Dear Mr President,
RESTRUCTURING THE ILL-FATED POLITICAL STRUCTURE OF NIGERIA
May I kindly draw your attention to the speech read on your behalf to a Conference of Governors from the oil producing states of Nigeria in November 2000. The thrust of the speech was the dire warning you delivered to the Governors on the legality or illegality of their desires to take control of the mineral resources in their states.
Although the speech was politically powerful it is morally weak because it clearly left out justice in the new democratic dispensation or democratic learning period (as it is commonly used).
Even though the speech forcefully relied on the letters of the Nigerian Constitution and by the logic of your argument the constitutional rights espoused therein justified the moral right of the Federal Government to appropriate to itself every mineral resources in the country.
There is no way the premise on which the policy objective of your government with respect to the ownership rights of state governments to the mineral resources in their domain will not lead to the moral question about whether there is any justice whatsoever in the philosophical underpinning, socio-political intentions, pragmatic designs and the spirit of the letters of the Nigerian Constitution.
It is on record that constitutional lawyers in and outside Nigeria have raised objections to the claim in the opening paragraph of the said constitution without any response from the Federal Government. They have demanded over and over from the FGN to clarify the identity of the people in Nigeria whom the constitution claimed have agreed to the contents of the constitution.
Mr President, the continued act of playing dumb by your government to the concerns of well-meaning Nigerians cannot but eventually end in disaster for everyone. Let us face this issue now or never: Nigeria has no constitution that was agreed to either in principle or in actuality by the people of Nigeria. It is becoming clearer day by day that what the FGN based its hegemony on is the greatest political illegality of all times.
Mr President, can a situation where a clique of criminals drew up and imposed a contract on the people without seeking their opinion or blessing be regarded and called normal? And can such contract drawn up and imposed under duress be regarded as the constitution of the people by the people and for the people of Nigeria?
Quite simply, the much quoted and flaunted constitution of Nigeria is an illegal and immoral imposition.
Therefore, Mr President, to situate the policy objective of a democratic government on this illegality is merely prolonging and compounding the illegal acts of the immediate and recent past of Nigeria’s shame.
May I please invite you, Mr President, to note that it is high time your administration faced up to the critical purpose of your presidency. This purpose, if you are yet to understand it, is crucially and principally the realignment of the illicit structures on which the Nigeria-state was couched and presently constructed.
The Federal Government of Nigeria, since the colonial times, was constituted as an illegal structure for the purpose of exploitation and the criminal debasement of the indigenous people that populated the geographical space called Nigeria.
The amazing surprise is that the so-called independent Nigeria state has kept and protected the philosophy of exploitation and its administrative structure without amendment. This is a testimony to a lack of understanding of the whole purpose of imperialism on the part of the so-called leaders of Nigeria.
Mr President, it is needful to let you know that as long as the structure of the FGN remains as presently constituted, Nigeria can never fulfil any of its avowed goals as purportedly stated in the said constitution for the people of Nigeria. The Nigeria state cannot be anything more than a puppet of its colonial creator. There is no amount of political manoeuvring by any incumbent Nigerian on the coveted throne of either the Head of State or The President of Nigeria that can make a difference to the fatal whirlwind of ruin that is about to swallow up the people of Nigeria.
For that reason, Mr President, to continue to claim the moral high ground on behalf of FGN based on the spirit and letters of a morally unjustifiable constitution in the defence of the criminal appropriation of the wealth of the sovereign and suffering people of Nigeria is simply foolhardy and preposterous.
And to continue to blackmail the patient and suffering States who have borne the brunt of the callousness and recklessness of FGN since 1914 is not a tactic that can achieve any meaningful result under the present climate of awareness in Nigeria. Mr President, please call off the incessant bluffs and high-handedness and for goodness sake, listen to the voice of reason.
The present structure of FGN should not be allowed to continue beyond the tenure of your presidency. There is no other reason for your return to the presidency of Nigeria other than to set into motion the processes of dismantling the illegal structure called FGN. This is the divine purpose why Heaven has given you a second chance to redeem Nigeria and point it in the direction of justice.
Please, for the sake of heaven and the people of Nigeria, stop your irrational dream that believes that the status quo of Nigeria can be retained or reformed or strengthened and defended into the near future. It is suffice to say without any exaggeration that it is impossible for your presidency to achieve any socio-economic progress either for Nigeria or for Nigerians unless the unjust political structure that brought you into power is totally dismantled.
To remove any shade of ambiguity, may I humbly identify some of the features of this inimical political structure that need the urgent attention of every Nigerian. These are:
• The structure that is constitutionally constructed on a borrowed but out-of-fashion monarchical philosophy that believes on the ownership rights of property/state by a sovereign who premised its claim on the principle of might is right and who justified this right on the historical ancestor’s acts of brigandage on a conquered people;
• The structure that establishes public policy on theories or ideologies of society that evade or de-emphasise every question of inequality and exploitation within the polity;
• The structure that creates and empowers an overbearing, no-nonsense, non-listening, non-responding and non-accountable style of a unitary and over-centralised federal government;
• The structure that has inherent tendency time after time to foist on the nations despotic and tyrannical individuals as leaders;
• The structure that fatally weakens and paralyses all its appendages – States, Local Governments and Communities. Because, by a fudged Constitution, it greedily seized their resources and means of sustenance thereby reducing them to paupers and beggars;
• The structure that continually establishes security institutions that have since become extraordinarily proficient in threatening, blackmailing, incarcerating, maiming and murdering all citizens that beg to differ from the waywardness of their criminal governments and officials; and
• The structure that recruits, breeds and nurtures criminally-minded individuals and demon-possessed psychopaths for its national intelligence and security services.
Mr President, this is a very serious matter. If this afore-mentioned structure is left in place undisturbed by your government during your current tenure of office, it will eventually take Nigeria back to the era of the 1985-1998.
The only difference one can envisage at this stage will be that the would-be clandestine military-political actors, using your successful conversion from a military Head of State to a civilian Presidency as precedence, will no longer wear military uniforms.
Since these groups of Nigerians have not accepted that they did anything wrong between 1985 and 1998 and therefore have no cause to countenance repentance, the dastardly deeds of that period will be a child’s play if they have a second chance like you.
This is the crux of the matter. The structure that gave you the Presidency is an unjustifiably defective structure. It is through the manipulation of this defect that those who sponsored your election into Aso Rock succeeded. What guarantees have you put in place, so far, to ensure that these same sponsors cannot uproot you at will when they feel that your service is no longer needed?
Mr President, I don’t want you to delude yourself by feeling that you are in absolute control of the situation in which you find yourself. You are not. However, the Creator of heaven and earth has a job for you that was why your sponsors succeeded so far.
My assignment is to warn you on the precarious state of your political situation but most importantly to alert your soul to the divine plan heaven expects you to fulfil. Some of these divine plans were stated in a book written by this writer. Find enclosed excerpts of the book for your attention.
I shall not take any more of your valuable time. I believe the spirit of truth will elaborate more on this subject matter.
Sincerely,
Sam Abbd Israel
A Concerned Citizen
N.B
A letter written to General Olusegun Obasanjo on January 1, 2001. It seems the letter did not get to his desk or it got there but was ignored like one of those mails written by pranksters. Whatever it is, it is obvious the Federal Government of Nigeria throughout the tenure of ex-President Obasanjo had no interest in the issue under the focus of this letter.
The issues highlighted in the letter are still relevant today as they were in 2001.
SAM ABBD ISRAEL 