Senator Abba Moro is the Senate Minority Leader. In this interview, he speaks on the call by The Patriots for a new constitution, constitution amendment by the National Assembly and development in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), among other issues. ANAYO EZUGWU writes

The Patriots, a group of eminent Nigerians, is asking for a return to a truly federal system, where regions will have control of their resources, with royalty paid to the centre. What do you make of this demand?

I think that confusion arising from the feelings and opinions of individual politicians has given rise to a lot of permutations. One of it is the clamour in some quarters for a return to regional government. Recall that we had regional government in this country before. Then we moved on and some crisis of some nature precipitated the civil war.

Arising from the civil war was the creation of 12 states to break regional concentration and to put Nigeria on a stable path to nationhood. We moved on from there to some 19 states, 21 states, and to 36 states, plus the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) the 37th state, so to say.

If you’re asking for a return to regionalism at this point in time, to my mind, that is retrogression. It puts us in the mood of a nation in search of nationhood, a nation groping for the pathway to development and growth. And I think that is a path that Nigerians don’t want to take.

Some want to take that path. Some are asking for a totally new constitution. Others want just an alteration. The constitution has been amended five times since 1999 and that’s why probably the Patriots are saying that it was foisted on us by the military. What do you make of the fact it’s been amended five times and we seem to be still having challenges here and there?

First of all, if you’re talking about the military foisting the constitution on Nigeria, you want to ask: What gave rise to military intervention in the first place? We had a constitution.

And it was executed in breach rather than in implementation. And that gave rise to a series of crashes. That gave rise to military intervention and aberration on constitutionalism. And here we are forging a path towards stability. We are not in debt of conferences and recommendations.

You’ll recall that the government of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan had constituted the 2014 Confab and the high point of the recommendations in that confab was power devolution, which will gradually lead to the creation of more states and more development centres.

That beautiful document was not implemented and has not been implemented up to today. We’re having other series of conferences now and the gathering of The Patriots with virtually the same recommendations. If you want to note, the United Kingdom doesn’t have a written constitution and I insist that a written constitution of a country is a life document.

As we move on, certain elements that were ordinarily supposed to be there that are not there, needs to be included and needs to be amended. Some aspects that offend even the basic rights of human beings are there that have to be removed. So, I think that as long as we develop the necessary political will to continue to tinker with the constitution and moving gradually towards a perfect document for this country, is a better pathway than the call for a complete overhaul.

So, I think a point arrives in our lives that we must agree to accept what we have and possibly, like they say, tinker with it to arrive at the perfection that we are looking for.

Where are we in terms of public hearing on amendment of the constitution by the Senate and House of Representatives?

At the moment, the Senate and the House of Representatives have had public hearings at the various zonal centres. What remains to be done now is a centralised conference, where all Nigerians that may have missed out from the zonal hearings will now converge to look at the reports from the various zonal centres with a view to arriving at a very concrete framework that can be imputed in the constitution.

After it goes to the state Houses of Assembly for concurrence it will come to the National Assembly once again for a proper concretization of all the issues, and then it goes to the President for assent.

That is what the constitution provides for and that is because the framers of the constitution anticipate that for any surgical amendment of the constitution, a greater size of the people must be involved.

Some believe that the constitution is not really the problem of this country but implementation of what we have in the constitution. Do you agree with that?

That is the point that I wanted to make. Is it the absence of laws, for instance, that we are where we are because the laws are there. Apart from the constitution, we have a legal framework within which we work in this country.

Yet, we are where we are. I have had reason to say that the problem of this country is the the mindset of the people themselves, the implementers of the constitution.

Today, we are talking about political coalitions, political gatherings, political mix-ups and the rest of them. It goes to demonstrate that we don’t even have faith in ourselves as a community.

How do we reorder or change that paradigm? We have to go back to the basics. Where has our value taken flight to?

I’ve asked this question before. If all of us have been participants in the political process up to this point and a section of the community or the political class identifies themselves as more patriotic and more concerned about the predicaments of the country than the other, that they cannot offer themselves to contribute to an existing structure unless it is a structure manned by them, the confusion will continue.

Look at Ghana, for instance, that celebrated with fanfare years of uninterrupted electricity, and we are witnesses to it but we stay in this place, a country of over 200 million people and we cannot fashion out a design to generate and distribute electricity to serve us even for one full day when smaller countries are celebrating 50 years, not 50 days. I am saying that we are where we are not because of lack of law, but because of the political will to implement the law.

And I am not exonerating myself because I am part of the process and I am part of the leadership that we are talking about. A tree does not make a forest, so why can’t all of us come together and say, let us do it this way.

The PDP National Executive Committee (NEC) has directed the National Working Committee (NWC) to take immediate legal action to recover the seats of all serving members of the national and state assemblies elected on the platform of the party, who defected to other parties. Has that been done?

That is in the process. I was part of the meeting that instructed that legal action should be taken against everybody elected on the platform of PDP that has defected to other political parties.

And that is part of the issues that we just raised now about constitutional amendments that we are proposing amendments to the constitution to the effect that without preconditions, if you were elected on the platform of a political party and you decide midstream to leave that political party, then you lose your seat.

That is going to be part of the amendment that we are clamouring for because the movement from one political party to the other is part of the confusion in our political journey and we cannot continue to allow it that way.

That is, again, essentially because we are not practising a system that is ideologydriven. Very many persons that you find in the political space today are in politics by accident.

But what the law says, correct me if I’m wrong, is that one can leave if there’s a division in the party or some semblance of something wrong…

No, not semblance of something wrong. The constitution is very clear that the only condition under which you as an elected legislator can leave the platform that brought you to the National Assembly, for instance, is if there is a division in the leadership of the party at the national level.

There’s no division in PDP. The problem in PDP is not a division in PDP. A division in a party that could lead one to leave the party and join the other in line with the constitution is where the leadership of the party is divided and there are two parallel leaderships in the party.

If you recall, there was, in the past, NewPDP and PDP. That is division because the NewPDP had all the paraphernalia of the leadership of the party and the other PDP had the old leadership of the party.

So, you can call that division but a semblance of disagreement or conflict amongst members of the party, does not constitute division. That is why I keep insisting that PDP is not divided. There is no division in PDP. There are contending tendencies within party, I agree, but I don’t agree that there is division.

Chairman of PDP Board of Trustees (BoT), Senator Adolphus Wabara says PDP is not dead, which is what you’re saying now but some others are saying PDP is actually struggling for oxygen. Don’t you don’t think so?

I can tell you for free here that the PDP is a very big brand. It may not be as it used to be but there are series of activities have been put in place to bridge the gap that those PDP members who have left PDP for the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and for other political parties have created.

So, by the time we end up with the convention of the party and we have a brand new leadership of the party, I can assure you that those of us still remaining within PDP will galvanize enough strength to be able to give the All Progressives Congress (APC) a run for its money in 2027.