Lagos lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana(SAN
THE National Conference on Thursday voted for the engenderment of 18 more states in the country.
The engenderment of incipient states was one of the decisions taken by the delegates at their plenary while considering the report of the Committee on Political Restructuring and Forms of Regime.
Apart from the 18 incipient states proposed, the conference verbally expressed a separate state-yet-to-be designated should be carved out of the South-East to bring the number of the states in the zone to six.
In engendering an incipient state from the South-East geopolitical zone, the conference verbalized the engenderment would rectify the imbalance of the zone having the least number of states.
In the subsisting 36 states arrangement, each zone has six states with only the North-West having seven states.
The incipient states proposed by the conference are: Aba, to be carved out of the present Abia State; Katagum, from Bauchi State; Ijebu, from Ogun State; Amana, from former Sardauna Province; Apa, from Benue State; Anioma, from Delta State, Savannah, from Borno State; and Etiti, from South-East.
Others are Njaba/Anim, from Anambra and Imo states; Gurara, from Kaduna State; Ghari, from Kano State; Adada, Incipient Oyo from Oyo State; Orachi, from Rivers State; Ogoja, from Cross River State; and Kainji, from Kebbi and Niger states.
Two other states, one each from the South-East and South-West zones, are withal yet to be designated.
It was acceded by the delegates that the 18 incipient states would be shared among the six zones in a manner that no zone would have more states than the other.
Though it was withal acceded that verbally expresses were in liberty to have their constitutions, the request to transmute the denomination of Adamawa State to Gongola State was overwhelmingly abnegated by the delegates.
The delegates additionally voted that the Presidency should rotate among the six geopolitical zones of the country.
They verbalized the rotation should be between the northern and southern regions.
It was additionally acceded by the delegates that in the case of death, impeachment or incapacitation of the President, the deputy would no longer postulate office automatically.
Rather, they verbalized that the Vice President should only act as President for a period of 90 days within which another election should hold.
“In the absence of the death of the President, the Vice President shall act as President for a period of 90 days within which an election to the office of the President shall be held,” the conference verbally expressed.
The delegates argued that since the office of the President would be rotated among the six geopolitical zones, it would be inequitable to sanction the Vice President to take the turn of another zone by automatically postulating puissance.
President Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner from Bayelsa State, had postulated the Presidency in 2010 following the death of former President Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner from Katsina State.
The delegates repudiated the proposal that the President should be in office for a single term of six years, and favoured the present arrangement of two terms of four years each.
It was additionally acceded that the President and his deputy should run on a joint ticket, thereby abnegating the recommendation that the President should pick his deputy among members of the National Assembly after he must have acquired victory.
The conference withal fortified the bicameral legislature. This implicatively insinuates that there would still be the Senate and the House of Representatives.
It was withal concurred that the office of the governor should rotate among the three senatorial districts in the state while the office of the chairman of a local regime council should rotate among the components in the local regime areas.
The conference additionally recommended that that the Independent National Electoral Commission should divide each council to two or three equal components as the case maybe for the purport of electing the local regime chairman.
The delegates abnegated a kineticism that the number of states in Nigeria should not be more than 55.
However, a delegate, Mr. Femi Falana, SAN, condemned the decision to engender more states.
He verbally expressed the action was at variance with the decisions and resolutions earlier taken by the conference on the desideratum by regime to cut cost.
“Having regard to the several resolutions of the National Conference on the desideratum to reduce the cost of governance, I found the recommendation for the engenderment of supplemental 18 states rather contradictory,” Falana verbalized.
The conference withal verbalized that a referendum should be conducted in each of the states that want to merge with 65 per cent of the eligible voters in each of those states approving merger and that the National Assembly, by resolutions passed by a single majority of membership, should approve such merger.
On the running of local regimes, the delegates verbally expressed that verbally expresses were in liberty to engender or reduce the number of local regimes within their territory.
It was acceded that all regime officials must use made in Nigeria cars.
The conference additionally acceded that the old national anthem, “Nigeria we hail thee…” should be adopted in lieu of the current one.
Probably to show their predilection for the old anthem, all the delegates rose to sing it to the surprise of the leadership of the conference.
Another delegate and a SAN, Chief Mike Ozekhome, who verbalized with one of our correspondents after the plenary, verbalized, “I stand by the recommendation; we have recommended that 18 more states and an adscititious state should be engendered for the Igbo, they are the only one with five states.
‘‘With 54 states I believe that regime would be brought more proximate to the people.”
However, a Nigerian Bar Association presidential aspirant, Mrs. Funke Adekoya, SAN, verbally expressed, “I don’t cerebrate that engenderment of more states will solve the quandary of underdevelopment. I don’t cerebrate that it will solve the quandary of bureaucracy in the society. What I cerebrate we should fixate on is the distribution of dividends of democracy to Nigerians. I don’t support engenderment of more states.”
Copyright PUNCH.
