Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, I Have No Doubt Nigeria Will Soon Break Up

 Elder statesman and  Afenifere chieftain, Chief Ayo Adebanjo on Thursday said the breakup of  Nigeria is inevitable if certain critical issues in the country are not urgently resolved.
Speaking in an interview with Independent, Adebanjo who was a delegate to the 2014 national conference also said President Muhammadu  Buhari has refused to implement the recommendations of the conference because he is not interested in keeping  Nigeria together as one.

According to him, Nigeria’s continued unity lies in the implementations of the confab report organised by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.

“Restructuring is not a strange word. It is nothing more than reverting to the constitution we had at independence during the time of Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe. It was the military that changed the whole thing in 1966”.
“That is why we have problem till date and when the military want to return the country back to civilian rule, we advocated that the constitution at independence must be the basis”.
“That is why I said that Buhari is not interested in the implementation of the conference report because he wants to keep us together on the condition that is not acceptable to every part of the country or  on the condition acceptable to a particular section of the country”.


“The unity of this country depends on the implementations of the report of the last conference. Yes it is.  I have no doubt in my mind that this country would one day break up if certain things that are not going on well in this country are not resolved”.

“If you don’t set up a country under federal system where the federating units are allowed to grow at their pace, it would break up, there is no doubt about that.
But some delegates of the last conference from the north claimed that those of you from the south calling  for restructuring  are not specific in your agitation. How do you respond to that?”.
“They are being mischievous. We said let us have a federal constitution, can anything be more categorical than that? And the kind of restructuring we are talking about is to revert to the constitution we had when Obafemi Awolowo,  Nnamdi Azikiwe and Abubakar Bello were premiers of West, East and Northerner regions respectively”.

“Can any of them from the north who are kicking against restructuring be more northern than Sar’dauna who accepted that constitution?  The kind of government and development we had at that time was competitive and that is where the people want the country to get back to. Ahmadu Bello built his university; Awolowo built Obafemi Awolowo University while Azikiwe had UNN in the east.

”There was fair distribution of revenue but suddenly, the whole thing was up turned. We want to get to where we were before the whole thing was truncated. That is all we are advocating expect some body want to be mischievous” he said.

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