By Olatunji Dare
The parties that lost in the recent General Election and their proxies have been cooking up yet another “June 12” subterfuge with their call for an “Interim National Government,” a term they alternate with “Government of National Consensus.
They are pursuing the quest unmindful of the circumstances that led to the setting up of the body that operated under the first title 30 years ago.
It was set up, remember, after military president Ibrahim Babangida, aided principally by the infernal Arthur Nzeribe of ghastly memory, suborned a coterie of state actors led by the Federal Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Clement Akpamgbo (SAN), to confect a raft of threadbare falsehoods and spin an elaborate web of intrigue to serve as a pretext for annulling the June 12, 1993, presidential election.
The SDP presidential candidate, Moshood Abiola, was set to win a landslide. The annulment torpedoed the process. But the annuller lost the plot. In the event, he was forced to beat a ragged, tearful retreat from Abuja to his hometown Minna, and to infamy.
Then, unlike now, a president-elect was never proclaimed. So, technically, there was going to be a vacuum, albeit contrived, in the governance of Nigeria. The ING was rigged up to fill that vacuum.
With the successful completion of the 2023 poll and the proclamation of a president-elect, no such vacuum now exists. To create one, the ING protagonists will have to engineer and successfully execute a coup d’état. They must know that they face overwhelming odds, the seething discontent with the election outcome in some quarters notwithstanding.
As was said of the ING, it was not national, and it was not a government. Its only redeeming grace was that it was interim through and through, doddering on for just 83 days.
It was conceived in treachery, delivered in infamy, and died in ignominy.
At the time of its inauguration, I set out to examine the law undergirding it, portentously called the Interim National Government (Basic Constitution Provisions) of 1993 All I had to go by was a photocopy that had been pulled from a photocopy.
No one among my contacts had seen a hard copy, or had been able to obtain one from the Government Printer. For one thing, Government Printer could no longer cope with the rate at which decrees were being churned out in the twilight of Babangida’s presidency. For another, it could not be trusted to circumvent the stringent procedure for vetting them.
Consequently, the presidency had farmed out to the printing of government documents to Babangida’s private commercial outfit in Abuja, Heritage Press, against the law. Pardon the digression, The Mint had likewise found itself unable to keep up with Babangida’s demand for new banknotes to buy support for the regime.
Nobody knew what version of the Interim Constitution was being followed in Abuja, assuming that they were following anything other than the divisive, dilatory and duplicitous instruments that had served the preceeding regime so well,
Senate President (as he then was) Iyorchia Ayu, not to be confused with the retread, had said that the document being touted as the Interim Constitution differed significantly from the one he was shown on the eve of Babangida’s exit. By one account, as many as four different versions of the document were in circulation.
The distinguished jurist, Dr Akinola Aguda, since departed, said that the document was signed by Babangida after he had been forced out of power, and then backdated to make it look like his final act.
Aguda, a former chief justice of Botswana and pioneer director-general of the Nigeria Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, was no flippant commentator. His charge called into question the honour of the Attorney-General in particular and the government as a whole, and their claim to being worthy custodians of the public trust. But they were too busy procuring any gesture that could be construed as support for their lawless rule to worry about such trivial matters.
To return to the version of what purported to be the Interim National Constitution that I examined: From the Preamble, we learned that the Federal Military Government decided to annul the June 12 1993 election and processes leading to it out of its abiding concern for “national security, law and order, enduring democracy and for the provision of effective economic direction for the nation,” and “because the processes had been marred by “grave electoral malpractices.”
So deep was this concern that no court of law in Nigeria was allowed to inquire into the validity of the decree, and no part of it could be varied, altered, modified by any other decree, law, or enactment.
Section 42 of the Interim Constitution was remarkable for what it concealed. It says: “The Chairman and Head of the Interim National Government shall be . . .”
Section 47, which provided for a vice chairman was just as dodgy. It stated: “The Vice Chairman of the Interim National Government shall be . . .” The intention was to fill in the names later.
Babangida the military president was keeping his options open, leaving himself ample room to morph into Chairman of the ING and for another dupe to bask in the delusion of being second-in-command.
The so-called Interim Constitution was drafted by a coterie headed by Professor Ben Nwabueze (SAN), fresh from serving as Secretary for Education in the Transition Council that was supposed to lead the nation to democratic rule but ended up being another complaisant tool in Babangida’s arsenal of duplicity.
The team also compromised the Attorney-General of the Federation, Clement Akpamgbo, aforementioned; PK Nwokedi, chair of the Law Review Commission, and two scholars from that body, Professor Egerton Uvieghara, and Dr Epiphany Azinge.
In Nwabueze’s telling, they all waited and waited for Babangida to supply the missing names. At their deadline, the names had not been furnished. So, they turned in their draft, lacunae and all.
The Constitution, was silent as to who would appoint the ING chairman and vice chairman. But it provided for the appointment of ministers, to be named by the ING chairman. In the event, Ernest Shonekan, who became chairman of the ING, functioned with “Secretaries” foisted on him by Babangida.
Section 5(c) spelled out the powers of the chair of the ING. Part of his remit was “to oversee the election to the Local Government due in December 1993 (emphasis added). Now, since the Constitution could not be altered or amended or modified in any way, this meant that the council elections could not be held before or after December 1993.
The calculation was that, by lumping the local council and presidential election together, the National Electoral Commission and the ING would be able to induce an electorate still chafing from the annulment of the June 12 poll to come out again and vote. Instead, they found themselves confronted by an impregnable obstacle where they least expected it.
The constraint on the staging of local council elections was more than compensated, however, by the fact that the ING Constitution set no limit on the Interim period.
Shonekan gave the public to believe that his interim team would complete its work and quit on March 31, 1994, But the version of the ING Constitution that I saw, said nothing of the sort.
Hardly had the ING embarked on its doomed tenure on July 26, 1993, than resonant calls for an extension of its mandate were being issued by the usual people. Just 93 days into their tenure, Shonekan and the ING were put out of their misery by Sani Abacha, acting on a clause Babangida has surreptitiously inserted in its Constitution mandating “the most senior military officer” in the outfit to take over power in the event of the resignation or incapacitation of its chairman.”
That clause was not included in the draft that Professor Nwabueze and his team had produced on demand. And for four years thereafter, Abacha presided over one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history.
The ING Constitution, then, was shot through and through with bad faith. Lateef Jakande’s Lagos Daily News rightly dismissed the entire scheme in a withering editorial as “interim nonsense.”
*Those calling for a reiteration of an ING can be forgiven for not knowing the treacherous history of its first coming and the sad end to which it led the country. Still, they must be careful what they wish for.*
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