The Menacing Cracks in Nationhood We See Today Are Caused by the Insistence on Building Nigeria on a Wrong Contrived Foundation – says LNC’s Tony Nnadi

Open the  embedded video link above to watch the Channels TV live interview on YouTube

Mr. Tony Nnadi, the Secretary-General of the Lower Niger Congress (LNC), was a guest of Lagos-based Channels TV’s special 60th Independence Anniversary program series titled “Nigeria @60: Getting I Right”. The object of this program series is to ascertain the country’s performance thus far toward the attainment of the so-called “Nigerian Dream”. The LNC scribe, who is a legal practitioner with specialization in the field of jurisprudence, painstakingly reviewed the evolutionary history of poet-Independence Nigeria with the aim of accomplishing two goals. First is to restate the fundamental understanding that informed the establishment of post-colonial Nigeria as a multiregional federation by the founding fathers. The second issue is to identify the arbitrary abrogation of the regional federalism by the military, after the military intervention of January 1966, as the very juncture that Nigeria lost its way and instead chose to tread on the path to perdition that has brought the citizenry where they find themselves today.

From the preceding, the legal luminary eloquently argued that the success experienced by Nigeria in the immediate post-Independence era was made possible because of the strict observance of the original foundational constitution that entrenched regional federalism during the First Republic. General Gowon’s decree of May 27, 1967, which abolished Nigeria’s four semi-autonomous regions and replaced them with twelve new states, marked the historical point of departure from normalcy from which the country has never recovered to date. The only geopolitical delimitation carried out by self-ruled Nigeria was creating the Midwest Region out of the old Western Region. This was done through a plebiscite during which the majority opted for the fourth region, the Midwest Region. Within only months after a bloody takeover, the military jackboots that usurped political power succeeded in destroying the prospering regional governments and have embarked on the mission of playing God by creating client states and fiefdoms just for the asking.

The processes utilized by the military to derive the 1979 Constitution and the imposed fraudulent 1999 Constitution that replaced it remains dubious and thus inconsistent with the standard procedure for constitution making. Those who controlled the government erroneously arrogated to themselves the powers to make the constitution for unifying the geopolitical entity called Nigeria. This sovereign right resides solely with the indigenous ethnic nationalities on whose ancestral lands the country in question is based. Mr. Nnadi clarified how General Obasanjo singlehandedly tinkered with the 1979 Constitution draft by redacting all the provisions designed into it to assure a return to regional federalism. In 1999, the General Abdulsalami Abubakar ruling junta pretended to be reverting to an updated version of the 1979 Constitution based on popular demand nationwide. What happened, however, was the imposition of Decree No 24 of 1999, which was later baptized to answer the 1999 Constitution after President Obasanjo was already sworn into office to lead the Fourth republic.

Mr. Nnadi cursorily mentioned the deliberate errors of the imposed fraudulent 1999 Constitution, which included the 68-item Federal exclusive Legislative list and the so-called Land Use Act that forcible seizes the ancestral lands of stakeholders without due process. Because of the untiring efforts of the PRONACO, Movement for New Nigeria (MNN) and Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-determination (NINAS) in the past two decades, a majority of Nigerian stakeholders have since denounced and rejected the 1999 Constitution as an imposition that must be scrapped and replaced by a renegotiated agreement that guarantees regional autonomy and the return of all ancestral lands to their rightful heirs. 

It was made evident in this video that the task of constitution making is not one of the chores of the National Assembly. Only a constituent body established for that purpose, as representatives of “We, the people…” have the sovereign mandate to deliberate and produce a valid constitution. Mr. Nnadi warned that any meddling of the National Assembly into matters relating to the making of a constitution for Nigeria’s stakeholders must be seen as a treasonable act punishable under the law.

The LNC scribe revealed to his TV hosts that the MNN/NINAS alliance partners in the Lower Niger, Yorubaland and the Middle Belt are poised to initiate a Constitutional Force Majeure (CFM) to proclaim the gross unworkability of the imposed fraudulent 1999 Constitution which many now blame for all the woes of Unitary Nigeria. It is this flawed document that enables the perpetuation of the Buhari administration’s Islamization and Fulanization agenda, among other issues. The CFM, which was initially scheduled for the first quarter of 2020, was shifted to a later timeline because of the unanticipated intervention of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Today’s Unitary Nigeria, which is propped up by the widely repudiated imposed fraudulent 1999 Constitution has finally reached the point of implosion because the center can no longer hold. The impending cataclysm can be better managed by an orderly transitioning from the present into a future demanded by “we the people…” who own the geopolitical space called Nigeria.

The LNC/NINAS message to stakeholders at Nigeria’s 60th Birthday of October 1, 2020 is for everyone to be on the lookout for the imminent Constitutional Force Majeure to unshackle the citizenry from the crippling bondage imposed by the fraudulent 1999 Constitution to benefit on a minority.