By Richard Ikiebe
Public debate about Nigeria’s future has grown increasingly crowded with competing prescriptions. Two of the suggested remedies dominate the discourse: the demand for outright dissolution and the call for a Sovereign National Conference. Both are emotionally and politically potent. Neither is constitutionally valid, logically sustainable, nor practically persuasive. More critically, they distract from the real challenge, and, tellingly, from the people most responsible for the situation: the elite. Nigeria is now under heavy strain because its elites have repeatedly refused to complete the arduous work of negotiating it.
A “Sovereign National Conference” is routinely invoked as though its utterance alone constitutes a solution. Such a conference would stand above the existing constitutional order, carrying authority to redesign the state and impose binding outcomes without reference to any prior legal framework. Nigeria has never convened such a conference in any strict sense. If we must be candid, we have lacked the discipline, the maturity, and the organisational capacity to manage such a process.
What Nigeria has held, at various intervals, are consultative constitutional conferences, the kind that operate within established legal boundaries, generate proposals, and depend entirely on political will for implementation.
It is useful to distinguish between two broad eras of our constitutional engagement. The late colonial period from 1946 to 1960 was concerned with creating and structuring a new state; the post-independence period has been concerned with managing, repairing, and renegotiating it.
The pre-independence years offered a coherent model of elite statecraft: leaders gathered in structured settings to negotiate Nigeria’s future on their own terms. The contrast between what those earlier gatherings achieved and what the post-independence equivalents have largely failed to deliver is, by itself, a damning commentary on the quality of post-independence leadership.
The Ibadan Conference of 1950, for example, established the principle that Nigeria’s political structure would be determined through dialogue among its leaders, not by colonial decree. The London Constitutional Conferences and Lancaster House negotiations built on the foundation of Ibadan, ultimately delivering the Independence Constitution of 1960.
The conferences did not resolve every tension: they could not have. They may have been imperfect by entrenching ethno-regional blocs and deferring minority concerns. However, they shared some defining characteristics. They were conducted seriously; they demanded genuine compromise, and their outcomes were implemented.
Conversely, the post-independence conference records are uneven; they are chronicles of studied evasion and squandered opportunities. In moments of acute national crisis, attempted negotiations were rarely sustained with sufficient discipline or openness.
For instance, the Aburi (Ghana) Accord of 1967 stands as the most sobering illustration. An agreement was reached at the highest levels of leadership, only to unravel within weeks under the weight of bad faith, divergent interpretations, and institutional cowardice. Nigeria descended into a civil war that claimed over a million lives – a direct indictment of what elite negligence costs ordinary Nigerians.
However, in more formally structured settings, Nigeria has demonstrated a capacity to generate workable frameworks when its leaders choose to engage honestly. The Constituent Assembly produced the 1979 Constitution and introduced a presidential system designed to stabilise competitive federalism. But even then, many questions, like the real meaning of federal character, were not fully resolved.
With later experiments, including the Vision 2010 Committee and the 2014 National Conference, Nigeria’s elites demonstrated that they could diagnose problems and reach consensus on solutions. Reports from these national conferences are substantive and remarkably sophisticated. But they also revealed a perennial lack of political will for implementation. Recommendations were produced, volumes ceremonially received, but somehow, momentum was allowed to dissipate.
The pattern of failures has acquired the markings of deliberate choices made repeatedly, by identifiable people in positions of power who benefit from the very disorder the efforts were set up to resolve. Records clearly point to a conclusion that Nigeria suffers from a deficit of political courage among those entrusted to act on the outcomes of dialogue or implement solutions.
In contrast, although America’s Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 had its compromises, the conference was not morally unblemished. But it is often cited because it established a durable habit of structured elite bargaining and, critically, an institutional follow-through. The longevity of the American union rests less on any single document than on a governing elite that accepted accountability for what it agreed.
Crucially, Nigeria’s ruling elite has not accepted accountability in a consistent manner, and when it mattered most. The current national debate must therefore move beyond reductive binaries of breakup versus unity, or sovereignty versus consultation. Our elite must confront the bitter truth that a credible negotiation process requires a defined scope and a binding pathway to implementation. They must understand that convening a national conference and honouring its outcomes are not the same act, and that they must not confuse the theatre of dialogue with its substance.
Eighty years of struggling to build Nigeria have been a long, arduous task. The country cannot be rebuilt by sporadic slogans in broken tongues. The foundation was set through hard negotiations and will only be sustained the same way. This responsibility belongs squarely and without qualification to those who hold power. Nigeria’s elite must return to the table. They must speak candidly across divides, and this time, with full awareness of what evasion has already cost. They must see dialogue and negotiation through.
Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant, Teacher and Chairman, Board of Businessday Newspaper
