Members of Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, Mr Tony Uranta and Senator Khairat Gwadabe are already commending Nigerians on the manners at which participants conducted themselves at all the locations where presentations of memoranda are made. The duo also affirmed that the completion of the first phase of the committee’s assignment has recorded key milestone in line with the terms of reference. They made this known recently in Abuja, at the venue of the final stop to the consultations and memoranda received from Nigerians.
According to Mr Uranta, ‘‘first of all, it has been very successful, we have found out that 80 to 90 percent Nigerians are eagerly awaiting this opportunity to come together and talk candidly about what they believe are things that bind us together and those things that we need to resolve that would tear us apart. More importantly however, I find that even though this is not a conference, it was just collecting of opinions based on our terms of reference. Nigerians already started putting issues on the table and actually debating them.’’
Speaking further, Uranta who doubles as Secretary General of the Nigerian National Summit Group (NNSG) expressed confidence in the success of the national conference, having seen the positive attitudes of Nigerians about the exercise. ‘‘The ability to talk, the readiness to talk is there. There was a period that we thought part of the country was shying away from talking, and there was another one part that was more interested, but right now every part is eager. Some people even said they wouldn’t want a sovereign national conference are now even demanding a sovereign national conference. We don’t know exactly what we are going to recommend yet; as the chairman (Sen. Femi Okunrounmu) said what we are now faced with in the next phase is collating, remembering, listing, reading and coming up with those things we can distill out, before we start thinking of what we are going to advice the President on.’’ Uranta stated.
On the part of Hajia Khairat Gwadabe who was one time Senator of the federal republic representing FCT, she said some participants already assumed the conference had started which made many of them to ventilate and bring their concerns to the open. She also confirmed that others who do not believe in the exercise initially later changed their minds and now throwing their weight behind the convocation of national conference.
‘‘We just ended the first phase of dialogue/consultative meetings which had taken a form of town hall meetings, everybody was free to come, free to attend, deliver and state their minds. As contained on our terms of reference, we wanted people to also have feedbacks from that, and we have had tremendous reactions. At many locations we have hundreds of memoranda and many came in through e-mail system. A lot of people assumed this is a conference; many of them have actually come to ventilate and bring their issues on board. We have to keep reminding them that this was just a precursor to the conference itself, and for the responses, some skeptics from the beginning eventually become converts. Those skeptics were initially feeling that nothing good will come out of this, it was a distraction, waste of time, a lot of opinions in that regard. But gradually some of them are giving it a chance. But the good thing is that many of the people are not talking about breaking up, although we had few ones who did, but very small in number and that’s a good one. I sat and I heard a lot, I am really impressed with the presentations.’’ Gwadabe said.