Tinubu: Without restructuring, Nigeria cannot make real progress

Bola Tinubu, national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has said restructuring is the only way Nigeria can make real progress as a nation.

Tinubu said “things will be in a constant state of disequilibrium and irritation” if the clamour and calls for restructuring are not heeded.

He lamented the “undue concentration” of power at the federal level, saying it makes competition for office a “winner-take-all-duel”.

According to Tinubu, it is pertinent for Nigeria to restructure so as to attain balance.

The former Lagos governor shared his view on the subject on Saturday while delivering a keynote speaker at the annual dinner of the King’s College Old Boys’ Association.

Tinubu said: “We are like the bewildered couple who has got their marriage licence after a lavish wedding; yet neither of them really understands the meaning of marriage or their roles as husband and wife in it.

“Legally, they are married but functionally, their union is a crippled one. This couple will be at loggerheads until somehow they forge an agreement on what type of home they want and what are their respective duties in making that home come into existence.

“It is a rather curious lapse that a nation with such diversity as ours has not taken the time to give our legal marriage its proper functional underpinning. In other words, we all lined up to call ourselves Nigerians without gathering to discuss what it meant.

“We may be defined by political borders and boundaries but we have not glued ourselves to collective purpose and vision. Too many of us are born in Nigeria but not of it. Thus, our society is not a collective enterprise as important to each of us as our own personal endeavour. It is a platform, an arena, to claim whatever one can by whatever means available.

“Thus, we argue over matters that long ago should have been settled. The longer such fundamental questions fester, the more extreme become the proposed answers. Thus, we have people clamouring for secession in one part of the country and the murmur of such a course grows stronger in other sections.

“Constitutionally, we are a federation of 36 states. However, the vestiges of past military rule continue to haunt the democratic road we hew. We function like a unitary state in many ways. We cannot become a better Nigeria with an undue concentration of power at the federal level. Competition for federal office will be too intense, akin to a winner-take-all duel.

“Those who lose will bristle at the lack of power in the periphery they occupy. They will scheme to pester and undermine the strong executive because that is where they want to be. The executive will become so engaged in deflecting their antics, that it will not devote its great powers to the issues of progressive governance for which such powers were bestowed.

“Things will be in a constant state of disequilibrium and irritation. Such a situation tends toward the maintenance of an unsatisfactory status quo in the political economy. It is against reform.

“It would be better to restructure things to attain the correct balance between our collective purpose on (the) one hand and our separate grass-roots realities on the other. We must listen to what is being said so that we can determine what is really meant.”