By Tony Nnadi
16th November 2021
Being a transcript of the NINAS Movement video of the same title as this article, by Mr Tony Nnadi, premiered on July 28, 2021. (Edited for shortness). Tony Nnadi is Secretary-General of the Lower Niger Congress and Co-convener of the NINAS Movement. Please read on:
As the countdown continues in the in last phase of consultations being 120 days taken from April 17 of 2021 in the Constitutional Force Majeure implementation that was deployed and activated on the 16th of December in 2020, questions are coming, and inquiries are coming in torrents from everywhere. People who live across the face of the globe are enquiring about this Constitution that they have come now to realize is the source of everything [disagreeable and unpleasant] that they want to terminate in their lives.
Whether it is the ones asking for the Oduduwa Republic, or the ones asking for the Biafra Republic or the ones singing Restructuring as a song, or the ones agitating for Resource Control in the Niger Delta, they have all come to realize that the first order of business is to break the cage in which they are [all] held, because nothing will change as long as that Constitution that ties everybody’s leg and hand, is in place. And so, the question that has emerged which we are nowhere to answer is: Now that we have all agreed that the Constitution has to go down what exactly do we have to do to take the Constitution down? Because it is from the point we take it down that we can go to other things including the [vital] question of security and insecurity. [Even the matter of] armed self-defence, because what that Constitutional Force Majeure did was to activate self-determination rights at the level that should accommodate the constituent part of it that has to do with [the human right to] self-defence. That is the armed self-defence part [if ever confronted by armed attackers], of our right to self-determination. The right to armed self-defence is an integral part of the right to self-determination.
And so, they are asking: What exactly do we need to do to take down this Constitution to activate that right to self-determination at the level of armed self-defence? So, the answer to it is simple. We see that the Constitution is the source of every pain. We see that the life of that Constitution is renewed once every four years by-elections. We know that only political parties contest elections. We know that all the political parties in Nigeria subscribe to that 1999 Constitution – all of them without exception. We, therefore, know that whoever wins in any other elections [coming up], particularly the general elections in 2023 will have to swear to defend, uphold and govern by the 1999 Constitution. So, no matter who wins, no matter how good he may appear [to be] compared with the bad ones before, he will have to swear as a condition for accessing office, as a condition for taking power, as a condition to activate the powers that be vested in him in the period of that governance, he will have to swear to defend and uphold that Constitution. And so knowing all of this does it not present itself in clear terms that we cannot be crying about the killings coming from that Constitution, we cannot be crying about impoverishment ensured by that Constitution, we cannot be crying about the corruption flowing from that Constitution, and at the same time be planning for how to go to renew the life of that Constitution by way of elections in 2023, knowing fully well that it is only by the mechanism of elections that the life of that Constitution is renewed!
So NINAS [Movement] invites us as part of this consultation that is ongoing… to step forward and join the task of shutting down the voyage to 2023, as a strategy and mechanism for ending the fraud of the 1999 Constitution. I repeat NINAS invites you today… to come forward if you are one of those who believe that we should end the unitary union of death and retrieve our right to self-determination, and our sovereignty to work out fresh protocols amongst ourselves in whatever formations we agree to. [Stand with us] if you are one of those who believe that it must be a union of equal partnerships going forward, if you are one of those who believe it must be a union in which our life is held sacrosanct and that all men be treated equally. This address is of course going to the peoples of the New South, [that is] the Alliance in the map you see here, separated [from] the Sharia Caliphate i.e. the Sharia North, and the Alliance [which is] the New South which we call the Alliance Territory.
We invite you today to come forward if you want to end your enslavement and your bondage. We invite you today to come forward to be part of stopping the journey of renewing the life of that 1999 Constitution, which will happen yet again in 2023…
We invite you to come now. The international community to whom we have explained [the situation], including the United Nations (UN) where we have a petition of the Constitutional Force Majeure. NINAS [Movement] opened a petition addressed to the UN Security Council and the US Government and other institutions i.e. European Union, for what we are doing to extricate ourselves from this union of death. So, the global community is waiting for us to confirm that we have rejected this Constitution. You remember that we have by Solemn Assemblies repudiated that document. We have defeated the 1999 Constitution, that is what that Constitutional Force Majeure of 16th December 2020 actually accomplished.
The people who are in torment, the people who are being killed in the Middle Belt, the ones whose oil and gas assets have been seized in the Niger Delta, the ones in Yoruba land who are being killed and chased into IDP camps in the Benin Republic. [Many] do not yet see that that Constitution that brings the enemy that is killing them, that is chasing them around, that is tormenting them, invading them marauding them, they do not yet know that the Constitution is dead. [NINAS Movement is now making them see this reality] because we say the Constitution is dead. But there are people still blowing sirens, sharing the proceeds of three million barrels of crude oil every month in Abuja, sending soldiers in the name of Nigeria to go and kill people in the eastern parts, and generally molesting everybody.
We saw what happened in Lagos, that Yoruba people came out to peacefully demonstrate their support for their self-determination, and they [detained some of them]. So, how do we end this trauma? The answer is simple: let us demonstrate that we have rejected this Constitution by now prevailing on the political parties to [even if temporarily,] shut down, i.e. to close shop, because all they are doing no matter the colour of their party whether it is PDP, or APC or APGA, or Youth Party [they are all renewing the life of that illegitimate 1999 Constitution].
Young people, I want you to listen carefully, particularly the ones who championed the End SARS protests. This address is particularly for you because it is your future that has been mortgaged under that Constitution, that we are discussing. It is your future that has been sold by those who know the truth but yet swear to defend and uphold this Constitution every four years, who are again inviting you to elections. They are inviting you to come and take your PVC. That PVC is plastic, and elections we have seen in Nigeria are dependent on a metal called AK-47. They give you PVC, inviting you to a battle of AK-47! That is what you see on elections day – they are just deceiving you.
It is the Caliphate who imposed that Constitution, that is now struggling, knowing that the rest of us have pulled back our signature that they implanted falsely on the Constitution that they imputed to us, as the authors of our damnation. The Caliphate knows that their British sponsors know that, so they are struggling to save this Constitution from being decommissioned, from being defeated openly, and from being taken down, so therefore they are inviting you to elections in 2023. The choice you have to make is whether you want to go to renew the life of this Constitution further, or whether you want to join those who have taken the trouble through the last 21 years to bring the matter to where this Constitution is taken down.
If you want to be part of that so that you can understand… this is the action to which you have been invited – to reject this unitary Nigeria’s union of death. But if we say that it must end now, and we declare our Republic we are likely to get into what happened with eastern Nigeria in 1967.
We do not have the jet fighters at the moment, we do not have all the missiles required or the warships that may be required. So, we said this Constitution that is the basis of this [warped] union is something that has our signature, and so can we organize ourselves to where we actually say to the whole world that we did not make it, and insist on it? That is because it is a forgery! It is taking its life from that falsehood, i.e. that we made it when we know that we did not. They said, “we the people solemnly resolved”, yet we know we never met [over this 1999 Constitution.] They also said we agreed to be a union of indissoluble nature and therefore make and give unto ourselves the following Constitution. Those three big lies that are contained in that “prayer book” in the name of God, is said to be an “indivisible Union” under God! How can a society be lying to itself, and be putting the name of God at the centre of it? Are we still surprised at the calamities and catastrophes visiting Nigeria! That is where they are coming from: we lie to ourselves and we are killing people to sustain that lie. So, we say that Constitution that has our forged signature is something that is within our reach to pull down, by rejecting it, and we have done everything we need to do democratically to reject it.
Those Solemn Assemblies happened in Port Harcourt in 2015, in Ibadan in 2017, and in Makurdi in 2018. Those were the points at which we repudiated the Constitution formally. The twelve contiguous states that imposed Sharia were the first to repudiate [that 1999 Constitution] because Nigeria was supposed to be a secular union, and the Constitution as bad as it is, in section 10 says there shall be no state religion, so neither federal or state.
Those twelve states knowing of that provision that makes Nigeria a secular state, in pulling out to impose Sharia, seceded from our secular union. But [NINAS Movement] has no problem with that for they have exercised their own right to self-determination. The rest of us who are the New South, the Alliance territory that includes the Middle Belt who are mostly Christians have now stepped into our own right to self-determination by the action of December 16 2020, and so in rejecting this unitary union we have repudiated this Constitution. We now come to the Constitutional Force Majeure in saying that no further national elections will be tolerated in the Alliance territory under this [unitary] Constitution and the three [Blocs which are] all of us the Lower Niger, the southwestern Yoruba, and the Middle Belt, are now poised together to take down this 1999 Constitution.
Our own people who want to be president… we ask them under which Constitution and under what arrangement would that president govern? Was Obasanjo not president or Jonathan not the president: how did they fare? How much more now that everything has been seized from us, and whoever is going to become that president will be the nominee of the Caliphate north…
What we have ongoing for which reason we are making this broadcast, is, that having defeated this Constitution, the Caliphate Sharia belt that is driving a conquest mission, is eager to find a way to deceive us into going towards 2023 elections so that they can have enough time left under their watch to carry on with their conquest mission. That is what is going on. If we are foolish enough, if we are stupid enough to go with them in that journey to nowhere by saying: it is the turn of the south to be president under this Constitution, then we are only saving this union of death for them to complete their conquest mission. So, we invite us to look directly at the political parties operating in the Alliance territory, all of them, since they are all complicit in subscribing to this [illegitimate] Constitution of death, this toxic Constitution that has erected this union of [disaster]. We now have to confront them. We have to prevail on them by whatever means. They are our cousins, our brothers, our sisters who want to be president and governor and senator in 2023. We must now question them, and ask: by what Constitution are you going to govern that will be different from the 36 states imposed, that will be different from the 68 items on the Exclusive List that make it impossible for us [to develop], that seizes all our assets and puts them in the hands of people who do not wish us well? By what Constitution are you going to govern that will turn off the tap of corruption instituted by this Constitution, in giving the spare keys of the treasury to the heads of executive branch? By what Constitution are you going to govern that will not have this immunity that protects those who are beneficiaries of corruption for all times? By what Constitution are you going to govern that will allow you to upturn the provisions of section 6 subsection 6C by which the government is absolved of obligations towards the citizens in the social contract that the Constitution is supposed to be? By which Constitution are you going to govern that will remove the 33 years of immunity instituted by section 6 subsection 6D of this Constitution, that is all the atrocities by which Nigeria was brought to where it is now, [where perpetrators] were given immunity, the jurisdiction of the court was withdrawn from being able to probe into that immediate past. Whereas [elsewhere] people are still being chased around for their role in the Nazi war crime against the Jews. So, we are saying that all of this is the foundation of the impunity we lament, both that section 6 subsection 6D and section 308 that offers blanket immunity to all of those who are the beneficiaries of the corruption guaranteed by this Constitution. So, everything put together, we should be asking those people from our own communities who want to go and become governor and president under this Constitution: By what Constitution are you going to govern?
Let the young people lead this charge in asking that question. Let the lawyers in the land be confronted wherever they turn up. Let those who are inviting you to go and get your PVC for elections be confronted. Ask them: By what Constitution will the winner govern? If it is this Constitution, then let us stop now, go to transition and rework the basis of the union.
It is when we begin to do that… when we say no to the elections of 2023 that we knock the 1999 Constitution down because it is really the Constitution we are rejecting, so that Constitution goes down. That Constitution guarantees this union of misery, this unitary union. It is not Nigeria as a federation that we are quarrelling with, it is the Nigerian unitary country that was imposed by decree since 1967 that we are rejecting. Everybody has been talking about Restructuring and all kinds of changes to the constitutional arrangements. Their demand is simple, it is that we go back to a union of agreement. And, that agreement is entirely up to us to arrive at by meeting together. It is not by writing one Constitution. We see lawyers who go about drafting Constitutions that will be taken to the National Assembly. No! there are two businesses to be done. The owners of the sovereignties must first sit down and agree on whether they want to associate in terms of being in one political union, especially with the Sharia that has come into the equation in which adherents owe it a duty of faith to kill others as infidels. There is also, the feudalism that reigns supreme in the midst of those adherents of Sharia, since they do not believe that all men are born equal, they tell us to our faces that they are born to rule us… Seeing you as a slave in that feudal mindset that they have, as you ask for democracy you are challenging your master, that is how they look at it. We saw on 18th or 19th of July [2021] a video in which the Caliphate was now projecting Osinbajo whom they have kept in the cooler all the while as vice president, presenting him as the one who has to go and be president, as the anointed for 2023.
The caliphate is struggling very desperately to preserve this Constitution. So, the choice will have to be made by Osinbajo personally at this time whether he will lend himself to that Caliphate to preserve this Constitution by being their candidate for the elections of 2023 which all of us are rejecting. Osinbajo has to make that decision by himself, nobody else will make that decision for him: whether he wants to be on the side of his people who are struggling to take down this Constitution and recover their life, their sovereignty and their future, or he wants to be at the service of the Caliphate that wants to keep this Constitution that exterminates his people, and become the owners of their sovereignty permanently.
So, the voyage to elections 2023 has to be stopped, as that is the strategy for ending the fraud of 1999… If we listen now we can save ourselves the trauma of having to face the AK-47 wielding Fulani herdsmen who are marching towards our space, but who rely entirely on our foolishness, and on our ignorance, for being able to do that, because every day we leave this Constitution standing we are empowering them to come to get us.
