A socio-cultural group in Nigeria, the Urhobo Progressive Union has issued a strong reaction to a remark credited to President Muhammadu Buhari that those calling for a restructuring of Nigeria were naïve and ignorant about the 1999 Nigerian Constitution.
“And again those who are discussing restructuring, my question is, what are you going to restructure? If you ask many Nigerians what they are going to restructure, you will find out that they have nothing to talk about.
“Some of them have not even studied the 1999 Constitution. The 1999 Constitution is almost 70 to 80 per cent 1979 Constitution,” the Executive Secretary, Revenue Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Mohammed Shehu, said last week while representing Mr Buhari in an event in Zaria, according to a report by Vanguard newspaper.
The remark is interpreted as a foreclosure by the president on the agitation for restructuring which clearly is getting louder and more intense by the day.
The Urhobo Progressive Union, in a statement issued on Tuesday, described the remark credited to President Buhari as “an invitation to forced marriage and therefore an invitation to violent uprisings”.
The statement, signed by the President-General of the group, Joe Omene, said the remark was similar to “pouring petrol on a raging inferno”.
“How will the foreclosure of such a civic avenue of dialogue, as the President is proposing, help to secure a country that is falling apart? Did the President actually endorse these volatile statements made on his behalf by this representative?”
The group said every Nigerian long for a country where they can be proud to live in, where everyone and every group is treated as equals, but that that has not been the case since the country secured its independence from the British in 1960.
This, it said, is the reason “the country is collapsing and in urgent need of the embrace of enduring solutions that will bring peace to the land”.