Non-viable States should be merged‎ – Atiku

Vice President Alhaji Atiku Abubakar yesterday advocated the merging of some states.

He said such would solve many challenges facing the country.

Atiku wondered why States must always rush to Abuja for allocation and added that those not independent should be collapsed.

According to him: “There is no doubt that many of our states are not viable and were not viable from the start, once you take away the federal government allocations from Abuja.

“We have to find creative ways to make them viable in a changed federal system. Collaboration among states in a region or zone will help.”

“We can examine the possibility of using the existing geopolitical zones as federating units.

“We can also find other ways to determine the viability of states, for example by introducing a means of test such that a state that is unable to generate a certain percentage of its expenditures internally for a specified period of time will be deemed unviable and collapsed into another or a group of states,” he said.