Many Nigerians have complained that the 1999 Constitution does not reflect the will of the Nigerian people.
But what most people do not know is the extent General Abdulsalami Abubakar, the then head of state, went in shortchanging fellow citizens.
Dr. Uma Eleazu, the 91-year-old economist, political scientist, administrator par excellence, who served in the 1978 Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) set up by General Olusegun Obasanjo to midwife the 1979 Constitution and was also a member of the Constituent Assembly, knows all the intrigues that culminated in the “big fraud.”
In a two-hour interview on June 17, he told IKECHUKWU AMAECHI how Abdulsalami, who set up the Constitutional Debate Coordinating Committee with a mandate to take the General Sani Abacha draft constitution to various geo-political zones and let people say whether they liked it or not, ignored all the inputs made by Nigerians. He sent them on a wild goose chase, even when he had a plan which he perfectly executed with Justice Nikki Tobi and Professor Auwalu Yadudu.
In this first instalment of the two-tranche interview, he talked about his regrets at 91 and how politicians used money to corrupt the General Ibrahim Babangida transition process.
On June 16, you celebrated your 91st birthday. In a country where life expectancy hovers around the 50s, what is the secret behind the longevity?
I will not say that I have any particular secret except to say that I believe it is all by the grace of God. There are people God loves and wants them to do something in this world to achieve His own purpose. He, therefore, keeps such people longer in the world.
Beyond God’s design, is there anything in your lifestyle that may have contributed?
I also think there is something hereditary in it. My father lived up to 90. My mother died at 102. So, it may be in our gene to live long. I eat almost everything I want to eat. I don’t have any particular regime of what I eat. When I was younger, I used to exercise. I played tennis. I don’t swim but I walk. I used to run but somebody told me that walking is better than running when I crossed 70 years.
So, I get up and walk around. Even last year when I was 90, they said I should just keep on with walking. And I said okay, so I am now Johnny Walker (laughs).
So, walking is one of the ways you keep yourself going. And mentally, one also has to keep working. Be alert in your mind. Try and read books and write if you are somebody who has the flair to write. That is the way that you keep your mind working. So, both mind and body work together.
I just don’t worry about anything in particular. I take the admonition, don’t worry, to heart. Why worry about food, dress, about beating the other man or building a bigger house? I try to live moderately. I don’t bother myself too much.
And you know, the more you try to live a Christian life, you will find out that it is in fact very simple. You don’t even envy other people over what they have. You try as much as possible not to get angry over inconsequential things. I hardly get angry but if I do, it dissipates and by the end of the day, I have forgotten it.
So, how do you feel at 91?
I feel strong except for the joint pains. Also, getting up now is much slower and if I drink too much liquid, then I will go to the loo a number of times and if I don’t go very fast, it can start coming out by itself. Otherwise, you understand your body and you know how to pace yourself in everything that you do.
What was growing up like in those days?
People of my age grew up in Nigeria when almost everybody was upwardly mobile. In other words, there was in the air stories about the brave new world that Nnamdi Azikiwe was talking about when he came back to Nigeria and started talking about renascent Africa. And at that point, I wanted to study and be like him.
Every parent wanted his child to be like Azikiwe, to go overseas and study and come back. The whole Eastern region where I grew up was changing. So, we had such romantic idea about how Nigeria was going to be. People were struggling to be better in education, in everything. At the same time in the East we had every village organizing to make sure if they don’t have money as families to send people overseas to study, then the town unions can do it.
Prof. Eme Awa, who was chairman of NEC, was sent to the U.S. to study by the Ohafia Improvement Union. There were three of them like that. People contributed money to send them abroad to study. My father contributed so that somebody from Ohafia will go to America. And many town unions did that.
That is why, no matter what, I don’t miss going to my town union meeting because the town unions are the real purveyors of development in Igboland. They built secondary schools instead of depending on the missions alone. Ohafia High School was built by the town union. It was just an age of improvement in Alaigbo.
Then other parts of Nigeria started seeing what was going on and started organizing themselves. People wanted to be part of the change that was taking place in the world. It was just the immediate years after the Second World War and soldiers who went to India to fight came back with their own ideas about the world out there.
I remember one of our boys who was in the Middle East came and said they were in Egypt and my mother shouted that it was a lie. She asked if he was talking about the same Egypt in the Bible because as far as she was concerned, the Egypt in the Bible must be somewhere in heaven or the outer space. So, how can an Ohafia man claim that he was in Egypt?
That was the milieu in which we grew up, went to school, and then started studying to make ourselves better.
How was education then?
I studied mainly from home. After my two-year teachers’ training after Standard Six, every other thing – O’Level and A’Level – was from home.
There was only one mission secondary school for the Church of Scotland available for people in Ohafia and that was the Hope Waddell in Calabar and there was also the Methodist College in Uzoakoli. Although I passed entrance to Government College Umuahia, my father said I won’t go there, that they were godless. He said it was either Methodist College in Uzoakoli or Hope Waddell in Calabar. So, I got stuck. I didn’t go to secondary school.
The only other way was to go to a teacher training college. You spend two years there, then you come out and teach for about two years, go back and do another two years to get what they call Higher Elementary Certificate, which can now qualify you to teach up to Standard Six and if you are lucky, you will go for training for one more year to become senior teacher.
Senior teachers could teach only one subject in secondary school but I couldn’t wait for all that. After the first two years, I started taking oversea tuition to study at home. First of all, I took my London Matriculation. Anyone who wanted to go to the university, you must take that examination. It is like JAMB but it was set in London. And you have to have School Certificate to be able to take London Matriculation.
Since I didn’t go to secondary school, it was trouble for me. But luckily in 1953, they abolished London Matriculation and substituted it with what they called General Certificate of Education (GCE), still set in London but administered all through West Africa. That time, whether you were in Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone, Nigeria, it was the same thing. So, the same day you are taking the examination in Umuahia or Lagos will be the same day in Accra or Freetown and it was monitored by white men.
So, when they changed to GCE, they said anyone can sit for the examination. So, a pass in GCE Ordinary Level was equivalent to school certificate. So, I sat down, read my subjects, presented myself and cleared the examination. That was in 1954. And thereafter, I entered for the Higher School Certificate. I entered for four A’Level subjects. And the following June, I took the four subjects.
When I went for the examination, I met some of my tutors. And they said, Uma, what are you doing here? I said I also came for the examination. When the result came out, one of my tutors got one subject at A’Level, and failed the other subjects. And the other one didn’t even get any O’Level but I had all four subjects at A’Level – English, Economics History, Geography and British Constitution. Three weeks after, I received a slip from London University that exempted me from the inter-BSC. That means I could proceed to the final degree and they said it would be fine if I wanted to study from home.
You know, in those days, some people stayed at home and studied for Bachelor’s degree. Professor Chike Obi studied from home. But my brother said I should come to Lagos because I ought to go to England.
What was parenting like in those days? How did your parents influence what you became?
My father was a Catechist in the Methodist Church. You know in the hierarchy of the church, the Catechist is at the lowest rung. When he got what was called promotion, he was made a circuit rider. After helping to establish three or four churches, on Monday he is in one village teaching Catechism, on Tuesday, he goes to another and by the end of the week, he has gone round his circuit. So, I grew up in a mission environment and started studying the Bible and knowing about Jesus at a very tender age. My father was very strict, making sure that we kept to what the Bible says. You can even be flogged if you came to church late.
My parents watched out to make sure that all the children passed Standard Six. They said they didn’t have the opportunity to get that high in school. My mother didn’t even go to school at all. She was taught how to read the Bible by missionaries because her mother had twins and instead of allowing them to kill the twins, they had killed one and she snatched the remaining and ran to the missionaries in our village where the white women were. They received them – mother and child. So, they grew up under missionaries. So, my father married from among the mission girls.
When they came to Ohafia, there was no Igbo reading material. So, the book they used was in Efik . In the 1940s, 80 per cent of all the people in my village can speak Efik because that was the reading material most people started with. People like my parents knew when the Bible was being translated into Igbo.
So, when you go through such a straightjacket discipline, it doesn’t leave you.
Looking back, are there things that if given the opportunity to live your life all over again, you would have done differently?
There are things one would have liked to do differently. Let’s begin with family. I would have preferred marrying early and getting done with the issue of having children and bringing them up. When I got married, most members of my age grade were already married and people thought it was late for me.
What age are we talking about here?
I married at 32 and that was when I started raising a family and at the same time, I was doing my Ph.D. in the United States. So, I had my hands full – family problems, civil war in Nigeria and so on. However, one managed to go through it all.
I would have preferred to be on the ground during the civil war because most of those I knew, those who grew up with me, were soldiers on the Biafran side. But, although I couldn’t come back home for a number of reasons, still, working with the Joint Church Aid (JCA), I busied myself with raising money and food for the Biafran children who were starving. JCA were the people who ferried the food we could gather across to Biafra.
In my academic life, when I came back and was sucked into the system, I wish I had gone back to the university to teach. I was already in the university system in the U.S. but back home, I moved from working for the military government under General Olusegun Obasanjo to working for the Manufacturers Association.
I thought I was helping to build a country, contributing my quota in any place that I found myself so that Nigeria will become what it ought to be. But looking back now, all the efforts that we made, some of them are not even remembered. They only made impact at the time that they were started but the way the country has run, I now wish I had just gone back to the university and live my life as an academic.
Any regrets?
When I came back to Nigeria, I helped to set up what was called the ombudsman – Public Complaints Commission – with Professor Ladipo Adamolekun from Ife. We set it up and then I was invited to come and head the National Policy Development Centre in the Cabinet Office. They called it the Think Tank. And from there, towards the end of the military regime when they were handing over to civilian government, they moved us to Jos.
I started the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) in Kuru but for some reason, one day I was just in my office, and somebody arrived and told me that he had been appointed Director-General of the Institute and that I was supposed to hand over to him and restrict myself to the role of Director of Research.
That jolted me. With all the arrangements that I had made because when we moved in, the 1979 elections had just been concluded and most of those who were coming into the National Assembly had not understood the American system which we had adopted.
In the Think Tank, we decided that we were going to have series of seminars. So, I went back to the U.S., talked to people in the State Department, people that I knew and we organized those who would come to hold seminars for the new lawmakers. So, when they said we should go to Kuru, I thought ok, when we get there, they will all be coming for these seminars so that they will know how the presidential system of government works.
So, when they appointed somebody else, I left. I regret leaving, I should have stayed back. But being a young man, I was angry. In the first two weeks, we disagreed as to what the institute ought to be doing. And it just seemed to me that the man didn’t understand what strategic studies and policies were all about. So, I left. I didn’t even resign, I just walked away. I regret that.
I mean, looking back now, I should have at least continued in order to accomplish what we had planned for the people going into government, which was to train them to understand the new system because I served in the Constitution Drafting Committee and from there we went to the Constituent Assembly, and literally, I wrote the section on the Executive in the 1979 Constitution except the bit under the Directive Principles which Prof. Ben Nwabueze wrote almost single-handedly.
We were all working like that as young men, setting up something new. But when this happened, I left. Looking back, I should have stayed and continue with the programme we had mapped out even under somebody else.
So, where did you go to after leaving NIPSS?
I left and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) approached me and then I saw it as an opportunity to do the reverse of what I was doing so that I can now advise the private sector on how to relate to the government in the presidential system. So, I became the policy adviser of MAN. From there, we started what is today known as organized private sector. Then it was just a triumvirate of us – one Prof Ayo Ogunseye from Ibadan who was heading the NACCIMA, Barrister Chike Okogwu at the NECA and I was in MAN. That was the organized private sector.
So, all the big companies were members of MAN or NACCIMA. I did that until General Muhammadu Buhari came in on December 31, 1983 and sacked President Shehu Shagari and the National Assembly, which meant that all those ideas of creating a new system based on the presidential system of government, American style, couldn’t work.
Again, I dropped everything and left. I was always moving. It was at that point that the UNDP invited me to help other African countries to develop their own private sector and I moved to East Africa. I went to Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Swaziland.
How then did your relationship with the military begin? Did they discover you or you discovered them after your return from the US?
When I returned, I went back to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. And there was disagreement on salary. I was Associate Professor in the U.S. and when I came back, Prof Kodilinye, who was Vice Chancellor, made a rule that all those coming back from the U.S. had to start where they were before they left. It has been ten years since I left and he wanted me to go back to Lecturer 2, which was my position before I left in 1965. So, I refused to stay there. This was now 1974 and while in the U.S., I finished a doctorate degree, started working, got promoted based on my writings.
I said okay, I was ready to wait, let them go and do their own assessment but I couldn’t come down from Associate Professor to Lecturer 2. I waited for about three months, nothing happened and I left and went to the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) Enugu and developed the business side of the Institute with Dr. Chijioke, who was then the Rector and I was the Dean of Studies.
While we were there, Ukpabi Asika was still the Administrator of East Central State and both of us were working under the same person for our doctorate degrees at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). So, he invited me and said, you and public administration, there is something worrying these military chaps, he said they wanted to set up something where civilians can go and make complaints because people were getting tired of military rule. He said he told them that they should have an ombudsman all over the place.
So, they told him to form a small committee and develop the framework. That was how I was sucked into government. They brought me and later Prof Adamolekun and Patrick Cole who was Senior Assistant Secretary then at the Cabinet Office as the committee secretary and also Sunday Adewusi, who was then Deputy Inspector General of Police.
We travelled round the Scandinavian countries where they had the ombudsman. But while we were at it, the coup that removed General Yakubu Gowon took place. So, Murtala Muhammed who took over power asked us to return. We did and I went back to my job in Enugu.
But after some time, they said we should still produce a report since we had travelled abroad to understudy the system. So, Adamolekun and I came down and with Patrick Cole, we wrote the report and they promulgated a decree establishing the Public Complaints Commission in Nigeria.
Alhaji Maitama Sule was appointed the Chief Public Complaints Commissioner. So, how do you run the office? They fell back on me and Adamolekun to help him develop his office. While we were doing that, Adamolekun got a Fellowship and left. So, I sat down with Maitama Sule, worked with him, set up his office and what he should do based on what we saw in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
After that, I went back to Enugu but they wanted me to be the Secretary and I refused. Apparently, Maitama Sule went to Murtala Muhammed and specifically asked for me. So, I was invited back and that was my first and last time of seeing Murtala.
I came and he said he had seen the report, which he said was beautiful. He found it difficult to pronounce ombudsman. He said Alhaji told him that I did a very good job and that they wanted me to be the Secretary to the Commission. I said, no sir, I am a teacher and that is what I want to do.
And he said, “No, no, what is your salary there?” I told him I was on Level 14 and he said, okay, we will give you Level 16 but I told him it was not a matter of money.
He said okay and I left. Two weeks after, he was assassinated. So, everything was in a state of flux until they stabilized with Obasanjo as the new head of state. Because they had been thinking of having this policy centre, they said when they were discussing it, Murtala said he knew of one person who could do the job and that was me.
We didn’t know each other from Adam. It was just that encounter and he felt I was the person they should make the head of the National Policy Center. After he died, they fished me out again from Enugu to come and head the National Policy Development Centre.
Obasanjo wrote about what we did under him in that his book, “Not My Will.” You can read what he said there. I don’t boast. It is not my style.
You were once a presidential aspirant. At what point did you decide to go into partisan politics?
Again, one was looking at how to help this country. I did so many other things during the military regimes and I had got enough experience to run the country. I was in the team that wrote the original Social Democratic Party (SDP) manifesto from which I developed my own personal manifesto.
I had looked at other leaders of the world, so I thought I should go into politics. And I didn’t want any other thing except to be president so that I will be able to do exactly what I think this country required.
I wrote it, distributed it and then when we went for campaign, I saw what Nigerian politics was. The way it was played in the First and Second Republics and during the Babangida transition period. I didn’t like it.
What did you see?
It was already becoming a money affair. If you don’t have money, you cannot be in politics. They use all kinds of underhand means, including devilish means to ensure that the good candidates don’t emerge. Money bags had taken over and bribery was the only way you could progress. I addressed voters both in Abia State and Jos. I said if you compel me to go and borrow money and share to you so that you will vote for me, those that will give me that money will hold me by the jugular when I win. But that didn’t wash. They just wanted me to bring money, otherwise they won’t vote for you.
The last night before we went to Jos, when they were still waiting for me to bring money, I think I had a greater number in the camp – they used to call it cage. You cage your delegates in one place so that the other people won’t have access to them. Everybody was on my side until the money issue came up. I told them that I had already said I was there to serve because, that if I get up there, I would make sure that their interest was covered.
Somebody, for instance, was asking me for money so that his wife can go to market, but I said, whatever I give you lasts only one market day or one week at most, whereas if the problem is solved on a longer term, his children can go to school without paying school fees. They can go to hospital paying little or nothing. They can have good roads and they can even go to the bank and get a loan to run their businesses. I told them that those were the kind of things we had to do. They didn’t want to hear that. So, when I didn’t give money, by 2 am, some people left my camp in Umuahia and went to Arthur Nzeribe’s camp in Oguta because they had gotten information that Nzeribe was giving N5,000 per person on behalf of one Samek and this Samek didn’t go to school.
But I still won and they followed me to Jos. In Jos, Babagana Kingibe was giving N25,000 per delegate and MKO Abiola topped it to N30,000. So, all the 110 delegates that followed me from Abia came and said, Oga, we know you don’t like this kind of thing but we have to see other aspirants. I said okay, do whatever you like.
As a student of politics, I wanted to see what was actually going on and money was moving from hotel to hotel. Abiola was giving N30,000 per delegate and there were over 3,000 delegates in Jos. So, you can imagine the amount of money he spent and, of course, he won. But don’t forget that this was still the primary election. So, he won and all of us left Jos. I was so sad. I said money politics was going to destroy this country. Abiola took my personal manifesto, read it and said it was beautiful and asked if I would want to work with him if he won and I said of course, it was our party. I told him that all I wanted was the good of Nigeria. So, he became our flag bearer and you know what happened thereafter.
After the election was annulled, did you just disappear from the political scene?
General Abdulsalami Abubakar again invited me to be part of the Constitutional Debate Coordinating Committee. That was what he called it and he appointed Justice Nikki Tobi the chairman.
We arrived in Abuja and asked what debate we were going to coordinate. It was then we realized that what he meant was that we should take the Abacha draft constitution to various geo-political zones and let people say whether they liked it or not.
So, they gave two weeks. I read through it that day but how would people debate a document they had not seen? They said they had given copies to some people. I was sent to the South-South. In Port Harcourt, those who were in the Abacha Constituent Assembly had the document. In the South-South, their major issue was what was going to be the derivation. They said they wanted resource control. They wanted us to go back to the situation where each zone will control its resources and make contributions to the centre. They also said they wanted parliamentary system of government where both government and opposition will stay in the same house and debate. They didn’t want presidential system.
And we came back with our reports from all over the country. But nobody looked at those reports. The next week, Nikki Tobi said they would take charge of everything and he called one Auwalu Yadudu, a university lecturer from Sokoto and they doctored the Abacha version of the constitution and reissued it as an attachment to a decree. That is what the 1999 Constitution is all about. All the recommendations that people made from the various places, I didn’t see any of them reflected in the document.
So, we didn’t write the 1999 Constitution and we are not part of the “We, the People” mentioned there.
Do you then agree with those who say that the 1999 Constitution is a fraudulent document?
Yes, I agree because not only did Abdulsalami not use the outcome of the debate that he mandated us to do, two people – Nikki Tobi and Yadudu – simply doctored the constitution. That is not how to make a constitution. It would even have been better if in the decree they made, they had said, we will now submit this document to an open debate or call a Constituent Assembly like in the 1979 Constitution to debate it. They could have formed a Constituent Assembly to debate that draft that Abdulsalami attached to that decree. That is when most of the things there would have been sorted out. But they didn’t do that. They just said we have given you a new constitution. It is a fraud.
What is the way out of the quagmire? Do you agree with those who say since a National Assembly is in place, they should do the necessary amendments or go for outright constitutional conference which outcome will be subjected to a referendum?
My view is that a lot of money has been spent since that time. The Jonathan 2014 Constitutional Conference produced a report which many parts of Nigeria contributed to. In my view, the National Assembly should have dug up that report and look at the conclusions. To say that they want to amend this same constitution that everybody is saying they don’t want is a waste of time unless they are going to amend the constitution out of existence, that is, by the time they finish and bring it back, it will be a fresh, new document.
I also think that the National Assembly made a mistake by sending senators to their constituents. In a memo I sent to Ike Ekweremadu and Enyinnaya Abaribe, the senator from my state, I suggested that what we can do now is for the National Assembly to recognize the zones we have been working with in the constitution. So, they take either Section 4 or Section 5 and say instead of the corporate Nigeria divided into 36 states, it will be corporate Nigeria divided into six geo-political zones, each of them comprising of states and the states will be enumerated under their respective zones.
When you now recognize the zones in the constitution, then the next stage will be to ask the senators and members of the House of Representatives to go back to their constituencies according to the senatorial zones plus the members of the state assemblies and they will sit together in a conference. Then they will pick from non-politicians an equal number to ask how do we want to govern ourselves?
After that, they will come back to the state level and have a report of what Abia people, for instance, want. From the state, you go to the regional level and ask what the five states in the Southeast region want. Then we report back at the national level. It still has to need a conference where all these things will be harmonized and you need a technical committee made up mainly of lawyers and may be political scientists, to craft the document, the same way we did between 1978 and 1979.