Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar stirred the hornet nest a few months ago about the need to restructure the country, and the topic has since then been a hot debate in the political space with arguments for and against.
Since then, prominent Nigerians have identified with the call, describing it as a panacea for growth in the country. They opine that a strong centre is the reason for the monumental corruption in the country.
Still basking in the euphoria of restructuring debate, Atiku insisted that restructuring Nigeria is required to enhance national integration and stability.
Atiku said this in a paper he presented at the Late Gen.Usman Katsina Memorial Conference, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Memorial Hall, Murtala Square, Kaduna.
The former vice-president explained that he has been an advocate of restructuring for over a decade because he truly believes it is the key to solving some, if not most of the nation’s problems.
He stressed that Nigeria had struggled to build a nation where the component units would feel a true sense of belonging.
Atiku said, “As a country, we have struggled to live up to this ideal. We have obviously not done enough to realise national integration, and the survival of our democracy is still a work in progress.
“The cost to us has been enormous. We even fought a civil war to forcibly keep the country together.
“Since the various amalgamations that created the entity that we now call Nigeria, different segments of Nigeria’s population have, at different times and sometimes at the same time, expressed feelings of marginalisation, of being short-changed, dominated, oppressed, threatened, or even targeted for elimination.”
He explained that other pressure groups had expressed similar frustrations arising from a sense of exclusion and helplessness, believing that their voices were not being heard or that they were unable to hold those in power to account.
Similarly, General Overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare, recently , told Northern leaders opposing restructuring of the country that they are not following the footsteps of their forefathers.
He made the disclosure at the golden remembrance lecture, entitled: ‘Fajuyi and the Politics of Remembrance,’ organised by the Yoruba Think-Tank for former military governor of the defunct Western Region, Lt. Col Adekunle Fajuyi.
Bakare said the elders of the North, who, today, are opposed to the call to restructure Nigeria have deviated from the ideals of the founding fathers of Northern Nigeria such as the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello and former Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; leaders who were forerunners of Fajuyi in the Nigerian hall of martyrdom.
He said,”The great Nigerian leaders from the North made it clear in the series of constitutional conferences that heralded Nigeria’s independence that true federalism with regional autonomy was the only condition under which they would exist within the Nigerian nation.
“Need we remind those in opposition to restructuring today that one of the main grouses of Nigerians of northern extraction within the army and civil society after the first coup was the abrogation of the federal system by the Aguiyi- Ironsi led government
“This, without doubt, was the main reason the northern leaders and the counter-coupists, who took the lives of Aguiyi-Ironsi and Fajuyi demanded a reversal of the unification decree and a return to the federal system of government.
“Consequently, to oppose restructuring now, 50 years after, is to confirm the words of Aesop that ‘the injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.’
Hitting back at those claims, Senate Leader, Ali Ndume in an interview rejected suggestions that the North is afraid of restructuring.
According to him, “if there is a need to restructure, if there is a need to redefine our existence as a nation, it should be through dialogue”, as he pointed out that Nigeria came together through dialogue. “When the colonial masters wanted to give us independence in 1957, northerners said ‘hold on, we are not ready yet, let us get our house in order”.
“So, the independence was not by force. All I am saying is that whatever we want to do to make changes, it should not be through violence but dialogue. It should not be through threat and all the negative means that we are seeing daily.
“We came together by mutual consent. Why must we separate through violence? It cannot work because we didn’t force ourselves on anybody. And so, I don’t think it is right to use derogatory words on one another.”
The Senate Leader noted that there are some countries that do not have resources and they are surviving, saying in other words, “there is no part of this country that does not have one mineral or another. If the country is divided today, northerners will not die.”
He said the resources everybody is talking about, they didn’t come from anybody. God gave them to us. Nobody made you to be Fulani, Igbo or Yoruba. It is God’s decision to make us what we are.
“If Nigerians want restructuring, I have no problems with that. But it can’t be one part of the country, it must be holistic. Then, there must be a proposal, there must be constitutional amendment, there is referendum to be held before we can be talking of restructuring.
“Recently, Britain exited from the European Union (EU), the people didn’t fight. There was no life lost in the whole drama. Again, I don’t think we should be dwelling too much on oil. The so-called oil is gradually becoming non-fashionable.
Ndume noted that other sources of energy are emerging everyday and time would come when nobody would be talking about oil anymore.
“Meanwhile, find out the quantity of the reserves of oil in the North, you will be shocked at what we have. It is much more than what you can imagine.”
Meanwhile, former military Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, has thrown his weight behind those clamouring for the restructuring of the country, saying there was nothing wrong with restructuring, provided it is done within the “context of one Nigeria”.
Gowon made this comment when the Deputy Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Sen. Shehu Sani, visited him in Abuja last week.
He recalled that Nigeria was restructured under his leadership as military head of state through the creation of 12 states from the regional structure in 1967.
He said” You can restructure within one Nigeria context. I did it in 1967. We created states to stop Eastern Nigeria from seceding,”
“We had to do something to ensure the fear of their secession did not exist – a serious issue of a part of the country wanting to breakaway when we had already lost a part to Cameroun.
“If we had allowed the Eastern Region to go away, the map of Nigeria would have looked funny, it would have been tilted one way.
“So we decided overnight to break the fear through the creation of states. If we had to save the country, that was the only way to do it.
“We also ensured that no state was too big or too small to threaten the unity of the country,” he said.
