RE: Nigeria can’t become great without reforms – President Bola Tinubu

Professor Funmilayo Adesanya-Davies the Presidential candidate of Mass Action Joint Alliance MAJA in 2019 has re-called the stance of President Bola Tinubu on Restructuring and Regionalisation in 2017 and 2023, saying, “It’s high time the did got done!” This is a soft reminder to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

In a report in Business News by Gboyega Akinsanmi on Breaking News, in 2017, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said, “Nigeria Won’t Make Progress without Restructuring.”

It reads, “Lending weight to growing calls for restructuring of the Nigerian federation, tye national leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, said on Saturday in Lagos, “That the country development would remain an unrealistic hope under the current quasi-federal structure.

“Tinubu stated this in his keynote address at the 2017 Founders Day Dinner of Kingâ’s College Old Boys Association. He said, “The present system was over-centralising power at the expense of the federating units.”

“The former governor of Lagos State and current President of Nigeria therefore, “called for a return to the ideals of the 1963 Constitution, which he said guaranteed fiscal federalism, regional autonomy, regional constitutions, and progressive competition among the federating units.”

“Tinubu said, “Many of the 68 items on the Exclusive Legislative List should be transferred to the Residual Legislative List, explaining, “This would be in harmony with the 1963 Constitution, again an instance of reaching back to revive something old yet more likely to give us a better Nigeria. That prior constitution granted vast powers to the regions, enabling them to carry out their immense responsibilities as they saw fit.

He faulted the approach of the federal government to the Paris Club refunds, saying it has no right to withhold funds that constitutionally belong to the states.

“Represented at the dinner, where he was Principal Guest of Honour, by chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hydro-Carbon Pollution Restoration Project and former Commissioner for Finance, Mr. Olawale Edun, Tinubu spoke on the topic, “A New Nigeria or A Better One: the Fitting Tools of a Great Repair”. He said, the vestiges of the country’s military past were still been allowed to haunt its democratic future.”

“APC, which had promised restructuring and true federalism as cardinal principles in its manifesto while contesting the 2015 general election, has been widely criticised for jettisoning that promise since winning power. But owing to pressure from the public, the party sometime set up a committee on restructuring headed by Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai to make recommendations on the hot issue. The committee has, reportedly, submitted its report to the APC authorities, but it was not made known public.

Tinubu, whose defunct Action Congress of Nigeria was a key proponent of restructuring and fiscal federalism before entering the merger that gave birth to APC, re-echoed his stance on the structure of the federation at the KCOBA dinner, lending a strategic voice to a growing demand.

Lamenting that Nigeria functioned as a unitary state, despite being constitutionally defined as a federal republic, Tinubu said, “We cannot become a better Nigeria with an undue concentration of power at the federal level. Competition for federal office will be too intense, akin to a winner-take-all duel. Those who lose will bristle at the lack of power in the periphery they occupy.

They will scheme to pester and undermine the strong executive because that is where they want to be. The executive will become so engaged in deflecting their antics that it will not devote its great powers to the issues of progressive governance for which such powers were bestowed.â€

He said, “If Nigeria continued in the current pseudo-federal path, it will be in a constant state of disequilibrium and irritation. Such a situation augurs toward the maintenance of an unsatisfactory status quo in the political economy. It augurs against reform. He stressed that the country must restructure to attain the correct balance between our collective purpose, on one hand, and our separate grassroots realities, on the other.

Under the 1963 constitutional order, he explained, regional autonomy was a major feature by virtue of the fact that the regional governments were closer to the people and had a better understanding of the material and intangible priorities of their populations.

The APC leader stated, We must return to this ideal. Some items which should be left for the states to handle, such as police, prisons, stamp duties, regulation of tourist traffic, registration of business names, incorporation of companies, traffic on federal truck roads passing through states, trade, commerce and census, are now on the Exclusive List for the federal government.

In another publication titled, same, “Nigeria can’t become great without reforms – Tinubu” published by Anthony Ailemen on August 28, 2023;
President Bola Tinubu had said that, “Nigeria would not become the great country that the citizens and the rest of the world desire it to be, without critical reforms.

“We cannot have the country we desire without the reforms we have initiated.

“Can we continue to service external debts with 90 percent of our revenue? It is a path to destruction. It is not sustainable,” Tinubu said.

The president also noted that Nigeria could not sustain the economic theory of the past that wasted 90 percent of the country’s revenue in servicing external debts, adding that such money could have been used for development.

“Tinubu spoke at the annual general conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) at the Moshood Abiola National Stadium, in Abuja.

“He added that prosperity could only come when poverty was banished from society with the cooperation of private sector players.

“We must make the very difficult changes that are necessary for our country to get up from slumber and be respected among the great nations of the world,” he said.

Speaking on the theme of the conference, “Getting it right: Charting the course for Nigeria’s nation-building,” Tinubu said that decisions must be taken to put the country on the growth path.

“We cannot have the country we desire without the reforms we have initiated. It is painful at the beginning, in the short and medium term, but we must do what we have to do to take this nation to its great destiny.

“It is not about you and it is not about me. It is about our generations yet unborn, for whom we must bequeath a great and prosperous country,” he said.

In another similar development, “Afenifere backs Reps on Parliamentary System, says Political Restructuring must Begin ahead of 2027.”