www.ooduapathfinder.com
By adminadmin on November 14,2015


Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in his speech to the Nigerian Legislative Council, had this to say: “we shall demand our rights when the time is ripe. We do want independence and we shall fight for it if necessary, but I should like to make it clear to you that if the British quit Nigeria now at this stage, the Northern people would continue their interrupted conquest to the sea.”
Nnamidi Azikiwe, as President of the Igbo State Union, said “it would appear that the gods of Africa has specially created the Igbo nation to lead the children of Africa from the bondage of the ages”, while another prominent Igbo, Charles Daddy Onyeama was the same time saying that “the domination of Nigeria, indeed Africa, by the Ibo race was a question of time”.
Oloye Obafemi Awolowo, on his part, had this to say: “Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no Nigerian in the same sense as there are English, Welsh or French. The word Nigeria is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not.”
These statements, made around the same time, 1947-1949, in the heat of the push towards independence formed the foundational and continuous story of Nigeria where some parts would be thinking of reserving for themselves the right of a conquest, either by sheer force of arms or by a supposed divine mandate.
These historical trajectories had been at the expense of the Yoruba, who appeared to be the target of these adventures especially with the alliance between the aspiring domineers, such that the breakdown of the alliance in 1966 and its attendant orgy of violence against each other did not prevent further cementing of the alliance in peacetime. Having gone through fifty years of this alliance in one form or the other, everyone now realizes that the resultant political space is unsustainable.
Nowhere was this manifested more than our most recent past with the economic meltdown in the states and in the federal government itself; institutions that had been surviving solely on “allocations” from the federal government even as some claims were made as to increases in what is called internally generated revenue. The cost of running these bureaucracies at the state and central levels go over seventy percent of the total income of the entire country thus leaving no room for any capital for any form of development.
Yet, for the Yoruba Nation, our post-colonial experience showed that such a bureaucracy is antithetical to development as all it took us was in being rooted in a socio-cultural ethos based on the need to situate the Yoruba anti-colonial experience within the ambit of the development of “man”, which was why Federalism took root in Yorubaland and had since been the bedrock of our praxis.
This is borne from an appreciation by Oloye Obafemi Awolowo, not only because he was the major proponent of Constitutional re-engineering of Africa based on the recognition of the African to influence the trajectory of the world based on his inherent ability as a human being to determine his relationship within as well as without, which all boils down to the meaning of a Constitution as the formal establishment of a social, economic and political relationship between different people.
In his Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lecture delivered in 1976, he had this to say about Constitutions:
“ [b]Constitution-making has, since independence, become a past-time in all parts of Africa. As soon as a new set of people accede to power, they find some pretext for introducing a new Constitution. Be that as it may, the point I wish to make here is that none of the Constitutions operating in Africa today are likely to endure beyond the tenure of those who make them and hand them down to the people, because they are fundamentally unsuitable in character for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual or multi-national State.
I have made a long and careful study of the problems involved in Constitution-making and, as a result, I have certain definite principles. Time does not permit me, in this lecture, to set out the theoretical and empirical bases for the principles which I am going to state presently. But if I may say so, without appearing immodest, I would refer those who are interested to two of my books entitled “thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution and the People’s republic which contain a full exposition of the said principles.
Of all the 189 countries in the world, twenty have Federal Constitutions and the remaining 169 have Unitary Constitutions. The twenty Federal States have a population of 2400million, that is approximately two-thirds of the entire population of the world and as far as is known, in spite of occasional social upheavals in some of them, th4e character of their Constitutions, together with the basic provisions thereof, has endured because it is suitable for their respective peculiar conditions.
I will now state the principles which I have evolved and relate each of them, as appropriate, to the twenty Federal countries and to other multi-lingual States with Unitary Constitutions. They are as follows:
(1) If a country is unilingual and uni-national, the Constitution must be unitary. Examples are: France, Italy, Portugal, Poland and Greece, among others, which are unilingual and have always had Unitary Constitutions.
(2) If a country is uni-lingual or bi-lingual or multi-lingual and also consists of communities, which, though belonging to the same nation or linguistic group, have, over a period of years, developed some important cultural divergences as well as autonomous geographical separateness, the Constitution must be Federal, and the constituent States must be organized on the dual basis of Language and geographical separateness. Examples are: USA, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Federation of South Arabia, Australia, Austria, the two Germanys and Switzerland.
(3) If a country is bi-lingual or multi-lingual, the Constitution must be Federal, and the constituent States must be organized on a linguistic basis. Examples are: Canada, Mexico, Burma, China, India, Malaysia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR and Yugoslavia.
(4) Any experiment with a Unitary Constitution in a bi-lingual or multi-lingual country must fail, in the long run. Examples are the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Belgium, Spain, Sri Lanka and Cyprus, all of which have, for some time, been experiencing incessant turmoil and violence because, though they are either bi-lingual or multi-lingual, yet they stubbornly insist on operating a Unitary Constitution.
If the vast majority of mankind, among them the USA, the USSR, China—the three super powers-and India—the harbinger of freedom from colonial rule—if all these countries, for what I sincerely think are very sound reasons, consider a certain form of Constitution suitable for some specified set of circumstances and adopt such a form of Constitution, African leaders would do well to learn from them and not follow the erring ways of Britain, Spain and others who have refused to learn, and are right now suffering the agonies of their errors. But before proceeding to learn, African leaders should endeavor to appreciate the true meanings of terms like Clan, Tribe and Ethnic or Linguistic or National Group, and the difference between tribalism and ethnicism. For it is not in a chemical laboratory alone that wrong labelling could lead to serious disaster and death. It could do so too in politics. The only difference is that in the former case, disaster is instant, whilst in the latter, it tends to be insidious and delayed.
If our leaders and all of us observe the principles enunciated above, it will be the easiest thing for us to fashion, for Africa’s multi-lingual States, a Constitution which will endure in its character and eliminate ab initio, the tendency to future secessionist agitation, because it preserves the pre-colonial co-eval status of each of the constituent ethnic or linguistic units, and allays the fears of minority groups.”
[/b]
The above would be the further concretization of his 1945 statement which manifested in the quest for Federalism to which it appears everyone has now subscribed, one way or the other, even as secessionist tendencies also thrive. This is exactly the reason why Nigeria is presently in a position to set an example for the rest of Africa in a fundamental manner and the Yoruba have a lot of responsibility in this regard.
Such responsibility hangs on, among others, creating a pathway for its realization. Nigeria has had so many conferences whose reports have not seen the light of day such that aspiring or advocating for another will be a waste of time as well as an unnecessary ritual. Yet, the only way the aspirations of a people can be decided is through such a Conference or Convention, but now anchored on a Referendum among the various peoples simply because of the multi-lingual, multi-cultural composition of Nigeria itself.
This is all the more urgent considering the 2015 election experience and whose replication in 2019 is just around the corner. The economic meltdown and the corruption associated with it alongside the attempts at truncating the legal means of tackling corruption will leave no room for any form of radical transformation of the economy that will be needed to check the economic drift, hence the necessity to arrest this situation from its foundation—the political structure. The Yoruba Nation can begin this process by calling on the Attorney General of the Federation to hearken to this necessity based on his own convictions on Constitutional imperatives.

This is a very good Report. I agree with the recommendations 100 percent. Gej s NC was doomed to fail from the inception because the Delegates were selected. Gej should have processed the recommendations of the NC through a Referendum to accept, authorize and approve it, but he didn't. He simply left it to whims and caprice of NASS. And now, the complications of bokoharam insurgency, biafran reappraisal, Fulani Herdsmen regular guerrilla time bomb infiltration into every part of Nigeria and their claims of constitutional authority to kill and maim their fellow Nigerians every where in the Country etc, have shown that only an Elected National Conference can solve Nigeria Constitutional problems once and for all times. Therefore, all Pressures should be mounted on PMB now to convoke an Elected National Conference of 5 Delegates from each of our existing 800 Local Government and Area Councils. A total of 4000 Delegates is not unwieldy for a population of over 150 million people.