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The word ‘Restructuring’ is almost becoming a song in many of the presidential candidates vying for the office of the president in 2019. Many of them believe restructuring Nigeria is a laudable idea, but it appears majority of them are still vague about how to go about it. The most challenging and annoying thing is even the fact that, there is no single one of them who is seeing this matter of restructuring the way an average Nigerian on the street sees it.
For example, the APC government, through one of its mouthpiece, Vice President Osinbajo, believes that restructuring is: Devolution of powers and resources to the states, matching grants from the federal government to the states to help them grow their internally generated revenue position; the privatisation of unviable federal Government-owned assets, a truly free market economy driven by the laws of demand and supply, replacing state of origin with state of residence, and passing the PIGD so that our oil and gas sector will run as a business with minimal governmental interference.
For Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, he so much believes in geographical restructuring of Nigeria. But the vice president Yemi Osinbajo accused him that his idea about geographical restructuring of Nigeria is vague, that he should explain what he meant by that. Defending his boss recently, Mr. Segun Sowunmi, the spokes man of the Atiku campaign organization claimed that their idea of restructuring his hinged on the fact that Nigeria is facing a lot of structural issues which must be addressed.
According to him, “There are structural issues that we need to deal with. “Restructuring will give constituent parts of this country the opportunity to move on at their own pace. How come, from Awolowo down to now, the story has always been the leaders are unable to perform to the level of their optimum and in trying to answer that question, if you allow yourself the robustness of an intellectual mind like Atiku Abubakar, you will conclude that there are structural issues we need to deal with.Therefore, the need for restructuring of the country to give it the ability to allow the constituent parts of this country to be able to move at the pace that brings growth and prosperity,” Sowunmi stated.
For Ali Soyode of YES Party, the idea of restructuring Nigeria cannot be fruitful if the constitution of Nigeria is not first and foremost, worked upon. “The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, until amended, is vague. We are talking about Nigeria Constitution being defective. If we are using defective constitution to swear-in a governor, swear-in a president, which means you are using something you do not believe in to bring them into office. So, we need to do something about the constitution.
It seems this matter of restructuring Nigeria will not go away soon. It is as a matter of fact looking like an herculean task in which many of the presidential candidates don’t even know how to go about it yet. No wonder the APC government promised to do it in 2014 and up till now, nothing appears to have been done regarding restructuring the nation.
