Former President Goodluck Jonathan has revived the long-dead call for the implementation of the National Conference report which took place between the months of March and August 2014. While speaking at the public presentation of a book in honour of Senator Femi Okurounmu, he stressed that implementing the report would go a long way in solving many of the myriad problems which the current administration is facing.
It appears that before Jonathan revived talks about the 2014 National Conference report, talks about Restructuring– one of the recommendations in the report- had been relegated to the background totally.
Many of the suggestions by the 2014 National Conference report, namely: Creation of New States, Resource Control/Derivation Principle/Fiscal Federalism, Public Finance/Revenue Allocation reforms, Part-time Legislature, Local Government Autonomy, Immunity Clause removal, Independent Candidacy, Good Governance principles, Special Courts for Anti-corruption, Land Tenure Act reforms, reverting to old National Anthem, government ending pilgrimage sponsorship, among other recommendations, cannot be that difficult to implement. A partial implementation would even suffice to catapult the country into a better structured and autopilot mode of operation which developed economies enjoy.
As many individuals have called in to question the sincerity of Jonathan’s calls, regarding his own inability to implement the report before he left office, the former president has defended himself using the opportunity of the book presentation to state his position:
“I believed that given the nature of the consultations and due deliberations involved in advancing the process, an orderly and systematic implementation could not have been conducted in less than one year.
Then, the members of the National Assembly, whose duty it was to consider and validate the process, were preoccupied with the battle for political survival.”
Besides Jonathan’s point, as government is a continuum, why has the Buhari administration not yet implemented the conference report? Could it be that President Buhari still has a notion that everything which was deliberated about at the conference was needless? Can there be a justification for the President to be political or ideologically biased towards a report concluded on by 492 delegates? Is it possible that Buhari is thinking of constituting another National Conference during his second time? Or is the President simply not serious about anything which has to do with the fundamental development and progress of the nation?
All of these questions need to be answered by the current administration, and as well pondered upon by the lot of the citizenry.
The nation cannot keep on wasting precious resources on half-finished projects which fail at attempts at developing the country. The time is, therefore, ripe to ask for what is right from this slumbering administration.
References
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