We don’t need another confab By Dr. Odunayo Talabi

True to our character of re-inventing the wheel, there are already some whispers across Nigeria, asking that we should hold yet another confab in the nation. This is not unrelated to the general atmosphere of insecurity pervading the country and the incessant killings by the so -called killer herdsmen, who going by what the government admitted are actually foreign invaders who came from neighbouring countries, essentially to steal our land, to kill our people and to destroy our country. This is barely contestable, when you see the level of brutality being displayed by these criminals. They are not killing like a “kinsman should kill another kinsman”; if ever there was anything like that.


But asking for a new confab, that is just like reinventing the wheel as I earlier stated. We have had many of them already. From Yakubu Gowon’s 1966 Constitutional Conference to Murtala Muhammed’s Constitution Drafting Committee of 1975, the search for a better organised nation has always been on. In fact, with the possible exception of General Muhammadu Buhari’s military government of 1984/85, every other head of state and civilian president had always seen a need for a conference of sorts, including General Sani Abacha who despite being regarded a dictator still organised a national constitutional conference in 1994!

And recently in 2005, Olusegun Obasanjo’s National Political Reform Conference chaired by Ahmed Makarfi, preceded President Goodluck Jonathan’s Kutigi-led National Conference of 2014.



We therefore don’t need more papers, what we need do is to urgently implement the contents of previous confab reports, since the problems of Nigeria have largely remained the same, only attaining newer and more dangerous dimensions.

For example, in Section 5.1.8 of the 2014 national confab, members – made up of Nigerians from all walks of life and of course from every tribe – agreed inter alia that government must involve farmers, herdsmen, fishermen and rural dwellers in policies regarding soil degradation and asked that emphasis should be placed on ranching and better policing to discourage cattle rustling.

For state policing, the same conference in Section 5.11.2(ii)  concluded that there was a need for more decentralised police in solving our security problems and – in an attempt to allay the fears of the nays and reassure the yeas – suggested that, while the Nigeria Police retains jurisdiction all over the country, policemen from the rank of Deputy Superintendent of  Police and below should be deployed to their states of origin so as to address concerns of language and culture, and also because it will lead to better intelligence gathering if policemen know the terrain and speak the language.

These conclusions were very similar to those of the 2017 Nasir el-Rufai’s All Progressives Congress Restructuring Committee and the 2019 Presidential Committee on Police Reform, both of which further gulped taxpayers’ money unnecessarily. It is only in Nigeria that you set up a committee to review a committee’s review of a committee!

 For the records, I read every single page of the 898-page report of the 2014 National Conference and I know that, forms of government, fiscal federalism, devolution of powers and other critical issues were all extensively debated and concluded upon by the 2014 committee and of course their predecessor conferences;  so, what we need now is action.

President Buhari should urgently call for a referendum, if not on the whole report of any particular conference, at least on the issues that are very pressing and currently threatening the very existence of the nation.

To address the anxieties of the populace vis a vis the political class, I suggest there should be three votes for every issue to be adopted. Vote 1, being the result of the Referendum; Vote 2, that of the President, and Vote 3 from the National Assembly. An issue with at least two votes automatically comes to being and is immediately adopted into the constitution without any need for further debate. However, the votes of the National Assembly and President combined cannot be the two votes. It has to be referendum + either of the other two. e.g. REF (no) +NA (no) + PRES (yes) =NO. REF (yes) +NA (no) + PRES (Yes) =YES. REF (no) +PRES (yes) +NA (yes) =Impasse.

In the final analysis, whatever needs to be done for Nigeria needs to be done urgently!