NIGERIA’S RIGHT TO LIFE AS AN HOLLOW DECLARATION (2)
Right to life goes with right to keep and bear arms. It is an inalienable right that nature clothed man with to safeguard his life and property. This right is the greatest mark of freedom. The right to life and its protection being a natural right is a cultural thing common to all humanity, Nigeria being no exception; how then did Nigerians lose this inalienable right without any effort to regain the right. Right to life goes with right to keep and bear arms. It is an inalienable right that nature clothed man with to safeguard his life and property. If the Igbo, and by necessary implication other ethnic nationalities in Nigeria with similar culture of self-defence lost this right to the British restructuring of their native legal order and consequent colonial reforms why then did Nigerian nationalists fail to regain this African aboriginal customary legal order thereby entrenching it as the post-colonial constitutional framework. The first casualty to British colonial project was the abolition of the people’s right to keep and bear arms and maintain community militia. For self-preservation and for subjugation, control and rulership of the colony, Britain abolished the constituent ethnic nationalities’ native legal orders with their entrenched inalienable right to arms. And so, the law against unlawful possession of firearms became one of the most obnoxious colonial laws which were strictly enforced. It is pertinent to note that the very first mass movement formed to agitate for independence in Nigeria, the National Council of Nigerian Citizens had in its Freedom Charter of 1947, declared the right to keep and bear arms as one of the fundamental rights and a fortiori, the people’s right to organize and maintain well-regulated militia in every state in Nigeria. The NCNC in that charter had espoused the institution of a common citizenship of Nigerians clothed the right to life and property and to settle and work wherever he wanted. This political organisation and praxis was fuelled and directed by nationalist fervour before tribalism and religious bigotry crept in and destroyed this putative nationalism. This putative nationalism was not helped to take root as its leader; Nnamdi Azikiwe made his infamous compromise with British colonial authority, whereupon these beautiful provisions in NCNC Freedom Charter were watered down, and in some cases entirely removed. The sabotage of this Nigerian nationalism went along with the youth movement called the Zikist Movement that sprang out having been formed by four victims (Abiodun Aloba, Kola Balogun, MCK Ajuluchukwu and Nduka Eze) of British colonial oppression as they were dismissed by their Lebanese proprietor of their newspaper company where they worked as journalists. To help stabilize and strengthen Nigerian nationalism, this youth movement called the Zikist Movement was formed in 1947 and its mission was to bolster the party and be the guardian angel of the NCNC and Nnamdi Azikiwe and constitue formidable fortress and bulwark against British colonial intrigues and neocolonial shenanigans.
What is this argument against the right of the people to keep and bear arms? The argument issues from ancient idea that a community without an organized state is a society inhabiting a state of nature where law and order do not operate so that the rule of might prevails. In that case, the strong and powerful will always ride roughshod over the weak and poor. To obviate this state of nature, it becomes incumbent that the state should be the sole repository of coercive instruments of terror to compel obedience to law and order. In this wise, no individual ought to be allowed to keep and bear arms or use it except on the permission of the state according to law. The state through the instrumentality of the police and armed forces became seised with authority as the sole repository of state’s coercive powers and the instruments of terror with the regulatory power to use it for the control and organisation of the society. The idea of state as the sole repository of coercive instruments of terror had found favour in majority of states to the extent that nearly 200 countries of the world only about ten countries have constitutional provisions allowing their citizens to keep and bear arms. But this power has been whittled/watered down in all but few countries such as the United States, Haiti, Mexico and Guatemala, which we have to acknowledge wrestled with autocracy to free themselves through excruciating revolutionary wars and constitutional processes. The United States due to its peculiar constitutional background designed a constitutional framework that assures it of unfettered freedom as encapsulated in its Declaration of Independence which recognizes eternal truths of equality of all men with inalienable rights protecting life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Its 1787 Constitution recognizes protection of rights under Article 1, section 9 (Habeas Corpus and No Bill of Attainder), Article V guarantees right to life, liberty and property, Article IV, Section 2 and Amendment XIV create United States’ common citizenship with equal rights and privileges in all states, Second Amendment guarantees state militia and right of people to keep and bear arms. The United States’ gun-right has faced challenges when many people, including its presidents have been victims of gun-abuse, yet several efforts to abrogate it have failed. This love of freedom over transient inconvenience of abuse constitutes this right an eternal and unalterable truth. Against USA’s legal order’s generous guarantee of rights to life and liberty is to be compared Nigeria’s1999 Constitution’s fundamental rights where section 33 creates bare right to life and sections 34–44 create other rights but section 45 restricts and derogates from the enjoyment of these rights by ‘reasonable’ statutory actions by government, thereby burdening the courts as the arbiter of ‘reasonableness’ of any law abridging, restricting or derogating from those rights.
The problem of Nigeria is the problem of cultural diversity that the rulers have made irreconcilable so that the Igbo aboriginal democratic and republican ethos cannot be reconciled with the Hausa-Fulani feudal and autocratic principles. So, the Igbo village assembly with each member having equal right with every other member and having the right to bear arms becomes antithetical to his Hausa-Fulani compatriot’s emirate system where the Emir is the commander of the faithful with his organized armed police (dogarai/yandoka) and the prisons. The British colonialist did not help matters as he centralized the country’s security architecture with a unified Nigeria Police which latter military rulers bastardized to a grotesque proportion when it abolished native authority police instead of designing federal constitution to check abuse of police powers in the constituent regions and the local governments.
The security challenges of Nigeria have made it imperative that the constitutional framework of Nigeria must change to make every Nigerian the best judge and determiner of their security and welfare while police must be a community, local and state affairs so that the people will have control over their own security affairs. Compulsory military training as stipulated in section 220 of the 1999 Constitution should be activated to prepare the citizenry on the rudiments of civic duties including knowledge of security matters which helps to demystify the gun thereby culminating in the greater goal of democratizing security infrastructure to curtail current insecurity in Nigeria. Right to life presupposes right to arms and it is legal and democratic.
