Godwin Tsa, Abuja
A senior lawyer in the legal team of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, Chief Mike, has set agenda for President Muhammadu Buhari as he commenced his second term in office.
The human rights crusader specifically called on President Buhari to run an all-inclusive government and to “quickly take Nigeria out of the social, economic and political doldrums he and his APC government have sunk it.
In a statement made available to our correspondent on Tuesday, Ozekhome called on the president to be more nationalistic in his approach to governance.
The statement reads: “Before the much-awaited Election Petition Tribunal judgment, President Muhammadu Buhari must quickly take Nigeria out of the social, economic and political doldrums he and his APC government have sunk it. He should be more nationalistic in his approach to governance, less sectional, less partial, nepotic, cronystic and prependalistic. He should drop his stiff garb of suffocating military imperiousness and jackbootism and know that he is now supposed to be a Democrat, subject to due process of law, with the attendant democratic safeguards. Buhari should allow Rule of Law to flourish, learn to obey court orders and respect citizens’ cherished and inalienable fundamental human rights.
Buhari must, as president of a whole nation, drop his 97%-5% bellyaching mantra and endeavour to be less divisive and vindictive; and treat all Nigerians equally and as one, whether they presumably voted for him or not. He must stop promoting the superiority, suzerignty and sovereignty of his ethnic group over and above the other more than 350 ethnic groups in Nigeria.
He must give democracy dividends to the Nigerian prople, through the provision of adequate security (Section 14 of the 1999 Constitution), robust economy and infrastructural development.
He should think outside the box of how to fight corruption, as his performance in this regard has been woeful, selective, exclusionary and favouritism-based.
Nigeria is more corrupt today than ever before (according to latest Transparency International Corruption Perception Index).
Where corruption could be said to have been “democratised” by previous governments before him, corruption under Buhari has been greatly “privatised” by a few high-healed cabalistic elements.
Thus, corruption money, unlike before now, no longer circulates or sip down to the common people.
It has been hijacked privatised and held down by the jugular by these few elements at the precincts and corridors of temporary power.
“More importantly, Buhari should dust up the over 600 ground-breaking recommendations of the 2014 National Conference scripted by 491 delegates from across Nigeria (wherein I was a Federal Government delegate, and voted “Cicero of the 2014 National Conference”) and implement them.
Some of the most important amongst them is the vexed but overdue issue of devolution of powers and restructuring of the unworking Nigerian contraption, to become a truly fiscal and federal system of government.”
