…Backs calls for restructuring
The Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan has urged the Federal Government to change the way of doing things in addition to yielding to call by Nigerians to restructure the country.
Onaiyekan gave this advise at a news conference on the Centenary of the Late Ignatius Cardinal Ekandem, the first Episcopal Archbishop of Abuja Catholic Metropolitan, on Wednesday in Abuja.
He called on the government to be fair in its dealings so that anger and dissatisfaction would not be the order of the day among the people of the nation.
“We all know what is causing people to be angry, and if you want to be sincere, there is no part of Nigeria where there is no cause for anger, no part.
“May be some people are expressing their anger more than the others. But everywhere, people are dissatisfied.
“It goes in my opinion to the rules of governance. How we governed ourselves, the whole area of justice system and equality before the law,’’ he said.
He said that whole concept of federal character supposed to be that no part of the country is left behind and called for justice to avoid the issue of favoritism or marginalisation.
“If the federal character leads to injustice and marginalisation, then, it does not make sense.
“We must change the way we are doing things, we cannot continue like this. Definitely, if we do, there will be more anger.
“We don’t know who will be able to mobilise more people to cause more problem,’’ he said.
Onaiyekan also called on those at the helms of affairs to look at the agitation holistically to correct the imbalance in the land for peace to reign in the nation.
According to him, we need to critically and effectively look at, in such that, this sense of dissatisfaction, exclusion and injustice that people are feeling will be reduced to the minimum.
“Some people think that restructuring is to create more states, as far as am concerned if you create more states and the system remains the same, you will only have more problems.
“It is not the number of created states that matters. How do I feel at home in this country? How do I expect that I will be treated with justice, respect and dignity?
“It is not only the Biafrans, who are disgusted with this country; a lot of us are, even though we still are not thinking of that,’’ he said.
Speaking on the process entailed in the canonization of Archbishop Ekandem, he described him as a real man of the church who lived from 1917 to 1995.
NAN