By any means necessary
By Muhammed Adamu
When the moment comes either the Cortes (Spanish legislature) will submit or we shall make it disappear— Jose Maria Gil Robles’, Spanish politician.
THE right of Nigerians to picket or to occupy the National Assembly may be legitimate, founded either in constitutional or human rights law -or in both. But the right of the people, forcefully to evict members of the National Assembly, or even to shut and to abolish for good that arm of government or any part thereof, is a revolutionary one and it is exercisable by the people without regard to existing laws which, by the way are laws the people themselves had made -or permitted to be made to govern their affairs.
Gradually the capacity of Nigerians to harness their pockets of individual discontent into a hot bowl of collective majoritarian anger is gradually gathering the necessary democratic momentum. For too long we have maintained a reputation only for mouthing revolutionary hogwash. The “right to revolt”, said U.S jurist William Orville Douglas “has sources deep in our history.” But we have a poor history for the demonstration of collective anger against the excesses of our usually wicked political leaders.
Partisan disunity
We are now –like in the case of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt- in the throes of two possible revolutions: “one demanding that we should unite together, love one another and strain every nerve to reach our goal; the other forces us…to disperse and give way to hatred, everyone thinking of himself.” If we could, we should long have been stealthily about town, singing and swinging.
Even in what should, demonstrably, have been a hot bed of partisan disunity, -namely the National Assembly- our lawmakers have managed to forge a unity of mutually-shared fate in the very roguery that binds them. But we are still entrenched in our diverse geo-political and ethno-religious trenches hauling obscenities at each other and still pretending to shout ‘aluta continua’ and ‘we shall overcome’! We should be realistic enough to add ‘or be overcome!’
Preaching law and due process: Those who should be angry and tearing down fences, are the ones who are preaching law and the due process of law. Yet those who steal our patrimony have not the littlest scruple subverting the law. In truth ‘singing’ and ‘swinging’ in a democracy, are not the enemies of law or of the due process of law. Said Jean Paul Marat, the 17th century French revolutionary “It is through violence that one must achieve liberty”; and that sometimes “a temporary despotism of liberty” may be necessary “to crush the despotism of kings.”
In my last week’s piece titled ‘What To Do With Saraki NASS’, I quoted one of America’s former presidents, Abraham Lincoln at his first inaugural where, in underscoring both the ‘constitutional’ and the ‘revolutionary’ rights of the people in a democracy, he announced radically that: “this country, with its institutions, belong to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, OR THEIR REVOLUTIONARY RIGHT TO DISMEMBER OR OVERTHROW IT”. (emphasis mine).
Constitutional provisions abound by which the people, through their elected representatives at the legislature, can remove their presidents either by impeachment or by some other laid down constitutional procedures. Plus the people also have a constitutional right to periodic elections at which they can freely and willfully elect, re-elect or remove their governments. All these and more are democratic ends which are regulated by the Constitution and which can only be legitimated by adhering strictly to the due process stipulated by the Constitution. Thus ‘constitutional powers’ are regulated, limited powers; as are the very ‘rights’ inherent in them, regulated and derogate-able.
But from Lincoln’s inaugural outburst it is clear that there is another species of ‘peoples power’ which is contradistinctive with constitutional power, and which because it is not legitimated by the Constitution, it cannot therefore be in conflict with; -and that is the ‘revolutionary right’ to act even extra-constitutionally in resolving any democratic state of affairs. Lincoln was suggesting –and rightly so- that beside the popular ‘constitutional right’ available to the people, whenever they are dissatisfied with their governments or any part thereof, to amend it, there is also an unwritten species of ‘right’ –namely a ‘revolutionary power’ , equally available to them, whenever they so desire, to overturn the whole damn system or any part of it, and in fact in its place to establish entirely another.
The revolutionary power: The ‘revolutionary power’ of the people in a constitutional democracy cannot answer to the Constitution since it is an unwritten power that ante-dates and is thus superior to the Constitution itself. It is pristine and transcendental. The people did not give to themselves their revolutionary power like they did their Constitution and other laws. The revolutionary power of the people is a natural right deriving from natural law itself. This extra-legal -or should we say ‘extra-constitutional’ power?- is available to the people only when they have been moved to collective anger; and by which time it is strictly their prerogative to remain bound by the constitutional remedies that they gave to themselves, or to repudiate the entire document and to upturn everything that a priori they had willfully and collectively legitimated into existence.
Nor can the Constitution therefore contain the due process by which the revolutionary temperament of the people should be expressed. The people may choose to sing ‘we shall overcome’ or they may choose to go swinging in order to overcome.
It is ultra vires the Constitution to purport to set the terms for the expression of peoples’ revolutionary anger; the same way that scientific man cannot set the terms for the behaviour of destructive natural phenomena (tsunami in my mind). At the peak of its destructive or reformative anger, the revolutionary power of the people in a democracy, like the tsunami, can only be allowed to wear itself out. It is thus equally ultra vires any ‘public opinion’, no matter how enlightened it may be, to seek to regulate the conduct of peoples’ revolutionary anger by citing mere constitutional and statutory laws which essentially are inferior to the revolutionary right of the people –to be angry when moved to anger; and to ‘explode’ when they are ‘ignited’.
A right to anger
It is like the logic of Shylock in Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’, and by which the Jew justifies taking his pound of flesh. He says something to the effect; ‘if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? And if you offend us do we not therefore have recourse to anger?’ The people have a right not only to anger when they are willfully and brazenly offended, but they equally have a right to the demonstration of that anger.
A certain British labour leader was the one who said “The tragedy of the working class is the poverty of their desire; I have no apologies” he said “for inciting the poor to live less Spartan lives”. Said Antonio Maceo, the Cuban soldier-revolutionary “Liberty is won with the edge of the machete: it is not asked for. To beg for rights is the domain of cowards”.
Postscript
BY any means necessary, was Malcolm X’s
rallying call to arm during the Afro-American struggle for civil rights in the deeply racial democracy of the 50s and 60s in the United States. It is as ideologically relevant as Shakespeare’s “ten to one” which he says “is no impeach of valor’. By any means necessary is not encumbered by the rigours of law because “amidst the rumblings of arms” as one of the maxims of law posits, “laws must necessarily silent’ (silent legis inter arma’). Malcolm X did not believe in ‘sit-down action’. He believed that all revolutions are bloody, violent.
All oppressors are the same. They kill in disregard of the law; but they insist that the oppressed must exhaust the rigors of the law. They hate the oppressed, but they preach the virtue of the oppressed ‘loving’ his enemies. Let the oppressed love his enemies, no problem. But let him be alive to do so. By any means necessary, let him be alive.
Re:‘What to with Saraki’s NASS’
+2348062887535:– Wonderful piece of the week. Your pen will not dry in Jesus name. Amen
–Gordon Chika Nnorom, Umukabia
+2348030508667:- “Salaam Mohammed. The legislators behave the way they do because, as you rightly said, ‘they do not feel obligated to respect the will of those who elected them’; and that is because we ACTUALLY did NOT have much say in their being elected”
-Tafida
Online:- “I am foreseeing a situation that the people will do the needful if things should continue to move the way they are going in the National Assembly”
–Nasir Rabiu
Online:- “At which seminar did you deliver this pro-dictatorship paper, Moammed?”
–Bolaji Adebiyi
Online:- “This highly incisive, well researched and articulately presented wake-up call in all intents and purposes is not a campaign for enthronement of dictatorship or disorder. It only seeks to sensitise all Nigerians of good conscience to mobilise for peaceful positive action to check ruinous legislative excesses, impunity, greed and arrogance”
–Balarabe Nazeephy
Online:– “Ultimately, the tipping point will be reached. If, for whatever reasons, good and not-too-good we decidedly rise above principles and elect to swing, perchance we may yet abort what appears to be a rollercoaster to legislative dictatorship. For now, the existence of what could easily pass for balance of terror between the executive and legislative arms is welcome, as it provides ample time for the people to organise and lay in wait for the next bold step, an increasingly inebriated legislature. It’s truly about time for all to get their back off the wall. May the ink in your pen never dry”
–Abdulrazaq Magaji.
Online:– “Good write up, keep it up Sir. Allah ya saka da alkhairi. We are proud of you”
–Mujitaba Ibrahim
Online:- “Keep us posted should you be SERMONED over the weekend. In the meantime, just note that I read the piece more than thrice.”
–Kabir Isa
Re: Buhari’s poor game
+2348066677668:- “My friend, your masterpiece on ‘Buhari’s Poor Game’ is articulate and educative; it is a political and democratic enlightenment of the human mind, of salient points about the democratic process and procedure hitherto forgotten in the Presidency, with its belated suffering and regret! Please let your pen-like sword not pity and shy away from the President’s deficit spending. Thank you. Thank you”
–Rev(Dr.) Lawrence S Okwori, B/S
The post By any means necessary appeared first on Vanguard News.
VÃa Vanguard News http://ift.tt/2qx4ymE
Comments
Post a Comment