ONE of Nigeria’s obvious national hobbies is the routine tinkering with the constitution. Whether under military or civilian regimes, the impulse to convene conferences towards the promulgation of new constitutions or the routine amendments of existing ones is always with us, but we still end up with the same unsatisfactory constitutional document.

The Ninth Senate has again started the process of altering the 1999 constitution. The sum of one billion naira has already been dedicated to the effort.

In its call for memoranda, the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution listed 13 focal areas including: State Creation, Federal Structure and Power Devolution, Fiscal Federalism, Police and Security Architecture, Electoral Reforms, Indigeneship/Residency, Immunity and others.

The Northern Elders Forum, NEF, in a rather radical departure, described these routine constitution reviews by successive regimes as “wasteful”.

The NEF prefers a national talk shop by prominent representatives of Nigeria’s great geopolitical, ethno-religious and professional divides which will produce a constitutional recommendation based on which the Federal Government and National Assembly will jointly organise a referendum to enable Nigerians to decide their governance system. This is a call for a fresh national charter rather than these routine cosmetic alterations.

The NEF’s call appears very close to the demands that Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum, SMBLF, leaders have been clamouring for under the calls for restructuring.

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With the mindsets of the North and South seeming to converge on the need for a new constitutional order, we believe that the time is ripe to shove aside the 1999 Constitution which is Decree No. 24 of 1999. This constitution has often been described as “a lie” in that a military decree is purported in the Preamble as a document “we” made, enacted and gave to “ourselves”.

And as typical of the draconian nature of most military decrees, the 1999 centralised federal constitution makes it almost impossible to amend or alter some of its fundamental provisions because of the lopsided way the colonial rulers and their military successors modelled the political architecture of Nigeria.

Because of this, many Nigerian groups feel trapped in an unfair, inequitable, unworkable, unimprovable, unproductive, hate-stirring, violent, draconian and oppressive system. There is a massive yearning for freedom, both within and out of Nigeria because our constitutional order has no credible answers to our needs.

How many times have we tried to tinker with the legislative lists, actualise state creation, devolve power and reform the indigeneship/residency issue without success? Yet without these reforms we are headed nowhere.

We must summon the courage and allow the Nigerian people to decide the type of system that can carry Nigeria into the unfolding Artificial Intelligence, AI, world order. Indeed, the routine constitution alterations are wasteful and of little use.

VANGUARD