The disgrace has been made most obvious by the United States of America which has rather brashly refused to share intelligence information with the Nigerian government and insisting on not selling ammunition to the Nigerian state, because of the infiltration of the Nigerian government by the Boko Haram sect and the disrespect of the Nigerian Army for the fundamental human rights of the insurgents. Surely, with a foreign power earning a role that is not so innocent in the narration of the events, the matter ought to be seen not so much as problem for just the President of Nigeria but one on which a sensible political class ought to see a high-powered annulment of its status and an oblique pressure for its members to be pushed sideways for a foreign body to be inserted as problem-solver. That this is not the case and that there are sensational disagreements of a partisan political nature between the government and the opposition, without a sensible proposal for an alternative handling of the matter, portends a serious challenge to the integrity of Nigeria’s political class as a whole. To have allowed matters of national security and survival to degenerate to partisan brickbats in such a manner is like refusing to see the handwriting on the wall. Which makes it quite a sore point that President Jonathan has not volunteered what he is doing about those Nigerians, within or outside his government, who are alleged by the United States to be working for or sponsoring Boko Haram. When will they be outed and exposed? Or what are the highly explosive Nigerian dynamics that the President is keeping quiet about because of the need to defeat Boko Haram or prevent the break up of Nigeria which a United States Intelligence outfit almost gleefully fixed for 2015, a decade ago? Well, these are questions which have cut into an assessment of President Goodluck Jonathan’s term of office and which may explain why he is being denied objectivity or fair hearing in many quarters.

The truth of the matter however is that there is simply no running from the reality, which some may wish, like ostriches, to forget by burying their heads in the sands. This reality is that Boko Haram is part of the running sore of competition between “North” and South which must be resolved either by capitulating to those who wish that the North be treated as another country or by acknowledging that the harsh draw-line between North and South must be removed by proper social engineering and the building of a new national consensus. Once this is realised, it becomes clear that the inverted commas used in the case of the North are worth emphasising. This is because the North is a diverse zone in which forced-draft unity (northern exclusivism) has become the means deployed to create violence on a large scale by those who believe that all who live in the region must have the same standpoint on all issues, without dissent or difference of opinion. Those who so believe are the real culprits of the Boko Haram insurgency even when they have nothing to do with Boko Haram. Otherwise, there is no reason why any set of citizens should be allowed to act with such brashness and impunity as flaunted by those presuming to have a divine mandate to prevent other citizens from having or taking to, a different viewpoint form theirs. The crisis in the North East and across the North is, in this sense, simply one that requires Nigerians and the Nigerian government to defend the right of every Nigerian to self-respect, integrity, freedom of opinion, worship and association. Mercenaries and suicide bombers who seek to force the rest of us to abandon our own idea of Islam or Christianity and to buy into their rejection of western education, must be seen as enemies of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious Nigeria who think that taking over the North East and, may be, the North West, will give them a place to stand from which to take the rest of the country.

Odia Ofeimun

No question about it: the idea that one part of the country has to be granted special benefices as a result of some over-played difference, or lack, is the basis of the success that Boko Haram has had so far. In my view, the champions of such exclusivism, searchers for an Arewa President for Nigeria instead of a Nigerian President for Nigeria are the real bulwarks of Boko Haram, even if they do not belong to the sect and have no religious reasons to hate western education. In this regard, the shame of the Nigerian political class is that the northern exclusivists who took over Nigeria’s largest political party, the PDP, from the beginning, have since succeeded in overcoming the new mega-party, APC and are hammering on President Goodluck Jonathan’s ‘cluelessness’, as a means of ignoring outstanding performances. Still, it does need to be said that the humungous corruption across the country and the large-scale insecurity in the North East and elsewhere have dented greatly but not managed to erase Goodluck Jonathan’s good deeds. Of interest here is that Olusegun Obasanjo who has been making a show of siding with the northern exclusivists to hide, or remove obviousness from, his own ‘coup of succession’ against the North simply wont let up. More critical for him is that Goodluck Jonathan’s performance in sector after sector after sector has down-graded and displaced him, in his bid, now supported by so many ‘commissioned’ books, to be seen as father of modern Nigeria. To make matters worse for him, his fears have been confirmed by the glittering success of the national conference which Goodluck Jonathan made possible and serviced executively against all blandishments.

In this period of electioneering, it is particularly important to talk about the success of the national conference because of the queer habits of the political parties, all of them acting shy of presenting formidable manifestos and retreating from taking strong positions on the serious matters that have worried Nigerians who continue to see the conference as the grand necessity required to firm up a basis for living together in harmony and plenty. In this connection, it is good always to remember that the Fourth Republic began with a national consensus on this necessity: to provide for a new constitution that could end the charade of having a decided military over-hang purloining our democracy. True, there were Nigerians who felt there was no need for a new constitution. Theirs was the bemusing cop-out that the trouble was not with the constitution but with its operators. Except that no one ever could tell how to deal with the operators outside the champions of dictatorship who continued to offer grim-faced dispensers of fiats and feckless “immediate effects” as messiahs. Generally, they failed, and are still failing, to look at how the oddities of the 1999 Constitution have been obstructing reforms and reformers, deleting development, empowering corruption, and making Nigeria look truly big for nothing. The surprise is that anyone could think of a law-governed change in the country without attending to the business of having a constitution that truly works. Unfortunately, although the political class seemed convinced about the need for change, the leadership under President Obasanjo was playing games. The 2005 Political Reform conference flopped because President Olusegun Obasanjo turned it into a self-aggrandizing pursuit of a third term agenda. His personal ambitions sought to over-ride national honour and a sure sense of national destiny. Besides, he was overburdened by the necessity to meet the instructions of a cabal of Northern hegemonists who said they gave him power to do their bidding from which he could not renege. In response to their brag, he decided to put a worm in their ointment when he strategized for President Umaru Yar’adua, a better Nigerian than a Northerner, to succeed him. He proved he had a hidden polemic, however, when, in obedience to his minders, he gave Nigeria a good man whom he knew would not last the distance. All the same, whatever President Yar’adua may have done, or not done, the most important part of his legacy is that his successor, President Goodluck Jonathan, did not abandon the imperative of working for a new constitutional order. While Jonathan’s opponents, including Obasanjo, successfully seized the airwaves to paint his progress as clueless, he pulled off a deft platform by setting up a Belgore Commission to pair down the known differences between the previous constitutional efforts. He organized a parley of civil societies to confront the difficulties in the way, and saw to it, that the Senate and the House of Representatives each delivered virtually a new constitution before he set up the Okurounmu Committee that strategized the way to a national conference which brought Nigerians of different fractions and factions together and has since further empowered the National Assembly, as it should be, to complete the process. It showed skill.

Those who had asked for a sovereign national conference obviously saw the futility of insisting on their pursuit and so participated in making the national conference a whopping success. Never mind that some did it through proxies. So easily forgotten now is the absence of the great champions of constitutional change, and their political siblings, who against their long-drawn and highly effective and praise-worthy advocacy of restructuring and campaign for social welfare turned their backs on the conference and are still uttering truly cynical and distracted opinions about its glittering success.

The good thing is that all Nigerians, including those afraid that the salutary outcome of the national conference may never be adopted, are agreed that the document from the conference remains a solid departure from the impunity-ridden ones of hidden agendas in preceding national conferences. The new document is so grandly superior to the current 1999 constitution in terms of ideals and implementation strategies, and has been so very wisely handed over to the National Assembly to boost the many politically correct positions already taken by both the Senate and the House of Representatives, that it deserves to be at the heart of the current campaigns. Especially so, now that the process has reached a most self-congratulatory stage with the Houses of Assembly across the country submitting their joint report in response to the National Assembly. The indisputable fact is that, irrespective of what anyone might think of particular provisions in the constitution being crafted, Nigeria is actually on the verge of having a new constitution that is less problematic, more development and people-oriented, less tolerant of ethnic and regional hegemonies, and more oriented towards the fight against corruption, than all the attempts made since, and including, the 1979 and 1999 Constitution, to move Nigeria in a positive direction.