NigeriaOpinionPoliticsThe Strange Case of Nigeria: How Military Decrees Automatically Become Civilian Laws

This essay examines the issue of Past Military Decrees and Constitutions and their continued pernicious effects on Nigeria.

The typical situation of ignominy: A group of armed military officers and their underlings criminally conspire to take over a democratically elected civilian government. The key coup plotters quickly set themselves up as “Supreme Military Council” or “Armed Forces Ruling Council” as the case might be. With their illegal regime in place they then run the nation’s affairs by force of arms – issuing decrees, which everyone must obey. This happened from 1966 to 1999, with two [civilian] interregnums from 1979 to 1983 and from 1993 to 1994.

You would think that the civilian administrations – executive, legislature, judiciary – would immediately upon coming into office quickly repudiate the previous illegal military government and repeal all its military decrees. But in the strange case of the cursed country called Nigeria, the civilians have always promptly converted the decrees of the unelected military dictators into regular parliamentary laws, subjecting them only to occasional half-hearted amendments. What a travesty!

A prime example of this outrage is the Land Use Decree erstwhile military dictator Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo signed in March 1978.

To begin with, the members of the military junta – the Supreme Military Council – were not representative of the people of Nigeria. They were predominantly Northern Nigerian military officers, with a few Southern Nigerian officers who had less power and were in a minority. In the case of the Igbos, which make up at least a quarter of the total Nigerian population, they were usually represented by only a single member, normally a mid-ranking Naval officer – at different times Ndubuisi Kanu, Ebitu Ukiwe, Allison Madueke. Glaringly a token member with no say.

It was outrageous some of the decrees these military regimes passed; and not to forget, the edicts promulgated by state military governors. In the case of the old East Central State, it was the civilian Administrator, former University of Ibadan don Mr. Ukpabi Asika, who was issuing the edicts. Mr. Asika was notable for dropping his first [Roman Catholic] name Anthony perhaps to side with General Yakubu Gowon against the Catholic Church missionaries who had risked their lives to stay on in war-torn Biafra to serve the needs of the battered Igbos.

As Biafran resistance collapsed finally in January 1970, then Col. Obasanjo’s officers and men rounded up all those Irish Catholic priests and took them to Port Harcourt. Here the clergymen and nuns who had run refugee camps in Biafra while continuing to hold regular church services throughout the duration of the war were herded like cattle into the open lorries and taken to the old Port Harcourt Airport (now an Air Force base) and expelled from Nigeria with a warning never to return. General Yakubu Gowon’s administration was angry about the philanthropist role the Catholic and Anglican prelates played in Biafra, which it believed helped to prolong the war.

The Christian missions operated the majority of secondary schools in the old Eastern Region. The question now was: With the expulsion of the missionaries, who would run the schools?

Mr. Asika issued an edict [decree] in 1970 that his government had seized all the secondary schools in the East Central State (today the Southeast Zone) founded and run by the Christian missions. Though Asika’s target was the Catholic and Anglican churches, the edict also applied to the schools founded and run by private individuals – as collateral damage. His government thus nationalized secondary schools such as Trinity High School, Oguta (founded by Chief H. P. Udom, 1947); Okongwu Memorial Grammar School, Nnewi (Barr. C. C. Mojekwu, 1949); Merchants of Light School, Oba (Dr. Enoch Oli, 1949) ; Ernest Gems Grammar School, Akokwa (Dr. Elechukwu Njaka, 1958); Zixton Grammar School, Ozubulu (V. C. Ikeotuonye MP, 1957); Abbot Boys Secondary School and Abott Girls Sec. School, Ihiala (Gilbert E. Okeke, 1955, 1964); Awo-Omamma Comprehensive, Oru East (Dr. Ben Uzoukwu Nzeribe MP, 1959); Emmanuel College, Owerri (Edmund Umez-Eronini, 1947); and it included the Owerri Grammar School, Imerienwe, founded by my father Dr. B. Nnanna Ukegbu MP, 1958.

There are scores more of these private schools than are listed above. There are twenty of such schools in Anambra State alone. Mr. Ukpabi Asika’s government proclaimed it would pay a just and adequate compensation to the owners of the seized schools, but despite staying in office for the next five years failed to do so. The succeeding governments of Mr. Sam Mbakwe and Mr. Jim Nwobodo failed to do so. Mr. Peter Obi failed to do so, either, merely returned the mission schools to the churches; and was followed in the same vein by Mr. Ikedi Ohakim in Imo State. It was the government of Mr. Theodore Orji in Abia State that returned schools to the former proprietors along with the churches.

The physical situation of these schools we are talking about is a monumental disgrace. The buildings are dilapidated, abandoned. I visited my father’s school in 2003 from the USA, and found that it had become a forest, with only about a quarter of the school in use. Bush had overgrown the many school buildings and teacher’s houses. The numerous fields had been turned into grazing reserves for cows. It was shameful to behold. What kind of asinine governments do they have there in Nigeria? My father recounted to me a story told him by Dr. Uzoukwu Nzeribe. Dr. Nzeribe once got an audience with then Imo State Military Governor then Captain Amadi Ikwechegh, and complained that he was horrified by the state of Awo-Omamma Comprehensive which he had founded. Governor Ikwechegh’s response was: “Why do you care? It’s no longer your school.” What craziness!

Never mind that the school was seized, and no compensation was paid. It was these patriotic young Igbo men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and carved out ground from forests and built those schools – from scratch. They along with the Irish priests were the reason the Igbo race achieved that great leap in education from circa 1945 to 1965 that enabled them catch up with the Yorubas, who had been receiving European education since the 1840s.

Sadly, virtually all those education pioneers have died, and their children now have to carry the mantle to get their schools back and to rebuild the education legacy of their fathers. These second-generation educators have to ditch the soft approach used by their fathers in confronting these people in government, realize and show that these government leaders are not gods but servants.

Asika seized these famous mission schools: Christ the King College (CKC), Onitsha; Dennis Memorial Grammar School, Onitsha; Bishop Shanahan College (BSC), Orlu; St. Augustine’s Grammar School, Nkwerre; St. Catherine’s Girls’s Secondary School, Nkwerre; Methodist College, Uzuakoli; Holy Ghost College, Owerri; Owerri Girls Secondary School, Owerri; St. Theresa’s College, Nsukka; College of Immaculate Conception (CIC), Enugu; Queen of the Rosary College (QRC), Onitsha; Ovom Girls Secondary School, Aba; Sacred Heart College, Aba; Immaculate Heart College, Aba; Ngwa High School, Abayi, Aba (Ngwa People/Anglican Church); Santa Crux Secondary School, Olokoro; and Madonna High School, Mbano; among others.

Quickly the virus of school takeovers originated by Mr. Asika spread to Lagos State where the socialist-minded Education Commissioner Mr. Adeniran Ogunsanya under Lagos State Governor Major Mobolaji Johnson also took over schools, beginning the complete ruination of such great colleges as my second alma mater St. Gregory’s College, Ikoyi-Obalende and its sister school Holy Child College; in addition to Methodist Boys High School, Broad Street, Lagos Island; as well as Igbobi College, Yaba; St. Finbarr’s College, Akoka; Maryland Comprehensive; St. Anne’s College, Yaba; Methodist Girls also in Yaba; Baptist Academy, Obanikoro; CMS Grammar School, Bariga; Birch Freeman High School, Surulere; Ahmadiyya College, Agege, Ansar-ud-Deen Grammar School, Surulere; among others. I visited St. Gregory’s College in 2003, to find the place a slum. Thankfully, the Lagos Archdiocese got the school back in 2007 and the Old Boys like so many others around the country helped tremendously to revamp the school.

Military dictator Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo ceded power to civilians in October 1979, and you would have expected that these incoming civilian leaders who turned out to be craven, cowardly, lily-livered, clueless would have thrown into the dustbin these misguided and mischievous decrees and edicts and begun fresh legislative processes to craft new bills and pass new laws. They didn’t.

The country called Nigeria is lucky that such heinous and odious decrees as Major Gen. Muhammadu Buhari’s infamous and abominable Decree No. 2, No. 4 and No. 20, all of 1984 did not make it to the civilian era. Who knows what might have happened? Decree No. 2 banned all dissent and stated that anybody deemed a security risk to the government would be detained without charge for up to 3 months. Decree No. 4 stipulated imprisonment for any journalist [or newspaper editor] who wrote and published any news report that would embarrass any government official regardless of whether the story was accurate or not. Decree No. 20 went further in its bestiality: it stipulated death by firing squad for any drug user or trafficker and backdated its enforcement to cover several years before the date of the promulgation of the decree. Thankfully, some of these decrees were abrogated before the civilians had a chance to convert them into regular law. But it is notable that Decree No. 2 and No. 4 were only repealed in 1998 by Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar.

Similarly, Gen. Buhari defied a 1983 landmark Supreme Court judgment which gave my father Dr. Basil Nnanna Ukegbu leave to operate his Imo Technical University which was being co-sponsored by six leading American universities. He simply banned the school with a stroke of the pen clearly to frustrate the desire of the Igbos to race ahead with their development and get out of the restraints of the questionable “quota system” of admissions into government universities. And Buhari’s lawless action was considered okay by the succeeding civilian governments.

Military Decrees Become Constitutions

The country’s present conundrum has all to do with the “Constitutions” of 1979 and 1999. In each case, a body of distinguished Nigerians were brought together to draft a new constitution for the country and by most measures did a good job. But in each case the unrepresentative coup plotters got to decide what provisions of the draft to accept or reject, and even made their own additions. The so-called constitutions were never taken to a referendum for all Nigerian voters to make the final decision. The “constitutions” were simply imposed on the country by the unelected, unrepresentative coup plotters before they departed. And the cowardly civilians just accepted what was given to them.

That is why today Nigeria is grappling with the issue of unfair and uneven, inequitable distribution of local government areas. It is the reason the country is being torn apart by a diseased federalism and the concomitant insistent cries for Restructuring.

Stretching this further, it is why today the country is burdened with the issue of General Obasanjo’s Land Use Decree of 1978, a hydra-headed monster that spits out such hot flames as resource control, and a growing new angle called Ruga Settlements. Refresh your memory: this was the decree which vested all lands in the country to state military governors – to allocate as they wanted, to any Nigerian of their choice for that person’s self-described economic needs. [The Obasanjo-led military government went further to smuggle this decree into the 1979 “Constitution.”]

One very important thing to note: that 1978 Decree specifically said “state military governors” – not civilian state governors. But the succeeding civilian legislatures just accepted willy-nilly and converted the phrase [state] “military governor” to just “state governor.” This military decree, now law, has caused a lot of injustice and disruptions in the country called Nigeria, and the more controversial aspects of it will keep raising the danger of Nigeria’s implosion. Read this in the context of the madness of the Fulani cattle herders’ armed attacks against native farmers roiling increasing swathes of the Middle Belt and the South.

One significant but little talked about aspect of this malfeasance is the fact that these conversions of military decrees to regular legislative laws might not have happened were it not for the strong support for the practice from Northern legislators in the National Assembly over the years since 1979. Cleary the Northern-dominated military regimes carried out policies, wrote decrees, which unfairly and abnormally favored the North to the serious disadvantage of the South. Prime examples are the creation of new local government areas by military dictators such that Kano State gets to have far more local government areas than the vastly more populated Lagos State; locating certain institutions in the North that have no economic basis being there, for example, the Kaduna Refinery; and creating and operating an uneconomical institution such as the Petroleum Equalization Fund, which subsidizes the cost of transporting gasoline fuel to the North from the South.

Why isn’t the Nigerian government subsidizing the cost of transporting agricultural goods produced in the North for consumption in the South? To be fair and equitable, providing such a subsidy will ensure that produce prices in the North match the prices in the South.

Rotational Presidency and the Constitution

One of the most egregious instances of the practice of turning military decrees into civilian laws is what happened to the 1999 “Constitution.” That so-called constitution practically cemented the style of government in Nigeria as “unitary” as opposed to the misnomer of “federalist.” How else can one describe a constitution which assigns 68 items of government activity to the “Exclusive List [reserved for the federal government], also known as the “Federal Legislative List,” and 12 items for the “Concurrent List [on which both the state and federal governments can act on].”

But equally troubling is what the military government in 1999 did to the draft constitution drawn up by the National Constitutional Conference in 1995 under dictator Gen. Sani Abacha. The government-endorsed draft called for the provision of “rotational presidency” for the first 30 years of the return to civil rule. Each of six geopolitical zones was to take a turn and provide the president of the nation for a single term of five years.

In the original plan of the civilian constitution drafters, each president would have multiple vice presidents. For illustration a president originating from one of the zones in the South would have one vice president from the South and one from the North. If this president from the South were to leave office before the expiration of his or her term, the vice president from the South would take over and complete the term. Instead of taking the Draft and putting it to a referendum, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, head of the Provisional Ruling Council, formed a 25-member panel headed by Justice Niki Tobi to hold debates around the country and overseas on the document and then present the report to the Provisional Ruling Council.

Ultimately the military threw away these reform provisions and basically went back to the 1979 “Constitution” for most of the provisions. If the Abubakar junta had not excised this Rotation provision, there would have been a ready solution when President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua became too sick to continue in office and his Northern supporters would not allow Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to be promoted. There would have been no such constitutional crisis if the military had not amended to their liking the Draft prepared by the civilians in 1995, which came into effect May 29, 1999.

These same Northern politicians who love turning military decrees into civilian laws have for over a decade taken advantage of the Land Use Decree/Act and opposed the passage of the various iterations of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB Bill) because of their belief it favors the South [who own the oil by the way, whose resource it is]. Furthermore, they vociferously demand it should be the North’s turn to take the presidency each time the South has held it for eight years. To rub salt into the wound, some Northern politicians are looking for ways to hold the presidency after General Buhari leaves office.

These Northern politicians conveniently forget that Northern army officers ruled Nigeria for 26 years between 1966 and 1999. And the North continues to this day to reap the rewards that come from their military decrees. From Independence in 1960 to the next presidential election in 2023, a period of 63 years, Northern politicians would have separately led Nigeria for 19 years –in addition to the 26 years of rule by their military brethren.

Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa led Nigeria for 5 years and 3 months, before the Civil War. Alhaji Shehu Shagari was president for 4 years, Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was president for 4 years, and Muhammadu Buhari has been president since 2015 – 5 years and counting to 2023. In other words, out of Nigeria’s 63 years of Independence from Great Britain, the North has ruled Nigeria for 45 years, 70% of the time. Of the other 18 years, the Yorubas [Gen. Obasanjo] have held the power for 11 years; while the Ijaw [Dr. Goodluck Jonathan] have held the office for a full 4 years, while serving out the last two years or so of Yar’Adua’s term. The Igbos [Major General Johnson T. U. Aguiyi-Ironsi], by contrast, have held the power for only six months in all of the 63 years of Nigerian independence, from January to July 1966. You then wonder why there is IPOB.

The days of injustice and oppression are gradually coming to a head in Nigeria. There will come a time when the mounting contradictions of Nigeria will simply overwhelm it. Period. Full stop.

Editor’s note ♦ Article first published on: Feb 29, 2020