Former Vice Chancellor of the
Ahmadu Bello University and Secretary of the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF),
Professor Ango Abdullahi has asserted that the North is not afraid of breaking
up.
The elder statesman bared his
mind at a two-day conference organised by the Arewa Research and Development
Project (ARDP).
Speaking on the theme of the
conference, “The North and the future of the Nigerian Federation”, Abdulahi was
of the view that “If we can’t go back to 1914, we should go back to 1960,
regional governance. North is not afraid of getting its North back, just like
those that want East and West. I see this as a political manoeuvre and the
North will not take it,” he said.
“Restructuring means so many
things to many people, but to me, I am not speaking for Unongo or NEF, when I
was confronted about this, by people from the South, we sat with Prof Nwabueze
and he said Nigeria is unbalanced and Lugard made mistake by amalgamation and
North has always dominated that’s why they asked for national conference in
2014.
“We reminded him that the North
has always sacrificed for the unity of Nigeria. I was a student when we got
independence and we saw that each time there was need to unite, Nigeria, the
North made the largest sacrifice,” he stressed.
He explained that the north has
always wanted a peaceful country.
“Now we have 36 states from three
regions which existed in 1960. No country has had constitutional conference
like Nigeria, yet it has not created basis for a united country.
“We ought to have realized from
that, that the failure of operators of the country is needed, if we want to
restructure Nigeria, we have to start from the beginning, 1914, North and
South, let’s go our separate ways,” he emphasized.
He said that such clamouring are
not new, because it has always been an antecedent of the South whenever a
Northerner was in charge of leadership.
“Things happening since 1999 to
2006 tazarce, and 2015 when a party agreed that Presidency should rotate, and
that was the beginning of what we saw.
“Some of our various formations
were unhappy with what was happening to the North, we decided that we must
confront it and thanks to our efforts we succeeded in changing leadership.”
“Since assumption of Northern
leadership, we have witnessed demands like they always occur whenever a
northerner takes over leadership,” he pointed out.
If the north is in power the south will be crying marginalization, Nepotism,lack of tranperancy in governance and also corruption and believe me is vice versa then the question is why the lack of trust
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