Nigerian Constitutional Reviews; Can a Chicken Feather Fly? -By Prince Charles Dickson Ph.D

What is heavier, 200 pounds of bricks or 200 pounds of feathers?

The answer is feathers.

200 pounds of brick is just a bunch of bricks. But if you try to carry 200 pounds of feathers, you also have to carry the weight of what you did to the poor birds…

A man kept a parrot. That parrot also used to talk, one day this man said to the parrot:

“I am going on a long journey, if you need anything from there, tell me…”

The parrot said: “There is a forest of parrots, our gurus live there, our companions live there, go there and give my greetings to the guru parrot and say that a “slave parrot” living in a cage, in slavery, bound in a cage greets your free parrots…”

The merchant reached there and he went and gave this message.

Suddenly there was a sound of fluttering in the forest, one parrot fell, another fell and then the whole parrots in the forest died.

The merchant was very surprised as to what this message was, it was the end of the world and he came back sad.

On his return, the parrot asked: “Did you give my greetings…?”

He said: “It is very sad, I did give your greetings, but your guru died and all the disciples also died…”

He was so shocked to see that his parrot also died after hearing his statement.

The merchant was very surprised and sad.

He picked up the dead parrot and threw it outside.

The parrot immediately regained consciousness and flew away to safety and perched on a tree branch further off.

The Merchant was baffled and asked: “What is this…? What is happening?”

The parrot’s response shocked the merchant!

The parrot calmly replied said: “The point is, unknowingly to you, the message you delivered for me was how to escape from your captivity. I used you to ask my guru of a teacher to tell me how to escape from your cage.

From the way they behaved after hearing your question, which you came back to tell me, the message is: “Die before you die.”

I did just that after listening to you and when I died before I died, you threw me away and thus paved the way for my escape from your cage…”

The riddle opens with deceptive simplicity: what’s heavier, 200 pounds of bricks or 200 pounds of feathers? The answer, we are told, is feathers. Not because of inherent weight, but because of the crushing burden of conscience – the weight of “what you did to the poor birds.” This poignant metaphor hangs heavy over Nigeria’s perennial quest for the perfect constitution. We carry the immense, often unacknowledged, weight of our history, our failures, our unhealed traumas, and our unfulfilled promises, layered upon the legal document meant to govern us. It is this accumulated burden, not the paper itself, that threatens to ground any attempt at constitutional flight.

The allegory of the caged parrot cuts deeper. The “slave parrot,” yearning for freedom, sends a cryptic message through its captor to the free parrots in the forest. The message, delivered unknowingly by the merchant, triggers a mass feigning of death. Upon the merchant’s return, the caged parrot, learning of this response, performs its own convincing demise. Thrown away as worthless, it instantly springs to life and escapes. The secret? “Die before you die.” Liberation required the appearance of annihilation, a complete shedding of the captive form to trick the jailer and seize freedom.

Now, witness Nigeria’s constitutional arena. The Senate embarks on another “comprehensive review” of the 1999 Constitution. Public hearings buzz across zones. Proposals proliferate: state police to combat pervasive insecurity; shifting labour matters to the Concurrent List for state flexibility; granting states control over waterways; creating more states and local governments; and the House of Representatives proposes reserving 10% of legislative seats for women and 5% for Persons with Disabilities. Parallel to this state-sanctioned process, The Patriots, led by the venerable Emeka Anyaoku, prepare their own “emergency National Constitutional Summit,” a gathering of eminent voices seeking a more fundamental dialogue on Nigeria’s future. The machinery of constitutional amendment grinds once more, generating heat, sound, and mountains of position papers.

But we have been here before. We recall the 1979 Constitution, hailed internationally as a model of democratic design, yet collapsing under the weight of political ambition, ethno-regional chauvinism, and military intervention. Was the document flawed, or were its operators fatally flawed? The parrot story whispers the answer: the cage wasn’t just physical bars (the constitution’s text), but the mindset of the captor (the political elite) and the learned helplessness or cunning resistance of the captive (the populace and the system itself). The 1979 Constitution didn’t fail; it was failed by those unwilling to truly live by its spirit, who saw it not as a covenant but as a tool for domination.

The landscape is littered with the carcasses of grand constitutional visions: the abandoned reports of the 1994/95 Constitutional Conference, the 2005 National Political Reform Conference, and the 2014 National Conference. Each represented significant intellectual and consultative effort, proposing radical restructuring, true federalism, resource control, and mechanisms for national cohesion. Yet, like the free parrots in the story who dramatically “died” upon hearing the slave’s message, these reports were met with political death – shelved, ignored, or selectively plundered by successive regimes.

The political establishment recoiled from the profound transformations these reports implied. To implement them would require a form of “dying before dying” – the death of centralized, oil-dependent patronage, the death of winner-takes-all majoritarianism, the death of the suffocating grip of the federal leviathan on states and localities.

So, what of the current flurry of activity? Are the Senate hearings and the proposed amendments akin to the merchant dutifully carrying messages, oblivious to their true meaning? Are they genuine attempts at liberation, or merely rearranging the bars of the cage? Proposals like state police address a critical symptom (insecurity) but ignite fears of governors wielding coercive power as personal militias without deeper systemic safeguards. Creating more local governments often seems less about grassroots development and more about political patronage and access to federal allocations.

Reserving legislative seats for women and PWDs is a positive step towards inclusion, yet 83 additional seats also raise questions about cost, efficacy, and whether it addresses the deeper cultural and systemic barriers these groups face.

The parallel Patriots’ summit highlights a profound unease: that the official process, bound by the very constitution it seeks to amend and controlled by incumbents benefiting from the current structure, is inherently incapable of the radical introspection and restructuring needed. It echoes the opposition’s historical calls for a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) – a gathering truly representative of nationalities and interests, empowered to renegotiate the fundamental terms of Nigeria’s existence, free from the constraints of the status quo. The official process risks being the merchant delivering messages within the existing paradigm; the SNC concept represents the parrot seeking the guru’s code for true escape.

The fundamental question however remains: Is the constitution the problem, or are we? Like the 200 pounds of feathers, the 1999 Constitution carries the unbearable weight of its illegitimate birth (forged by the military), its unitary pretensions in a federal guise (“feeding bottle federalism”), and the decades of cynical manipulation by a self-serving political class. It is a cage constructed from the bars of distrust, inequity, and centralized power. The parrot’s escape teaches us that tinkering with the lock (amending sections) might not suffice if the captor remains vigilant and the captive hasn’t mastered the art of transformative resistance.

For Nigeria’s constitutional feather to fly, it requires more than legal draftsmen. It demands a collective act of profound political and societal metamorphosis – a “dying before dying.” It requires:

The Death of Illusion: Acknowledging that incremental changes within the current flawed structure have consistently failed. True federalism, not cosmetic decentralization, is non-negotiable. The Death of Impunity: Establishing a culture where constitutional provisions, especially regarding accountability, human rights, and fiscal federalism, are enforced ruthlessly, regardless of office or status.

The Death of Exclusion: Creating a process that genuinely incorporates the voices of marginalized groups, regions, and nationalities, not just political elites. The Death of the “Nigerian Factor”: Rejecting the cynicism and corruption that perverts even the noblest constitutional intentions. Building institutions strong enough to resist capture.

The Senate hearings and the various proposals are messages being carried. But will Nigeria’s political gurus – the power elite, the populace, the diverse nationalities – receive them as a call for genuine, transformative liberation, responding with the radical “death” of old ways that precedes rebirth? Or will they remain caged, merely debating the colour of the bars while the fundamental structure of captivity remains unaltered? The weight of the feathers – our history, our choices, our burdens – is immense. Only a collective, courageous act of constitutional and spiritual “dying before dying” can lift it and finally allow the Nigerian parrot to soar. Until then, the feather may twitch, it may rustle, but true flight remains a tantalizing, elusive dream—May Nigeria win!

—

Prince Charles Dickson PhD
Team Lead
The Tattaaunawa Roundtable Initiative (TRICentre)

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