Fatherland Group Constitutional Workshop Number 2

The Fatherland Group invites you to our Constitutional Workshop No 2

Topic: Ending Cash and Carry Politics

GENERAL MESSAGE:

Whether you belong to the school of thought that says that the 1999 Constitution is bad or that it is a fraud, the fact remains that we have a problem which will have to be fixed.

There is much truth in the saying: “as you make your bed so you will lie in it”. The problem is that Nigerians have always been lying in a constitutional bed made for them by others. Thus, the 1922 Clifford Constitution, the 1946 Richards Constitution, the 1956 McPherson Constitution, and the 1960 Independence Constitution (but which was really the Lyttleton Constitution), as their names suggest, were all shaped and influenced by British colonial interests. The 1979 Constitution and the 1999 Constitution might as well be named the General Obasanjo and General Abdulsalami Constitutions, because although they claimed to have been made by the people of Nigeria for their governance, they were made by the military regimes and so they reflected the interests and priorities of the military regimes that made them.

After these serial failures at Constitution making for Nigerians, by both the British and the Military, it remains for Nigerians to make a Constitution by themselves for themselves.

This Constitutional Workshop is part of the process by which Nigerians get to determine how they wish to live and be governed.