Popular human rights lawyer, Chief Mike Ozekhome SAN says Nigeria’s problems have surpassed what any single individual can solve.
He said virtually everything that could go wrong was already wrong with the country and only “reforms at the meta-level” to salvage the country.
Ozekhome stated this in Abeokuta on Friday in his speech at the 2022 Independence Day Anniversary Lecture organized by the Ogun State chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Punch reports.
The senior lawyer said that Nigeria needed to be restructured to tackle problems like insecurity, bad economy, poverty, and hopelessness.
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“Virtually everything that can possibly go wrong is wrong with our country: insecurity, collapsed infrastructure, failure of the public school system, an economy in shambles (epitomized by the free-fall of the value of the Naira and spiraling inflation), an unremitting insurgency, etc. The list is endless.
“Reforms at the meta-level would entail either embracing our discarded Prime Minister system of government or dismantling and recoupling several of the institutions that help or hinder us, including a serious re-examination of the 36 state structure as federating units vis-à-vis their fiscal/economic viability or their consolidation into six or more regions with economies of scale and higher investment rates; multiple vice-presidencies representing respective regions other than the region of the president, each with supervising powers over certain ministries to ensure equitable representation at the federal cabinet.
“The greatest challenge is how to get some of the elite whose privileges are provided by the existing system to support its dismantling into a system that is potentially beneficial to ‘society’ but perhaps disproportionately harmful to their interests in the short term.
“In other words, we are faced with the same kind of conundrum as some western countries with their welfare system. Having designed and implemented it for generations, it has grown into an unsustainable octopus of inefficiency but reforming it is not easy,” Ozekhome said.
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