the initial shortcoming it encountered.

It is really sad that the National Assembly seems to be the greatest bottleneck to making quick and significant transformation on the issue of gender.