Another Constitution Review Jamboree?

As the 10th National Assembly gears up to amend the 1999 Constitution, there are concerns about repeating past failures marked by insignificant changes and wasted resources, potentially leaving public needs unaddressed, Wale Igbintade writes

Having constituted two committees to review the 1999 Constitution, the House of Representatives and Senate will any moment from now begin another process to amend the country’s statute book.

The committees had requested the general public and other stakeholders, including civil society organisations, professional bodies and other interest groups to submit a memorandum for further alterations of the constitution on some listed matters or “any other matter that will promote good governance and welfare of all persons in our country.”

Other areas it listed were the Nigerian Police and Nigerian security architecture, devolution of powers, judicial reforms, electoral reforms, socio-economic and cultural rights, strengthening the independence of oversight institutions, residency and indigeneship, immunity, National Assembly and state creation.

While the House of Representatives has 45 members in the committee, the Senate has 47 members. The two committees have the Deputy Senate President, Senator Barau Jibrin as chairman and Deputy Speaker of the House, Benjamin Kalu, as co-chair.

Speaking at the pre-inaugural meeting held in Abuja recently, the House Committee on Constitution Review led by Kalu pledged to complete the task in December 2025.

Since the Fourth Republic, five attempts have been made by the successive federal lawmakers to alter the 1999 Constitution, which many believe was hastily cobbled together by the military as it hurriedly sought to return power to civilians in 1999. These attempts, which took place in 2003-2007, 2007- 2011, 2011- 2015, 2015-2019 and 2019 and 2023, ended largely as a waste of human and material resources as there were hardly significant amendments carried out to impact the lives of the people.

Besides a few alterations like some judicial reforms, age reduction, and movement of a few responsibilities of government like the railways from the exclusive to the recurrent list, the outcomes of the previous exercises were out of sync with the resources injected.

Since 2011, N1 billion was always voted annually in the national budgets for amendment or review of the 1999 Constitution. 

For instance, between 2011 and 2015, the committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate reportedly spent a whopping sum of N7.75 billion of public funds in four years to purportedly review the 1999 Constitution, according to investigation. It was not clear how much was released for the same purpose between 2015 and 2019, and 2019 and 2023 under the Senate presidency of Bukola Saraki and Ahmad Lawan, respectively, which also engaged in the constitution amendment exercise.

Though the committees carried out their assignments, a lot of gaps were still left uncovered in the constitution. For instance, there are many recurring issues like local government autonomy, devolution of power, rotation of power at federal and state levels, autonomy for state Houses of Assembly, electronic voting, and state police, which were clamoured for by a majority of Nigerians during previous exercises, but were not included in the amended constitution.

Out of the 44 bills transmitted to the state Houses of Assembly during the 2019 and 2023 constitution amendment exercise, less than one-third of the states performed their roles in accordance with the constitution. One of its most prized constitutional amendments – the Electoral Act, 2022 – suffered major setbacks as the controversy on what the law says in the transmission of votes in real time to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s viewing portal has led to intense calls for further amendments.

It is for this reason that Nigerians have continued to find holes in the 1999 Constitution. It was in acknowledgement of the growing attacks that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Abbas Tajudeen, stated recently that the 10th House will pursue constitutional reform “purposely, deliberately, and expeditiously.”

 Amid the increasing wave of crime and banditry in the country occasioned by the failure of the Nigeria Police to maintain law and order, there have been nationwide calls for the establishment of state police for effective policing. The aim is to hire locals familiar with the environment, language and all the nuances of culture to help identify, fight crimes, and solve social problems. The relative success of the Civilian Joint Task Force in the North-east, Amotekun in the South-west and others evidently inspired the recent formation of community protection guards in Zamfara State.

As the former security chief, General Aliyu Gusau (rtd) clearly stated, Nigeria is too big and complex to be policed from Abuja, an assertion endorsed by the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party’s governors.

It is heartwarming that President Bola Tinubu and the governors met recently and agreed on the need to establish state police to combat insecurity more effectively. It is expected that the National Assembly will approve the creation of state police and also carry out other constitutional amendments that will impact positively on the people.    

Constitutional amendment, from the experiences of many developed societies, is not embarked upon every year, the way it is done in Nigeria. For instance, the American Constitution, which went into effect 231 years ago, has been amended only 27 times since then. Ten of those amendments were done once, the Bill of Rights. The last time a US constitutional amendment was ratified in the United States was 28 years ago.

However, many analysts believe that most of Nigeria’s teething problems are not constitutional. They posited that the impunity and  brazenness of the Nigerian leaders, changes to the constitution are very unlikely to improve governance. For instance, one of the analysts, Philip Akowe said: “Is it the constitution, for example, that is responsible for corruption, income disparities, wasteful projects, poor economic management, insecurity, lack of democracy in local governments, lapdog nature of state Houses of Assembly, ineffectual Auditor Generals, election malpractice and many other woes of Nigerian public life?”

Akowe concluded that instead of wasting money in travelling abroad to sight model constitutions, holding numerous committee meetings, flying from one part of the country to another for public hearings, and engaging in expensive secretariat work for the review, the National Assembly should identify specific issues that would need to be tackled, initiate private member or executive bills on them, conduct public hearings and carry out approved amendments, which according to him, is less expensive for the country.

He stated that the lawmakers are only interested in the huge money they make in the constitution amendment process than getting serious with the exercise.

He further called on the National Assembly to take another look at the many crucial bills gathering dust in their chambers and initiate the processes of representing them, if that would save Nigeria the cost of engaging in the leg-work for amending the sections of the constitution related to them.

The constitution analyst equally advised the lawmakers to study the report of the 2014 National Constitutional Conference which contains far-reaching deliberations and resolutions on how to move the country forward in that report. He noted that it would be wise to initiate relevant bills based on the conference’s recommendations and avoid this planned constitutional review, which he said might end up as another jamboree.