Kingsley Moghalu, presidential
candidate of Young Progressives Party (YPP), says Nigeria is not yet a nation.
Moghalu said this on Monday while
speaking at the sixth annual conference of the Nigerian Political Science
Association (south-east).
The conference held at the
University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), Enugu state.
The former deputy governor of the
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said Nigeria is a nation waiting to be born.
According to him, restructuring
is the best path to the desired “economic transformation” of the country.
“Nigeria is not yet a nation. It
is a country created by our erstwhile colonial master the United Kingdom, made
up of many ethnic nationalities, but a nation waiting to be born. Such a form
of government requires a fundamental overhaul of the 1999 constitution
presently in force to achieve national unity and cohesion as well as the
development of the component parts of the federal state at their own pace,” he
said.
“Nigeria today is called a
‘federal republic’ but in reality is a unitary state. This reality is the
result of military intervention in our polity through the first coup of 1966.
“The case for restructuring,
then, is clearly four-fold.
“The first is the case for
justice and equity. Anyone can make disingenuous arguments, but the current
constitutional structure of Nigeria and concentration of power at the centre in
Abuja favour some parts of the country and disenfranchises others, in particular
those parts of the country from which the natural resources rents support the
current structure.
“It disenfranchises them because
they have no control over these resources (which should not be the case in a
truly federal state), and also because the arrangement places excessive
political power in the hands of whichever groups control power at the centre.
“A perversion of this cardinal
principle has created injustice, which has created disunity. It has led to a
retreat from Nigerian-ness, egged on by these valid resentments at inequity and
injustice, back to primordial identities that make a mockery of our nationhood.
You really do want a nation in which everyone is essentially a happy camper on
the basis of collective interest, not one in which some groups feel they are
held ‘captive’.
“Second, restructuring is
necessary because of the destabilisation that the current conditions have bred.
We can either stabilize Nigeria by restructuring it, or continue to play the
ostrich by insisting that our ‘processes’, not the structure, are the problem.
Low-intensity conflicts will continue in various parts of the country, with the
theatres of conflict shifting to different regions at different times
(south-south, south-east, Middle Belt in the north-central, north-east, and so
on).
“This would be a dereliction of
the federal government’s responsibility to protect the lives and property of
the citizens of Nigeria). A derelict, vastly overstretched and over-centralised
police force will not accomplish this task, nor will siege-style security
governance in which our armed forces are constantly deployed to check-mate
internal dissenters.
“Third, restructuring is
imperative in order to take care of what I call the ‘fundamentals’. We need a
peoples’ constitution. A constitution that was made by military dictators
should not guide a democracy, if such a democracy truly is a government of the
people, for the people, and by the people.
“We need to address the national
question, that of what makes Nigeria’s nationhood and the relationship between
the nearly 400 ethnic nationalities and the Nigerian state. Here I would
recommend that, if we are to achieve real progress, we resolve this conundrum
decisively in favour of Nigerian statehood rather than ethnic nationality, but
at least it must be agreed by the Nigerian people.”
Moghalu said sending an executive
bill to the national assembly is the best way restructuring could be achieved.
“I believe that restructuring is
necessary and inevitable. Some stakeholders may dismiss the prospect because of
a fear of the loss of perceived political advantage,” he said.
“But no one has anything to fear
in an intelligently restructured Nigeria.”
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