Buhari, Nigeria’s Unity is Negotiable

By Adesina Adedipe 

As stated in last week’s column, President Muhammadu Buhari a fortnight ago held a meeting with some leaders from the South – South and promised to deal with all issues in the region once and for all and rebuild the Niger Delta. He had earlier had audience with some Igbo leaders to discuss issues relating to their ethnic group and their South – East homeland. As a result, I want to take his statement last week that Nigeria’s unity is not negotiable to mean that he will not agree with anybody to break up the country and will do all in his power to make it impossible. Not that he will not discuss the country’s problems and find solutions to them and take steps to preserve the nation as an entity.
But I expect that President Buhari should know that if he does not act urgently to promote national unity in meaningful ways, that the country can break up. He should learn from the experience of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Sudan, where people of different ethnic groups and religious persuasions were forcefully brought together as a nation by colonial powers in the 20th century, as was the case with Nigeria in 1914. Today, what used to be the Soviet Union is now fifteen countries, while Yugoslavia has split into seven independent states and each of Czechoslovakia and the Sudan into two. So, if care is not taken Nigeria too can break up.
Fortunately, immediate past President Goodluck Jonathan late in 2014 took steps to ensure that the country remains one when he organized a national conference, known as national confab, to which all the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja sent representatives made up of Christians and Muslims, and people from the major and minority ethnic groups. The delegates came up with decisions which included a return to true federalism, restructuring the country and others that will ensure stability and oneness of the nation and make for rapid development.
If President Buhari therefore wants to end the tension and instability created by Boko Haram insurgency and the actions of the militants in the Niger Delta and South – East and prevent the collapse of the country, it is the report of the national confab that he should go and read. And take steps to implement the confab’s decisions soonest by presenting a bill or bills to the National Assembly, with the input of his own government. There is no need for him to organize a new national conference, which is any case, our present parlous economic and financial situation make unnecessary.
The uprisings in the country since the return to civil rule in 1999, especially in the last seven years, were caused by people’s desire and commitment to have full control of the resources of their states to guarantee better and faster development and adequately take care of their welfare. Which a return to true federalism recommended by the confab guarantees since the states will be entirely in charge of their resources, paying only taxes to the Federal Government. Not the present order in which everything goes to the centre, which gives the states a small per centage of what was derived from their territories.
The traditional rulers in the South and North including the Sultan of Sokoto, the head of the Hausa and Fulani monarchs and the Muslims in the North, after a meeting about two weeks ago called on the President to take a look at the confab’s report. While Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the country’s Vice – President in the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo (May 29, 1999 – May 28, 2007), has come out to support a return to true federalism, and restructuring the country which Yoruba leaders and their people in the South – West have been championing since 1999.
So, the President is only making himself more unpopular by refusing to act on the confab report. As an army officer who retired as a General in 1985 and who came to power on Saturday, December 31, 1983 through a putsch, Buhari surely knows that soldiers carry out a coup when they know a Head of State has become wholly unpopular. And it is instructive that within a year of his administration that there was a rumour three weeks ago that some soldiers were planning to topple him. A reason why he should act fast to remove issues causing people to want to break away.
The SUN