Segun James
Former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Olabode George, has joined the list of prominent Nigeria calling for the restructuring of the country, saying restructuring is the only way to save Nigeria from disintegration.
George in an open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, who was his commander-in-chief while he was in the Nigerian Navy, said he wrote in reaction to Buhari’s recent statement on restructuring, adding that he is writing as a junior to the president while in service.
The PDP chieftain, who said his position was without partisan or ethnic considerations, said: “It will be wrong and even cynical for anyone to pretend that the present Nigerian structure is smooth and without flaws,” adding that” “On the contrary, the skewed structures are provoking the glaring indices of terror and widening chaos in the country.
“From Sokoto to Calabar to Jigawa to Delta to Borno to Rivers, the Nigerian state is sinking deeper into loose banditry and general uncertainties.
“Virtually everyone is vulnerable. There are no safe havens anymore. The present policing architecture is obviously unsuitable to modern threats and challenges. Policing can no longer be centralised. This is one of the cardinal points why restructuring of the Nigerian state is important.”
Continuing, George said in the letter that: “Power has to be loosened at the centre for the survival of this very fragile union. The states must be constitutionally empowered to determine their growth and development. We cannot all be held down by an overarching unitary system which stunts merit and halts individual progress and initiatives.
“Nigeria can only survive when the states can prosecute their individual vision, and explore their God-given resources at their own pace without the intrusion of the central organ.”
He said a nation can only be sustained on the platform of equity and fairness and not when some sections of the society feel fettered and squeezed out of the national equation.
According to him, “The states are suffocated, stifled, hindered and cluttered by inimical constitutional constraints that are savaging to developmental enlightenment. We are a country of nations whose innate diversities should be cultivated as our collective advantages.
“While I will never support a violent dissolution of the country, I am a strong proponent of a very loose, tight and elastic union, where each state can freely assert itself without any overbearing intrusion from an outsider; where the indices of economic advancement are devolved to the states; where policing are enforced as local matters, where natural resources are controlled by state organs, and where the collective wealth of a state are sustained and steered towards the development of each state.”
