The essence of democracy is not merely that leaders are chosen by the people, but that those leaders remain subject to the law once chosen. That is the essence of the John Adams quote which serves as the first part of this UCJ editorial.
This is important for us as University of Ibadan students to consider given certain happenings which have taken place this semester in our beloved union.
These are the unconstitutional endorsement of a NANS candidate by the SU president and the unconstitutional conferment of honorary house membership on Hon Adedeji Stantley, pka Hon Odidiomo, by the SRC speaker.
It is of note that the authority of the Students’ Union President, Speaker and every other principal officer is derived from the Constitution.
Their offices are creatures of that document, their powers are limited by it, and their legitimacy survives only for as long as they remain within the boundaries it establishes.
That is why the recent conduct of principal officers of the University of Ibadan Students’ Union should concern every Uite.
What we have witnessed is not merely an isolated question about protocol, ceremony or administrative style.
Taken together, the unilateral endorsement of a NANS aspirant by the Union President and the controversial conferment of honorary SRC membership on Hon. Adedeji point to something more troubling: a growing willingness among those entrusted with the Union’s institutions to treat constitutional procedure as optional when it becomes inconvenient.
This Editorial looks to bear on our collective consciousness. Beyond the individuals involved, we must consider the broader institutional and constitutional implications of this action.
The Constitution is not decorative
The UI’SU Constitution is not a ceremonial document to be invoked during elections and forgotten after office is won.
It is the instrument that determines who may exercise power, how that power may be exercised and, crucially, where one institution’s authority ends and another’s begins.
The distinction matters.
The Constitution makes the Students’ Representative Council the Union’s representative policy-making body and specifies the categories of persons who constitute it. These include elected Hall representatives, constitutionally prescribed co-opted members and the Presidents of Faculty Students’ Associations (consider Article XVII (2) of the SU constitution)
It does not create a category of honorary members of the House. Yet the Union has recently found itself embroiled in precisely such a controversy.
The distinction is not pedantic.
The Constitution expressly permits the SRC to confer honorary membership of the Union upon a person who satisfies the prescribed condition, but requires a special meeting and a two-thirds majority of members present and voting.
That is the procedure.
If the House wanted to honour an outsider, the Constitution already supplied the lawful mechanism. There was no constitutional vacuum requiring the invention of honorary membership of the House itself.
And this is precisely where institutional discipline matters: an officer cannot create a new constitutional category simply because an existing procedure is inconvenient or it has now become custom to act in illegality.
A House cannot confer powers upon itself
There is an elementary principle of constitutional government that should be obvious even before one opens a law textbook: a constituted body cannot enlarge its own constitutional jurisdiction merely by deciding that it can.
If the Constitution establishes the composition of the House, an officer of that House cannot create another class of members by ceremony.
If the Constitution establishes a procedure for conferring honorary membership, that procedure cannot be replaced by handshakes, photographs and certificates.
This is why the honorary-membership controversy is not really about Hon. Odidiomo. It is about whether the Constitution still means what it says.
If the SRC wishes to honour a distinguished Nigerian, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Indeed, the Constitution expressly permits honorary Union membership.
More broadly, parliamentary practice recognises the legitimacy of legislative bodies conferring honours or commendations on individuals who are not members of the body.
The United States Congress, for instance, confers Congressional Gold Medals in recognition of distinguished contributions, without that honour conferring membership of Congress.
Even the Nigerian Parliament does not recognise “honorary membership” of the National Assembly as a category.
Membership of the House is a constitutional status governed by the Constitution, while persons outside the House may instead be recognised through parliamentary commendations, honours or awards.
The National Assembly itself had even contemplated a Parliamentary Honours/Award System for recognising Nigerians who have achieved extraordinary feats. But then till date, we only have Honourable members, just like in the UI’SRC, and no Honorary members.
Legislative practice demonstrates that honour and substantive membership are distinct concepts.
The power to honour is not, without more, the power to confer membership. Where membership is a constitutional status, the authority to create or confer an honorary form of that status must itself derive from the governing instrument; it cannot be manufactured merely by attaching the adjective “honorary” to an otherwise unauthorised act.
The fact that the person is a politician makes the matter even more deserving of scrutiny. It is precisely in politically sensitive circumstances that institutional safeguards are most valuable.
The President’s endorsement is another warning
The controversy surrounding the Union President’s endorsement of a candidate for the National Association of Nigerian Students election raises an even more straightforward constitutional question.
IndyPress reported that on May 22, 2026, the President issued an “Official Presidential Endorsement” of Alao John for National Financial Secretary of NANS on official Students’ Union letterhead. The report further stated that the SRC Speaker said the House was unaware of the endorsement and that the matter had not been presented to Council for approval.
The Constitution’s language here is unusually clear.
Article XXV(3i) gives the Council the power to approve or reject the candidature of a student representing the Union in an external election. It prescribes a simple-majority vote at a Council meeting following written notification through the Clerk. It then adds an emphatic restriction:
“Without such an approval, no member of the Union shall be allowed to contest to represent the Union.”
This is not a suggestion, it is not a recommendation, it is not a ceremonial provision, it is a constitutional condition.
The President is the head of the Union and the Executive Committee, and unquestionably possesses substantial executive authority. But executive leadership is not constitutional omnipotence.
The Constitution deliberately distributes authority among institutions.
The President cannot transform a power specifically assigned to the Council into a presidential power simply because the President is the Union’s chief executive and wants to promote “students’ welfare”, as he argued during his State of the Union address during the last SRC sitting.
That would render Article XXV(i) meaningless.
Authority is the issue, not the letterhead
We must now come full circle and, in the interest of intellectual honesty, acknowledge something.
There is nothing inherently unconstitutional about the President unilaterally issuing a letter or statement on official Union letterhead. The Constitution does not say that every piece of Union correspondence must bear the General Secretary’s signature.
On this point, we agree with the President’s argument during the emergency sitting. We will not, in the pursuit of a convenient conclusion, manufacture a constitutional prohibition that simply does not exist.
But then the stronger question remains: What authority did the document purport to exercise?
If the President was merely expressing his personal support for a candidate, that is one thing.
If he was communicating an Executive Committee position properly authorised within its constitutional competence, that is another.
But if the document purported to make the Students’ Union itself endorse a candidate whose candidature had never received the Council approval mandated by Article XXV(i), then the problem is not the stationery.
The problem is that the President’s office has been used to perform an act constitutionally assigned to another organ.
Official letterhead and goodwill cannot manufacture constitutional authority, and the grandeur of an office cannot substitute for a vote that the Constitution expressly requires.
What makes the pattern disturbing
Individually, each episode could be dismissed as an error.
Together, they reveal a worrying governing philosophy: that institutional procedure can be bypassed where the leaders believe the objective is worthwhile.
And that is quite interesting, as in both cases, even as that emergency sitting dragged into midnight, variants of the goodwill argument were offered for why these errors should be dealt with a pat on the back or punished with a slap on the wrist.
That philosophy must be rejected.
Constitutions exist precisely because officeholders will sometimes believe that their preferred outcome is sufficiently desirable to justify circumventing procedure.
The argument always sounds reasonable at first.
The senator is bringing money for the sponsorship of the SRC legislative summit when others would not. The candidate is capable. The event will benefit students. The President is only trying to help.
But constitutional government asks a different question: Who has the authority to make that decision, and what procedure must they follow?
That is the question that protects institutions from becoming personal fiefdoms.
Because if ₦50 million can justify towing greylines and bypassing constitutional procedure today, what prevents ₦100 million from doing so and even more tomorrow?
If a promising NANS candidate can be endorsed without the Council’s approval today, what prevents the President from deciding every external political representative of the Union tomorrow?
And if an outsider can become an “honorary member” of the legislative House contrary to what the constitution allows, then what prevents all subsequent House leadership from continuing the “precedent” of creating honorary legislators whenever it finds them politically useful?
The danger is not necessarily what has happened. The danger is what the precedent permits.
Furthermore, money must never become a constitutional argument. This is the especially uncomfortable dimension to the Hon Odidiomo affair.
We do not need to allege a corrupt bargain to recognise the obvious institutional danger.
A Students’ Union must be capable of accepting legitimate support without allowing financial generosity to purchase institutional recognition. This is not because every donation is corrupt. But because public institutions must avoid even the appearance that institutional honours can be exchanged for financial patronage.
This is particularly important because some SRC members who attended that emergency sitting, and who were arrayed in APC-branded clothing, resorted to arguing that the best way to ‘balance the equation’ is to extend the same honour to the APC candidate, Hon. Aderemi Abasi Oseni, who is contesting Hon. Odidiomo in the 2027 Oyo South Senatorial Election, in return for a similar favour.
This is bigger than Deboye or Rt Hon Oludele
It would be tempting to interpret this editorial merely as an indictment of particular individuals.
That would miss the point.
Today’s officeholders will eventually leave office. Tomorrow’s President and Speaker will inherit whatever precedents today’s administration establishes or continues.
If today’s leadership can bypass the Constitution because it believes it has good intentions, tomorrow’s leadership will inherit the same excuse. That is how constitutional erosion occurs.
Rarely does an institution collapse because someone declares democracy old-fashioned.
More often, it happens incrementally: a procedure is skipped, an authority is assumed, an exception is made, a precedent is defended, and the next administration inherits it.
Eventually, what was once an extraordinary violation becomes “how things are done.”
That is precisely what Uites must refuse to normalise. And the UCJ therefore calls, once again, for constitutional accountability by our dearly beloved union officers.
The Constitution must outlive administrators
There is an irony in the fact that the Union’s historic motto is: “An injustice to one is an injustice to all.”
The principle applies beyond individual students. An injury to the Constitution is an injury to every student whose representation depends upon it.
The Constitution is the one thing that stands between the ordinary student and the arbitrary exercise of institutional power. It is what prevents the President from becoming the Union, the Speaker from becoming the House, and the House leadership from becoming the Constitution.
The current moment therefore demands something more profound than the apology demanded of the president; it demands a reaffirmation of a simple proposition: No principal officer is bigger than the Constitution.
Strong democratic institutions survive generations of leaders because these institutions are supposed to be bigger than their occupants.
If the Constitution says a vote is required, there must be a vote.
Provided the Constitution assigns a power to Council, Council must be the one to exercise it.
When the Constitution creates honorary membership of the Union, that mechanism must not be casually side-stepped into honorary membership of the House.
And if the Constitution is currently inconvenient, the answer is to amend it or, rather, fast-track its amendment while continuing to act within the ambit of what it currently allows.
It is imperative for all to know that the Union does not need leaders who merely know how to wield power. It needs leaders who know where their power starts and ends.
Until that principle is restored, every constitutional safeguard becomes merely decorative, and the UI’SU becomes governed not by law, but by the discretion of whoever happens to currently hold the microphone.
