Nigeria: Where Is The Sovereignty? -By Kushi Daniel Friday

Those who are complaining forget that the only way the Nigerian state can minimize, mind you, not stop pipeline vandalisation and crude oil theft, is to hand over the work of the Nigerian Navy to a non-state actor.

The critical questions that all Nigerians must answer going forward is whether Nigeria is beyond a reset? If it is, what next? Must we continue like this and for how long? Those who ask these fundamental questions, I dare say, are not less patriotic than those who insist on preserving the status-quo willy-nilly. Truth be told, the status-quo is not fit for purpose and Nigeria is not working.

In his article, “Can Emeka Anyaoku’s Patriots reset Nigeria?” Anthony Kila, a Jean Monnet professor of Strategy and Development and the Institute Director at the Commonwealth Institute for Advanced and Professional Studies, CIAPS, Lagos, said: “The Patriots will show the world on Monday if they can stimulate speakers and audience to proffer solutions and workable roadmaps on how to get a new people’s constitution under an elected government and a sitting parliament.”

Kila was writing about the national

constitutional dialogue with the theme, “Lawful procedures for actualizing a people’s constitution for Nigeria,” organised by The Patriots, a pan-Nigerian group of eminent national leaders of thought, in honour of the late Prof Ben Nwabueze.

Nwabueze co-founded The Patriots with his late friend, Chief Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams, the first chairman of the group, and when he died on March 26, 2005, the mantle of leadership fell on Nwabueze. Today, the group is led by Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary General of the Commonwealth – a testimony of how eminent the group, indeed, is.

The national dialogue was the least the group could do in honour of Nwabueze, Nigeria’s foremost constitutional lawyer, who spent his entire adult life advocating for constitutional equilibrium, political stability, unity and good governance of Nigeria through restructuring

In a chat I had with him on March 29, 2017, he bemoaned the state of anomie and insisted that restructuring and transcendental leadership were pathways to Nigeria’s viability.

The country is not what I had expected it will be or what I thought I would leave behind when the time eventually comes… I regret that we don’t seem to have learnt from the point of view of good governance. I don’t think we have learnt what good governance means, what its demands and challenges are. Our founding fathers meant well but since that time, leadership that we have had, has been disappointing,” he moaned

Kushi Daniel Friday
Can also be reached via
danielkushi52@gmail.com