Written by Obi Nwakanma - Vanguard, Nigeria
At its inauguration as a free nation, Nigeria established itself as a federal democratic republic. The founding fathers of this nation thought hard, and long about the options open to a multi-ethnic society such as Nigeria, and knew that it could not, like the Kingdom of Swaziland, be a constitutional monarchy, run on a unitarist model. In 1960, the federation of Nigeria secured political independence as a free nation under the British Commonwealth.
By 1963, it established by its own act of parliament, its republican charter, and announced itself as a federal republic outside of the British commonwealth of nations. It abolished the office of the Governor-General, which hitherto was her majesty's representative officially, and established the office of the President as the Head of state and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic.
The implication of the Republican constitution seems even now to confound Nigerians, including many who even as lawyers, do not seem to have had really good grounding in both political and legal theory, and constitutional history.
Under the Constitution of the Republic, Nigeria stopped being an appendage of the constitutional monarch of Great Britain. Nigerians stopped being "subjects" of the English monarch, but "citizens" of a free Republic of Nigeria. There is a material difference in status in those definitions. British people theoretically as "subject" people have limited citizenship. They are loyal subjects of her majesty's government, not free citizens of a republic.
In other words, theoretically, the government of Great Britain belongs to the monarch, but is run, especially after the restoration of the Stuart monarchs by Charles II, following the death of Oliver Cromwell who had attempted to establish a republic under what he called the British commonwealth, by a House of the Commoners, also known as the Commons, based on an intriguing power-sharing premise with the monarchy. So in effect, while the monarch left the commoners the happy illusion of running their common affairs, while the monarchy took long vacations, nothing happened in the land without the consent of the monarchy. The position of the Prime Minister in the House of Commons as leader of the business of her Majesty's government was basically as chief representative or spokesman of the common people, and the Queen's chief adviser on matters of the life of the commonwealth.
It is not the Prime Minister that has power, but it is the parliament which he leads, for as long as he has the support of the highest number of the MPs. The monarch was still head of state, and the Parliament served always at her pleasure. There are of constitutional restraints that have subtly limited the extreme power of the monarchy, still, under the British Parliamentary system, the English monarch has regnant powers.
It was this power that was transferred to the President of Nigeria at the inauguration of the Federal Republic, very symbolically on Dr. Azikiwe's birthday on November 16, 1963. The Republican constitution placed power in three institutions: the office of the president, the parliament of the Republic, and the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Executive power was vested in the president, and the Prime Minister became something of his Chief adviser, and leader of government in parliament under the Parliamentary system. I have heard even educated people talk about Zik as a "ceremonial president" - there was no such president. Azikiwe, as president, had invested in him the Executive power of state as provided for by the Republican Constitution of 1963, and Nigerians stopped being "subjects" but "citizens" of a republic. Sadly, all what I have written I realize, is possibly lost to an entire generation of Nigerians who have never been taught the history of their country, of West Africa, or of the World, just to enable them get a bearing of the thrust of the contexts of their existence as people.
A nation is a systematically conditioned space, and lies within the frame of how modern societies, having examined all kinds of social and historical imperatives come to organize for more efficient, more productive and more coherent social orders. Because Nigerians have largely been socially conditioned to regard each other as alien, for instance, the prospects of building a common nation, with an organic value is impossible. Without that kind of common ground, given its diversity, it would be inexorably constrained by forces of hate and extreme difference; it would be impossible to create and sustain a common goal or vision. It was the intention of tyrannical governments in Nigeria to dumb-down the nation in order to exercise control over its population.
Therefore they failed to provide real historical and civic education to the people. An educated and enlightened population is the basis for progress, and for the sustenance of democracy. An ignorant, miseducated population is the devil's workshop. It will create Boko Haram and such other movements whose aims would be to hobble the nation. It will also create tyranny and alienation. It will create an oligarchy of interests that will subvert the basis of individual freedom founded on equal citizenship. Among the oligarchic interests that have been prodded up by the wide ignorance of the population are the monarchies and pseudo-monarchies still in existence in a republican nation like Nigeria.
Let me re-emphasize this: Nigeria is a Federal Republic. It is therefore a profound contradiction that the Nigerian National Assembly has continued to allow, and even preserve, the antiquated institutions that have served mostly to emphasize the disunities that make Nigeria profoundly chaotic. Most Nigerians have no loyalties to the Republic, because their loyalties have been seized by primordial loyalties. They do not inhabit the Nigerian identity fully. If Nigerians are sincere about creating a federal democratic republic, they must as a matter of legal obligation, stop the perpetuation and proliferation of these pseudo-monarchies. We must abolish the kings; the kingdoms and principalities that continue to claim a place in this republic. It is time to abolish the titles of the Obi of Onitsha, Emir of Kano, Ooni of Ife, Eze Nri, Sultan of Sokoto, Oba of Benin, Shehu of Borno, Oba of Lagos, etc, and such claimants to titles because it is antithetical to the meaning of a republic. These offices are unconstitutional under Nigeria's laws.
A central feature of the Republican idea is the principle of the equality of citizenship, and the idea that sovereignty belongs to the people. No other offices or titles must be permitted to impose on the sovereign. Any claims of title above the title of citizenship, other than the titles conferred academically is both a fraud and an aberration under a republican order. In the East of Nigeria, for instance, which had a traditional republican ethos, the emergence of these false and new monarchies have destroyed once stable and progressive communities.
Where communities once elected their town union governments, the creation of new Ezes and Igwes, have alienated most of the people, and established a very antinomic order in the East, so much so in fact, that the development initiatives once championed by democratically elected town union governments have disappeared.
There is a new power cult; a move towards hereditary governance, that is at loggerheads with the real trend in modern societies where individual freedom is linked to the development of modern democratic societies. The irony is that these backward medieval institutions are being supported by elected Assemblies in Nigeria, who have sort of established, at public expense, the equivalent of the Privy Purse to maintain these frauds. But we must follow the example of India, which by 1975, abolished its own, even more powerful Rajs.
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