Afenifere leader, Pa Ayo Adebanjo has reacted to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s claim of a plot by militant herdsmen and Boko Haram to “Fulanise West Africa” and “Islamise Africa”.
He noted that while Obasanjo’s outcry was valid, it came a bit too late as others like himself had been crying out for a while without backing from the ex-president and retired general.
Adebanjo said, “Obasanjo said the obvious; he just joined some of us who have been calling attention to it. He is a latecomer to the call. Obasanjo is a latecomer in arousing the country on this dangerous trend; I have been talking about it before and he didn’t lend his voice, or was he waiting till all the Christians are wiped off before he would talk?”
Meanwhile, the 91-year-old said that Nigeria will not achieve true federalism until it jettisons the 1999 constitution and adopt the Independence Constitution that recognised regionalism.
He said, “When we tell people that we should go back to the Independence Constitution, they ask, are we going back to the three or four regions? No, the principle there is the type that Zik, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello had at that time, which made Awolowo to be able to give free education. If it is going to be on three, four or 10 states that is another matter.
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“Go back to the constitution we had at independence. Go back to history, when there was crisis, when Chief Anthony Enahoro moved for self-government, Northern leaders led by Sardauna said they were not ready to go. The West withdrew and said without self-government, they were not going to take part. The colonial masters invit- ed the leaders to come for a meeting and the government then collapsed. This is a matter of history. That is when they accepted federalism and they came back to create pre- miership in all the regions with autonomy. Every region at that time had the same constitution. Under that constitution, they had embassies abroad. The Western Nigeria embassy in London was where I got mar- ried in 1960. That is the constitution we had until 1966, when the military imposed this constitution on us. This is nonsense. The constitution we have was not subjected to any referendum, and it doesn’t take a long way to do it. Take the 2014 constitution, and if there is anything you object about it, take it out and if there is anything you want, put it in and subject it to referendum.
“They resort to subterfuge that there is constitution, which constitution? You want to tie us down with the constitution we have jettisoned that is not ours?”
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