Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has maintained that unless Nigeria was restructured, to make it more efficient and productive, it would be difficult for the country to wriggle out of security challenges, pervasive poverty, and retarded growth, as successive leaders would only be dealing with the symptoms, not the root causes of a festering illness.
A statement by his Special Adviser, Media, Uche Anichukwu, quoted Ekweremadu spoke as speaking at the weekend, in New York, the United States of America, during the 2016 Convention of the World Igbo Congress, WIC.
He regretted that “successive military regimes reneged on the core ingredients of a federal structure agreed upon by our founding fathers, at various constitutional conferences leading up to independence, as the basis of the Nigerian union”
He further stated: “Over the years, we have moved from a strong and viable three-regional federal structure to a weak, spendthrift, and unwieldy 36-state structure; we moved from a decentralised police system that allowed the federating units to take greater charge of security of life and property in their territories to a centralised police system in which one man at the centre pretends to be in full charge of security of lives and property in the creeks of the Niger Delta, the cocoa farms of the South West, the expansive land mass of the North, and the hinterlands of the South East.
“We also moved from fiscal federalism, which encouraged productivity and competitive development to a feeding bottle federalism that runs on free oil money, encouraging indolence, corruption, and lack of creativity in governance”.
“Now you can see why the cost of governance is so high; why states can no longer pay salaries; why neither the federal government nor the federating units cared to invest, but lived off their allocations like lottery proceeds over the years,” he added.
A statement by his Special Adviser, Media, Uche Anichukwu, quoted Ekweremadu spoke as speaking at the weekend, in New York, the United States of America, during the 2016 Convention of the World Igbo Congress, WIC.
He regretted that “successive military regimes reneged on the core ingredients of a federal structure agreed upon by our founding fathers, at various constitutional conferences leading up to independence, as the basis of the Nigerian union”
He further stated: “Over the years, we have moved from a strong and viable three-regional federal structure to a weak, spendthrift, and unwieldy 36-state structure; we moved from a decentralised police system that allowed the federating units to take greater charge of security of life and property in their territories to a centralised police system in which one man at the centre pretends to be in full charge of security of lives and property in the creeks of the Niger Delta, the cocoa farms of the South West, the expansive land mass of the North, and the hinterlands of the South East.
“We also moved from fiscal federalism, which encouraged productivity and competitive development to a feeding bottle federalism that runs on free oil money, encouraging indolence, corruption, and lack of creativity in governance”.
“Now you can see why the cost of governance is so high; why states can no longer pay salaries; why neither the federal government nor the federating units cared to invest, but lived off their allocations like lottery proceeds over the years,” he added.
