The General Overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly, and a
delegate to the National Conference, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has said that only10%
of Nigeria’s 36 states are viable. He made the assertion on SaharaTV over the
weekend, while discussing his expectations of the National Conference.
“All the states created were created by military fiat,” he
said. “Hardly do you find ten percent of the states in Nigeria viable.
Pastor Bakare who represents Ogun state at the ongoing
National Conference in Abuja suggested that the solution to the problem of
unviable states is not nullification of states. Rather, he sees, the
restructuring of the nation along geopolitical zones where each zone can decide
the number of states it wants within the zone.
Pastor Bakare who was
the CPC’s vice presidential candidate of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari in the 2011
election, said that power must be devolved from the center to the regions. The
geopolitical zones, he said, must be allowed to develop at their own pace. He
said the zones should contribute to the center.
“Nobody was piping groundnut from Kaduna or from Sokoto or
wherever the pyramids were to the South,” Bakare said to SaharaTV’s Rudolf
Okonkwo. “And we were not piping cocoa from the West to the East of Palm oil
from the East to the North.”
He said that fiscal federalism would remove “this lethargic
laziness and pathological laziness where our leaders are no longer thinking.”
In the same program, Senior Advocate of Nigeria Mr. Olisa
Agbakoba said he does not think it is possible for the delegates to the
National Conference not to discuss the no-go area of Nigeria’s indivisibility.
“To make it (the conference) a success, each geopolitical
area, ethnic and federating units must say we want to be in Nigeria,” he said.
“If we don’t cross that question it’s gonna fail.”
As Agbokoba said, “The main thing is are we going to use the
opportunity of the three months to bang a new Nigeria?”
SAHARA REPORTERS
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