“Every stratum of the elites in Nigeria must by now transcend above their jealously guided pettiness and pedestrian political and financial contestations to begin to articulate and implement holistically, a range of fit-for-purpose and functional mechanisms and measures to stop Nigeria from sliding into the precipice of anarchy, doom, and gloom. This may take hard-core legal and constitutional reforms”.
With the above affirmation, a civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has asked the governors of the 36 states of the Federation to look at President Muhammadu Buhari eyeball-to-eyeball to demand that he takes concrete and statesmanly steps to stop the Country from witnessing imminent war.
The Rights group said the country is indeed in a state of war against itself.
The Rights group in a media statement by the National Coordinator Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko and National Media Affairs Director Miss Zainab Yusuf tasked the governors to stop their individual and corporate beggarly etiquettes and tendencies which they always display whenever they visit the President but to conscientiously interface with the President to see to the imperative need to act decisively to arrest the drift before it is very late to rescue the collapsing Nigeria.
“We hereby suggest to President Muhammadu Buhari and the governors to resolve to begin a weekly meeting of the National Council of state devoid of frivolities of entertainments and foods, but to intellectually take bold measures to canvass the immediate constitutional reforms to bring into being, effective State Police and to encourage private sector-driven security vigilantes to save Nigeria from anarchy.
“These measures must be measured, immediate, and time-barred because the time is ticking fast and the nation is sliding irredeemably into a state of war and it is already in a state of nature whereby life has become cheap, short, brutish, and uninteresting even as might has become right in Nigeria even when the country ought to operate as a Constitutional democracy.”
The Rights group adopts the position canvassed by the Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka that President Muhammadu Bello should seek for international assistance but the government must first show that it does not support terrorism of any kinds by dismissing his minister of communications and digital economy for expressing sympathy for global Jihadists movements of AlQaeda and Taliban.
HURIWA accused the governors of always rushing to President Buhari to beg for financial bailouts from the Central Bank of Nigeria instead of these political elites to accept the present National Security threats as big tasks that each one of them must mobilize stakeholders and the state legislatures to effectively introduce and implement measures to stop the widening frontiers of insecurity all over Nigeria.
“These governors have turned themselves into executive beggars who often come to Abuja to pick up crumbs that fall from the master’s table when they should tell the President to up his executive game and do the needful including respecting Federal Character Principle in the appointments of heads of Internal Security architectures because as it is, the ethnically based, and majorly Fulani/Hausa/Moslem Northerners heads of Internal Security has compromised our collective National security”.
The Rights group has also accused governors of abdicating their roles as persons who should localize measures to secure their constituent parts but have continued to spread the pedestrian interpretation that only the President can secure the country.
“But the governors should then tell their people why they still collect huge security votes and pocket these humongous sums but frequently comes to Abuja to beg the President for help as if they have no state houses of Assembly that ought to make law for the good governance of their states as clearly spelt out in section 4 (7)of the Nigeria Constitution just as this provision specifically empowers the state houses of assembly to act decisively to compliment the national security architectures in a bid to protect their people.
“All that the governors need to do is to canvass constitutional reforms to input state security into the Concurrent Legislative List. But as it is, there is no specific provision in the Exclusive Legislative List prohibiting the setting up of armed vigilantes to secure the states of the Federation.
Specifically, section 4-(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria states: “the legislative powers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria shall be vested in a National Assembly for the Federation which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
(2) The National Assembly shall have the power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Federation or any part thereof with respect to any matter included in the Exclusive Legislative List set out in Part I of the Second Schedule to this Constitution.”
