Laziness responsible for North’s opposition to restructuring – Atiku

Former vice president, Atiku Abubakar has taken northerners who are opposed to the current clamour for the restructuring of the nation to the cleaners, accusing them of laziness.  

“I don’t know what those who are against restructuring are afraid of. Those afraid must be lazy,” he declared.

Atiku who spoke last weekend in Abuja while delivering a keynote address at a youth forum organised by a conglomeration of civil society groups under the auspices of Play Forum, said he would continue to speak against the current faulty ‘unitary federalism’ structure even at the detriment of his political ambition.

“I want to agree essentially that there is every need for us to sit down and talk about our future. This is because the arrangements in the last 50 years or so have not served us very well.

“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 was why I came out, some people even 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. I still stand by it. But we cannot determine the nitty-gritty of this restructuring until we are able to dialogue and agree on how we want to continue to live together as a country.

“It is good that all the representatives of the ethnic groups agreed that we should continue to live together. I believe it is imperative. But I also don’t believe in the current arrangement, which I have always referred to as unitary federalism, which was a creation of a prolonged military rule.

“It all started after the civil war, when General Murtala Mohammed set up the Constituent Assembly of 1978 and specifically instructed the Assembly to recommend a very strong Federal Government which no component can challenge or try to secede from. He was understandably coming from the perception of Biafra civil war. He felt that the war was caused by the region, which felt that it was too independent to pull out of the country. Subsequently, they kept amending the constitution centralising more and more power at the centre,” he said.

- Sun News