Former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, has explained why he is advocating that Nigeria should be restructured.
Atiku made this explanation in a paper he presented at the Late Gen.Usman Katsina Memorial Conference, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Memorial Hall, Murtala Square, Kaduna, on Saturday.
The Turakin Adamawa, who spoke on the theme of the conference, “The Challenges of National Integration and Survival of Democracy in Nigeria”, noted that he had been an advocate of restructuring for over a decade because be truly believed 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.”
According to him, previous initiatives aimed at addressing these concerns have not yielded the desired results as mutual suspicions still existed, adding that, “If anything, our unity has been fragile, our democracy unstable, and our people more aggrieved by their state in the federation.”
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.”
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 called on all Nigerians irrespective of their religious, political or ethnic persuasion to support the restructuring of the nation.
