Afenifere leader, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, has lambasted the
President, Muhammadu Buhari, for saying that Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable.
Adebanjo said that Buhari, who is 78-years-old, ought to
have known that Nigeria’s Independence and terms of unity were negotiated in
the 1950s, but the President was a “small boy at the time, hence his
ignorance.”
The 93-year-old Afenifere leader said this during a live
chat with The PUNCH on Friday while responding to the President’s Independence
Day speech.
Buhari had said that the unity of Nigeria remains
non-negotiable. However, Adebanjo said that in 1953 when the North opposed the
call for Independence and rather advocated ‘Araba’ (secession), Chief Obafemi
Awolowo and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe convinced the northern leadership headed by
Ahmadu Bello, to negotiate the terms of their unity and ultimately their
independence from British rule.
Adebanjo said, “He (Buhari) is talking nonsense. These are
the kinds of things that cause trouble.
“How can the President of a multinational, multilingual and
multi-ethnic society say the unity of Nigeria is non-negotiable? We negotiated
the unity of Nigeria in 1954 before independence.
“The 1960 Constitution was a product of negotiation that
arose from the London constitutional conference.
“Of course, I can’t blame him (Buhari). He was still in
primary school at that time, so, he couldn’t understand. He should go back to
the records.
“Before the constitutional conference, the country was being
run as a unitary government and that was what caused the crisis.
“When we got to that conference, Chief Awolowo re-educated
them that you cannot run the country as a unitary system. It was at that
conference that Nnamdi Azikiwe was converted to federalism and when he returned
from that conference, Azikiwe, at the airport, declared that federalism was
imperative. It was in the Daily Times of 1954.”
The Afenifere leader said that the 1960 Constitution gave
all the regions financial autonomy, such that every region was able to control
its own destiny.
Adebanjo, however, said that after the military coup of 1966
and Nigeria became a unitary state, things began to go downhill.
He, therefore, argued that, for Nigeria to return to the
path of progress, it must embrace restructuring and this could be done by first
doing away with the 1999 Constitution which he said was not based on fairness
but exploitation of the South.
The Afenifere leader also lambasted Vice-President Yemi
Osinbajo and the All Progressives Congress leader, Bola Tinubu, for paying lip
service to restructuring.
Adebanjo said that it was unfortunate that Osinbajo and
Tinubu, who promoted restructuring, are now pretending as if it was not
included in the APC manifesto during the election campaigns in 2015.
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