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In Nigerian English, when someone has no competence to carry out an act, we say that the person is too small to do it. My position is that President Goodluck Jonathan is too small to sign the constitutional amendments passed by the National and State Assemblies of our federation.

Over the past two weeks, there has been an intense debate over whether the said constitutional amendments have come into effect or whether they require presidential assent. Unfortunately, the debate has been too focused on legalistic arguments and most of the voices animating the debate have been those of lawyers. We non-lawyers should be part of the debate.

Indeed, my view is that the issues underpinning the debate are too important and too complex for lawyers, who with all due respect, are trained to argue about texts rather than their underlying foundational principles.

While the lawyers are arguing about whether the famous judgement in the United States {Hollingsworth vs. Virginia (1789)} – that presidential assent is not required for constitutional amendments to come into force – applies to Nigeria, we should take time to focus on the foundational principles.

In federal political systems, the federal (national) and federating (state) governments all have constitutionally defined areas in which each level is sovereign as well as areas where both levels have
concurrent authority.

According to the “father” of federal theory, K. C. Wheare (1963), in federal regimes, neither the federal nor regional governments are supreme; the constitution is the only supreme organ. He adds however that citizens in federal systems live under two separate authorities, each of which is supreme in its area of competence. On matters of the constitution, the two levels of authority – federal and state must act in concert. In addition, the act must be carried out by the most important organ,the legislature.

In democratic theory, legislatures are the most powerful institutions in democratic regimes for a very simple reason: Legislatures are the only institutions with the power to create other powers. They have the monopoly of the powers to make laws through which they create new commissions and agencies, enact public policy and determine public expenditure through the process of appropriation laws.

In democratic theory therefore, the powers of legislatures are considered more important than the powers of executives. Indeed, the theory of representative democracy is constructed on the pivotal role played by legislators, who have been elected by the people to represent them at the level of law-making for the society.

It is this legitimacy derived from the electoral process that gives them the power to translate the views and concerns of citizens they are representing into public policy. It is on the basis of this principle that when a president refuses to assent to a bill, a two-thirds vote by Parliament overrides the presidential veto.

Constitutions are fundamental to the culture of democracy. This is why the process of constitutional amendment starts with a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly thus giving it, ab initio, a status that is higher than the powers of the president.

As we are in a federation, the process is completed by two-thirds of votes cast by legislatures of two-thirds of the states – expressing the powers of the people which reinforces peoples’ power and gives the assent of the state legislatures a status that is higher than and beyond the authority of state governors. State governors are “too small” to sign the votes of over two-thirds of state legislatures and the president is too small to sign the two-thirds majority vote of the National Assembly.

As democratic theory accords great importance to constitutions, its amendment is given a status that is far beyond that of an ordinary act or statute, which is why a constitutional amendment is more than the question of signing a bill into law.

The debate on whether or not a presidential assent is required is coming at a difficult time in which Professor Attahiru Jega and his team at INEC are making Herculean efforts to produce free and fair elections after a long period in which Nigerians have lost their franchise.

All my arguments on the relative supremacy of the powers of the legislature over the executive assume they have been genuinely elected by the people whom they represent. We know however that a good number of them emerged through massive electoral fraud and therefore represent their godfathers not the people.

Our ambition as a nation is to organise credible elections so that genuine representatives of the people can exercise power on our behalf. We must not be distracted from this objective. Having asserted the theory, I conclude by proposing the only way forward in federal democracies: The lawyers should argue out the case in the Supreme Court and the decision that emerges becomes the final truth.

Naomi Campbell is not just a pretty
woman. She has the kind of beauty that arrests attention, regardless of
race, gender or age: luminous and fascinating. So when I chanced on the
relay of her testimony to the Special Court for Sierra Leone on
television, I stopped to watch, expecting to appreciate her beauty.

What
I didn’t expect was to also appreciate her intelligence. But the way
she answered the questions, both from the prosecution and the defence,
showed a woman at the top of her game.

It explained why – in an era where
every workaday clothes horse is described as a ‘supermodel’ – she
remained at the top of a business where you need more than just good
looks to stay ahead for so long.

The
British media were also watching Campbell testify … with their knives
out. That’s another thing I didn’t quite expect. Campbell is certainly
notorious for her temper, but she isn’t the only international
celebrity guilty of public and private meltdowns. Yet ever since her
possible association with a diamond gift from former president of
Liberia Charles Taylor arose, Britain’s media have been in overdrive.

Subpoenas are as common as dust in
legal proceedings. But when one was served on Campbell, the story
became one of her being ‘forced’ to attend and testify, under threat of
imprisonment, as though a particularly harsh and unusual procedure had
to be deployed to drag a guilty and greedy accused person to court. An
ordinary subpoena!

From Campbell’s testimony and extracts
read by Taylor’s lawyer during cross-examination, it’s clear that only
her estranged former agent, Carol White, who apparently admitted two
men bearing the gift of uncut diamonds in the middle of the night, can
even link them to Taylor. Enough studies have been done to show how
different testimony about the same events can be, but despite the
brouhaha about how much contact Campbell had with Taylor, it’s worth
reminding ourselves that in 1997, when she was given the “dirty looking
stones”, the term ‘blood diamonds’ was hardly common currency.

The international NGO, Global Witness,
was among the first to highlight the link between diamonds and
conflict, but that was in 1998 when its report, “A Rough Trade” was
published. By July 2000, this had led the World Diamond Congress to
institute the ‘Kimberly Process’ under which all rough diamonds would
be given certificates of origin.

Again, although Sierra Leone’s civil
war raged from 1991 to 2002, it was not until the same July 2000 that
the UN Security Council held a public hearing on the conflict where the
direct link between the trade in diamonds and the purchase of arms by
the Revolutionary United Front (‘Foday Sankoh’) rebels was highlighted.
The role of Taylor’s Liberian government in supplying arms in exchange
for ‘conflict’ diamonds which it then passed off as originating in
Liberia, was exposed. As a result, the Security Council banned Liberia
from the diamond trade.

While a great deal of opprobrium has
been heaped on Campbell (the message conveyed by the media’s conversion
of her evidence about “dirty looking stones” to “dirty diamonds”
doesn’t even pretend to be subtle), we might also remember that from
her perspective, she was at dinner (not a ‘charity dinner’ as widely
reported) with ‘Saint’ Nelson Mandela, then President of South Africa,
and that Charles Taylor, whom she was meeting for the first time, was
Mandela’s guest.

One may wonder what he was doing there.
By September 1997, Taylor had been President of Liberia for just about
a month, and despite his history as a warlord in Liberia’s vicious
civil war, it had ended with elections that Taylor had won. However
widespread the feeling that his victory was due to the war-weary
Liberian people’s fear that anything other than giving him the
presidency would only mean the continuation of violence, he was now
Mandela’s brother-African President. Perhaps it was hoped that the
Madiba’s civilizing influence, which had worked its magic across South
Africa from Mangosuthu Buthelezi to fearful and suspicious Afrikaners,
might bring Taylor onside in the search for peace in Sierra Leone and
end his support for the rebels.

It’s
unrealistic to castigate Naomi Campbell for not knowing all this. Those
who want to ridicule her claim to have ‘never heard of’ Liberia might
pause to remember the number of times in their travels that they, on
identifying themselves as Nigerian, have been asked about their
interlocutor’s Ugandan friend. Or in what part of Accra is Nigeria?
(Yes!) How many island nations of the Caribbean can we name? Frankly,
the coverage given to Campbell’s testimony by the Western media in
comparison to that given to the trial, and indeed, the war for his role
in which Taylor is on trial (apart, of course, from the ‘fact’ that
Britain ended it) contains the alpha and the omega of why even educated
people who consume it know little or nothing about the rest of the
world.

Campbell may be no saint; but she’s hardly the blood-soaked villainess media hindsight would have us believe either.

The
campaign slogan, ‘a diamond is forever’ is credited to American
copywriter Frances Gerety. It has been rated as the most successful
advertising slogan of the twentieth century. The story is that she was
dog-tired and at the end of her tether with a looming deadline in 1947
to create a new allure for the De Beers product.

Of course the stamp of that concept has become
indelible and even I as a teenager remember the slew of ads over the
decades that grew from that association of diamonds and romance and the
path to a woman’s heart, well, or thereabouts.

Tell her you love her all over again, was the tag line for the anniversary ring, tenth, I think it was.

There was also the eternity ring, which rhymed nicely with the idea of timelessness,

or the trilogy ring, integrating past present and
future that tied in nicely with yet another related concept, that of
undying love, or material value as the case may be.

That idea of forever though was a carefully worked
one tied down by the nuts and bolts of another enduring business
concept – cartels, controlling supply to control price, hello OPEC.

De Beers was founded by Cecil Rhodes to who is
attributed the quotation: “Our only risk is the sudden discovery of new
mines which human nature will work recklessly to the detriment of us
all.” By the time competition came along with the discovery of the
Culinan Mine whose owner refused to join the De Beers cartel the idea
had become a raison d’etre of the industry and Ernest Oppenheimer said
in 1910: “Common sense tells us hat the only way to increase the value
of diamonds is to make them scarce, that is to reduce production…”
Yes life would be drab without gorgeous artifacts to symbolise our
feelings and translate our values into things we can touch taste, wear,
enjoy and derive pleasure and self -affirmation from.

Giving them a price that places them above the
reach of others and establishes a hierarchy of values is all part of
creating that sense of luxury and “set apartness” from a bunch of
stones that may or may not be rare. It is a miracle of marketing that
as society changes has come to mean different things.

Witness the concept of blood diamonds that in the
context of the brutal war in Sierra Leone has come a long and some
might say circuitous way from the gleam it formed in Cecil Rhode’s eye.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

But talk about looking through a glass darkly, the
idea of the precious stone as a symbol of love and fidelity was given a
slightly different perspective by the song Diamonds are a girls best
friend. It was written by Jule Slyne and Leo Robins and made famous by
Marilyn Monroe who sang it in the movie Gentlemen prefer blondes which
was based on the book of the same name by Anita Loos. ‘Men grow cold as
girls grow old’, the lyrics go and the advantage of those sparkly
stones is that their value is always bankable.

Love may die, but those diamonds will go on… And
you can walk way with them being as they are small and amenable to
being secreted away. So even if you have to give up the flat, car and
eventually dump the gucci-pucci-uiton bag, (that equivalent of a car
down payment), as it goes out of fashion, you can always turn the
diamonds into cash. De Beers in 2001 established a joint venture with
Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, luxury brands coming together, a move that
makes complete sense.

Louis Vuitton designed the case to hold another
quality brand, the all gold World Cup that was launched at the recently
concluded World Cup tournament in South Africa.

When they are first dug up from the ground those
million dollar gems do look like dirty stones, but cleaned, smoothed,
buffed, polished and cut they sparkle with a thousand points of light.

Fact is that even a rough diamond, man that is,
can work his way to affording those gifts that when displayed on the
woman he loves, announce to the world the strength of his hand and the
power of his magnetism. The game is the same world over, whether it
comes from the bright red lips of Marilyn Monroe or from Dede with his
flashy SUV in Suru City.

A rock on her finger will inspire comparisons with
a diamond in the rough, and hidden attributes that only she can enjoy;
or not.

What
shall it profit a country if its musicians amass a dozen KORAs and
Grammys, or its banks overrun West Africa and Wall Street, or its
soccer teams monopolise FIFA’s trophies – while its citizens continue
to import light-bulbs and toothpicks from China?

How truly great is
a land whose roads are devoid of locally-made automobiles, because,
like the ghost workers in its civil service and the invisible power
plants that dot its territory, the made-at-home automobile remains a
ghost invention; a sheaf of mildewed sketches filed away in
long-forgotten frustration.

At least twice
since its inception, the NLNG-funded Nigeria Prize for Science has gone
un-awarded because of the low quality of entries. One year the judges
found homemade bottles of wine among the entries.

Yet, every year
thousands of people bag basic and advanced degrees in the technological
sciences in our universities; their diplomas certified by professors
who own two sets of notes – yellowed, dog-eared notes for their
longsuffering students; and PowerPoint 2010 files for their foreign
fellowships and lecture circuits.

We talk
confidently of Vision 20/2020 – taking our place in the world’s top 20
economies by the year 2020 (as a replacement for the ill-fated visions
of the past), and go on to make noise about owning the world’s
second-largest movie industry; failing to realise that India’s status
as an emerging global power depends far less on Bollywood than on
Bangalore. For while culture and the arts certainly have a role to play
in positioning a country in an increasingly contested global economic
space, depending solely on them without making any effort to exploit
our technological capacity will be akin to seeking to win a soccer game
without leaving your own goal area.

Somehow we miss
the fact that what will count the most for our reputation and our
economy will be what we can contribute to the global(ised) production
pool – in brain drain-free human talent, and in tangible, useful,
technological resource.

Philip Emeagwali
explains it in his “Africa must produce or perish” speech: “A $100 bar
of raw iron is worth $200 when forged into drinking cups in Africa,
$65,000 when forged into needles in Asia, $5 million when forged into
watch springs in Europe. How can this be? European intellectual capital
– the collective knowledge of its people – allows a $100 raw iron bar
to command a 50,000-fold increase!”

The Asians are
competing head-to-head with the West in the area of innovative
technology. China is busy creating and exporting new technology. We
depend on them for our power generators, our standing fans, and our
affordable brand-new cars. The Indians have made history with the
cheapest car in the world, the “Nano”built by Tata Motors, an Indian
company that in 2008 acquired from Ford two British icons: the Jaguar
and Land Rover brands. Someday, very soon, the Nano will swarm our
streets and, in the hands of Nigeria’s
‘let-us-buy-now-for-tomorrow-we-may-be-gone’ masses, become the mobile equivalents of ‘I better pass my neighbor’ generators.

The same Indians
are busy establishing their country as the outsourcing capital of the
world, unsettling the Western IT establishment. Brazil is leading the
ethanol revolution and becoming a biofuel superpower – more than half
of its cars now run on ethanol. Iran, Pakistan, Korea -and even Libya –
are (even though controversially) trying their hands at nuclear
technology. Every country that wishes to be taken seriously is busy –
creating, producing, fine-tuning.

We are also busy, but waiting; for the rest to produce so we can consume.

“Relax o
compatriots; Importers’ call obey!” might well be the new opening line
of the Nigerian national anthem. In the long wait for the ports to
discharge their treasures we remember to entertain ourselves: speeches,
slogans, schemes and strategies a-plenty.

Unfortunately we
will not wake up in 2020 to find that we have become a superpower. We
will realise too late that superpowers jettison faith in the false
comforts of rhetoric, and instead stay awake and at work. We will also
realise that superpowers need super-leaders, visionaries who can see
beyond Abuja’s next ‘allocation’.

On May 25, 1961,
John F. Kennedy shared, before a joint session of the United States
Congress, his vision of having the United States put a man on the moon
before the end of the decade. “I believe that this nation should commit
itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a
man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” he said.

Two and half years
later Kennedy was dead. But not his dream. Because, depending on the
country, dreams don’t have to die when dreamers do. Ask Martin Luther
King.

But not Obafemi Awolowo.

A
very interesting drama is being played out in the US state of Arizona
as we speak, and the causes and effects of this drama will reverberate
on a global scale, especially in the coming decades as populations
grow, and resources become scarcer.

You see, Arizona’s
budget deficit for 2009 was $1.7 billion which was one of the largest
in the US. As of June of this year, the unemployment rate is 9.6% and
rising. Governor Jan Brewer’s administration is also the largest
employer by far in the state, the second largest employer in the state
happens to be Wal-Mart with 17,343 employees as at 2008 from a
population of almost 7 million. This paints a pretty bleak picture for
Arizona’s prospects, and the state government has chosen to go down the
well worn path of xenophobia.

Immigration has
always been an issue of contention wherever it rears its head. Indeed,
history is full of cases of a failing government blaming the easiest
targets for its failure, and appealing to the innate xenophobic
sentiments in all human beings to explain away its failures.

After the First
World War, Germany was hit by a major depression. Part of the cause of
this depression were the murderous penalties imposed by the
‘victorious’ allies at the end of the Great War. In Germany of the
time, saving for the future was an exercise in stupidity as the price
of bread for example topped a million marks in soaring rate of
inflation never before or since. People needed someone to turn to, and
only one person appeared to make sense of all the rubbish that was
happening. He said, “blame the Jews, blame the foreign powers, blame
everyone else but us,” and the people listened. In 1933 the man swept
to power, and by the time he was bundled out by a combined effort of
world powers twelve years later, close to 60 million souls had been
shuffled screaming and kicking off the mortal coil.

Throughout
history, leaders have conveniently used the scapegoat of the foreigner
to explain away their inadequacies. The Russian Tsars did it, Napoleon
did it, American leaders were fond of doing it (1891 comes to mind),
Nigerians have done it (within our little ethnic enclaves, and who can
forget the Ghana-must-go fiasco?), and now the Arizonans are toeing the
same line.

However, what
concerns me is the line about Nigerian enclaves. You see, for too long
in this country, we have let the dangerous part of immigration in our
relatively new nation (internal immigration) fester for a long time
with no attempt whatsoever to contain it. I as an example, having been
born and spent a greater part of my life in Edo state, cannot claim to
be a citizen of that state. I have to go a few miles east in order to
exercise one of my major democratic rights, the right to stand for
office and be voted for.

Nigeria would have been a much better country if people we allowed to indigenise in whatever state they chose to settle in.

It is that
indigene-settler dichotomy that has brought us to this precarious
position on which we stand, and we have already seen the manifestations
of this madness in Jos. People who have lived in Jos for close to a
century are still not thought of as coming from there, with the result
being that periodic fights break out over the control of resources
which are getting scarcer and scarcer.

This problem is
only going to get worse in Nigeria over the next decade or two, and we
are already seeing the signs of what will happen in the furthest
regions of northern Nigeria. Look around you in Lagos, and indeed all
over the south of the country. The Fulani herdsmen who used to come
down South only in the dry season are here almost all year round
nowadays. They are not seen by the locals as being one and the same (we
are all from Nigeria), but as foreigners, so periodically, fights break
out and people die.

You see, as a
result of a triple whammy of bad policies by inept politicians and
desertification, the north of Nigeria is gradually shutting down. The
Sahara desert is inexorably moving south in the core northern states.
As is usual, we have no policy in place to check it. Where there might
be a policy, it exists only on paper. Northern Nigeria if this
situation continues will be unable to feed itself in another decade or
two as land is eroded away. Populations will move southward in search
of more habitable climes. That would bring more of them in contact with
those people who they are already fighting in the Jos area, and some
from both sets of people will move even further south to escape the
fighting that must break out.

On going further south, they would meet even more conflict.

Think this is an apocalyptic scenario? Consider that in another
decade we should be knocking on the 300 million population mark…