Femi Olajide, secretary, Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), has said in as much as Yoruba people desired that all ethnic nationalities in the country should continue to co-exist peacefully, that stand should not be misunderstood to be at all cost.
Speaking in Osogbo as the Chairman of a Memorial Lecture organised by Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Osun State Council, in honour of the late Parliamentary reporter of Osun State Broadcasting Corporation (OSBC), Nathaniel Abimbola, who died last year, Olajide, said the statement credited to the former Inspector General of Police and chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Ibrahim Coomassie, that the rest of Nigeria can’t survive without the North, was absurd.
Olajide said: “The Newspapers reported the Arewa Consultative Forum as saying that Nigeria cannot survive without the North, whatever was meant by that statement credited to the ACF Chairman, Coomassie remains to be understood.
“However, I congratulate him for accepting that the North as it is today represents all that is wrong with Nigeria. The North East is ravaged by insurgency, costing the country billions of dollars annually.
“The North West is home to religious crisis, the North Central is ravaged by herdsmen of Northern extraction. Collectively, the zone in the North is home to all negative indices of the quality of life. Infant mortality rate is highest in the North. Illiteracy rate is highest in the North, and out-of-school children are highest in the North.
“The poverty index is highest in the North. The twin evil bedeviling the North is feudalism and religious fatalism. It will not be out of place to say the North has, in fact been dragging Nigeria down since independence. All sort of mischievous phrases were coined by the very tiny political/military elite of the North to give undue advantage to the North.”
According to him, the Yoruba Council of Elders are not only insisting on restructuring of the country’s political architecture, but are also insisting on the wholesale reform of the elite-centered system of government in operation at the moment in the country.
He said Nigeria would survive and prosper, if any of the component parts chooses to go on its own.
The guest lecturer, Prof. Mojeed Alabi, representing Egbedore/Ejigbo/Ede Federal Consistency in the House of Representatives, in his paper titled: “Current Challenges of Nigerian Political System; Some Suggestions for the way forward,” said the challenges facing the country at the moment had existed before independence.
He however, added that they were minimal at the time because regions were allowed to develop at their own phase.
He therefore, called for the return of the pre-independence political negotiations on which the nation was built.
BOLA BAMIGBOLA, Osogbo
