Popular legal practitioner, Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), has prepared what he termed an interim blueprint for President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term in office following his swearing-in.
Ozekhome in the document tagged “an interim blueprint of governance for President Muhammadu Buhari upon being sworn in after an election that is still being hotly challenged and contested at the tribunal” which was made public on Tuesday gave steps on what the president must do before the judgment of the Election Petition Tribunal
Ozekhome asked President Buhari to quickly take Nigeria out of the social, economic and political doldrums that the APC government has sunk it, adding that the president should be more nationalistic in his approach to governance by being “less sectional, less partial, nepotic, cronyistic and prependalistic.”
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“He should drop his stiff garb of suffocating military imperiousness and jackbootism and know that he is now supposed to be a Democrat, subject to due process of law with the attendant democratic safeguards.
“Buhari should allow Rule of Law to flourish, learn to obey court orders and respect citizens’ cherished and inalienable fundamental human rights. Buhari must as president of a whole nation, drop his 97er cent to 5 per cent bellyaching mantra and endeavour to be less divisive and vindictive; and treat all Nigerians equally and as one, whether they presumably voted for him or not,” Ozekhome stated.
He further asked the president to stop promoting the superiority and sovereignty of his ethnic group over and above the other more than 350 ethnic groups in Nigeria and give democracy dividends to the Nigerian people through the provision of adequate security as provided in Section 14 of the 1999 Constitution.
Other things he demanded from the president include a robust economy and infrastructural developments, adding that the president should think outside the box of how to fight corruption.
According to him, the performance of the president in the fight against corruption has been “woeful, selective, exclusionary and favouritism-based. Nigeria is more corrupt today than ever before according to the latest Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. Where corruption could be said to have been democratised by previous governments before him, corruption under Buhari has been greatly privatised by a few high-heeled cabalistic elements.”
He explained that “corruption money unlike before now, no longer circulate or sip down to the common people. It has been hijacked, privatised and held down by the jugular by few elements at the precincts and corridors of temporary power.”
He concluded by asking the president to dust up the over 600 groundbreaking recommendations of the 2014 National Conference scripted by 491 delegates from across Nigeria and implement them, adding that “some of the most important amongst them is the vexed but overdue issue of devolution of powers and restructuring of the non working Nigerian contraptions, to become a true fiscal and federal system of government.
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