A former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Olabode George, on Thursday, said he would never support a violent dissolution of Nigeria.
He however said to prevent the violent dissolution of the country, there was the need for President Muhammadu Buhari to urgently restructure the country.
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In a letter to the President, George, who is the Atona Oodua of Yorubaland, said his position “is without partisan or ethnic intimations.”
“I bear no sectarian toga. My resolve is purely on the need to prevent the violent dissolution of the Nigerian entity,” he stated.
According to him, “it would be wrong and even cynical for anyone to pretend that the present Nigerian structure is smooth and without flaws.”
He said, “On the contrary, the very skewed structures are provoking everywhere the glaring indices of terror and widening chaos.
“From Sokoto to Calabar, from Jigawa to Delta, from Borno to Rivers- the Nigerian -state is sinking deeper into loose banditry and general uncertainties. Virtually everyone is vulnerable. There are no safe havens anymore.”
‘Decentralised Police’
The PDP leader called for the decentralisation of the policing structure, saying: “The present policing architecture is obviously unsuitable to modern threats and challenges.
“Policing can no longer be centralized. This is one of the cardinal points why restructuring of the Nigerian state is important.
“Power has to be loosened at the center for the survival of this very fragile union.
“The states must be constitutionally empowered to determine their growth and development.
“We cannot all be held down by an overarching unitary system which stunts merit and halts individual progress and initiatives.
“Nigeria can only survive when the states can prosecute their individual vision, explore their God -given resources at their own pace without the intrusion of the central organ.”
He added: “While I will never support a violent dissolution of the country, I am a strong proponent of a very loose, tight and elastic union where each state can freely assert itself without any overbearing intrusion from an outsider, where the indices of economic advancement are devolved to the states, where policing is enforced as local matters, where natural resources are controlled by state organs and where the collective wealth of a state are sustained and steered towards the development of each state.
“The states are suffocated, stifled, hindered and cluttered by inimical constitutional constraints that are savaging to developmental enlightenment.
“We are a nation of nations whose innate diversities should be cultivated as our collective advantages.
“A nation can only be sustained on the platform of equity and fairness and not when some sections of our society feel fettered and squeezed out of the national equation.”
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