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By Uchenna Nwankwo
In the past week or so, Nigerian citizens have surprisingly been threatened and warned by the DSS to refrain from discussing, planning or hoping for Interim Government in Nigeria following the messy elections of the year. Suggestion(s) for interim government is being made to look like some kind of mutiny, treason, coup plot or anti-state activity that cannot be tolerated in Nigeria because, it is said, interim government is not in the Nigerian Constitution! How farfetched, dogmatic and opinionated!! Indeed, it is being broadcast that interim government is anti-Nigerian Constitution and cannot be allowed in Nigeria!!!
The first thing to note about the above is that the mere fact that interim government is not mentioned or discussed in the Nigerian Constitution does not mean that it is anti-Nigeria or its Constitution and cannot therefore be tolerated or applied to solving problems that arise within the country. No national constitution can contain or address every subject or possible situations that can arise within a polity. Whenever new situations and circumstance rear their ugly heads within a polity, it behoove the citizens to seek solutions to the emergent problems working in conjunction with their elected representatives in their national and state Assemblies. Through that synergy, the Legislature may make new laws to deal with the new situation. Such new laws may amount to the formation of an interim government. In other words, it is expected that the doctrine of necessity will be applied to create new laws to tackle new situations that were not envisaged at the time the Constitution was made. Indeed, that is why the legislature is there! Nigeria is presently saddled with the problem of deciding who takes over the reins of power from the outgoing Buhari administration. That is why the elections of February 25, 2023 came about. The elections were conducted more than three months to the expiration of the tenure of the current government so that anticipated legal issues pertaining to the elections can be disposed of by the courts before May 29, 2023 when the tenure of the current government ends. This therefore presupposes that Nigerians do not want anybody installed president before vitiating legal issues of the presidential election remain unresolved. As things are now, it is expected that all such matters must be rested within the next two months in order to make the inauguration of a new president possible on May 29, 2023.
The office of the president of Nigeria is not like any other political office in the country. The president holds the utmost power in the federation. It is therefore dangerous and risky to swear somebody in as president and have some other person or persons continue to challenge his accession in court; wrangling over whether he should step down or not. The last time Atiku Abubakar challenged Buhari’s continuation in office as president of Nigeria, he was so rightfully afraid that he had to go on ‘self-exile’ and leave the day to day management of his court campaign to his then vice-presidential candidate, Peter Obi. Indeed, it is only tidy that all legal matters pertaining to the accession to the presidency are disposed of before anybody is sworn in as president!
But what if the Supreme Court cancels the 25th February 2023 presidential election when we cannot afford to immediately organize another presidential election before the terminal date of the Buhari presidency or when it will be unwise and unhealthy to even do so? I mean, the dust and smoke of the last electoral battles are yet to clear! How shall we react to such verdict from the courts? No doubt, under the circumstance an interim government suggests itself! And it will come handy!! It will enable us address a number of pressing matters that dog the Nigerian state and indeed have fuelled the level of political instability in the country as well as our high degree of failures as a people in social and economic terms. Let me highlight just one of these problems: The untidy Nigerian Electoral System. In the much-vaunted American Presidential System of Government, one man, the president, is saddled with the power to appoint a country’s head of the electoral commission. This is part of what Nigeria, an un-rooted democracy, has inherited by adopting the American Presidential System in place of the British Parliamentary System of Government. In this regard, the Nigerian president is both a player and the ‘referee’ in the ‘nation’s’ electoral contests, given what Nigerians are! The system has of course made electoral heist such a common denominator in Nigerian politics. And these rampant electoral frauds bring untold misery, resentment, bloodletting and political instability to Nigeria!
The above system should be contrasted with the Parliamentary System of Government even if in this narrow electoral respect. In the parliamentary system, executive power is shared between the President/Head of State and the Prime-Minister (PM) or head of government. While such ‘regulatory’ aspects of government – the Electoral Commission, Census Board, Federal Audit, etc. are placed under the President/Head of State, who is normally a constitutional monarch and not a politician, the Prime-Minister, who is a partisan politician, takes charge of the other aspects of executive functions and governance. Thus, in the parliamentary system, the Head of State/President, who is insulated from politics, appoints the head and commissioners of the electoral commission and sees to it that elections are fairly conducted and transparently so, while the Prime-Minister, the partisan head of government is safely kept out of that department.
In the above regard, the parliamentary system has a very good chance of guarantying the much-needed transparency in Nigeria’s electoral processes and hence safeguard us from much quarrels, bad-blood and political instability, in comparison to the American presidential system, which is currently in vogue in Nigeria. Of course you must be wondering why we didn’t fare any better in the First Republic…! The remote causes of the collapse of the Nigerian First Republic are the acrimony and bad blood that resulted from the disputed 1962/3 census, the rigged 1964 national elections and the fraudulent 1965 Western Regional elections. The latter produced the mayhem known as “Operation Wetie” in Western Nigeria, which was one of the main factors that attracted the military coup of January 15, 1966. So, the Nigerian First Republic was also a victim of electoral fraud! But that is because our parliamentary system of government of the time was itself a fraud!! Our system of government then was only parliamentary in name!!! In actuality, it involved the same concentration of power in one person as dictated in the presidential system of government. Prime-Minister Balewa was fraudulently given powers over the Electoral Commission, the Census Board, etc., while Azikiwe, the President/Head of State had no power in the affairs of government. They called him a “Ceremonial President”. Matters got worse with the coming of the 1963 Republican Constitution where the president lost every power he had over his Prime-Minister. It was thus little wonder the degeneration that came with the 1964 national elections and the 1965 Western Regional elections which produced the crisis that brought the Nigeria-Biafra war. We are at it again!
I said this before the elections of February/March 2023: that we can save ourselves from another civil war by having and using an interim government to make needful changes that will help us in the governance of this country. To start with, we should adopt the Parliamentary System of Government!
I suggested that a six-man Presidential Council – one man from each zone – should run the Interim Government. The six-man body should elect one of its members the chairman of the council. The chairman is to bear the title ‘Head of Interim Government of Nigeria’. Now let me squeeze in a few more details: The six members of the Presidential Council shall all be traditional rulers (who are of course insulated from partisan politics) and should each be nominated by the traditional rulers in each zone. And when eventually we transit to the Parliamentary System of Government, we must have a six-man Presidential Council made up of traditional rulers to play the role of President/Head of State, while the politicians would produce the members of parliament and of course the PM. We must create this constitutional role for our traditional rulers now. It should help stabilize our polity!
