S-East, S-South professionals insist on new constitution before 2015 polls

Disturbed by the do-or-die attitude of politicians towards the 2015 general elections and stunted socio-economic and political development, which they attributed to the 1999 Constitution, South-East and South-South Professionals, SESSP, have called for a new constitution before the next general polls.

Arguing that the country will continue to witness little or no development with the current constitution and warning that the situation will worsen without urgent action, they said they would embark on intense mobilization across the country to get Nigerians to support moves for a people’s constitution.

Speaking in Lagos, the SESSP leaders including Emeka Ugwu-Oju (president), Nuhu Yakubu (vice president), Dagogo Karibi-Whyte (secretary general), Hannibal Uwaifo (legal adviser), Andy Wabali (financial secretary and Gloria Maduka said in a statement: “We truly believe that at the root of Nigeria’s problems is its faulty political structure, as enshrined in the current 1999 constitution, which inadvertently reward mediocrity, and has therefore led us to become lazy, corrupt, unpatriotic, under-developed, poor, insecure, etc. We believe the right constitution will breed the right socio-political economy.”

Their words: A Federation is a union of constitutions and since Nigeria embraced unitary system upon the collapse of its defining constitutions in 1966, the conference should be at the least two stages in which the federating constitutions are distilled in the first instance and then federated in the second stage.

“On proposed 2015 elections, the National conference is to decide an acceptable constitutional arrangement under the current but disputed 1999 Constitution and so elections previously advertised under that constitution may need to be deferred such that the next election will be premised upon the outcome of the National Conference (i.e. the constitutional arrangements emanating from the conference).”

Ugwu-Oju said the matter was now a urgent because of the 2015 election. We are seeing a situation where knowingly or unknowingly, wittingly and unwittingly, many politicians have decided that the 2015 election is what we call Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD.

We have the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and All Progressives Congress, APC, which have declared themselves winners of the election before it is held. We are already mobilizing other professionals  to save the situation.

- Vanguard

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