Tunde Bakare attacks northern elite for opposing restructuring as Ahmadu Bello wanted

FORMER vice presidential candidate and Latter Rain Assembly general overseer Pastor Tunde Bakare has lashed out at the northern Nigerian elite saying they are betraying the spirit of their former premier Ahmadu Bello by objecting to the restructuring of the country.

 

Last year, former president Dr Goodluck Jonathan organised a national conference which sat for months and came up with suggestions about how to restructure the country.  However, the elite and elders from across northern Nigeria have objected to the implementation of the conference report because it calls for a radical diminution of their influence.

 

Pastor Bakare, who was President Muhammadu Buhari's running mate during the 2011 presidential elections, has called these elders selfish as their actions are inimical to the progress of the country.  Speaking yesterday at the International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan, Pastor Bakare said the likes of the former premier of the Northern Region and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello and the former prime minister, Tafawa Balewa were true nationalists who, throughout their sojourn, stood for true federalism with regional autonomy.

 

He added that the great Nigerian leaders from the north made it clear in series of constitutional conferences that true federalism with regional autonomy was the only condition under which they would exist within a Nigerian nation. To this end, he bemoaned the position of some elders from northern Nigeria that are opposing the restructuring of the country, saying such posture would bring to the courts of historical opinion the sincerity of the motives of the perpetrators of the counter-coup that led to the death of Adekunle Fajuyi.

 

Pastor Bakare said: “Need we remind those in opposition to restructuring today that one of the main grouses of Nigerians of northern extraction within the army and civil society after the first coup was the abrogation of the federal system by the Aguiyi-Ironsi led government? This, without doubt, was the main reason the northern leaders and the counter-coupists, who took the lives of Aguiyi- Ironsi and Fajuyi demanded a reversal of the unification decree and a return to the federal system of government.

 

“Consequently, to oppose restructuring now, 50 years after, is to confirm the words of Aesop that the injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales. In case it is not clearly understood by the antagonists of restructuring, whether they be from the north or the south, let me make it clear that the call for restructuring is a demand for true federalism."

 

According to pastor Bakare, this is a demand for federating units that can truly self-administer like the regions like in the days of Nigeria's founding fathers. He added that it is therefore inconsistent with the interest of the north or the south for the current pseudo-federal structure to persist.