Sunday, 24 September 2017
DON'T CONDEMN IPOB- TINUBU TELLS NIGERIANS
National Leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, has said Nigerians should not condemn but listen and understand the agitations by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
He said this while delivering the Keynote speech at the 2017 Annual Dinner of the King’s College Old Boys’ Association (KCOBA) at King’s College, Lagos.
The APC leader, who said the cry for separation had gained traction among average people due to the chronic failure of government to meet basic aspirations, however, warned against any attempt to split the country.
Tinubu noted that gargantuan challenges were facing the country but explained that they were not enough to call for the dismantling of the federation at a time some parts of the world were taking advantage of integration.
He said: “It is a rather curious lapse that a nation with such diversity as ours has not taken the time to give our legal marriage its proper functional underpinning. In other words, we all lined up to call ourselves Nigerian without gathering to discuss what it meant.
“Thus, we inhabit a nation that has not sufficiently defined its governance. We may be defined by political borders and boundaries but we have not glued ourselves to collective purpose and vision. Too many of us are born in Nigeria but not of it
Thus, our society is not a collective enterprise as important to each of us as our own personal endeavor. It is but a platform, an arena, to claim whatever one can by whatever means available. In too many ways we resemble a wrestling match instead of the nation we were meant to become.
“Thus, we argue over matters that long ago should have been settled. The longer such fundamental questions fester, the more extreme become the proposed answers.
“Thus, we have people clamoring for secession in one part of the country and the murmur of such a course grows stronger in other sections.
“These other areas resent that some have advocated secession. Blame and recrimination become the political currency. Statesmanship falls in short supply. The dominant urge is to confront instead of reconcile.
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