Southern Leaders Pick Holes In President’s Speech, Insist Nigeria Must Renegotiate Its Path Along Federal Lines

The Southern Leaders Forum (SLF) has insisted that it is time to renegotiate Nigeria along federal lines as was negotiated by the country’s founding fathers to stem the tide of separatist feelings and agitations.

Arising from its meeting held in Lagos, the group of leaders, elders and statesmen maintained that the British negotiated to put the various ethnic groups in the country together therefore renegotiation can never be rule out adding that all the constitutional conferences held in the years before independence were all product of negotiations

The group spoke in reaction to President Muhammadu Buhari’s Monday broadcast after his 105 days medical vacation in the United Kingdom.

According to them, the President should realize that the country is in a very bad shape at the moment and requires statesmanship and not ethnic, religious ,regional and political partisanships.

A communique at the end of the meeting signed by Chief Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, Chief A K Horsfall, (South South) , Chief Nnia Nwodo, Prof. Joe Irukwu, (South East), Chief R F Fasoranti and
Chief Ayo Adebanjo, (South West) read in part:

“The President expressed his disaffection about comments on Nigeria while he was away that “question our collective existence as a nation” and which he said have crossed the “red lines”.

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“Against the background of the threat to treat “hate speech” as “terrorism”, we see a veiled threat to bare fangs and commence the criminalization of dissenting opinions in our national discourse.

“Experience worldwide has shown that any attempt to deal with dissent by force usually drives it underground which makes it much more dangerous and difficult to deal with.

“We should have learnt a lesson or two from Boko Haram which was an open organization before the state drove it underground and we are still under its reign of terror despite official claim that it has been “technically defeated” or “degraded ”

“As elders who believe that it is better to seek solutions to problems, we appeal that we must engage in social engineering fully aware that globalization has made it very difficult to use repressive tactics to repress opinions.

“Mr President deploys the imagery of the late Chief Emeka Ojukwu to play down the the demand for the renegotiation of the structure of Nigeria by saying they both agreed in Daura in 2003 that we must remain “one and united”.

“While we agree with them, the meeting between the two of them could not have been a Sovereign National Conference whose decisions cannot be reviewed .The fact that we agree on their conclusion that we should remain united does not foreclose discussions of the terms and conditions of the Union.

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“The claim that Nigeria’s “unity is settled and not negotiable” is untenable.. Every country is a daily dialogue and there is nothing finally settled in its life.

“If If we were a settled nation ,we would not be dealing with the many crises of nation building that are afflicting us today which have made it extremely difficult to squarely and urgently face issues of growth and development.

“The one sentence by the President that every Nigerian can live anywhere without let or hindrance if meant to address the quit notice by Arewa youths against Igbos is rather too short to address the clear and present danger that the unwarranted threat represents.

“We acknowledge the President’s admission that there are ” legitimate concerns”in the land .That is commendable .We however disagree with his take that Nigeria is a “federation”. Nigeria ceased to be a federation since 1966 after the first coup.The turning of Nigeria into a unitary constitution which is not conducive for peace and development in a multi-ethnic country is what the military-imposed 1999 Constitution ,which lied against itself with the “We the people”, is all about.This is the taproot of the crisis of nationhood in Nigeria.

“We do not accept the President’s claim that the National Assembly and the Council of State”are the only legitimate the appropriate bodies for national discourse”. While we do not dispute that these are legal bodies,we insist they are not appropriate bodies to discuss the social contract that could bind us together as a nation-state.While the composition of the National Assembly is clearly jigged and indeed one of the bodies to be restructured, the Council of State is not open to Nigerians for any discourse.

If any “discourse ” is to take place on constitutional changes within the democratic framework Mr President is the one who has the responsibility to initiate the appropriate process”.

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