At the beginning of August 2022, President Muhammadu Buhari constituted a nine-member National Honours Nominations Committee with a four-year tenure.
It is chaired by Alhaji Sidi Muhammad Bage, the senior judge who resigned from Nigeria’s Supreme Court in 2019 to become the Emir of Lafia in Nasarawa State.
After initially repudiating that list, the government’s “authentic” list, when it finally came out, did not much differ from the repudiated one. However, it appears that the government had approved a national honours list at least six months earlier in April 2022 which suffered some last minute tinkering in October.
The first is the legal bases for national honours in Nigeria. Part 1 of the third schedule to the 1999 Constitution empowers the National Council of State to “advise the President in the exercise of his powers with respect to the award of national honours.” In force since October 1963, the National Honours Act confers discretion on the President to “by warrant, make provision for the award of titles of honour, decorations and dignities.
But several previous recipients of Nigeria’s national honours, such as bankers Richard Akingbola and Cecilia Ibru, and former Inspector-General of Police, Tafa Balogun, have kept the awards despite being the subjects of judicial verdicts for criminal malfeasance. To date, no president has made rules for lifting the national honour from those who bring it into disrepute. Like Hotel California, Nigeria’s national honours system seems “programmed to receive…. But you can never leave.
When he chaired the National Honours Nominations Committee at the turn of the millennium, Alhaji Liman Ciroma proposed a set of reforms to make it more credible.
So, Nigeria’s National Honours system is not exactly national and does not seem to much confer honour. Chinua Achebe rejected it in the past. On this occasion in 2022, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie appears to have done so too; and the family of a late Chief of Army Staff is reported to have boycotted it altogether. Buhari only managed to pin it on Gani Fawehinmi long after he had died.