By Akintunde Jacobs, Akure
Olumuyiwa Adu, a security expert has advocated the need for Nigeria to be geographically restructured, in order to ensure equity and justice in terms of ownership of the country or where the president comes from.
According to him, there is no shortcut to development than restructuring, which will in turn enshrine true federalism, thereby making each region to grow based on their own strength.
Adu who is an aspirant under the opposition Peoples Democratic Party to fill the vacant seat of the immediate past lawmaker, Omolafe Adedayo, stated this on Tuesday while speaking with journalists in Akure.
“A country where you want to offer admission to citizens of this same country and you say some people can have lesser mark and some have higher. Is that a country? We can only call it a country, not a nation because we don’t do things in common, we don’t share things in common. There is lack of equity and justice. These are things that restructuring will address, if only it is allowed.
“In Nigeria today, the structure is such that the whole of the north was divided into two and the South was divided into four and the core part of the South, North Central geopolitical zone. Whereas, Abuja is the middle in the latitude zero, which means anything below Abuja is South and anything above Abuja is north. This is a question of geographical terminology, not South East West. It was not created by tribe or tone. It is geographical, meaning that from latitude zero everything up there is North and when you come to longitude zero too, anything left of longitude zero is West.”
He said, “Rather than the way they divided North into two comprising of Northwest and Northeast, come down to the South and divide the south same way, so that there can be that block power in a situation where the entire country will see themselves as equal but it wasn’t done.”
He noted that dividing the South into four splits the people.
“An Igbo man will tell you he has no relationship with somebody from South-South and nobody has been able to talk about that. Why must Kwara, Kogi, Plateau, Benue and Niger, be called North Central geopolitical Zone. If Abuja is the center, then, anything below Abuja is South.”
Adu opined that all the institutions in the country are located in a wrong place, explaining that before siting any industry, or any institution, there must be certain things called natural resources or endowed resources that will support it to function.
“You can’t locate what is not supposed to be in a desert, so these are the issues. There is no equity, there is no justice. Look at what is happening on the streets. A country where we have banks, look at what you see today where currency are sold on the streets without being arrested and we are talking about bringing down the value of dollar to naira. How can that work? A lot of things are not done rightly.
“Restructuring will ensure that we prioritize our projects and what do I mean by that? We don’t have electricity, Ajaokuta is moribund, we went borrowing money to construct road and rail lines, whereas if you have electricity and you are able to develop that Ajaokuta, from there, the steel we need to construct the rail tracks will come from there without importing them from Germany. The only thing we need is technical support,” he said.
Adu, who also advocated the need for state of residence to be enshrined in Nigeria’s constitution said, “a country where we are still talking about state of origin. These are the things we need to address in our constitution. I am a lawyer, am not just going there as a layman who doesn’t know what is in the constitution and if you don’t know what is in the constitution, you can’t perform well in the National Assembly.
“I want a country where we talk about state of residence and not state of origin. If you live in Ondo state, you should have an identity card or a social security number that gives you the claim that you live in the state. You should be able to pay your tax, the government should have your data and everything.
“So, if you want to go to another state, you should drop as residence of that state and get a clearance before you go to other state. So, we have a server that controls the data of all the citizens and at the same time, you have zones being represented their, managing the server of the entire nation through which the resources of the states are Manage.
“There are areas in this country where you have only one building and they call such area a local government and in another area, you have so many population and call that same area a local government and they take the same allocation.”
He, however, said the best way to ensure tranquility was to eliminate state of origin and embrace state of residence in order to achieve true patriotism and achieve some level of cohesiveness, love and move the country forward.