By Amos Tauna
The best way to restructure Nigeria is to ensure fairness, equity and justice in all spheres of life, Executive Director, Human Rights Monitor, Festus Okoye has observed.
“The challenge of this country revolve around our people’s anger to the lack of justice, lack of fairness, lack of equity in the Nigeria Federation, that is the challenge we have in this country.
“The second challenge we have in this country is the challenge of lack of empathy by the ruling elites in this country towards the ordinary people,” he said.
Speaking to AFRICA PRIME NEWS in Kaduna, northwest Nigeria on the agitations for the restructuring of the country, he noted, “Whether you divide this country into one hundred states, if there is no justice, fair play, equity, we would continue to have problems.
“If you restructured this country into six geo political zones and we don’t have justice, fairness, equity and good governance, we will still have problems.
“If you create three countries out of this country, what you have done is also to decentralized the problems of justice, equity and fairness. If you don’t have leadership that is ready to work for the people of the country, no matter the type of restructuring you do, it remains at the surface and there will be no impact.”
He explained that what Nigerians need is fairness, justice and equity, adding, “Govern them with the fear of God, distribute the resources of this country equitably, so that everybody will have the share of the Commonwealth.”
Okoye observed that when the elites are talking about restructuring, they are talking about creating small chiefdoms for them to govern, when the elites of this country are talking about restructuring, some of them are saying that they have been schemed out from the sharing of certain forms of resources.
So for me, “People who are talking about restructuring are not being fair to the people of the country, they want to corner the resources of this country for their own personal use or they want to corner the resources of the country for their families and their own friends.
“To me, that is not part of restructuring. What l want in this country or the type of restructuring l want to see is let us know how we can restructure the executive, so that they can work for the people of this country, how do we restructure the National Assembly, so that they can work for the people of this country, how do we restructure the Central Bank, so that no one individual will go there and dip his hands into the resources of this country and use it for his personal use.
“The type of restructuring l want to see will be a situation where the farmer in every part of this country will have fertilizers, will have tractors in order to be able to put food on the table for his family. How do the people who are in the fish communities will fish with less hazard, while the people in the Niger Delta will also be in a position to send their children to school despite all the pollution they are experiencing. That is what Nigerians need.
“Nigeria does not need to restructure the country into six ethnic nationalities or six geo political zones. Even if you do that and you don’t solve the problem of injustice and other social vices, our problems will still remain.
“Even if you create additional 80 states in Nigeria and if you don’t stop the problems of equity, fairness and justice, our problems will still remain.
“Even if the whole resources of this country is given to one ethnic nationality without solving the problems of equity, fairness and justice, our problems will still remain.
“The only thing is that we must not on any account decentralized injustice in this country because the type of restructuring the elites are talking about is that they want injustice to be decentralised and we are saying we don’t want that type of restructuring.
“For me, solve the problems of equity, fairness and justice and our problems will be minimal.”
