Out of the squalor, a new consciousness
Dr Stanley Macebuh
 

It is amazing how, all so suddenly, virtually every Nigerian has become a friend of, if not an expert in unravelling the complexities of the Constitution. Practically every aspect of our lives is now thought to be guided by it. The Minister of the FCT is threatened with litigation because he is thought to have infringed on the citizen’s freedom by erecting ugly bumpers on the city’s roads, an arrogant breach of the constitution. The Secretary to the Government of the Federation is accused of improper and unconstitutional conduct. His offence? He used public funds to commission a legal opinion from Professor Ben Nwabueze on the constitutional implications of the President’s prolonged absence, and the professor ends up with a verdict that is not all favourable to president’s cause.
Up until quite recently, the constitution was an arcane document that only lawyers and lawmakers were supposed to have the exclusive prerogative of discussing. Ordinary folk were not obliged to know what an impeachable offence was, or what ‘gross misconduct’ meant. But all that has suddenly changed. Now, every school child knows that if you are a president, you cannot run the country from Dubai, and that we may blissfully accept a short broadcast addressed to a global audience as constitutionally acceptable evidence of a written declaration, by the president to the National Assembly, that he is not feeling well, and should be excused from duty.

All of which goes to show that progress and development are not exclusively about how much megawattage PHCN distributes, or how many miles of motorable roads we have, or how many people are gainfully employed, or how many children are in school. Progress and development can also be measured, sometimes, by the extent to which a people acquire the attribute of discernment from lived experience, and develop fairly sophisticated responses to unanticipated social challenges.
The general, national response to the ‘succession crisis’ that bedevilled us between last November and a few days ago is a case in point. Our national culture, we all know, virtually prides itself in its addiction to perpetual serenades of our collective failures and the imminent collapse of our ‘house’. We are not exactly notorious for exaggerating or even admitting our own strengths and modest successes. If we were, we should be congratulating ourselves for the common sense behind the hardly ‘constitutional’ solution we ultimately discovered for what at first seemed impossible of resolution.

From the start, it was clear that our constitution, whether from the incompetence of legal drafting or the wisdom of its framers, was unlikely to point the way to a quick and efficient resolution of the crisis. Besides, nothing in our previous experience as a nation had prepared us for negotiating such unfamiliar territory. We were compelled, in the end, to fall back on residual communal wisdom, a specie of problem-solving that transcended the constraints of law and legalism, and relied more on a collective sense of natural order. That preference demanded that we emphasised desired ends, at the expense of means and procedure. It may have been untidy, but it responded to a deep national commitment to justice. And it appears to have worked.

It is permissible to draw a few tentative conclusions from this event. First, it appears that the precondition for the coming to play of our national sense of justice is that a crisis must be such that demands the highest form of national engagement. It must transcend partisan disputation, and it must pose a tangible threat to the nation as a whole. In the matter of the succession crisis, virtually every segment of Nigerian society was sufficiently moved to take a position. The judiciary, the national legislature, the media, civil society organisations, the organised and not so organised private sector, religious groups, students’ organisations, political parties. It was through some imaginative distillation of the views and attitudes of all these sections of the national society that we finally came to this uncomplicated decision: that the president may not have written any letter to the National Assembly, but existing circumstances justified its resolution declaring the vice president Acting President.

It seems to me that the same process was active in the initially tortuous debates that preceded the ultimately simple but majestic decision to go for the option of amnesty as a way of resolving our national dilemma in the Niger Delta. It had first to become indisputably clear that neither the stubborn militancy of the insurgents nor the government’s military response was ever likely to resolve the conflict in a satisfactory way. This clarity was in turn possible only after the conflict began to be seen as a national challenge rather than an isolated confrontation between insurgents in the creeks and the federal government in Abuja.

Again, the recent governorship election in Anambra State was far more successful than previous ones quite simply, in my opinion, because it became an issue in which practically every sector of the national community chose to become actively engaged. It was not, like before, judged to be a contest merely between an overbearing political party and a lonely state. The national sensibility was aroused, because it promised to be a test case that could determine the outcome of the general elections of next year. And again, as in the succession crisis, a recourse to sensitive expansion of the limits of legalism saved the day. Since the voters’ lists were so unreliable, the authorities sensibly decided that anyone with a valid voter’s card was free to vote. That singular decision was ennobling, and conferred on the exercise a convincing air of fairness.

There are many more examples of this recourse to a framework that transcends the mere letter of the law, and seeks instead to resolve our national dilemmas through national engagement and a strong commitment to natural, rather than legal justice. It is for me some tentative indication that in the midst of the squalor of our material existence, something far deeper and ultimately more enduring in our national life is happening.
•Macebuh’s last article published in ThisDay on February 14, 2010.