By Ochereome Nnanna
Left to me, this conference call by President Goodluck Jonathan will be transformed to a great opportunity for the nation.

It would be an opportunity to right the foundational wrongs that have worked against Nigeria as a viable, progressive nation. We would seize the opportunity to make amends and turn a new leaf for the benefit of ourselves and future generations.

In the first part of this essay, I tried to debunk the tribal fundamentalism that drives our political behaviour, same which benefited a few of our founding politicians for only a brief moment and then started working against us all. I posited that tribalism is an otiose and overpriced political template which is no longer suitable for the globalised contemporary times where borders and barriers are beginning to give way to new realities both within and across countries.

It has long been acknowledged that a conference of “ethnic nationalities” will simply not work. It will turn into a tyranny of the Minorities, while the three major ethnic groups – Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba – which make up roughly 55 per cent of our population will have virtually no voice.

Besides, are you going to group Igbo-speaking peoples of Rivers and Delta states as separate tribes, more so as some of them profess separate identities? What, really, is the significance of putting tribe (or religion) in front?

We should also discountenance the suggestion put forward by Governor Muazu Babangida Aliyu of Nigeria State, asking for representation based on local government areas. According to him, the 774 LGAs should send delegates and by the time all the people he suggested are counted they will total 910 delegates!

How preposterous! Most of them will merely be benchwarmers, as there will not be enough time for each of them to speak for their people.

Besides, the local government areas as presently constituted, will not promote equitable representation. The North will dominate the conference with the superior number of delegates, and the Igbo will have the least number. That is not acceptable. It will extend the existing problems, rather than solve them. The conference will gulp unwholesome amounts of money without any guarantee of success.

We should go to the conference determined that in the new dispensation we will put things that divide us aside and lead with things that unite us. That is the way forward. If we continue to lionise the value of ethnicity in our body politic, it will not take long before dialectal groups among the Igbo (Ngwa, Wawa, Owerri, Bende) and in Yoruba (Ijebu, Ekiti, Ibadan, Awori) will, like the Igbo speaking groups in Rivers and Delta, start claiming separate ethnic nationality identities just to get more out of Nigeria. The situation will be getting worse, not better.

How do we emphasise things that bind us? How do we select the delegates to the conference? The answer is simple.

Representation should be based on the six geopolitical zones. These are the most appropriate groupings of Nigerians based on the cherished principles of contiguity and consanguinity. The geopolitical zones contain roughly people of common linguistic and geo-cultural affinities shorn of the dominance of the Majorities over the Minorities that the defunct three Regions (North, East and West) had.

I call them the zones of equity. If there is representation based on equality of the geopolitical zones, we might decide to have a conference of 60 delegates made up of 10 delegates per zone. The number could go to 80 when special delegates representing the professions, unions, women, youth, disabled, and the National Assembly are added. Yes, the National Assembly should send delegates to the conference, whose final document should be legitimised through a national referendum after a Constituent Assembly transforms its resolutions into a new constitution. We are talking about a new beginning, the sort that took place in Kenya only recently.

Delegates will not represent the tribes in the geopolitical zones. They will be people of integrity which people in the respective zones can vouch for based on their track records. Regional groups such as Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo, South-South Peoples Assembly, SSPA, Oodua Peoples Congress, OPC and Afenifere, Middle Belt Congress and the Arewa Consultative Forum, ACF, can coordinate the emergence of delegates from the respective zones. They will be nominated and chosen through election or acclamation by electoral colleges of delegates from the various corners of the respective geopolitical zones.

The delegates thus selected will not go to the conference to beat ethnic drums. Rather, they will go there to promote interests that bind the peoples of the respective zones together. There will be a very high tendency for the conference to reach agreement on issues that will promote nation building, peaceful co-existence, rapid development and broader group aspirations, rather than pursue the dominance of one ethnic group over the other, advantages of one religious group over the other, and the extension of the advantages of some zones while the others are marginalised.

If the President is serious about using this conference to contribute positively to the political and economic development of Nigeria, it is very possible and Nigerians, including even the opposition parties that are keeping their distance from it, will be glad to partner with him. But if he is merely going to play to the gallery just like former President Olusegun Obasanjo did in 2005/2006, it will be unfortunate. The decision that the National Assembly would work on the outcome is a greater moral damper. But it is not too late to make amends.