11th December, 2013
Nigeria came into being through the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates by Sir Frederick Lord Lugard in 1914.
And, for many years, we have blamed the colonialists for our continuing failure to metamorphose into a nation. No other group has condemned the country’s retrogression more than the political and economic elite.
To this infinitesimal political careerists and unscrupulous power adventurers, federalism is centralism of the component units and institutions of the state, while Nigerians can be easily manipulated to achieve cheap heroism.
To them, all that is required to set the north against the south, east against the west, Christians against Muslims is to press the combustible buttons of religion, ethnicity, or staging ostensible conferences of ethnic nations, among other devious antics.
Their networks are wide and, so are their collaborators. They include traditional rulers, religious clerics, academics, journalists, lawyers, Bretton Woods institutions, capitalists and liberal democracies. It is usually a conspiracy against the defenceless masses.
Powerless and living in crowded streets, shanties and without security, the lives of the poor contrast sharply with that of their oppressors in government.
When the subterfuge and intrigues among politically competitive interests were rife, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in 2005, set up the National Political Reforms Conference, NPRC. The decisions were jettisoned by the National Assembly over the insidious inclusion of a tenure elongation clause. Several millions of naira, expended on the conference for the tenure elongation plot, infamously dubbed “third term agenda,” were unaccounted for.
President Goodluck Jonathan announced his willingness to convoke a national dialogue and set up an advisory committee headed by a notable Afenifere chieftain, Senator Femi Okunrunmu, to fine-tune modalities for the conference.
No sooner was the majority report of the ad-hoc committee submitted than the familiar ghost in our politicians crept and began to walk.
Like Obasanjo’s failed conference, President Jonathan said the outcome would be subjected to the approval of members of the National Assembly. Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, also advocated a two-year tenure extension for the President and governors to douse tension ahead of 2015.
It is our genuine conviction that what is needed is a conference that will not be teleguided by the Presidency and the National Assembly.
Subjecting the will of millions of Nigerians and the future of those yet unborn to the approval or disapproval of 469 politicians is nothing but President Jonathan’s comedy of errors. The foundation of the Nigerian state must be built on social justice.
The executive and the legislature must know that power derives from the people.