FasasiFormer 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 previous vice-president defined that he has been an propose of restructuring for over a decade due to the fact be genuinely believes it was the key to fixing a few, if now not maximum of the state’s problems.
He stressed that Nigeria had struggled to construct a country wherein the issue gadgets would sense a real feel of belonging.
Atiku said, “As a rustic we have struggled to live as much as this perfect. We’ve manifestly now not done enough to recognize national integration, and the survival of our democracy remains a piece in development.
“The fee to us has been giant. We even fought a civil struggle to forcibly maintain the united states together.
“since the diverse amalgamations that created the entity that we now name Nigeria, special segments of Nigeria’s populace have, at distinctive times and now and again on the identical time, expressed feelings of marginalisation, of being brief-modified, ruled, oppressed, threatened, or even focused for elimination.”
He explained that other stress businesses had expressed comparable frustrations arising from a experience of exclusion and helplessness, believing that their voices had been now not being heard or that they have been not able to hold those in strength to account.
In step with him, preceding projects geared toward addressing these worries have not yielded the preferred results as mutual suspicions still exist including that, “If whatever, our cohesion has been fragile, our democracy unstable, and our people more aggrieved by their state within the federation.”
He harassed that his notion in one sturdy and united Nigeria has remained sturdy and that we are more potent collectively.
Nigeria’s team spirit he stated, is worth sacrificing for and that the component units have to observe the brilliant side of restructuring as it stays the best way to move.
He referred to that it became no longer a secret that many Nigerians from outside the North preserve the view that the primary beneficiary of the status quo has been the north, an undifferentiated north.
Atiku stated, “The north and Nigeria have now not been served nicely by using the reputation quo and there’s want for exchange.
“Who amongst us who went to number one and secondary college in the Sixties had a great deal to do with the federal government? Did the northern nearby authorities wait to collect month-to-month sales allocations from Lagos before paying salaries to its civil servants and teachers or solving its bridges and roads?”
He entreated Nigerians regardless of their non secular, political or ethnic persuasion to assist the restructuring of the nation.
Fasasi
