BY MAYOWA SAMUEL
Like a recurring decimal, the clamour for the restructuring of Nigeria continues to reverberate across the country at every given occasion. Last week provided yet another opportunity for more of such calls on political leaders in the country to do the needful now and save the country from disintegration.
It was during the 22nd anniversary of Democracy and the 28th of June 12, a presidential election won by the late Chief Moshood Abiola of the defunct Social Democratic Party, but annulled by the then military regime of President Ibrahim Babangida.
In Lagos, national chairman of Afenifere Renewal Group, Olawale Oshun, called on the government to restructure the country to save it from collapse. Oshun, who led protesters from several pan-Yoruba groups at a rally in Anthony Village, by the Beko Ransome-Kuti Park, said it was in the interest of the government to answer the call of the majority of Nigerians to restructure the country because “there is no part of the country that will not benefit from a restructured Nigeria”.
He added that “It is in the interest of our leadership that we find ways of accommodating all nationalities, by making sure there is equity and justice for all nationalities. It is for this reason that we support the Asaba Declaration because the governors are concerned about the interest of their people; they are concerned with insecurity, they are concerned with the potential for famine, which is looming because our farmers have been driven from their farms by terrorists who are not even Nigerians.”
Oshun blamed recent influx of foreigners into the country for the friction among Nigerians. His words: “If it were a question of Nigerians, we’ve always dealt with one another; farmers have always dealt with the herders, they have always cohabited. But, this is much more now. It is much more because we are having a foreign influx which the Federal Government appears incapable of dealing with.
Ironically, the government has the responsibility to stop it.
“The government has two great instruments that it can utilise to kick-start the process of restructuring: the 2014 National Conference Report and the Nasir el-Rufai’s Panel Report on restructuring of the ruling All Progressives Congress. If they had started implementing some of the recommendations, people would have given them the benefit of the doubt”, he said.
“Every Nigerian should be involved just like the same way you have called me now, not every Nigerian would have that opportunity, but they all deserve the opportunity to have a say in determining the future of the country”
Also, former national chairman of the All Progressives Congress, John Odigie-Oyegun, called on President Muhammadu Buhari and the ruling party to urgently address the agitation for restructuring for the survival of Nigeria as a nation.
The former Edo State Governor made the suggestion at the presentation of a book titled: ‘APC’s Litmus Tests’ authored by the Director-General of Progressive Governors Forum, Salihu Lukman, in Abuja.
He said APC under his stewardship as National Chairman foresaw many of the issues which are now subjects of national discourse and constituted the Governor Nasir el-Rufai Committee on True Federalism. The report of the Committee, he said, was “not by any chance a perfect document but it reflects then the thinking and the desires of the Nigerian people.
“Everybody kept quiet after we brought that document out, publicized it, held press conferences over it and most Nigerians were very happy. But once again, we did not make the kind of progress that we could have made and it has become once more, the topical subject in the Nigerian polity.
“Unfortunately, it has gone beyond that. We now have one or two things that did not happen before, people now wanting to disengage from the federation, which did not happen before and that is a warning sign. We must not, as the government of the federation, give the impression that only military governments can fundamentally tamper with the basic structure of this nation.
“We are in charge today, a progressive government, a progressive regime and I think it is proper that we show to the nation that when the people want some degree of change we should be responsive to it, we should address it. Compromises have to be made, there’s no question about that. The report itself is not final. It still has to go through the litmus test of compromises”, he declared.
Dr Wunmi Bewaji, former Minority Leader, House of Representatives and Director, Center for Research in Law and Business re-echoed what Oyegun said.
He told The Point on Wednesday in a telephone discussion that time was running out for restructuring.
“It is almost getting too late now. Of course you can see what is happening. When we had the opportunity, we did not do it. It is like when someone has a problem and refused to solve it, it does not mean that the problem will fly away. So, the problem has festered to the point that restructuring may not even now work”, he said.
Prompted to explain what he meant by “what is happening now” that could make restructuring too late, Bewaji said, “When we started this struggle before 1999, because I was involved when we used to have this meetings in Baba Adesanya house in Apapa, we were talking about true federalism, and some people said oh, what is the meaning of true federalism, from there we moved on to fiscal federal and from there we moved to resource control, this 13 percent thing, we now moved to sovereign national conference, and they said oh, remove the word ‘sovereign’ and we moved to national confab. “And people said this thing is not working, so we moved to restructuring. But we have been playing with it all along. Now, we are at a stage where people are now openly agitating for self determination and independence and what have you.
“I think the time for restructuring is rapidly running out because all this while, in 22 years, we have had two dominant political parties in Nigeria. Now it is no longer the case. We now have a third political party which is far stronger than the existing two political parties. And that is the independent movements, which the people in government will call secessionists. So, we now have that.
“And the beauty of what is going on now is that the entire political class, PDP, APC and the rest smaller political parties put together, are not up to 10 percent of the entire population of Nigeria. But you see the people that are now in the independent movements, they are the grassroots people – the plumbers, mechanics, the teachers, the common man on the street, they are the ones now in the independent movements.
“They are not so much of the learned or educated people. And they are not political contractors that are swayed by whatever is going on in the polity. Of course, people who think they have a lot to lose are now shivering. What you now find is that the mainstream political thought has shifted so much so that the wide acceptance that the independent movements are gaining from town to town, from city to city is such that it is now impossible for the political class to ignore.
“But I think that by and large, at this moment what we need is to have the ongoing constitutional amendment to focus on acknowledgment of what is going on in the street and then put in place a transitional constitutional architecture that would lead to the peaceful resolution of what we have on the ground.
“It is not enough for the members of the political class may be governors or elected people to say oh, we don’t want to go or we want to go. No! Every Nigerian must be given the opportunity to have a say in a free, fair and credible referendum to determine the future of the country.
“It should not be left to the elite, or to the political class. Every Nigerian should be involved just like the same way you have called me now, not every Nigerian would have that opportunity, but they all deserve the opportunity to have a say in determining the future of the country,” Bewaji said.
Unfortunately, the thinking in official circle seems to attach little or no importance to the urgent attention the call for restructuring demands. For the umpteenth time, President Muhammadu Buhari maintained in an interview last week that only the National Assembly can do anything about the subject matter.
As official apathy, lack of political will and total indifference conspire to deny Nigerians any meaningful dialogue and action on the call for restructuring, it seems a golden opportunity is being carelessly allowed to slip out of hand, leaving the country at the mercy of forces that would happily see it fractured. But whether there would be a rethink the next moment by the government, only time can tell.
