Nigeria’s unity must be negotiated –Southern leaders

Prominent leaders from the southern part of the country have insisted that the terms for Nigeria’s continued existence must be negotiated.

This was part of the resolutions made yesterday when the Southern Leaders Forum met in Lagos.

Present at the meeting were the President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, John Nnia Nwodo, Afenifere chieftain, Ayo Adebanjo, former Foreign Affairs Minister, General Ike Nwachukwu (Rtd), Prof. Joe Irukwu, former Director General of the Department of State Service (DSS) and Albert Horsfall.

Others are Dr Walter Ofonagoro, Prof. George Obiozor, Tony Uranta, coordinator of Oodua Peoples Congress, Gani Adams, Prof. Banji Akintoye, Dr Amos Akingba, Col Tony Nyiam (rtd) and Yinka Odumakin. Edwin Clark and Rueben Fasoranti were among those who signed the communique which was read after meeting.

In his national broadcast on Monday, President Muhammadu Buhari had said Nigeria’s unity was not negotiable and warned that any form of ‘hate speech’ will be treated as an act of terrorism. But, the southern leaders disagreed and said the claim that “Nigeria’s unity is settled and non negotiable” was untenable. The communique read after the meeting read in part:

“President Buhari expressed dissatisfaction about comments on Nigeria (while he was away) that ‘questioned our collective existence as a nation’ and which he said has crossed the ‘red lines’.

Against the background of the threat to treat hate speech as terrorism, we see a veiled threat to bare fangs and commence the criminilisation of dissenting opinions in our national discourse. Experience worldwide has shown that any attempt to deal with dissents by force usually drives it underground, which makes it much more dangerous and difficult to deal with.

“The president deployed the imagery of the late Ikemba Ojukwu to play down the demand for the renegotiation of the structure of Nigeria by saying they both agreed in Daura, in 2013, that we must remain one and united. While we agree with them, the meeting between the two of them could not have been a Sovereign National Conference whose decisions cannot be reviewed.

The claim that Nigeria’s unity is settled and not negotiable is untenable. If we are a settled nation, we would not be dealing with the crisis of nation building that are affecting us today.

“The one sentence by the president that every Nigerian can live anywhere without hindrance is rather too short to address the clear danger that the unwarranted threat against the Igbo represents.

We are equally miffed that the president talked about the onslaught by armed Fulani herdsmen against defenceless farmers as a conflict between two quarrelling groups.

“In the last two years, the herdsmen have become much more ferocious in their attacks against farmers in the South and Middle Belt, with security forces shying away from enforcing law and order.

To present the various onslaught of farmers by these herdsmen as ‘two fighting’ would portray the president as taking sides with the aggressive Meyiti Allah.

“There are clearly many errors of commission and omission the government has committed which have accentuated the strong self determination feelings across the country that only restructuring can tame.

Some of them are the insensitive and clearly lopsided recruitment and appointment into all federal institutions and the concentration of most of the heads of the Armed Forces and other national security agencies in one section of the country. We do not forget that the president went on a global stage to say he would not treat those who gave him five percent of their votes equally with those who supported him with 95 percent.

“There has also been an official indifference to the murderous activities of Fulani herdsmen against farmers and other settlements; there is the lopsided early retirement of mostly southern senior officers from the Armed Forces and the appointment of the Legal Adviser of Miyetti Allah as Secretary of the Federal Character Commission.

“As elders who have spent most of our lives fighting for the unity of the country based on justice, fairness and equity, we call on the president to realise that the country is in a very bad shape at the moment and requires statesmanship and not ethnic, religious and political partisanship.”