By John Amoda
WITHIN this past week, Femi Fanikayode, Chief Tola Adeniyi and NADECO have all proposed the urgent convening of a National Conference as the platform for re-negotiating the terms of association and union of Nigeria. Adeniyi in the Vanguard of Tuesday, January 31, 2012 demands such a meeting.

“We must have a confederation, we must have a nation and that is why we have to talk, we must have a national conference, people must come together to talk, we cannot run away from it”.

Pini Jason in his piece titled “A nation that constrains itself” in the same issue of the Vanguard is in full agreement with Adeniyi. He states his reason why such a conference is urgent and necessary. “We need to address why This Nation Is Not At Ease.

“We need to find out what Nigerians really want, when they want it (their priority) and how they want it. The only way to find out is unfortunately the path those at the helm of our affairs have decided to avoid. Call Nigerians together and find out what their preferences are and how to address them”.NADECO proposes the modality of how such a conference is to be convoked.

“We warned during the anniversary marking one year remembrance of our leader, Chief Anthony Enahoro, that action was needed to avoid evident disintegration of Nigeria; the group stated that plans had been concluded to convene the SNC within the first half of 2012, noting that it would intensify its position and that of other ethnic nationalities.

The process to convoke the SNC is on now and in coming days, NADECO will be inviting various Ethnic Nationalities to a colloquium where issues and processes will be outlined and reviewed because we believe that the issues at stake transcends amendments or empanelment of Presidential Committee to collate past reports and ratify them. Kanu said”.

NADECO offers to host and coordinate the convening of a Sovereign National Conference of Ethnic Nationalities. In its offer NADECO brings to the fore the two thorny problems that can make or break the SNC as it is presently conceived. The first problem is that of the formation of consensus on who hosts the SNC? The second problem is ensuring the relevance and representativeness of the Conference delegates.

Without solving these two problems, the issue of self-serving partisanship in the convocation of SNC will not have been addressed. Those who call for SNC forget that there can be as many SNCs as there are self-appointed hosts. The issue of the host is at the heart of the problem of defining the “sovereigness” of the Sovereign National Conference.

Thus, the question is not the feasibility of the convocation of national conferences on the present crises of Nigeria. National Conference by this administration and other bodies can be convoked without their decisions being adjudged to be sovereignly binding on some of the participants because it is not deemed by dissenters the expression of the Sovereign Will of Nigerians.

Rousseau helps us to make this point in his Social Contract. He distinguishes between the General Will and the Will of All. The second is the harmonization of particularistic wills. The first is the Sovereign Will being the will of the Sovereign. The second does not transcends the particularisms of the wills of all and any harmonization of these individual wills is always subject to veto of contrary wills that has a will.

Particularistic and therefore private wills must first reach an agreement to decide and confer Unification Authority to a General Sovereign. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan addresses how such General Sovereign is instituted by particularistic sovereigns whose particularism denies to rival sovereign a superiority of power, authority or legitimacy.

It is this hosting issue that makes it ab initio unacceptable to governments to convene a conference that immediately reduces them to only a participant in the conference. Decisions of conferences that this administration will regard as advisory and not as sovereign or national consensus are not what Pini Jason or NADECO are prescribing as the process for reaching agreements on terms of continued associations of “ethnic nationalities” in a Nigerian nationality.

Femi Fani-Kayode answers the question why the decision of a National Conference must be sovereign for it must put on the table the option for any group that wants to opt out of the Nigerian Union. The advocates of SNC insist that the union that makes Nigeria one must be voluntary not the result of coercion. We quote Femi:

“The right to self-determination and to forcefully resist what many feel is an internal colonial system is a legitimate and inalienable right of all free men and women. You cannot hold me down and keep me in your house on your own terms and deny me the right to be free or to say or do as I please.

If you do not treat me fairly and if you continue to make me feel worthless and full of fear of your terror and ability to inflict violence on me and mine, then eventually whether you like it or not, I will leave. No one signed their life or their future away to bondage and none of us subscribed to the view that decisions about our country and our future can and have been made by our past leaders and heroes and that they can no longer be changed or altered.

I say that they can if the circumstances determines that they must be so” (Sunday Vanguard, February 5, 2012).

That such decisions should be reached through peaceful negotiations is the raison d’etere of the advocacy for the convening of a Sovereign National Conference.

The terms of continued association must be negotiated and if negotiations are hindered by government then those who want to leave will leave without asking for permission so to do. This is the stance of those calling for SNC. This is why the question of who hosts such a conference cannot be side-stepped.

Sovereign national conferences are state matters that assume the present constitution and the system of government it authorises are prima facie in need of renegotiation because some statemaking constituents whose consent is needed for the entity of Nigeria to continue as presently instituted demand that Nigeria be restructured to elicit their support for its continuance. If this is anyway close to the truth concerning the present crises of Nigeria, then no statemaking interest group will be indifferent to the issue of who hosts such a conference. Reaching an accord on this question of who hosts the Conference, National or Sovereign requires preliminary conferences to determine the sovereignty of the participants in this diplomatic planning conference on who will and can host such a conference and government no matter how embattled cannot be indifferent to the process which must make it a subject and issue in the agenda of the conference. The hosting issue ineluctably entails the clarification of who the stakeholders are. In this essay they have been described as ethnic nationalities by those calling for SNC. We in turn have referred to them as statemaking interest groups. These definitional issues are important because they address the question who can participate in deciding the future existence of Nigeria. The fact that there is unrest and disquiet concerning the security of our society does not automatically anoint some as the legitimate resolvers of the crisis. We must know that this is so. We address the issue of the stakeholders of the SNC in the next Tuesday Column.