South, North brace for war over restructuring

The South-North dichotomy has worsened over the sharp division between the two regions on the persistent call for the restructuring of the Nigerian federation.

A group of delegates who attended the 2014 national conference, under the aegis of the Northern Delegates Forum (NDF), had, on Wednesday, dissociated itself from a meeting scheduled for May 2 in Abuja and from the report of the confab, claiming that it had “questionable legal validity and lacked popular mandate.

However, another delegate to the conference and the spokesman of the pan-Yoruba group, Afenifere, Mr Yinka Odumakin, debunked the claim of the NDF, saying the report was a collective decision taken by all delegates to the 2014 confab.

Rejecting the confab report, the NDF, after a meeting held in Abuja claimed that the decision on restructuring the country as well as the other major ones taking at the 2014 confab were arrived at by undemocratic means which it alleged breached due process.

The meeting was reportedly attended by a former Deputy Senate President, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu; a former Minister of Power and steel, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu; a former Minister of Defence, Alhaji Mohammed Bello and a former member of the House of Representatives, Mohammed Kumaila, among others.

The forum, in a communiqué presented by its secretary, Kumaila, said it was opposed to any group of persons or individuals agitating for any form of restructuring of the federation and advised such agitators to respect the existing constitutional order.

It further warned that any restructuring not done within the 1999 constitutional framework would lead to chaos and anarchy, even as it called on the National Assembly not to act upon the confab report which it claimed was full of flaws.

Obviously unveiling the northern agenda, the NDF, according to Kumaila, identified the need for the region to organise a conference of all its diverse groups to discuss around the “unique northern identity”.

This, he said, was with a view to evolving harmonious living among the northerners, even as the group urged the Federal Government to intensify efforts and deploy more resources towards the exploration of oil and gas in the Lake Chad Basin.

The group also urged both the federal and northern state governments to increase their support for agriculture and provide quality education for its teeming population, particularly the girl-child and the almajiris.

However, Odumakin, a delegate from the South West zone at the 2014 confab, faulted the claims of the NDF, particularly on restructuring as he said its position was a lie to balkanise the entire Nigerian delegates to the confab who, he said, jointly agreed to hold a conference on the 2014 confab report in Abuja next month.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with Saturday Tribune, Odumakin further said the NDF position was a well-known game and a repeat of “the same silly lies they (the delegates from the North East and North West) told at the conference. When we were at the 2014 National Conference, they used all sorts of shenanigans to frustrate the conference.

“Definitely we are going ahead with Abuja conference (scheduled for May 2) because we agreed on that conference as delegates of the 2014 National Conference.

“A section of the North now has seceded from the group; what they have just done is secession, but we are going ahead with the conference, by the grace of God, to reaffirm our belief in our joint decision at the 2014 National Conference.

“The invitation to all the 2014 delegates, dated April 3, 2017, to the conference was jointly signed by Mr John Dara (Delegate, North Centralzone); Mallam Bah Abubakar (Delegate, North East); Senator Nnamdi Eriobuwa (Delegate, Senators’ Forum) and my humble self (Delegate, South West)”, he said,

Odumakin further dismissed the fear that the proposed conference might be termed anti-North and seen as against the presidency, as he said it was not aimed at adding or removing from the 2014 confab report which he said had been ready before President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office on May 29, 2015.