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The All Progressives Congress has urged organisers of the planned August 1 nationwide protest to shelve its agitation to have President Bola Tinubu scrap the 1999 Constitution, describing it as a tall order.
The ruling party disclosed this after a closed-door meeting with the Forum of APC State Chairmen to discuss the modalities of the proposed protest at the national secretariat in Abuja on Friday.
In the last two decades, the need to change the Nigerian Constitution has become a hot debate among several state actors and elder statesmen.
On March 18, The PUNCH reported how Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, joined former Commonwealth Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku; former governors, notable diplomats, legal practitioners and other elder statesmen to advocate that Nigeria jettison the 1999 Constitution for lack of legitimacy.
But the ruling party through its National Secretary, Senator Ajibola Basiru, insisted that the renewed agitation to have the President dump the constitution he vowed to protect would amount to a mission impossible.
Basiru’s statement was a response to one of the 15 demands of the organisers of the proposed hunger strike protest.
The protest, scheduled to hold from August 1-15, has generated tension and elicited mixed reactions among Nigerians in the past two weeks.
It also trended for weeks on social media space with hashtags like ‘EndBadGovernance’ and ‘Tinubu Must Go.’
According to the APC national secretary, Tinubu alone doesn’t have the power to dump the 1999 Constitution.
He said, “On an intellectual basis, the meeting of the National Working Committee and the chairman of our party looked at what was put forward as a charter of demands, 15 of them. We looked at it and most of the issues raised there are not matters for protest. That is because they border on the issue of politics and the issue of amendments to the constitution.
“And we took them one by one. First, they said ‘scrap the 1999 Constitution and replace it with a people-made constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria through a sovereign national conference followed by a national referendum. The question is this, who will scrap the 1999 constitution? Is it a president who is elected and sworn to oppose the 1999 constitution? Even the right of a protester to protest is predicated on their rights under the 1999 constitution.
“The constitutional amendments in Nigeria cannot be done by presidential fiat. The president alone cannot sack the 1999 constitution. It requires four-fifths of the members of the National Assembly and two-thirds of the State (House of) Assembly to be able to do so. The first demand is asking of the president what he does not have the power and will to do.”
The APC also frowned at the push to have the Senate sacked, leaving only the House of Representatives to take care of the business of lawmaking.
Basiru stated that even the APC state chairmen could not agree less than that it was a contradiction since what it requires was just an amendment and not a total discarding of the entire constitution.
“Again, they said the Senate should be tossed away and the House of Representatives should be in place and have a part-time endeavour. That would suppose they are no longer talking about scrapping the 1999 Constitution. They are talking about amending the 1999 Constitution because the House of Representatives was established under the 1999 Constitution.
“So, presently there is an ongoing constitutional amendment by the National Assembly. Anybody legitimately interested in cutting costs of governance by sending away the Senate and retaining the lower chamber should prepare the necessary memorandum, and mobilise the National Assembly members as well as the State Assembly so that it can be amended.
“Beyond the general statements discussed, the National Working Committee in the meeting with the State APC Chairmen also got to check what was pushed out by the so-called organisers of the protest. One, we were shocked that the title of the protest is called #EndBadGovernance. It signals that you are not protesting but want to carry out a revolution.
“Revolution is not something you use protests for, and where such occurs, it comes with immense violence. This is not a time when our country will require violence and disruption of the efforts done by the President and the administration. So we want to urge Nigerians to be alive to the fact that the government will not be in a position to sit and allow violence to be meted on hapless citizens of the country,” he stated.
