Former Commonwealth Secretary-General, Emeka Anyaoku has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to eschew sectional practices and focus on eliminating Nigeria’s ethnic and religious fault lines.
Anyaoku’s comments came at a book launch in Abuja, Tuesday.
Over the past week, President Buhari has faced condemnation from prominent voices like Wole Soyinka and Olusegun Obasanjo, with both warning of impending disaster should the president fail to recalibrate his responses to lingering insecurity and economic woes.
“Every diverse federal country throughout the world achieves political stability and socio-economic development through successfully managing its national diversity,” Anyaoku said while delivering a speech at the launch of a book by Nigerian jurist, Dadi Onyeama, at the Yar’Adua Centre, Abuja.
“There are two common keys to this. The first is having an inclusive central government which gives the peoples of the component parts of the federation a sense of belonging that in turn underpins the sense of unity and patriotism in all the citizens.
“The second is having adequate delegation of powers to the federating units to enable them to handle their internal security and significant aspects of their socio-economic development,” he added.
As kidnapping, armed robbery, herdsmen violence and other crimes continue to claim lives and devastate the economy, Anyaoku said he was compelled to join calls for Buhari to change course before it is too late.
“No objective observer, including those in the government, can deny that the current state of affairs in our country is extremely worrisome,” the 86-year-old said.
“We see an unprecedented diminution of national unity; we see an unprecedented level of insecurity of life and property with kidnappings and killings of human beings occurring virtually every day in many parts of the country including the seemingly unchecked violence by Fulani herdsmen which has spawned fractious controversies over the proposed Ruga policy by the federal government.”
Specifically, Anyaoku asked Mr Buhari to thoroughly analyse the legal and national security consequences of his administration’s Ruga policy before implementing it.
“For the sake of peace and integrity of the country, the Ruga policy must be handled with circumspection and strictly in accordance with our extant constitution’s provisions on the land tenure,” he said.
The policy, which would see mostly northern herders occupy swathes of land across the country, was recently suspended following widespread outrage across the south.
