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18 — Vanguard, THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020
IT is no longer news that Nigerian
politicians have very little regard for
ideology, morality and integrity. Politics
in Nigeria has often been described as
a “criminal enterprise” where people
with crooked characters and criminal
intentions hold sway.
The questionable character of
Nigerian politicians makes it difficult his defection along with seven other
for people who are ready to promote PDP lawmakers to the APC. This brings
the noble visions of society to get the total number of APC lawmakers in
involved.
the house to 18, while the PDP is left
So Nigerians were not surprised with eight.
when they learnt that nine lawmakers The defections were obviously sequel
elected on the platforms of the Peoples to the recent controversial Supreme
Democratic Party, PDP, All Progressives Court ruling in which Senator Hope
Grand Alliance, APGA and Action Uzodinma of APC, who came fourth at
Alliance, AA, had on Tuesday, January the 2019 governorship election in the
21, defected to the All Progressives state, was pronounced as the winner,
Congress, APC, in the Imo State House thus displacing the PDP’s Hon. Emeka
of Assembly which previously had no Ihedioha who was sworn-in on May 29,
APC representation.
2019.
As if that was not enough, the Speaker Such an eyesore development has
of the Imo House of Assembly, Dr. become a recurring decimal since the
Collins Chiji, on Tuesday, January 28, nation returned to democracy in May
announced during a plenary session, 1999 when politicians nominated by
Imo’s defecting lawmakers
various political parties and elected to
represent the people do whatever
favours their personal interests once
they get into office.
The saddest part is that they violate
Section 68 (1g) of the 1999 Constitution
which says the only condition that
lawmakers can defect from the parties
which nominated and got them elected
is if there is factionalisation or their
parties go into mergers.
This provision means that if
lawmakers must defect from their party
before the end of their tenure they must
first resign their position to allow for a
new election and their seat declared
vacant. The intendment of the framers
of this section of the Constitution is to
promote stability in the parties and our
democracy at large.
Over the years, lawmakers have
flagrantly abused this constitutional
provision. In spite of the series of legal
challenges, most of them go scot-free,
thus paving the way for more abuses.
We affirm that it is the constitutional
right of lawmakers to choose to depart
from the parties which got them elected.
However, in doing so, the Constitution
must be upheld. Where there is no
factionalisation or merger as in the
cases of PDP, AA and APGA in Imo
State, the defecting lawmakers must
have their seats declared vacant. They
are free to re-contest from their new
political party, and if they win, so be it.
It is wrong and objectionable for them
to remain on their seats as lawmakers
representing political parties which did
not get them elected into office. It is a
rape of our Constitution and
unacceptable.
Their seats should be declared vacant
forthwith.
OPINION
Bridges we haven’t destroyed 50 years after Biafra
By BANJI OJEWALE
One should not forget that the war of 1967-
1970 taught everyone, even the victors, a lesson:
you cannot massacre a people or destroy their
property, even an ethnic minority (without a
response)…If you do, they will fight because
they have no choice but to fight—
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (1933-
2011) Biafra war leader.
IN both modern and ancient times, we have
inspiring annals of nations which
emerged from devastating civil wars and grave
turmoil and never remained the same again.
They destroyed old roads that could tempt them
into bigger caves of crisis. Then they embarked
upon a long and engaging construction of great
bridges that connected their people to a bright
and hopeful future. These overhead stretches
ensured the society wouldn’t return to the bitter
past that gave nothing but anguish and
despondency.
If we spare ourselves a throwback too deep
into the past, we can simply settle for two
African nations of contemporary times and
prove our point that you don’t come out of a
life-threatening storm and still be at the mercy
of deadly winds. Rwanda went through a
genocidal tide that consumed a third of the
population in 1994. A writer says the crisis
plunged the land into a “cataclysmic
wasteland”. But today the country has been
redefined by a united people and selfless
leadership building bridges of true
reconciliation, reconstruction, rehabilitation
and reintegration. Its president, Paul Kagame,
has brought forth a new society from ashes to
beauty.
An observer concludes: “Rwanda is easily
the safest, least corrupt, best groomed nation
in the region…In other ways the image is a
fantasy…” The motto in Rwanda is, ‘never
again’. They’ve allowed the harsh winds of war
to whip them away from the past into the future.
They keep singing, once bitten, forever shy. Go
to Ethiopia and you will find the same ashesto-beauty
story. After a succession of ‘creeping
revolutions’, as the bloody military coups in
the Horn of Africa came to be known, Ethiopia
fell into the league of the continent’s failing
countries. But when visionary leaders lay hold
on such circumstances, they sail on the crest of
adversarial torrents to turn the tide to favour
their people and society.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been one
such leader. His government has made
Ethiopia “overtake Kenya as the economic
giant of East Africa”. The International
Monetary Fund says the country’s “economy
since 2015 has been on an upward trajectory
since the government moved to modernise its
roads, railway and power plants. They are on
cue to have Africa’s biggest hydroelectric dam
upon the completion of work on the Grand
Ethiopia Renaissance Dam. Even though
landlocked, the country continues to make
giant strides in trying to industrialise.” It wasn’t
a surprise that the country’s PM won the
coveted Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, owing to
his effort in pulling Ethiopia from an
internecine war with Eritrea to peace and
thence into full blast postwar reconciliation
and development.
Now, Nigeria has had its own scorching civil
war which ought to have taught us lessons on
how to build bridges on which to walk into
progress. Hundreds of thousands, millions
indeed, lost their souls in the secessionist bid
by Biafra. Many more were maimed, while
several more incalculable losses were incurred
in the conflict. Fifty years after the inferno that
nearly brought down our rattletrap structure,
we can’t identify any bridge we’ve erected to
take us away from the graves of those cut down
by the sanguinary conflagration. We’ve been
standing at the spot we were in January 1970
when the Biafra War ended. Other nations
concluded their hostilities, whether domestic
or external, and moved on, improving the lot
of their citizens. They didn’t mock the departed
as we do when we fail to improve the society
they were slain for.
Fifty years after Biafra, the wraith of Biafra
hasn’t gone home. Every day it threatens us.
All what gave birth to this abiku is alive in our
politics, in our economy, in our lifestyle, in our
home, in our schools. Is it a coincidence that
six state governments in the South West of
Nigeria are declaring they have no confidence
in the security apparatus of the central
We must begin to pull down
those structures that seem to
be taking us down the war
alley again
administration and that they are pushing for
an independent machinery to protect their
people? Is it a coincidence that this is taking
place in January, the month marking the 50 th
anniversary of the end of the Nigerian Civil
War?
There was this ambience that preceded the
war- insecurity, corruption, nepotism, mutual
fear among the ‘federating’ units, toxic politics
followed by inane military rule, ethnicity,
official contempt for the masses, poverty, social
discontent, marginalisation of sections of the
nation, unchecked violence, dismantling of the
principles of federalism for an extenuated and
disfigured one, religious extremism, etc. The
question is: can we notice that we still have
these as our backcloth today, some five decades
after the Civil War? Military rule is missing in
the murderous mix. But you know Esau’s hands
and Jacob’s voice. These are bridges we
shouldn’t have retained after the war.
When we bulldozed the physical bridges in
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Biafra land we should have also razed the more
dangerous ones threatening Biafrans scores
of years after. But we have lacked great leaders
to exploit the conflict to go for broke over a
radical reordering of Nigeria. Of course, there
have been several other missteps in the wake
of numerous opportunistic national
challenges.
Elsewhere, the war would have produced an
Abraham Lincoln with a masterly Gettysburg
dirge to inspire the mourning folks to look
beyond the seeming helplessness and death
around them. Surrounded by fallen servicemen
and grieving citizens at the dedication of the
cemetery for the slain during the American
Civil War in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln
delivered one of man’s greatest speeches,
where he said your duty in crisis was to honour
those the crisis had claimed by abolishing what
brought about the challenges. He made the
point that “in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot
hallow- this ground…It is for us the living,
rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far
so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before
us…”
In our case, after we mowed down Biafra
and all its great promise of giving the Black
Race a home-grown technology whose fetuses
we saw during the war-a mobile radio station,
locally-made rockets with launchers and
bombs, improvised refineries, etc., we did not
dedicate to the “great task remaining before
us”, namely destroying the bridge to Biafra.
We have put up more. To honour those who
fought for the land, we must begin to pull down
those structures that seem to be taking us down
the war alley again. Wars, avoidable or
unavoidable, are challenges not meant to
crush us. They are to guide us into Eldorado as
they did for others: Vietnam, South Korea,
Rwanda, Ethiopia etc.
*Ojewale, a commentator on national issues,
wrote from Lagos