By Chidi Odinkalu
November 28, 1988 was a Monday. In Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, FCT, a Constituent Assembly inaugurated by military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida, had been in session for just over six months since May 11, 1988. At the helm as its chair was Anthony Aniagolu, then a recently retired Justice of Nigeria’s Supreme Court. He was a Christian from Enugu State. His deputy was Muhammadu Buba Ardo, then Chief Judge of Gongola State, who died suddenly in 1991, two years after the Assembly completed its work. He was Muslim.
*BuhariThe Secretary to the Constituent Assembly was one Alhaji
Babagana Kingibe, whom the country has since then got to know a lot more
eloquently, a Muslim from Borno State. Kingibe’s assistant was Amal Inyingiala
Pepple, who would rise to the height of the civil service in Nigeria, before
retiring in June 2009 as the Head of Service of the Federation. She is a
Christian from Rivers State.
In those days, Nigeria had 21 states: Akwa Ibom, Anambra,
Bauchi, Bendel, Benue, Borno, Cross River, Gongola, Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina,
Kwara, Lagos, Nigeria, Ogun, Ondo, Oyo, Plateau, Rivers, and Sokoto states,
plus the FCT.
The Constituent Assembly, which Justice Aniagolu chaired, comprised 567 members drawn from all these states. A total 458 were elected, while 109 were nominated by the Federal Government, including the Chairman and his Deputy (both of them male), and drawn from the ranks of judicial figures, senior lawyers, titans of industry, traditional rulers, experienced public servants and administrators, academics and other professionals.
At the submission of its report on April 5, 1989, the membership
was down to 565, owing to the death of two members: Dr. Daniel Obasi Agbafor,
an elected member representing Ohaozara federal constituency then in Imo State
in South-East Nigeria, who died on Sunday, August 14, 1988; and Honorable
Justice Umaru Agora Isiaku, a judge of the High Court of Niger State nominated
to represent Abuja in the Assembly, who died on 10 October 1988.
Assembled to negotiate the terms of a constitution on the basis
of which the Babangida regime claimed it would hand over power to an elected
government at the end of its transition programme, the Constituent Assembly got
into a very animated debate from October 1998 over the irrelevant issue – as
Nigeria’s current ruling party, the All Progressives Congress, APC, would have
us all believe) – of religion in Nigeria and the role it is to play in civic
and constitutional life. In this debate, there was no quarter given nor taken.
So, on Monday, November 28, 1988, the Assembly received an
unusual assortment of martial guests. They were led by Augustus Aikhomu, a Navy
Admiral, and second in command to the military president. Accompanying him in
full military uniforms were Air Marshall Ibrahim Alfa, Chief of Air Staff;
General Alani Akinrinade, former Chief of Defence Staff; Major-General Paul
Omu, Minister of Defence; Rear Admiral Murtala Nyako, Flag Officer Commanding
Western Naval Command; Air Vice-Marshall Hamza Abdullahi, FCT Minister; Colonel
John Shagaya, Interior Minister; and Mr. Victor Pam, Deputy Inspector-General
of Police. It seemed evident that their mission was serious.
On arrival, Admiral Aikhomu proceeded to read a Riot Act to the
Assembly, declaring, as Justice Aniagolu recalls in his memoirs on the making
of the 1989 Constitution that was never promulgated: “The Federal Government
has decided that this Assembly should stop further debate and discussion on
these clauses.” As the Assembly wound down its work on March 20, 1989, Admiral
Aikhomu wrote a letter (Reference: GS/CGS/235) to Justice Aniagolu as its
Chairman ordering them to “insert into the Constituent Assembly Draft
Constitution all matters and clauses of the Revised CRC Constitution which were
excluded from the jurisdiction of the Constituent Assembly.”
In this way, the military retained ultimate decision-making in
resolving the matter of the place of religion in Nigeria’s life. To address
that, they defaulted essentially to the framework agreed in the 1979
Constitution when, as in 1989, the then military regime had also sent their
second-in-command to order the Constituent Assembly gathered in 1978 to stop
debating the matter before it got out of hand.
Four years after this uneasy settlement, Nigeria’s political
elite reached an equally uneasy truce in order to hurry Ibrahim Babangida from
his ruinous and interminable political transition programme. At the end of the
truce, Moshood Abiola, a Muslim from Ogun State in Southern Nigeria teamed up
with the aforementioned Babagana Kingibe for the ticket of the Social
Democratic Party, SDP, which triumphed in the June 12, 1993 presidential
election before being frustrated from taking over power when Babangida
nullified the result of the election.
The 1999 Constitution, which ultimately transitioned Nigeria to
civil rule six years later, essentially defaulted to the 1989 settlement, which
in turn accepted the 1979 settlement. Many people prefer to say that the
constitutional situation is that “Nigeria is a multi-religious state.”
At both national conferences convened first by President
Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005 and then by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2014,
religion nearly derailed proceedings.
Indeed, at the 2014 National Conference, it was reported that
“religion pitched Nigerians against one another at the national conference with
delegates disagreeing over religion”. The leaders who have led Nigeria until
date have attempted to walk the fine balance that religion evokes in the
country.
Even President Muhammadu Buhari, often accused with some
justification of being narrow on issues of faith, was not unmindful of the
sensitivity of this issue when he declined the importunations of Bola Ahmed
Tinubu, like Buhari a Muslim, to be his running mate in the 2015 presidential
election.
The ruling APC has acted convenient on these issues, however,
rather than principled. In 2019, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai,
in a fit of sectarian hubris, toppled the conventions of faith and ethnic
balancing in the state when he decided to “pick fellow Muslim, Hadiza Balarabe,
as running mate”. The correlation between this decision and the deterioration
in coexistence in the state since then has been spectacular.
In explaining his choice then, El-Rufai claimed his only
consideration was “competence”. In justifying his decision to choose fellow
Muslim, Kashim Shettima, as his running mate for the 2023 presidential contest,
APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, has similarly argued the urgings of
competence with a bit of history, claiming that “the spirit of 1993 is upon
us”.
Like El-Rufai, Tinubu’s position implies spectacularly that
individual competence and religious harmony are somehow mutually exclusive. If
he wins and the country emulates the trajectory of Kaduna State, the country
could become a level killing field.
Tinubu’s cheap appeal to the heady events of 1993 mis-reads
contemporary Nigerian history in support of convenient, dubious and
patronizingnonsense. All this takes place in a country in which citizens have
been immolated without consequences on specious claims of blasphemy and the
Supreme Court has recently ruled that female, Muslim students in public schools
have the right to wear religious covering, none of which would be the case if
religion were such an irrelevance in Nigerian civic life.
The Abiola-Kingibe ticket in 1993 was a product of a peculiar
inflection point in Nigerian history unparalleled since then and unlikely to be
repeated. Since then, if anything, successive rulers, none more so than the
incumbent regime of Muhammadu Buhari, have invested considerable energy in
divisive and toxic politics and policies.
Indeed, as someone has rightly pointed out, ”religious balancing
is one of the first factors in determining competence for a Nigerian
presidential aspirant. He who fails in this is incompetent”.
Let us assume then that Tinubu and Shettima triumph at the 2023
presidential election and proceed to complete two terms.
Power will thereafter be liable to rotate to Northern Nigeria,
which will probably produce a Muslim. At the end of two terms of that person,
following the two terms of Tinubu-Shettima and counting back to the two terms
of Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s presidency would have been occupied by a Muslim
for pretty much a quarter of a century or for 27 out of 32 years going back to
the administration of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Children born at the beginning of
this period may end up with the impression that Nigeria is indeed an Emirate in
which only Muslims are entitled to aspire to the highest office. The point really
is that it is not.
*A
lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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