A former Interim National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Bisi Akande,on Saturday said successive military governments in the country between 1966 and 1999 are responsible for the current lopsided political structure in the country.
Akande in a lecture “Devolution of Powers and National Restructuring” he delivered at the APC-USA Second Annual Convention in Washington DC, United States of America,said the various military regimes created states and local governments solely for selfish reasons rather than through any scientific political reasoning.
The effects of those decisions on the country and the citizens now necessitate a restructuring,he said.
The former Osun State governor said the military might have inequitably created more local governments per population per state in the North than in the South, thus giving the North an unfair advantage in revenue allocation from the national treasury.
Akande, who is also a former governor of Osun State, said that the restructuring being canvassed would ensure “equitable rearrangement and redistribution of the existing states and local governments per population within the various ethnic nationalities.”
The former APC chairman, however, admitted it would be politically unwise to define the word equitable in such a way that it would be easy to convince those enjoying the unfair advantage at present to surrender such.
The former APC chairman also said constitutional amendments or not, Nigerians have begun to see themselves as belonging to geo-political zones-Northwest, Northeast, Northcentral, Southwest, Southeast and South-south.
He said the Southwest, on its own, has evenmoved ahead to create a Development Agenda Commission for Western Nigeria (DAWN) to conduct research to generate advisory information for the benefit of the each of the South-west state governments on integrated development programmes.
According to him, as a first step, the people of these Southwestern states are trying to key into the APC to back up the possibility of their governments to speak with one political voice, using one manifesto under one political party.
He recommended this initiative to other geo-political zones, saying it is an experiment worthy of encouragement and emulation for the strengthening of a federal political attitude towards physical and social development within each zone.
