Governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State has declared that the two major reasons responsible for recent call for restructuring, resource control and secession by various groups across the country are hunger and unemployment.
Okowa added that if there was enough food in the country, there would not be any agitation, adding that if youths are gainfully employed, they won’t care about the system of government that operates in the country.
While addressing journalists in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital Friday evening after he delivered the 2017 Alumni Lecture of the University of Ibadan, titled, “Good Governance for Weather Creation and Sustainable Development: Experiences and Lessons” Okowa said Nigerians need restructuring of minds and policies rather than the agitation for political restructuring into regional government as it was before military incursion into politics.
According to him, the clamor for political restructuring of the country from different parts of the nation via regional lines bordered more on the failures of the governance system, adding that with good governance, people would not care about the system of governance.
“The issues of restructuring are in many parts. You can see as at today, the discourse on restructuring is in various parts; some are agitating for restructuring of system of governance, some are agitating for restructuring in terms of geo-political zones and all manner of things, that is not the key thing.
“What we need to do first is to restructure our minds and to restructure our policies in such a way that governance is directly linked to the people and whatever we do, we must ensure that it’s all inclusive.
“When the people are happy and when we are actually beginning to impact on the people in a more positive way and there is less hunger and more employment, you’ll find that people will have less discourse on issues of restructuring and issues on secession.Those things won’t come to mind, the holistic thing is that all these issues are actually bordering more on failures of governance.
“I am not saying restructuring is not important. But they are bordering more on the failures of the governance system to such an extent that people are now feeling very pained over the years. It’s not the fault of one particular government. Over the years, we have failed to diversify the economy.
“We have just concentrated on the oil economy, and to that large extent, we try to destroy the agricultural economy and industrialisation, which was already picking up at a point in time.
“We refuse to use money from oil to critically address those issues and that is what has brought us to where we are. It is the pain that the people are going through that is making people to begin to talk about the discourse of restructuring.
“But what we need is the restructuring of our minds, starting from the leaders to the followers in this country. I think that is what we have to do”.
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