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… No genuine effort at nation-building under Buhari govt
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has said that Nigeria is present facing existential challenges and with its current form, the nation is not working for Nigerians and needs to be fixed urgently.
Atiku Abubakar who was the 2019 presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP also said that under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari, there has been no effort at nation-building.
Atiku spoke at the Public Presentation of the book, Remaking Nigeria: Sixty Years, Sixty Voices, held at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre, in Abuja, Thursday said, “That fixing or restructuring will help in our nation-building project because it will help to foster a sense of nationhood out of our disparate groups, cultures, religions, and regions. It is obvious that a country is not necessarily a nation. Nationhood has to be forged through what we do as a country, and leadership is critical in the process of nation-building. Leaders give direction and the example they set determines the extent to which their followers will trust them. Without trust, there’s no leadership. Without leadership, a country drifts and becomes more difficult to forge into a nation.
“Some contributors to the book have gone as far as to say that development will continue to elude us until we are able to forge that sense of nationhood, that is, until we deepen our nation-building process. This is understandable because of the growing frustrations we all feel at the slow pace of development and reversals in nation-building.”
Atiku also said, when Nigerians start developing with what they have, more of Nigerians will want to identify with the country, love the country and commit their lives to the country.
“When that happens, especially with fairness and justice, nation-building accelerates, however imperfectly. This is why I find it amusing when people declare Nigeria’s unity as fixed and non-negotiable while doing everything in their power to destroy that fragile unity. Nothing in the relationships among peoples is fixed for eternity. You cannot declare your marriage as non-negotiable while doing everything to sow seeds of discord in that same marriage. Countries can be created by force. You can whip groups of people into forming a country but you cannot whip them into forming a nation. Nations are built through conscious or even unconscious agreement by peoples who believe that being together is, on balance, more beneficial than being apart.
“Development and nation-building do not happen by themselves. They are guided by people, especially leaders, thoughtful, insightful, and visionary leaders who are willing to make sacrifices and reach compromises. When people see their leaders making those efforts genuinely, and experience improvements in their lives, they are likely to follow. Over the past six years the leadership of this country at the federal level hardly embarked on nation-building. They may have been making (utterly confusing and unproductive) efforts at economic development. However, it can be rightly argued that they have been un-building the nation by taking conscious and deliberate actions that not only make nation-building more difficult but also undo the achievements made in that regard by previous administrations.
“As we all know there were deliberate attempts made since the 1960s to forge a nation out of Nigeria: states creation, federal character, the NYSC, power rotation, unity schools, and multiple federal agencies. However imperfect, these were genuine attempts at giving each segment of the country a sense of belonging and a semblance of justice and equity and promote interactions among our peoples. All it has taken is one administration in six short years to tear up the fabric of that unity and make more Nigerians lose faith in Nigeria and question the rationale for having one united country. One lesson there for all of us is the need to always be vigilant and be prepared to defend our democracy, for it is through the democratic process that we can more easily promote the unity of our country.
“I strongly believe that Nigeria can and will remain one strong and united nation with significant strides in economic development to improve the lives of our peoples. However, we must not take it for granted. We must work hard at it and make necessary compromises to accommodate one another. Hard work and compromises are necessary for restructuring the country, especially in terms of the relationship between the centre and the constituent states and between the public sector and the private sector. We do not need to reinvent the wheel; there are numerous examples of success from around the world for us to borrow from while adapting them to our local conditions.”