The broadcast by President Muhammadu Buhari is most disappointing. Two lines came out of the fifteen paragraph speech, namely, that the unity of Nigeria is a settled matter and thus not negotiable and that “Every Nigerian has the right to live and pursue his business anywhere in Nigeria without let or hindrance”.
My response is that the president is living in the past and his statement is a re-affirmation of the obsolete Lugardian architecture and therefore unacceptable to many of us. Nigeria is a putative federal state, and must be restructured to unleash the held-down productive/creative capacity of its component units.
The extant national assembly is an illegitimate concourse of a skewed federal structure and lacks the political will to resolve the rightfulness of the Nigerian political community without which the goal of development remains an elusive quest. The prevailing state structure emasculates Nigerians in their fatherland.
Nigeria is not a frontier state; it is country of indigenous people who are multiple and territorially segregated by nature. Nigerians have the right to live everywhere, not at the expense of the wellbeing and cultural sensibilities of the component units of the country. It is not a free field for roving bandits and aliens.
Above all, Nigerians must reclaim their sovereignty from a system that emasculates their potentialities and survival.
Sylvester Odion Akhaine,
Associate Professor of Political Science
