A group, calling itself the Nigerian Indigenous Nationalities Alliance for Self-Determination, (NINAS), has said that any election conducted under the ‘defective’ 1999 Constitution will not be acceptable to the majority of Nigerians.
The group, therefore, advised the Federal Government to suspend the 2023 general elections because its winner will swear to govern by that constitution.
The group’s Coordinating Secretary, Tony Nnadi, who stated the group’s position in Lagos, yesterday, insisted the country cannot continue to live under the 1999 Constitution. He described the Nigerian Constitution as “a fraud” and blamed it for mis-governance, insecurity and other challenges facing the country.
Nnadi said instead of dissipating energy on an election that will not bring peace and solve myriads of challenges facing the country, the Government should immediately begin a “time-bound transition process to midwife the emergence of fresh constitutional protocols by a two-stage process in which constituent regional blocs will, at the first stage, distill and ratify their various constitutions by referendums and plebiscites, and in the second stage, negotiate the terms of federating afresh, as may be dictated by the outcomes of the referendum and plebiscites”.
Nnadi, who said the time had come to “end the fraud of 1999 and correct the mischief of 1914”, likened the current situation in Nigeria to the period when South Africa operated an apartheid Constitution. He called on the Government to begin the process of enthroning a true peoples’ Constitution.
The NINAS directed regional blocs to advance processing and ratification of their constitutions and charters in readiness for United Nations-backed self-determination ‘stay or leave’ referendum.
He said on-going efforts by the National Assembly to amend the 1999 Constitution cannot produce the new charter many ethnic groups are clamouring for, because according to him, a new Constitution goes beyond the function of lawmakers.
