Ibrahim Mantu's infamy

By Levi Obijiofor

What do you do with a decadent senator who received public condemnation in 2006 when he chaired a National Assembly joint committee that recommended a third term for despotic President Olusegun Obasanjo? An appropriate response should be: "chuck him into the scrapheap for discarded items". Ibrahim Mantu, former deputy senate president and the symbol of political brinkmanship, is in the news again for the wrong reasons.

For those who do not know him, Mantu is the former senator from Plateau State who incurred national outrage when the National Assembly committee he chaired recommended that President Olusegun Obasanjo should serve a third term. Rather than reflect the views and sentiments of a majority of Nigerians, Mantu's committee chose in 2006 to listen to secret voices in their heads, what Mantu himself described casually as the "preponderance of opinion". Emboldened at that time by his new-found image on the political stage, Mantu developed a one-track mind that compelled him to overlook what the rest of the nation saw.

It was that outrageous recommendation by Mantu's committee that effectively shredded the man's image and in fact exposed him as an obsequious servant of Obasanjo. Three years on since that plot was squashed on the floor of the National Assembly, Mantu has refused to accept that the actions of his committee and the devious procedures the committee adopted amounted to an indirect instalment of an autocratic president on the Nigerian people.

Presently, the Senate and the House of Representatives are still heavily divided on how to constitute a joint committee to re-start the process of reviewing the Constitution. If Mantu and his committee had done a fair and decent job three years ago, there would be no need now to revisit the vexatious question.

Despite the impact on our national psyche of that disgusting attempt by Mantu's committee to hand a third term to Obasanjo, Mantu has continued to rebuff suggestions that the recommendations of his committee reflected quite simply the secret agenda of Obasanjo and his political servants.

Mantu was confronted by journalists in Lagos last Saturday with allegations that he played a devious role in his capacity as the chairperson of the committee that recommended a third term for Obasanjo. In a somewhat bizarre abdication of his role as chairperson of that National Assembly joint committee, Mantu stunned journalists when he said that responsibility for the tenure extension recommendation should be directed at the chairperson of the sub-committee that examined that aspect of the constitution. How cowardly?

It is only a spineless and dysfunctional committee chairperson who would re-direct his duty to a subordinate when he feels the weight of public anger over the decision of his committee. Here is Mantu's cowardly defence. He said: "We had seven sub-committees. The administration committee chaired by a senator, who is still in the Senate, recommended the inclusion of the Third Term clause."

But herein lies the absurdity of Mantu's hideous excuse. The National Assembly committee on the review of the constitution was chaired by Mantu. To cover various aspects of the constitution within the stipulated time, that committee later broke into different sub-committees. The sub-committees and their officers were subordinate to the main committee. In this context, the sub-committees were required to report back to the main committee. It was this main committee, not individual sub-committees, that approved the final recommendations that were submitted to the National Assembly for further debate and consideration. In essence, the chairperson of the National Assembly joint committee (i.e. Mantu) has more legal authority and therefore must take responsibility for the defects in the recommendations made by his committee.

What I found particularly ridiculous and offensive in Mantu's comments last weekend was his suggestion that the current National Assembly should extract and adopt some of the recommendations made by his (Mantu's) committee three years ago. It would be mindless for the National Assembly joint committee (if and when it is formed) to borrow ideas from Mantu's committee that had long been discredited.

Mantu showed no shame when he told journalists last week: "I believe that if there is a genuine intention and desire to amend the Constitution, all the committee needs to do is to pick up the former report, remove all those unacceptable clauses and adopt the ones that are good for the nation. That way, it will not take them three months to finish."

The problem is that there is nothing good in the corrupted report submitted by Mantu's committee. That committee did not consult widely with the Nigerian public. In fact, Mantu's committee collected the views of a handful of influential politicians and public figures in a few days and configured those views to look like a majority opinion. Essentially, the process adopted by Mantu's committee was tainted. So, logically, the recommendations were inaccurate, unrepresentative, sullied and untrustworthy.

We must keep in mind that when Mantu was given the opportunity to chair the National Assembly committee that reviewed the constitution three years ago, he botched the golden chance and in the process discredited the entire constitution review process. It is strange that Mantu, whose committee rubbished the views of many Nigerians in 2006, is now recommending the adoption of his committee's contemptible recommendations.

Whenever the new National Assembly joint committee on the review of the constitution is constituted, it must be free from political arm-twisting by the Presidency and other interest groups in order for the committee to do a thorough job. In particular, the committee should, in the spirit of representative democracy, canvass the opinions of a wide spectrum of Nigerians prior to making any recommendations about aspects of the 1999 Constitution that need to be reviewed.

Mantu's unsolicited commentary on the review of the constitution has emerged at this time because suddenly everyone - including dumped senators such as Mantu -- wants to remain relevant to current discussions about the appropriate framework for amending the constitution. If anyone is least qualified to counsel the National Assembly on how to proceed, it must be Mantu. The man is worried that history, even before it is fully scripted, has already consigned him to the doghouse reserved for men with a rare form of creeping senility.

Although Mantu created the impression that the contentious third term clause was approved by all committee members, this was far from the truth. As the Punch newspaper reported on March 10, 2006: "At least 26 lawmakers, comprising 12 senators and 14 members of the House of Representatives, voted against the decision to adopt a three-term tenure of four years each for the president and governors."

What really offended the sensibilities of many Nigerians was not just the grubby recommendation made by Mantu's committee for the inclusion in the constitution of a third term for the president, it was also the outrageous manner in which Mantu, in his capacity as chairperson, ruled that only voice vote would be used to resolve such politically sensitive national question. If Mantu has forgotten how he managed his committee in 2006, someone should rouse him from his slumber.

In a grossly misleading statement after the voice vote, Mantu told a bewildered nation that the recommendation for a third term for the president (replace the word "president" with the name "Obasanjo") was the wish of Nigerians. What an exaggeration! The idea that the third term recommendation was the wish of Nigerians could only have emerged from a harebrained politician intent on manipulating the process for the review of the constitution.

Fortunately for the nation, the recommendation for a third term for Obasanjo was overturned by an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly. With that decision, the National Assembly signalled that it would not be associated with Mantu and his committee in pushing forward a recommendation that failed the basic test of representative democracy.

Hassled by relentless questions from journalists about the recommendations of his committee after its sitting in Port Harcourt in 2006, Mantu turned reason upside down when he addressed journalists: "We do not know why you journalists are trying to personalise what we have done. We don't make laws for an individual. We make laws for the nation. We are concerned with what is best for Nigeria. The third term proposal is not necessarily what Ibrahim Mantu wants. It is what Nigerians want."

Mantu got it wrong. He misread and misjudged the degree of public anger over the contemptible decision of his committee to recommend a third term for an overly ambitious and under-performing president.

Robot  # 1 | 03.04.2009 06:13

Ibrahim Mantu's infamy By Levi Obijiofor What do you do with a decadent senator who received public condemnation in 2006 when he chaired a National Assembly joint committee that recommended a third term for despotic President Olusegun Obasanjo? An appropriate response should be: "chuck him into the scrapheap for discarded items". Ibrahim Mantu, former deputy senate president and the symbol of political brinkmanship, is in the news again for the wrong reasons. For those who do not know him, Mantu is the former senator from Plateau State who incurred national outrage when the National Assembly committee he chaired recommended that President Olusegun Obasanjo should serve a third term. Rather than reflect the views and sentiments of a majority of Nigerians, Mantu's committee chose in 2006 to listen to secret voices in their heads, what Mantu himself described casually as the "preponderance of opinion&qu...Read the full article.