No to tribal delegates! (2)

No to tribal delegates! (2)
on october 31, 2013 at 5:02 pm in people & politics
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.