By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa
Last week, the Senate asked the President to declare a state of emergency on security in Nigeria. From one Senator to the other, the men and women of the Upper Chamber of the National Assembly were unanimous that something has to be done urgently, to stem the slide into anarchy, unbridled violence and bloodshed across the land.
What is the security
situation presently? We have a police force lacking in legitimate leadership,
the armed forces is so politicized that the leadership is loyal only to the
party in power and a commander-in-chief that seems to have been totally
overwhelmed with the crisis. It is by now clear to all and sundry, at least
from the comments and contributions of lawmakers across party lines, that
Nigeria is approaching a failed state.
This was indeed the conclusion reached at a stakeholders’ summit held last week, where Professor Pat Utomi and others x-rayed the dangerous dimension that security has taken in Nigeria. The Sultan of Sokoto said somewhere else that Boko Haram has now transformed into bandits and kidnappers. It is the latest business in town.
Nigeria became a State formally in 1960, with sovereign powers transferred from the British colonialists to the representatives of the people. By law however, section 2 (1) of the 1999 Constitution states that “Nigeria is one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign state to be known by the name of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”, and by section 2 (2) thereof, “Nigeria shall be a Federation consisting of states and a Federal Capital Territory”.
So, in the real sense of the word, Nigeria is
a sovereign state consisting of federating units. Fair enough, the same
Constitution that created the Nigerian Federation also specified the kind of
powers that it should exercise and the functions it should perform, for its
citizens. In this regard, Chapter 2 of the self-same Constitution comes to
bear. I will limit myself for this discourse however, to section 14 of the
Constitution.
Under and by virtue of section 14 (2) (a), “sovereignty
belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this
Constitution, derives ALL its powers and authority” (emphasis
supplied). In very simple terms therefore, the sovereignty attached to the
entity known as the Federal Republic of Nigeria, resides in the people of
Nigeria. In essence, all our leaders hold power in trust for the people of
Nigeria and they cannot go on acting as if it is the other way round. To break
it down more, there is no President who should claim to be in power, there is
no Governor who should assert any authority and there should be no legislative
house or even a court of law that should rule over and above the people to lord
their policies and decisions over them.
Power belongs to the people, pure and simple.
The fact that the people of Africa and especially Nigeria, have been living in
the opposite of civility and modernisation, whereby those elected into office
by the people turn around to arrogate power to themselves, cannot be an excuse
to obfuscate this simple truth. One cannot of course claim not to be aware of
the rare exception of the Nigerian situation where power belongs to and resides
in the leaders. It is an anomaly.
Now to section 14 (2) (b) of the Constitution, wherein it
is stated expressly and without equivocation, that “the security and welfare of the people
shall be the primary purpose of government.” A community
interpretation of section 14 (2) (a) and (b) respectively will show clearly
that the Nigerian State was created for the people of Nigeria, that the focus
of the entity called Nigeria is the people and that the target of power and
existence of that Federation, is the people. It is good therefore, to sound it
loud and clear, that the very existence of government, the totality of the
exercise of power, by all and sundry, is for the security and welfare of the
people and anything outside this, anything done that cannot achieve this, means
a failure of governance. Pure and simple.
According to the learned authors of Merriam-Webster
Dictionary, SECURITY means: “(a)
freedom from danger (safety); (b) freedom from fear or anxiety; … something
that secures, protection or measures taken to guard against espionage or
sabotage, crime, attack, or escape.”
The priority of security in governance is
better illustrated by section 4 of the Police Act, wherein it is stated that
the police shall be “… employed for the prevention and
detection of crime, the apprehension of offenders, the preservation of law and
order, the protection of life and property and the due enforcement of all laws
and regulations with which they are directly charged, and shall perform such
military duties within or outside Nigeria as may be required of them by, or
under the authority of this or any other Act.” What stands out
in this section is the phrase “protection of lives and property”. Now, let us
match this with certain data recently released by the leadership of the Nigeria
Police Force.
At the quarterly Northern Traditional Rulers’ Council
meeting held in Kaduna as back as 2019, the former Inspector-General of Police
stated that in the first quarter of 2019 alone, 1,071 persons lost their lives
in crime-related cases across the country. He stated further that between January
and April 2019 alone, 685 persons were kidnapped.
Amnesty International has a higher figure of
deaths and casualties. In 2018, it was estimated that about 6, 562 persons died
from crime-related cases whilst generally, an estimate of about 13,000 persons
are said to have died from the insurgency going on in the land, whilst about
1.1m people have been displaced thereby. Just in one year!
The Global Terrorism Index suggests that
Nigeria recorded about 8,314 deaths from crime-related cases in 2020. This is
surely frightening, to the extent that no one can claim to sleep with the two
eyes closed, any longer. It may well be that the government is taking all
necessary steps to contain the rising spate of insecurity across Nigeria, but
this remains to be seen by all and sundry, in terms of security and safety, in
the real sense of the word. The summary now would seem to be that the
government has not been able to rise up to the challenges posed by insecurity.
Now to welfare, since the two main points of governance
are security and welfare. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines
WELFARE as “the state of doing well, especially in respect to good
fortune, happiness, well-being, or prosperity.” Are we doing
well as a people, presently? Are we enjoying some form of good fortune
economically?
Is the well-being of the people of this
nation improving in any form at all? Are we happy, with the state of things in
Nigeria? Is there prosperity in the land? Are we safe as a people? Can we
travel safely on our roads presently? Without any doubt whatsoever, suicide
cases have increased, the economic power of the people has dwindled
considerably and virtually everyone now depends on handouts from the
government, as private businesses are all struggling to survive, in the absence
of basic infrastructure, especially power supply.
I have no doubt in my mind that the true
testimony across the land is that the majority of the people are suffering
indeed. I see it in the text messages that I receive every now and then, for
financial assistance, I read it in the news daily, of how many states in the
Federation are owing their workers’ salaries, for several months and how the
ordinary people are just living from hand to mouth, barely eking out a living,
just surviving and tagging along.
The present circumstance of Nigeria is that many people
have become beggars of some sort. Even as businessmen and women, professionals
and even as manufacturers, the bulk of the little profit margin is spent on
infrastructure, whereby you are forced to generate your own electricity,
provide your own water, build your own road, employ your own security, train
your children in private schools or send them abroad, if they must excel,
provide yourself health care if you must live, and may be buy your own car, if
you must move around.
It is that bad, that the government seemed to
have shifted all its responsibilities to the citizens. And how exactly is
anyone expected to survive in such hostile environment, where you spend most of
your valuable time in traffic, you get home to sleep in intense heat and
darkness and then you eventually manage to make it to the office the following
day, only to be confronted with power outage, all day long, draining all human
capacity, productivity and usefulness. Can we then say that we have a nation or
that any form of governance is in place?
From all the above frightening scenarios, how do you
describe the entity created as Nigeria, if it is agreed that the two critical
responsibilities of government are the security and welfare of the people? This
piece became necessary as it would seem that those in authority do not well
appreciate the enormity of the situation that we presently face in Nigeria or
that state propaganda has so prospered and become the art of governance, that
some of them are totally ensconced from the reality of present day Nigeria.
Whereas I know that some well-meaning persons
exist in authority presently, I verily believe that the time has now come, for
some frank introspection that will translate into some genuine appreciation, of
the debilitating welfare and security conditions of our people, if we are to
say that there is governance at all. In the absence of that, the reasonable
conclusion is that we are gradually moving to a failed state, as echoed by many
statesmen lately, who, very unfortunately, are themselves part and parcel of
the failure of the state. The main person we look up to for answers is the
President, who must rise up and walk the talk.
* Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa
is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)
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