I wanted to have the nav bar appear at the bottom of my pages in the page footer, much like it does in some other websites in the nuke/weblog universe.
You can see in in include/layout.inc.php that $navigation is calculated in F_drawHeader() and not available in F_drawFooter()
My simple hack was to add $navigation to the globals list for both F_drawHeader() and F_drawFooter()
now you can use $navigation in backend/template/name/footer.tmpl