Introduction
Agitations by individuals and groups, especially from southern Nigeria for a Sovereign National Conference over the years have put pressure on the president to cave in.
On 1st October, 2013, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, in his independence speech, agreed to set up a committee to look at the modalities of organizing a national conference. For many, the conference is the only panacea to the litany of woes plaguing the country. The belief is that there is need for all sections of the country to come to a roundtable to discuss the continued existence of corporate Nigeria.
With over 300 ethnic nationalities and close to a 1, 000 distinct languages and dialects, those who hold that view consider the entity called Nigeria as a fraud. These calls are as diverse as the people making them. Some of the calls are as genuine as those making them, while some are as fraudulent as the people making them.
This paper will be focusing on the implications of the proposed national conference and its implication to stability in Nigeria.
Concept of National Dialogue
National dialogue could be seen as a means to build confidence among national actors and to forge consensus on the key political, economic and social measures in support of the peace building process.
Concept of National stability
National stability can be described as a state in which a country is economically, politically, environmentally and socially stable.
Factors Affecting National Stability
It is generally accepted that in countries where the populace have a high quality of life, the tendency towards national stability in that country is high. Civil and economic unrest is usually seen in societies where living conditions are difficult. Poverty and lack of economic empowerment through gainful employment are some of the factors that unsettle individuals enough to want to create situations that do not provide for the stability of a country.
Certain factors which affect the quality of life can be used as factors which ultimately determine national stability. These factors are used in the calculation of the Quality of Life Score which is used by the UN to determine which countries constitute the best and worst countries to live in.
Factors Determining National Stability
1) Material Well-being: When a populace is empowered enough to satisfy their material needs, there is no motivation to engineer changes in government and in economic policies, events which can potentially unsettle a nation.
2) Job Security: Job security gives an individual confidence to make plans for himself and his family. Where job security is lacking, it could lead to labor unionism, strikes and other activities that will cripple a nation’s economy. Many governments have been brought down this way. Examples of countries where these events occurred are Haiti and Philippines in 1986.
3) Health: Illnesses like HIV/AIDS have revealed that there is a very direct relationship between economic stability and health. In situations where the working class of a country is not healthy, productivity of that country diminishes remarkably.
4) Political Stability: During the restiveness in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria, the country found it hard to meet up to 50% of its OPEC export quota. Once the situation improved, oil exports went up. Cote d’Ivoire is just coming out of a political crisis which saw its cocoa exports drop, causing the international price of cocoa on the commodity trading markets to spike. Internal conflicts lead to economic losses, a situation which further worsens the conflict situation.
5) Gender equality has become a knotty issue for many countries. The repression of women’s rights under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is one reason that government fell. The country is still in turmoil and its state of national stability can best be described as precarious.
It must be also said that in countries with political and economic instability, we tend to see situations where basics are lacking, with resultant hyperinflation and depreciation of the local currencies. Zimbabwe readily comes to mind.
An effort to combine these factors into measurable statistics of national stability has led to the development of many indices such as the Human Development Index, the Physical Quality of Life Index and the Happy Planet Index. Generally speaking, national stability is seen in countries with higher scores in these indices than in countries where the scores of these indices are low.
It must be said that there are many countries for which these indices are yet to be measured. But using these individual factors, one can actually pick out countries which have a low degree of national stability, or are at the brink of national instability.
Implications of national dialogue on national stability
Despite the fact that there is no formal breakup of the country, the nation is already disintegrating due to the refusal of the government to embrace national dialogue (Soyinka, 2012). Soyinka said this while speaking on “The quest for justice, tolerance and non-violent change” at a presentation highlighting Dr Martin Luther King jr and the American civil rights movement, organized by the Public Affairs Section of the US Consulate General in Lagos at the Freedom Park, Lagos. According to him, “the presidential system of government is totally unfitted to the governance of Nigerians. The legislators have become a bastion of corruption while the system operational in the country encourages corruption.” Soyinka, who maintained his stance on Sovereign National Conference as panacea to salvaging Nigeria from total collapse said: “We can even remove the word sovereign; there is need for national dialogue because if we don’t have a national dialogue, we will have monologues.
The primary duty of the Sovereign National Conference is to address and find solutions to the key problems afflicting Nigeria since 1914 to date. The concern is to remove all obstacles which have prevented the country from establishing political justice, economic justice, social justice, cultural justice, religious justice and to construct a new constitutional frame-work in terms of the system of government-structurally, politically economically, socially, culturally and religiously.
The beauty of a national dialogue lies in the fact that it will afford aggrieved Nigerians the elusive opportunity to ventilate their frustration, and brainstorm on the way forward for our dear fatherland. But the question is: Is the government sincere with the national dialogue? This is the worry of every reasonable Nigerian. Their fear is hinged on the premise that government has never shown faith with people in past deals (Punch newspaper, 2013).
However, while many have agitated for a national dialogue, many others share different opinions on the issue of the national dialogue.
Chairman of the Northern States Governor’s Forum and governor, Niger State, Dr Muazu Babangida Aliyu has stated that the Northern part of the country was not opposed to the convocation of a national conference but said the North was against the setting up of a sovereign national conference.
Speaking against the backdrop of renewed calls for the convocation of a sovereign national conference by some Nigerians, Governor Aliyu said such a demand would entail all elected politicians to vacate their positions and surrendering them to a committee that would be in charge of the sovereign national conference. (Punch Newspaper, 2014)
Governor Aliyu declared that, “those calling for sovereign national conference must understand its implication. You cannot have two sovereignty in one place”.
“If anybody says he is going to organize a sovereign national conference, all of us in government must resign our jobs and then transfer the sovereignty of the country to the committee that is going to discuss the sovereignty of the country”.
He continued that, “I will love a national conference that will look at our constitution and really give us justice, equity and fairness in our body politics and in our national life”.
Governor Aliyu insisted that the North is not afraid of the convocation of a national conference because it believes that it would move the country forward.
“Many people are trying to make it look like the Northern States are afraid of conference, we are not, let us come and talk, let us come and look at our problems if it means restructuring the country let us come and do it but we must not be hoodwinked”.
“If people want to secede let them secede and then we see under which constitution they are seceding, let us not be intimated, we cannot be intimated because intimidation will not give us good policies, intimidation will not give us good nation, intimidation will not give us any progress”.
The Sovereign National Conference will give ethnic nationalities an opportunity to examine the questions that have made Nigeria such a disaster and come up with some answers such as the right of every nationality to have greater control over their resources.
Conclusion
The quest for national dialogue has been seen as a panacea for national stability. The deep divisions, controversies and stalemate that emerge from the National Political Reforms Conference are reflections of the divided character of the Nigerian State. The potency of the conference to address and redress the divisive national issues is very weak considering the extreme and irreconcilable positions assumed on issues of resource control, derivation and rotational presidency, among others. The conference, more than anything else, has exacerbated primordial and sub-national loyalty, which has since independence denied the nation of the needed over-arching sense of loyalty and nationalism.
Reference
Punch Newspaper, (2013). A call for genuine sovereign conference. Written by: Gani Oge.
Fassassi, M.A. (2005). ‘The Essence of Sovereignty’. The Sun, Ibadan, African newspaper of Nigeria Plc.
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