Restructuring: Bakare advocates 10 years transition programme
Serving Overseer of Latter Rain Assembly Pastor Tunde Bakare has advocated the setting up of a Presidential Commission with a 10-year mandate towards actualising Nigeria’s restructuring.
The cleric said the commission should be allowed to begin by 2018 and end by 2028.
Bakare said his suggestion followed the manner in which the Nigeria’s seat of power, Abuja, was finally put in place over a period of 15 years, saying the idea called for sustainability.
“We expect that the project will be flagged off under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari in the period leading to the next governmental fiscal year,” he said.
The cleric spoke in his State of the Nation address in the church in reaction to various agitations by various groups for restructuring.
Speaking on the theme: “Pragmatic Steps towards Restructuring Nigeria,” he declared that the buck stops on the desk of President Muhammadu Buhari whose legacy was at stake.
He prayed that the President would find the courage and political will to do what was right at this momentous period in Nigeria’s history.
According to Bakare, who is also the convener of Save Nigeria Group (SNG), the body to be named “Presidential Commission for National Reconciliation, Reintegration and Restructuring” should be established by the President through an Executive Order, in full consultation with the Council of State and the National Assembly.
The cleric, who noted that many proponents of restructuring were of the belief that Buhari was against restructuring going by his recent utterances, said his interaction with him in the last seven years did not suggest such line of thought.
He hoped the National Assembly would do Nigerians proud on the onerous task of properly restructuring the country based on their antecedents particularly in frustrating the 3rd Third Agenda saga of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and in instituting “Doctrine of Necessity,” that brought in former President Goodluck jonathan – developments, he said, later stablished the polity.
“Not only does the president want agitations managed through appropriate constitutional channels, he also wants a clarification of demands in concise terms, as well as propositions on practical pathways towards achieving those demands,” he said.
On the job to be undertaken by the commission, Bakare suggested that the panel should be given the mandate and the powers to facilitate, within 10 years, the evolution of a functional and acceptable geopolitical structure subject to constitutional provisions while the 1999 Constitution was progressively amended.
The commission, he said, “shall undertake a geo-economic and geosocial path to geopolitical restructuring by creating geo-economic frameworks, mending geosocial fault lines and attaining a geopolitical climax”.
He said by this, the Federal Government would progressively devolve powers to the existing 36 states, which would themselves progressively evolve into a zonal arrangement.
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