LAGOS/Nigeria: The National leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu has warned against breaking the country into smaller pieces saying it would make the country vulnerable to external influences adding that restructuring is the way forward for the Nigeria. speaking at the weekend in Lagos as the keynote speaker at the 2017 Annual Dinner of the King’s College Old Boys Association (KCOBA), King’s college, the former governor of Lagos State who was represented at the event by his former commissioner of finance, Wale Edun said while nations more powerful and developed than Nigeria seeks to pool their wealth and might, some Nigerians are seeking to whittle the nations into smaller pieces.
“It would be better to restructure things to attain the correct balance between our collective purpose on one hand and our separate grassroots realities on the other. Moreover, not every split solves a problem. The political mentality, either good or bad that defined a group before the split will remain after the divide. If one is imbued with factionalism, that perspective will remain even when the immediate problem is surmounted. Division will manifest differently, but manifest it will.
Meanwhile, former Vice-President and Chieftain of the ruling Al Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has said that lazy northerners are the ones afraid of the much talk restructuring of the country adding that if it will cost him his political career, so be it. Atiku, who delivered a keynote address at a youth forum organized by Coalition of Civil Society Groups under the auspices of Play Forum at the weekend blamed the current political structure on the military government failing to implement on the constitutional conference of 1994/1995 recommendation of a single term of six years to rotate among all the six geo-political zones.
‘I don’t know what those who are against restructuring are afraid of. They must be lazy. We fought civil war with the Igbos, but today the Igbos have been completely rebuilt, but we still find mud-houses in the North. Is it the fault of the easterners that the North is like that”? He said
“I am not a product of the current structure of Nigeria. I am a product of regional government. I saw the government at work and I have also seen the current arrangement at work. That is why I came out, some people said to the detriment of my political career to advocate for restructuring or rearrangement or whatever you call it of the present structure of the country and I still stand by it”
