The All Progressives Congress has cautioned against the planned nationwide protest scheduled for August 1, which demands that President Bola Tinubu discard the 1999 Constitution.
The party considers this demand highly ambitious and difficult to achieve.
According to APC national secretary Senator Ajibola, “On an intellectual basis, the meeting of the National Working Committee and the chairman of our party looked at what was put forward as a charter of demands, 15 of them. We looked at it and most of the issues raised there are not matters for protest. That is because they border on the issue of politics and the issue of amendments to the constitution.”
Senator Ajibola emphasized that President Tinubu alone does not have the power to scrap the 1999 Constitution.
He said, “First, they said ‘scrap the 1999 Constitution and replace it with a people-made constitution for the Federal Republic of Nigeria through a sovereign national conference followed by a national referendum. The question is this, who will scrap the 1999 constitution? Is it a president who is elected and sworn to uphold the 1999 constitution? Even the right of a protester to protest is predicated on their rights under the 1999 constitution.”
The APC’s stance highlights the complexity of amending or replacing the 1999 Constitution, a contentious issue in Nigeria for many years, with input from various stakeholders including state officials, elder statesmen, and legal experts.
