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…backs calls for restructuring, state police
Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka has lashed out at people trivializing calls for national restructuring to just ‘restructuring of the mind.’
TheNewsGuru.com reports that there have been mounting calls by eminent Nigerians for the restructuring of the nation especially now when various ethnic groups in the country are beginning to demand for their independence.
Recall that in a special piece titled ‘Wanted: Restructuring of the mind’ published on TheNewsGuru.com on Saturday, Senior Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, said what Nigerians need at this time is restructuring of the mind, not the country.
In his words: “The sing-song in the country today is restructuring of the polity. We want more states. We want a return to regional structure. We want a revision of the revenue allocation formula. We want six vice presidents, one from each geo-political zone. We want those zones to be the federating units, rather than the states. And so on, and so forth.
“In fact, so loud is the cacophony of voices over restructuring that if you ask 100 people what they mean, they give you 100 different explanations. But as a country, I believe we will get there someday. And soon.
“However, is political restructuring the most urgent thing Nigeria needs now? I don’t think so. For me, what is more urgent is the restructuring of the Nigerian mind. A mind that sees the country as one, that believes that we have a future and a hope, that believes that we are one people under God. But what we see now is ruinous for any country. It is hemlock, bound to poison the entire polity, and send it to a premature perdition,” Adesina noted.
Reacting to this, respected literary icon, Soyinka, who spoke on Monday in Lagos at an event, said every Nigerian knows what restructuring is all about, whether it is called reconfiguring, return to status quo, or reformulating the protocols of association.
In Soyinka’s words: “My own position is that people shouldn’t allow themselves be put up by those who try to cheat on the expression, ‘restructuring.’ It doesn’t matter by what name you call it. We all know that this nation was deconstructed and what we live in right now, as a nation, is not allowing structuring that expresses the true will of Nigerians,” he said.
Speaking further, the Nobel laureate noted: “People go to churches and mosques for their minds to be restructured. Restructuring the mind is not the issue; nobody is saying restructuring the mind should not be undertaken; anybody who is involved in examination already engages in mental and or attitudinal reconstruction.
“So people should not try to substitute one for another. I find it very dishonest and cheap, trivialising the issue when people said it is the mind, which needs to be restructured. Who is denying that? So, why bring it up? We’re talking about the protocol of the association of the constitutive part of the nation. We’re talking about decentralisation, that is, another word. This country is over-centralised and that has been the bugbear of development, even of issues like security.
“Even if it is one state, that state has the right to say, listen people, let us restructure this state; the protocols that went into the making of this state are no longer viable or have been distorted along the way or have been abandoned and we want to go back to the original set of protocols that created what we call his national entity. You can say you want to reinvent the wheels completely or you want to go back to the original protocols of association,” he added.
He noted that an average citizen feels less secured today than a few years ago, yet “when people talk about state police, there are reasons for it. When they talk about bringing policing right down to the community level, they know what they are talking about; this is also part of restructuring or reconfiguration of the articles of association.”
Asked to comment on the clamour for a second term in office for President Buhari, by his aides and supporters, Soyinka said he was shocked by the move just midway into the president’s administration.
“Why are we talking about second term, for heaven’s sake? I don’t understand this; we have hardly gone half-way or barely gone half-way and people are already talking about positions. I refuse to be part of that discussion and absolutely refuse to be part of that discussion.”