Former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, on Tuesday, advised President Buhari and the National Assembly to take urgent steps to reverse the present security situation to forestall Nigeria drifting into anarchy and disintegration.
Anyaoku, who spoke at the launch of a book, titled “Dadi, the Man, the Legend,” written by Dillibe Onyeama, in honour of a former judicial icon, Justice Dadi Onyeama, in Abuja, stressed that the current scenarios in the country were ominous signs that needed attention without further delay.
The former diplomat directed his message at President Muhammadu Buhari, the members of the National Assembly, the Governors, and all our political elites and urged them not to continue to live in denial of the seriousness of these glaring facts which, if not effectively addressed, were bound to push the country over the brink of a national disaster.
He warned: “Nigeria is on the brink. For no objective observer, including those in the Government, can deny that the current state of affairs in our country is extremely worrisome. We see an unprecedented diminution of national unity; we see an unprecedented level of insecurity of life and property with kidnappings and killings of human beings occurring virtually every day in many parts of the country including the seemingly unchecked violence by Fulani herdsmen which has spawned fractious controversies over the proposed RUGA policy by the Federal Government.
“We also see that all these unwholesome developments are accompanied by a worsening level of poverty that is leading to Nigeria fast becoming the poverty capital of the world.
“For the sake of peace and integrity of the country, the RUGA policy must be handled with circumspection and strictly in accordance with our extant constitution’s provisions on land tenure.
“Every diverse federal country throughout the world achieves political stability and socio-economic development through successfully managing its national diversity. There are two common keys to this. The first is having an inclusive central government which gives the peoples of the component parts of the federation a sense of belonging that in turn underpins the sense of unity and patriotism in all the citizens.
“The second is having adequate delegation of powers to the federating units to enable them handle their internal security and significant aspects of their socio-economic development, Anyaoku added.
Warning about the possibility of the break-up of Nigeria, Anyaoku cited Yugoslavia and Sudan as two examples of unsuccessful diverse federations.
“The former following the death of its strong leader, Josep Tito, disintegrated into seven independent states; and the latter, after years of instability and civil war broke into two sovereign states that are continuing in turmoil.
He however expressed optimism that the Nigerian federation would be sustained “with an insightful and sensitive management of its affairs…to offer peace and stability to all its component parts, as well as opportunities for self-fulfilling development to all its citizens.”
“As I have stated on many occasions, I believe that the current travails of Nigeria will be more effectively tackled if the country’s diversity is managed with a structure of governance that draws not only from the present lessons of successful diverse federations, but more importantly, from Nigeria’s own past happier experience during its immediate post-independent years’’
“Nigeria does not need to reinvent the wheel. If only the people in government and all concerned would learn from our history thereby avoid validating the saying by the German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel, that “the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”, the former Commonwealth scribe noted.
