An illegal Confab and a dangerous agenda (I)

The President Jonathan-convened National Conference is taking off this week, not just amid controversies over its composition, legality and real purpose, but in an atmosphere beclouded by violence, bloodshed, deaths and destruction in especially the Northern part of the country.

But authorities who seem to have no ears, no eyes, no hearts and no compassion as they criss-cross the country holding political rallies and tossing glasses at banquets in Government Houses while hundreds of their countrymen are getting killed in senseless violence in Maiduguri, Bama, Buni Yadi, Katsina, Kaduna and Abuja, should be expected even less to bother about objections, no matter how valid, to a conference from which they hope to reap huge political capital.

We admit that there is a sense in which a conference of this type, per se, is not unconstitutional, or unlawful. It may even be rightly viewed as part of the democratic process of collating and aggregating opinions in the country, an exercise in democratic consultation.

But taking into consideration everything about this conference-its timing, its composition, the delegates’ selection process adopted, the competence and/or calibre of the selected delegates, the orientation and world view of the selected delegates and the set agenda for the conference-it is impossible not to see the unwholesome purposes the conference is meant to achieve.

There can be only one sense or purpose of convening a conference of this type in a campaign year, with the elections less than a year away, at a time when the country’s backdrop is becoming bleaker economically, socially and politically, and at a time when a strong opposition has emerged and is gaining ground while the ruling party and the governments it controls are becoming more and more unpopular: distraction.

With a very poor performance record, an increasingly unpopular party platform, a growing public perception as a sectional leader with a sectional agenda, the widespread popular view of his administration as one mired in scams and he himself as a leader lacking in capacity and the will to fight corruption, and with a strong likelihood of defeat in 2015, Jonathan has every reason to want to distract the nation’s attention.

Hence, this conference, by which he hopes to kill two birds with a stone: first, to get the elite in the confab to be talking and getting reported, not about him and his failures/failings, but about the wider issues of the day, and, second, to use the conference as an opportunity to mobilize support for himself and his 2015 ambition and agenda.

These narrow purpose and self-serving agenda, and not ignorance, are what have informed the lopsidedness in the composition of the conference, the total lack of sensitivity to the heterogeneous nature of our country and the refusal to find, or at least approximate a balance in representation at the conference based on the country’s demographics. Many bogus categories were deliberately created by the organisers that enabled Jonathan to pack the conference with his own men. His nominees number much more than the nominees of all the 36 state governors put together. Yet, even at that, Jonathan, blinded by the desire to ensure that the conference produces a particular outcome, would not follow the tradition, or precedent, set by the five conferences we have had in the past by striking a balance in the composition of the conference between the major forces in the county.

As a result, in a country where the population is almost equally divided between Muslims and Christians, the number of Christians in Jonathan’s is almost double that of Muslims. Some ethnic nationalities have no representation at all. Even the bigger and more populated Northern region is made by the conference organisers to be demographically equal to the South. And the last-minute tinkering

with the list of delegates by the authorities, resulting from protests, only made things worse by giving more to those who already have.

There was clearly not even a semblance of respect for the principles of democracy in the entire process. For, even among the many categories created by the authorities the delegates were hand-picked, not elected. And many of those so chosen are Jonathan’s yes men who can hardly be said to have the intellectual ability and competence to make meaningful contributions to debates in the conference. There was, besides, an abuse and breach of our Constitution which, in clear terms, stipulates strict adherence in all such matters to the principles of fairness, fair representation, equality and equity.