It’s false to say military wrote 1999 constitution — Abdulsalami

A former Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar (retd.), has dismissed as false the long-standing claim that Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution was written by the Military.

He insisted that close to 95 per cent of the document was lifted from the 1979 Constitution, a text drafted by 49 civilian legal experts with no soldiers involved.

Abdulsalami disclosed that the decision to adopt the 1979 Constitution, rather than General Sani Abacha’s unpopular 1995 Draft Constitution, came to him as a welcome relief after a 25-member committee he set up found that Nigerians nationwide, at home and in the diaspora, had overwhelmingly rejected the Abacha-era document.

The revelations are contained in Chapter 23 of Abubakar’s 264-page, 27-chapter autobiography titled ‘Call of Duty,’ obtained by our correspondent on Saturday at the public presentation of the book at the Aso Rock Villa, Abuja.

The presentation was held to mark the former Head of State’s 84th birthday and was attended by President Bola Tinubu, who was represented by Vice President Kashim Shettima as Special Guest of Honour.

Abdulsalami revealed that upon taking office in June 1998, he set up a 25-member Constitution Debate Co-ordinating Committee, chaired by Justice Niki Tobi with Dr Suleiman Kumo as Deputy Chairman, to coordinate a national debate on Abacha’s 1995 Draft Constitution, not to write a fresh one.

He wrote, “At the inauguration of the CDCC on 11 November 1998, I raised several contentious issues in the Draft 1995 Constitution and mandated them to come up with fresh ideas.

“I need to reemphasise here that their job was not to write a new Constitution but to coordinate a debate on the draft. I have heard many critics say the Niki Tobi Committee was set up to write a new Constitution. That is absolutely false.”

He disclosed that the committee received a total of 405 memoranda from ethnic, cultural and regional associations, with the Afenifere/NADECO bloc insisting the 1995 draft was an “Abacha Constitution” that should be discarded entirely, while Nigerians in the United States held a separate forum on the document at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C.

According to Abdulsalami, Justice Tobi’s committee found a national consensus when its findings were submitted.

He quoted Justice Tobi as reporting, “In the light of the memoranda and the oral presentation on the 1995 Draft Constitution, it is clear that Nigerians basically opt for the 1979 Constitution with relevant amendments.

“Putting it in another language, the common denominator in the mouths of Nigerians the world over is the 1979 Constitution with relevant amendments.

“They want it, and they have copiously given their reasons for their choice in the different memoranda and oral presentations. So, we have recommended to the Provisional Ruling Council the adoption of the 1979 Constitution with relevant amendments from the Draft 1995 Constitution.”

Abdulsalami admitted that the idea of simply reverting to the 1979 Constitution had not originally occurred to him, but that the recommendation came as a relief because it offered the fastest route out of a looming political crisis.

“I must confess that this was a welcome relief to me. Adopting the Draft Constitution wholesale would definitely be opposed by the Afenifere/NADECO bloc, which never wanted to have anything to do with Abacha.

“There was the real danger that we could go into another phase of crisis over that. For someone who wanted to get the transition programme done with as quickly as possible, I was quite comfortable with the option of adopting the 1979 Constitution.

“In all honesty, the thoughts of the 1979 Constitution did not initially cross my mind at all. After Tobi’s presentation, I found it attractive. That Constitution was a well-debated document,” he wrote.

He noted that many of the same politicians who later campaigned vigorously against the 1999 Constitution had themselves participated in debating the 1979 Constitution and contested elections under it.

“It is ironic that many of those vociferously campaigning against the 1999 Constitution participated in the debate over the 1979 Constitution and even ran for various elections under it.

They loved the Constitution then but now regard its replica as the worst legal document ever,” Abdulsalami wrote.

Addressing the allegation that the Military authored Nigeria’s current constitution, the former Head of State refuted the claim, saying the document owes its lineage to a Constitutional Drafting Committee set up in 1975 under the General Murtala Muhammed administration.

“It is false to say the Military wrote it. The 1979 Constitution and the Draft 1995 Constitution, both of which the 1999 Constitution borrowed from, were not written by the Military, even if they were produced under military rule.

“They were written by some of the best brains the country had to offer. I need to put this on record because there are many Nigerians who are not aware of the history and keep repeating this distortion,” he wrote.

He disclosed that the CDC had 50 members, chaired by Chief FRA Williams, and that Chief Obafemi Awolowo was nominated to serve but excused himself, believing it would be morally wrong to draft a constitution while also planning to participate in Second Republic politics, a decision that brought the committee’s membership down to 49.

“The CDC studied different Constitutions across the world and produced the draft that was submitted to the military government in 1976.

“By the way, all constitutions are drafted by a group. There is no constitution in the world where each clause is written by ‘the people’.

“Even if a ‘sovereign national conference’ was to produce the ‘perfect constitution’, it would still be drafted by a small group of people, not 200 million people,” he wrote.

Abdulsalami further disclosed that the CDC’s draft was subsequently scrutinised clause by clause by a 230-member Constituent Assembly headed by Justice Udo Udoma, set up under General Olusegun Obasanjo in 1977, of which only 20 members were appointed by the military government, and none of them was a soldier.

“Of the 230 members, only 20 were appointed by the Military Government, and they were neither soldiers nor military officers. Seven members of the CDC were also in the Constituent Assembly.

“The rest were elected based on a representation formula that used population, states and councils as factors,” he wrote.

On the criticism that two military-era decrees were retained in the document, the Land Use Act and the National Youth Service Corps Act, Abdulsalami argued the claim was being used to delegitimise the entire constitution unfairly.

“I would not consider this a disaster that should invalidate the other provisions of the Constitution. People are only trying to force the issue,” he wrote.