Former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar,
has insisted that restructuring Nigeria is required to enhance national
integration and stability.
Atiku said this in a paper he presented
at the Late Gen.Usman Katsina Memorial Conference, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua
Memorial Hall, Murtala Square, Kaduna, on Saturday.
He spoke on the theme of the conference, “The Challenges of National Integration and Survival of Democracy in Nigeria.''
The former vice-president explained that
he has been an advocate of restructuring for over a decade because be
truly believes it was the key to solving some, if not most of the
nation’s problems.
He stressed that Nigeria had struggled to build a nation where the component units would feel a true sense of belonging.
Atiku said, “As a country we have
struggled to live up to this ideal. We have obviously not done enough to
realise national integration, and the survival of our democracy is
still a work in progress.
“The cost to us has been enormous. We even fought a civil war to forcibly keep the country together.
“Since the various amalgamations that
created the entity that we now call Nigeria, different segments of
Nigeria’s population have, at different times and sometimes at the same
time, expressed feelings of marginalisation, of being short-changed,
dominated, oppressed, threatened, or even targeted for elimination.”
He explained that other pressure groups
had expressed similar frustrations arising from a sense of exclusion and
helplessness, believing that their voices were not being heard or that
they were unable to hold those in power to account.
According to him, previous initiatives
aimed at addressing these concerns have not yielded the desired results
as mutual suspicions still exist adding that, “If anything, our unity
has been fragile, our democracy unstable, and our people more aggrieved
by their state in the federation.”
He stressed that his belief in one strong and united Nigeria has remained strong and that we are stronger together.
Nigeria’s unity he said, is worth
sacrificing for and that the component units should look at the bright
side of restructuring because it remains the only way to go.
He noted that it was not a secret that
many Nigerians from outside the North hold the view that the main
beneficiary of the status quo has been the north, an undifferentiated
north.
Atiku said, “The north and Nigeria have not been served well by the status quo and there is need for change.
“Who among us who went to primary and
secondary school in the 1960s had much to do with the federal
government? Did the northern regional government wait to collect monthly
revenue allocations from Lagos before paying salaries to its civil
servants and teachers or fixing its bridges and roads?”
He urged Nigerians irrespective of their religious, political or ethnic persuasion to support the restructuring of the nation.
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