The President’s single-term bill
 By Mohammed Haruna  Newsdiaryonline  Tue Aug 9,2011

The first time I heard the speculation about the now controversial putative bill of President Goodluck Jonathan to replace the current constitutional two-term limit for the executive arm of government with a single term of six or seven years, I was tempted to dismiss it as idle. With all the problems in the country of so much insecurity, potential labour unrest over minimum wage, lousy infrastructure – you name it – facing the man, I thought the least of his concerns should be any type of tenure.

I was tempted to dismiss the speculation as idle not merely because I thought it was a diversion the president should know he could ill-afford. My temptation was the more difficult to resist because the deal that was supposed to help the president get his bill through the National Assembly could hardly be more narrow-minded and probably futile; in return for getting the bill passed by the legislators, my source said, the Senate president, David Mark, was promised the ruling party’s presidential ticket for the 2015 elections.

The Senate president, I told myself, would have been foolish to believe such a promise if only because of the high expectations by the South-East, not, of course, without a wink from the presidency, that it will be its turn to produce the country’s president in 2015. And anyone who knows Mark knows that they don’t come any smarter than he is even if there’s no telling what the promise of power can do to one’s sense of judgement.

I resisted the temptation to dismiss the President Jonathan’s single term bill as idle because my source, a one-man mafia of sorts if ever there was one, has never been given to idle talk. Even then I could not swallow his story hook, line and sinker. Even for the one-man mafia that my source was, I thought his story needed at least a pinch of salt before it could be nibbled at.

 My agony about how much salt I needed to apply to the story before nibbling at it ended on July 26 when Dr. Reuben Abati, the president’s spokesman, issued a statement that his principal was indeed considering such an executive bill. The possible intrigue, if you may, behind the bill may sound incredulous, but in spite of his overflowing tray the president obviously believed he had enough idle time on his hands to seek a constitutional amendment to the current two-term limit for the president and State governors.

Predictably the proposed bill has come under near-universal attack, largely because most critics think it is former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s thoroughly discredited “Third Term” project all over again.

The bill raises at least two questions, namely, its merit and, of course, whether it is self-serving of the president.

Naturally, the president and his sympathisers and courtiers think it is unfair, if not downright cynical, to accuse the man of self-service for merely proposing such a bill, especially when the man himself has stated categorically that he will not benefit from it.

Even some of the president’s long standing critics think it is unfair to dismiss the bill out of hand as self-serving. Thisday’s editor and well-regarded columnist, Simon Kolawole, for one, says, albeit with a rider, that it is wrong to dismiss the bill out of hand purely on grounds of suspicions that the president wants to use it to elongate his tenure. “I honestly cannot see the link between third term and single term, but this is Nigeria. Anything can happen.” (Thisday, July 31).

For someone who says he believes in Nigeria anything can happen I am surprised that Kolawole would not only criticize critics of the bill as being unfair. I am even more surprised that he would dismiss such critics as “incurable” cynics. “I believe,” he said, “it smacks of incurable cynicism to tear a proposal apart before seeing it.”

If Nigerians have become incurable cynics, we all know that it is essentially the leadership that is to blame because it hardly ever means what it says or says what it means. And you need no more than the president’s own flagrant repudiation of his party’s zoning and power rotation agreement only last year to prove the leadership’s culpability of behaving with impunity.

I am sure Kolawole and those like him who think those who disagree with the president over his bill are merely being cynical would agree with me that in a country like Nigeria, where, as Kolawole himself says, anything goes, people are more than justified to be cynical of anything their leaders do or say.

In this particular case there’s even more basis for cynicism. For one, the president’s rather disingenuous attempt at distancing himself from the proposal by claiming the idea was not originally his own once it came under widespread public attack could hardly inspire public faith in his credibility and integrity. For another, the president and his spokesman seem to be at odds on the extent of the president’s consultations before he made his intention public.

The president, according to Thisday (July 29), told a meeting of his party’s National Executive Council in Abuja the day before that he has not done sufficient consultation to knock the bill into the final shape that he will present to the National Assembly. “Before I take any decision,” Thisday quoted him as saying, “I ask people...I have not consulted with governors. I have never. Though as individuals probably I have mentioned it to one or two. Even the leadership of the party and the National Assembly...I have not done that level of consultation.”

However, whereas the president says he has not consulted widely on the bill his spokesman told the Presidential press corps during a subsequent briefing that his principal has. “This,” Dr Abati said, “is not a new issue for us as Nigerians, or in terms of Mr. President talking about this issue, I believe that he has consulted widely.”

Between Dr. Abati and his principal I am inclined to believe the doctor. The president may not have consulted widely but obviously he must’ve believed he had done so enough to have made his intentions public. The man himself says he did so because he heard people were already not only associating rumours about the bill with Obasanjo’s Third Term agenda. People, he said, were also meeting against it. “When,” he said, “we got to know that people were holding meetings, we said no, no, no, clarify this.”

You do not and cannot clarify a proposal that is not in good enough shape and has sufficient content for public contemplation. The devil, as they say, may be in the detail, but if the basic elements were not in place the president would not have asked his spokesman to make it public.

The fact is that the basic elements of the president’s single term bill lack merit. Our four yearly elections, as he said, may have been too expensive and they may have bred too much acrimony. However, there is nothing inherent about these in the current system. Rather the problem is the bad faith of politicians and no amount of constitutional amendment will solve that problem.

As for the argument that four years is not enough to make a difference, you only need to remember General Murtala Mohammed’s six-month military presidency to debunk the argument. Besides if longevity of tenure is enough to make a difference or a condition for making a difference, all those countries of the world with sit tight leaders would have been heavens on earth. But we all know, don’t we, that most of them are hells on earth.

The simple truth is that President Jonathan’s single term bill lacks merit, never mind the cynicism it rightly attracts, and one cannot agree more with Thisday’s editorial of July 31 that the man would occupy himself more usefully as president if he rests it.

The Christian clergy and Islamic banking -By Mohammed Haruna

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