Daily Post Nigeria
Published
“The policy of overt and covert exclusion and discrimination beginning with Awolowo’s banking regulations at the end of the Civil War and pursued relentlessly by the Muhammed/ Obasanjo administration has had its day and must now end in the interest of stability and progress.”
“In a famous motion which was disallowed for mysterious reasons by the President of the Nigerian Senate and subsequently published by its author after resigning his Senate seat, Mr. F.J. Ellah has drawn attention to what can only be called the Muhammed- Obasanjo conspiracy by which four states and a considerable interest in a fifth were given to the Yoruba while their Igbo competitors of about equal population got two. This was done in preparation for a new fiscal arrangement in which states would determine what share of Federal allocations went to whom. The gross inequity here must be apparent to anyone who is not blinded by prejudice or self-interest.”
Nigeria is a deeply divided country and a nation that is polarized along ethnic and religious lines. Even though the various ethnic and religious constituents have coexisted for a long time, there is no love lost among them.
Many Nigerians consider ethnicity, and religion before the humanity of their fellow countrymen and women. Nigeria is a nation that is on the edge and prone to ethnoreligious convulsion. The country easily descends into ethnoreligious bloodletting.
The creation of the trans-ethnic and trans-religious entity called Nigeria has not helped matters. Instead, it has complicated the situation. The Nigeria project has not diminished or minimized the divisive impact of these centrifugal currents.
Daily Post Nigeria
Published
President Muhammadu Buhari was once captured on the television receiving some Youths activists who visited him on a solidarity meeting to applaud his administration for supporting the Not –too –young –to run bill which was successfully passed into law and signed by himself, the President.
The President was about that same time campaigning to win a second and final legal tenure as President of the biggest black nation in the World. He was facing one of the fiercest political battles of his life given that the opposition political party- the Peoples Democratic party was actually giving him a fight for his money through the erstwhile Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria- Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who incidentally is another member of the old school in politics.
Fredrick Nwabufo: South-east, South-west, North will be biggest losers if Nigeria breaks up
Published
The idea of having a near-perfect country out of a ruptured Nigeria is illusory. The composite parts of the country each contribute to the miasma of confusion that Nigeria is. No single entity is responsible for Nigeria’s problems. All the ethnic nationalities are equal shareholders in the failing of the Nigerian enterprise. There is enough blame to go around.
Splintering the entity has often been exalted as the remedy to Nigeria’s problems. But this is a defective reasoning because in this instance, Nigeria is defined by its geography and not its people. Nigeria is its people. It is the same people that will occupy the emergent states not angels. There is no paradise anywhere. The problem with Nigeria is a people-problem. Recalibrating the map will not change anything – if the minds of the people do not conform to progressive values.