From Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja
Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Chief Audu Ogbeh, has said restructuring and secession are not the solutions to the problems facing the country.
The former Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development said if the United States of America recognised the union of many parts as inscribed in its coat of arms, Nigerians too must recognise it as well.
Ogbeh’s remark is coming amidst the calls for the restructuring of the country and the secessionist agitations in the country.
Ogbeh who spoke during the inaugural edition of the Sam Momah Annual Lecture Series in Abuja said long before the unduly acrimonious debate on restructuring, the late General Sam Momah (retd) in whose memory the lecture held, wrote about restructuring.
The former Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) added that Momah took time to look, not only at the political aspect of restructuring but the problem of managing the Nigerian environment such as the cost of governance and the cost and challenge of managing plurality.
He recalled that in the book Momah went as far as doing something which very few people have ever attempted to do and listed all the ethnic groups in the country and listed the states in which they were to be found.
‘The answer to the plurality problem is not in division or splitting and this is the point General Momah made in his book. He was agonising about how we could cope with the cost of governance, the challenge of revenues after oil.
‘He saw difficulties of development. In many ways, some eight, nine, ten years ago, he was looking into the future, the future in which we now find ourselves, a very complex future,’ Ogbeh said.
In his remarks, the son of the late Momah, Dr Nkem Momah, said the event was put together to honour the memory of his father who loved books.