A former National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Chief Bisi Akande, has stated that minority Fulani rulers are being perceived to be manipulating the North to rule Nigeria since independence.
He said that people understood minority Fulani rulers to be manipulating the North to rule Nigeria through “Islamic emirate system since two centuries ago.”
Akande said this while delivering a paper titled “Devolution of Powers and National Restructuring” over the weekend at the APC-USA Second Annual Convention in Washington DC.
The former Governor of Osun State also said restructuring was a herculean task for all Nigerians.
According to Akande: “The North is a largely Hausa-speaking people traditionally mix-bred and assimilated with and governed by minority Fulani rulers through Islamic emirate system since two centuries ago.
” The North has been amalgamated with the South in-law and in fact since a century ago. And, presumably, the Fulani has been perceived to be manipulating the North to rule Nigeria since independence.
“Even if one does not like the minority Fulani rulers of the North for being hegemonic in characteristics, can one separate them from the original majority Hausa-speaking people of the same North?
“Unless one was ready for another civil war, could one ostracise the whole North in the political considerations of the country.”
Akande said it was within that “context that some of them who were not ready to wait for another civil war to effect a geo-political restructuring of the country decided to go ahead with the APC arrangement, while our opponents are left behind to assume a loud coarse noise on mere sloganeering-restructuring- without any clear definition or a peaceful workable strategy.”
The former APC chairman also said “constitutional amendments or not, Nigerians have begun to see themselves as belonging to geo-political zones-North-western, North-eastern, North-central, South-western, South-eastern and South-southern zones.”
Akande insisted that the “South-west, on its own, had moved further to create a Development Agenda Commission for Western Nigeria, DAWN Commission, to conduct research to generate pieces of advisory information for the benefit of the each of the South-western state governments on integrated development programmes.”
He stressed that as a “first step, the people of these South-western 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.”
The APC chieftain recommended this initiative to other geo-political zones, saying it was an “experiment worthy of encouragement and emulation for the strengthening of a federal political attitude towards physical and social development within each zone.”
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