‘Centenary celebration, a jamboree’
Pro-National Conference Organisation on Monday described the planned centenary celebration of the 1914 amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates by the Federal Government as a jamboree.
PRONACO in a statement by its spokesperson, Olawale Okunniyi, said the celebration which commenced in Abuja on Monday, lacked depth and substance.
The group also said the celebration would only reveal the nation’s “unfortunate history”.
It said, “Instead of the organisers of the centenary jamboree thinking of how to enrich themselves during the historic occasion, the Nigerian Government should rather facilitate a solemn process of renegotiation by a Constituent Assembly to effectively fashion a national consensus and collective ownership of the renewal of a united and stable Nigeria beyond 2014.
“The implication of the present wrong-footing on the centenary will mean that the basis of the current unity and the subsisting Federal Government at the centre will become legally void so that any of the federating components can be morally leveraged to opt out of the foisted amalgamation by colonial Britain to last for 100 years.”
Okunniyi cautioned that the only way to sustain the unity and stability of Nigeria beyond 2014 was for government to rally the people of Nigeria into a more impactful political negotiation.
He said, “All that will be necessary for the component parts of Nigeria to legitimately secede from the union will be to formally approach the United Nations for official recognition. In the same manner the sovereignty of Nigeria will automatically become questionable and vulnerable to external aggression at the expiration of the terms of the Nigerian union in 2014, if the various constituent areas of Nigeria are not allowed to re engineer and own a new political agreement on the unity and continuity of Nigeria as one country.”
CULLED FROM: PUNCH NEWSPAPERS
February 5, 2013 by Sodiq Oyeleke
Written by NEWSTRAWL ONLINE UPDATE
Sodiq Oyeleke is a Media, Human Resources, Project Management and Public Relations Practitioner
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