The communique of a recent meeting attended by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar; Elder statesman, Edwin Clark; Muslim Cleric, Sheik Gumi and representatives of Ohaneze Ndigbo, Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Middle Belt Forum; CAN and several other groups, can be summed up as follows:
‘The existential challenges being faced in Nigeria today are not receiving adequate response. The situation is, therefore, escalating and widening the gap of disunity. If urgent care is not taken , the situation can snowball into full anarchy which may consume everybody.
Nigeria is faced with serious security challenges which may have devastating effects on its collective existence. The high prevalence of insecurity in the country is driven largely by social injustice and a failed economy, both of which are fueling continued agitation by the country’s alienated youth. Hunger and starvation may soon get worse, as continued violence and insecurity make farms unsafe for families whose basic sustenance is dependent on yields from their farms, just as neglect of oil exploration communities, and minorities, will deepen the threat to security and unity. Underdevelopment and isolation cannot remain the strategy or they would want out of Nigeria. National development without a focus on youths and the education sector will be a mirage just as the organized movement of street children, and the disabled, from one part of the country to another will not conduce to security.
A National Reconciliation Conference that will allow fairness, equity and justice, with an immediate consideration of legitimate agitations and a collective effort to de-escalate the conflict and violence across the nation can no longer be ignored.
Concluding, it reads: the 1999 Constitution is oligo-military in nature and does not represent the collective interest of Nigerians. Therefore, a constitutional review process, which will enable peace and social cohesion is necessary and the Government should provide the environment where a new Constitution can be made by representatives of the people and for the people’.
No lover of Nigeria will quarrel with how the present Nigerian condition is captured above and even if some people will ascribe the views of some of those present at the meeting to politics, only those who would rather play the ostrich, and bury their heads in the sand, would dispute their veracity.
On the contrary, what should be a worry is how the President Buhari government, armed with the mandate to rule Nigeria, has been able to turn a blind eye to the one action which could have proved decisive in taming our many demons. I refer here to restructuring which, put in one word, is the entire jeremiads of the elder statesmen who attended the meeting.
Even though at a point, APC was pressured to set up the El Rufai committee on the subject, the party soon forgot everything about its recommendations, instead, preferring the President’s body language. Since then, the party has become something of a tower of Babel with respect to restructuring, with several members saying different things.
Indeed, the President practically washed his hands off restructuring which, by the way, many Nigerians now regard as too little, too late, asking those keen about it to head to the National Assembly. The pity of it all is that President Buhari is not alone in the higher echelons of the party who would rather have restructuring consigned to the dustbin.
Not only does Chief Bisi Akande belong in this group, he very boldly, and honestly, I must say, repeated, almost word for word, in print in his very impressive, tell it all book, MY PARTICIPATIONS, what he told a few of us in Ado- Ekiti, during the governorship election campaign in 2018.
Wrote Chief Akande in My Participations: “APC did not have ‘Restructuring’ in its manifesto for the 2015 elections but promised to support the devolution of power from the centre to the states. While the President (whether Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan or Buhari) has the whole of Nigeria as his constituency, members of the National Assembly that have the powers to amend the Constitution imposed on Nigeria by the military represent constituencies individually from different ethnic nationalities. It is, therefore, mischievous to place the responsibility for effecting ‘Restructuring’ on the APC or its Presidency and not to appreciate that it would require deft negotiations among such members from different ethnic nationalities and constituencies or zonal and religious background before any political party or any ethnic nationality could successfully issue any fiat on the National Assembly to make laws on power devolution or on ‘Restructuring’, whatever it might connote,”
Unfortunately, he did not tell Nigerians why, despite APC ‘s very robust majority in the National Assembly, President Buhari’s towering reputation and despite the fact that ranking Southwest chieftains of the APC were, at a point, known advocates of restructuring, the party still did nothing to make it happen even as you read this.
Back then to our visit to His Excellency in his Suite at the hotel where we were all staying, in Ado – Ekiti.
Four of us – Senator Bunmi Adetunmbi – incidentally the secretary of the El Rufai committee, former Oyo state Deputy Governor, Iyiola Oladokun, Ayo Afolabi,, SW APC secretary and myself – had repeated our previous day’s courtesy call on the leader after we heard some dispiriting news about how the matter of restructuring was tasking the relationship between some of our leaders and those of the Afenifere Renewal Group – I had been an inaugural member of ARG but left , (after confiding in Chairman Wale Oshun) when the only member of my age group (Prof Ropo Sekoni) went back to the United States.
On seeing us, Chief Akande said: ‘e ni ke tun wa ba mi sere’, to which we all said yessir, before I launched into why we had to come back, as I was the spokesperson.
Sir, I said, we have talked at length since we left you yesterday but one issue that has agitated us greatly is how our party has managed to keep sealed lips on restructuring.
Chief did not allow me to go further when, as if he had anticipated the reason for our coming, he said: restructuring, what restructuring?
His Excellency’s reaction completely foreclosed any further discussion as it was needless arguing since all we went to do was to let one of our leaders know how our people were feeling especially with the opposition saying that APC deliberately deceived us in the Southwest where restructuring (Power devolution) was the party’s main attraction.
We were so nonplussed that on our way back, we decided to somehow mountk pressure on our Southwest leaders, and, ipso facto, on the party, to reconsider its lukewarm attitude to restructuring.
My first individual action in that respect was on these pages where it inspired the article: “That June 12 Recognition Would Not Be A Hollow Exercise” – 17 June, 2018. In it, I wrote, inter alia, as follows:
“Beyond the wildest imagination of Nigerians, President Muhammadu Buhari, a general of the Nigerian army who, though retired, still falls within that narcissistic military that guillotined the historic June 12, 1993 election, as well as a redoubtable and leading member of the June 12 – loathing Fulani race, on 6 June, 2018, rose far higher than his 6 foot plus frame, and proclaimed an executive order, recognising both the election, and the winner, Chief MKO Abiola, who was conferred with the highest honour in the land, GCFR, in a bold attempt to put a closure to a very pernicious phase of our country’s history.
Much has been written about June 12, but hardly would the relevance, and coverage of any national event, before or after that of 6 June, 2018, ever reach that crescendo. But lest we get lost in the euphoria of the moment, it is time to let the president understand that, truth be told, rather than that being the closure, it is, indeed, the very beginning of telling truth to ourselves; the starting point of very sincerely, confronting the demons that have been eating us up in this country. The first of these should be the realisation that Nigeria is nowhere near a federation. The question then arises: what is a federation? To answer this million naira question, I will, very respectfully, press my two- time teacher, Professor (Senator) Banji Akintoye, into service. Writing, mutatis mutandis, on the topic: What is restructuring, in his column in The Nation of 6 January, 2018, the world reputed historian, and statesman, who we shall quote at great length, opined: “The basic idea of a federation is that the various distinct parts of a country (especially a country comprising different ethnic nations) should be made a federating unit. Each state should have the constitutional power to manage its unique problems and concerns, to develop its own resources for its people, to manage its own security, and to make its own kind of contributions to the well-being of the whole country. The central government should manage common services -Defence, Foreign relations, the currency, the relations between the states of the country, and general principles like the defence of human rights. That, he wrote, was essentially, the federal arrangement which Nigeria’s founding fathers agreed upon in the 1950s.”
“But, since independence, our leading politicians, and our military leaders have gradually destroyed this structure and replaced it with a structure in which the federal government is the controller of virtually all power and all resources as well as the power to develop all resources, and in which the states have no control over their resources but must depend on federal allocations to exist at all”. ”The federal government is (therefore) over-burdened, controls too much money, has become egregiously inefficient and corrupt, and, is essentially, destroying Nigeria because the states have become impotent, cannot develop their resources, cannot fight poverty in their domains, and cannot make their contributions to the progress and prosperity of Nigeria. The cumulative effect of all these, he concluded, is that Nigeria and Nigerians have become horribly poor, most public facilities (roads, electricity, water installations, public administration, etc.) have degraded, and are not working with the result that most of our youths are unemployed and hopeless. Inter – ethnic relations have degenerated into enmity and hostility. Crimes have made life very unsafe all over Nigeria. So bad have things become that some sections are asking to secede.”
One would have thought that resolving all these logjams should have been APC’s uppermost consideration but in vain have Nigerian waited, all these years since they happily sent off PDP. Fortunately, even without as much as lifting a finger in that direction, President Buhari got re- elected in 2019. However, if he is desirous of leaving behind a worthwhile legacy when he exits in May, 2023, he must now enlist the thoughts and patriotic services of the young Turks in his party, the likes of Governors Kayode Fayemi, El Rufai and Rotimi Akeredolu, all of who are on record as urging his government to urgently restructure Nigeria for peace, security and development.
Credit: Femi Orebe