Posted by By ANSELM OKOLO, Abuja on
President Olusegun Obasanjo and Justice Niki Tobi may be praising each other for a job well done on the National Conference on Political Reforms, but President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Adams Oshiomhole, himself a delegate at the conference, has carpeted the parley, as a monumental waste of money and time and dismissed the report submitted as a fraud.
President Olusegun Obasanjo and Justice Niki Tobi may be praising each other for a job well done on the National Conference on Political Reforms, but President of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Adams Oshiomhole, himself a delegate at the conference, has carpeted the parley, as a monumental waste of money and time and dismissed the report submitted as a fraud.
He said the report could not have been the authentic report of the conference because delegates did not sit in a plenary to vet what was submitted. "It is not for the leadership to do an editorial and say this is the report. If they do that it will be fraud."
Oshiomhole said the leadership of the conference did not subject the final document to the scrutiny of delegates, "because they know they would not be able to get majority signatures for the report, because some of the decisions were manipulated".
Oshiomhole, in this interview accused the chairman of the conference Justice Niki Tobi of "naivety" and mismanaging it into a failure.
"It was a failure because what was being tested out was, can Nigerians use dialogue to resolve their differences amicably without undue tension, can we manage it, the conference failed to manage dissent, for that is the basis for this failure".
He said the procedure adopted in arriving at most of the purported decisions of the conference was undemocratic and "sheer madness" and urged President Obasanjo to dismiss the so called report.
"He needs to first convince himself that what is being submitted is indeed a true reflection of what was agreed, and the only way to do that is to look at the signature page".
"Delegates should come back in a plenary and vet page by page the final report and sign it as a reflection of what was agreed before government should begin the process of its implementation" he said.
The world, according to the NLC President, is increasingly talking about transparency and accountability, arguing that it is not enough to do the right thing, but should be done transparently.
"The normal thing is that even minutes of meetings are not taken as authentic until it has been read and members present move for its adoption. I think it will be a tragedy if the chairman goes ahead to submit the report without subjecting the report to delegates vetting" he said.
Following the failure in managing the conference to a success, he said the nation and Nigerians are now more divided than they were, before the commencement of the conference.
In the beginning.
Before the conference started he said there were assumptions and expectations, and hope that the country would use the opportunity to manage its minority problems.
"In the beginning, delegates went into the conference with a lot of enthusiasm, they demonstrated a lot of determination and patriotism, they did not think the conference was not going to fail, in the end did you hear anybody talk of consensus, when one side walked away, you can't say you achieved consensus.
Repeatedly accusing the chairman of throwing away the opportunity of the conference, he said in the future serving judges should be excused from the responsibility of leading such a gathering.
"When you use a sitting judge, depending on his person he may decide to allow some future consideration of opportunity to influence his decision. Using a serving judge for this role at the conference was a mistake, like we saw the Delta house becoming uneasy concerning the suitability of Justice Tobi to review the case concerning their governor, this is the kind of thing you get," he said.
Why it failed
Asked to say why the conference failed, he said it did because Justice Tobi misunderstood the essence and went about biting more than he could chew.
"My basic evaluation of this process is that the conference leadership mismanaged the process, what was supposed to be a political reform process, was turned into an all purpose conference to discuss all issues under the sun".
He said the President had in his wisdom identified issues that needed re-examination by way of terms of reference, unfortunately he said when the conference convened, the leadership decided on its own, that whereas eight items were on the President's letter, it identified additional 40 issues. And that was the beginning of the drift.
"So we ended up with 40 committees. Now many of us when we were called to the business committee, pointed it to the chairman that having 40 point agenda was too ambitious, but he was confused in my opinion that the other issues were also important, but that was not the issue.
"I remember that the chairman of Ohaneze, Bola Ajibola and several other eminent persons said they thought the comrade was right, that the chairman was getting too ambitious."
While conceding that all the other issues may be important in their own merit, time constraint demanded a more prioritized approach. "So if you bring all these other issues concerning the environment, police, armed forces, foreign policy you name it, you lose focus, the dangers we were going to face was that as we spent time on all the issues, we will not have enough time to seriously flog and interrogate the critical issues that affect the structure of the Nigerian polity". He said that was what happened.
"But the chairman was not persuaded by this argument, all he did was to regroup these 40 issues and repackage them into 20, but none of them was removed, so we ended up with 20 committees".
This he said threw up the problem of membership in the committees, "because in a conference where you have 400 persons, you will have a committee of 20 members, meaning having twenty people take a decision on behalf of 380 others. The implication is that the recommendation of 20 persons may coincide or not with the expectations of 380 persons".
According to Oshiomhole, this reality had untold negative impact on the work of the conference as the larger house then wanted to treat each committee's recommendation very exhaustively in plenary, simply because many people did not have a say in how they were arrived at.
"Unfortunately, the chairman once he had rushed into a conclusion was very reluctant to sit in an appeal, as the judges say over his judgement, and so you that you accepted it or not did not matter, that was how we were always limping along, I say limping because people were always grumbling".
Mistake and plenary
The huge mistake of the chairman, the NLC president said became most manifest during the plenary to consider the report of the committees.
"And so when we got to the plenary, we were now faced with the reality that we did not have enough time to debate the issues, he then decided that we should spend five minutes to comment on twenty-one reports covering over 150 recommendations.
For lack of time, Oshiomhole said Justice Tobi asked delegates to only comment on items they did not agree with in the reports, noting that the impression was that there are things you could not talk on because of time and so you agree with.
"So, if you have over 100 items you do not agree with, and because of time you could only speak on three or five, it means that all the other issues you could not speak on you agree with. That was sheer madness" he said.
At that point he said, "it was clear to me that we were not going to have a well thought out document.
And people started raising the issue of hidden agenda, maybe the leadership want the conference to go a particular direction especially when you remember that membership of the committees were unilaterally determined by them".
But he refused to agree that the conference may have been planned to fail by those who convened it.
"No, it was not, but I can say that it is clear that the government did not do enough home work before the conference started. I understand that part of the problem was that government did not also have all the time in the world, to plan and execute the recommendations from the conference.
"So I can appreciate the reason for the apparent rush. But that is not enough for its failure, because if we had taken say 12 or 13 items we would have managed the whole thing better"
Aside from the problem of time, there was that of the style of the chairman in arriving at decisions or recommendations.
"Like on the issue of resource control, the chairman decides in his own wisdom to set what was called the committee of elders, and in the end believed that consensus had been reached"
That Oshiomhole said, left many questions unanswered. 'Whose elders? Is this thing about the age of the delegates? Are we determining about the future or the past. The future belongs to the youths, the elders are a fading generation but he later admitted that he was misled, but even at that, who told him that the elders had the mandate to speak for everyone."
Statesmanship and ethnic leaders.
Rather than play the role of statesmen expected of them, he said the elders chose to play to the gallery in a bid to rehabilitate themselves politically.
"The tragedy was they left the main issues unaddressed, issues that required statesmanship were politicized, people were therefore competing to play to the gallery. Instead of becoming statesmen they chose to become ethnic champions. I sent a text to the conference leadership in which I warned that the conference had been reduced to a contest of ethnic champions, champions unacceptable to the people they claim to represent.
"All of a sudden nobody was speaking for Nigeria, nobody was bringing in the national perspective, everybody was speaking from the point of view of his ethnic nationality. You cannot have a nation where people do not see beyond the accident of their birth place." I thought that in reforming Nigeria the challenge was how do we build a nation, and not a coalition of ethnic nationalities, sometimes competing to outdo each other rather than complimenting each other."
This he said demanded a more imaginative leadership that understood what the challenges were, but lamented that "the tragedy of it all was the incapacity of the chairman to understand that at the heart of this conference in my view was to test the capacity of Nigeria to do justice to its minorities."