WORRIED by the festering multifaceted challenges confronting the country, the Director, Research and Strategy, Afenifere, Dr Akin Fapounda has called on President Bola Tinubu to initiate an executive bill for the setting up of a seven to nine-member political bureau with a mandate on the way forward for the country.
According to him, the body, which will have three months to carry out the assignment, will submit its recommendation by the end of March 2024.
In a piece with the title: On the way we are – Another January 15 Dawns tomorrow and made available to the Nigerian Tribune at the weekend, Fapounda wants President Bola Tinubu and the president of the Senator Godswill Akpabio, to collaborate expeditiously on the bill due to prevailing situation.
Recalling how what he described as the day that the Nigerian Federal Governance Agreement was violently truncated on January 15, 1966, he said the annual ritual o mark that date would be a day of remembrance if the fundamentals agreed upon in 1960 had been positively consolidated in the past year.
He said it was a matter for regrets that “Nigeria and Nigerians seem utterly infected with inertia, a disease that is tantamount to being immutable.”
Fapounda noted that despite all the strident shouts across the land about the duplicitous 1999 Constitution, the nation’s political class is fixated only on N160 million SUVs and then the next general election.
According to him, it may require a “constellation of earthquakes with unlimited aftershocks to wake up our rulers, on behalf of the citizens who are the receiving end of bad governance.
Instead of an uprising by the masses against the current system with potential unlimited damage, he advocated a collaboration between Tinubu and the leadership of the National Assembly to save the country from further tribulations.
“Suppose just one or two persons: President Tinubu and/or President Akpabio were to decide to act tomorrow based on the speech by Olisa Agbakoba last month, in less than three months, we could be on the road to redemption. The Nigerian polity would have been electrified.”
“All it might take would be an Executive Bill for an act to be enacted by the National Assembly giving effect to the setting up of a seven to nine-member Political Bureau to take off by say the end of March 2024.
“The task of the bureau would be to “collate and synthesise the opinions embedded in previous conferences and committee reports; take three months to observe and produce a report of national discourse on restructuring, after public debate through the media and various for a; based on the above, produce a draft framework for the new structure of governance for Nigeria – 2023 Federal and Regional Constitutions.
“Take another three months to present and explain their postulations for the public to understand; organise a referendum to accept or reject the constitutions or modify as may be necessary.
“All the above steps can be concluded before the end of 2024. The above will set the stage for the 2027 elections to be based on the new dispensation/ constitution.
“The current office holders will, in effect, be allowed to fully serve their present tenure. We shall be in 2 years of transition, during which all present laws and political configurations would be reworked.
“A new Republic will then take off in 2027. But who is listening? Who is acting? So, we are marooned and abandoned in the ocean of despair.”
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