By Dr Austin Orette
The future of Nigeria cannot be built by continually expanding the centre. It must be built by empowering the components, unleashing their creativity and making every level of government responsible for the prosperity of its own people.
Restructure Nigeria. Empower the Regions. Unleash the States. Let the Niger Delta develop on its own terms. Restructuring is not a luxury. It is the foundation for a truly productive, competitive and prosperous Nigeria.
The greatest challenge confronting Nigeria is not who occupies the presidency, who becomes governor, or who sits in the National Assembly. Our deeper problem is the structure of the Nigerian state.
Until we address that structure, we will continue to change governments without changing the conditions that keep our people poor, our regions underdeveloped, and our resources exploited without corresponding benefits to the communities that produce them.
The absence of genuine restructuring has created an over bloated government and an entrenched bureaucracy that rewards feudalism, dependency and indolence. Instead of empowering the component parts of the federation to develop according to their strengths and circumstances, we have created a system in which states and regions continually look toward the centre for survival.
That is not sustainable. Nigeria must become a country where its component parts compete in creativity, productivity, innovation and development, rather than compete for access to the federal centre and wait for Abuja to spoon-feed them.
The Niger Delta provides perhaps the clearest example of this structural injustice. The region produces enormous wealth for Nigeria, yet its people continue to struggle with poor infrastructure, environmental degradation, unemployment and inadequate connectivity
competition, innovation and responsibility rather than political patronage.
Nigeria does not need another cycle of merely changing personalities while preserving the same defective structure. We need structural change. We need genuine federalism. We need restructuring.
The future of Nigeria cannot be built by continually expanding the centre. It must be built by empowering the components, unleashing their creativity and making every level of government responsible for the prosperity of its own people.
Restructure Nigeria. Empower the Regions. Unleash the States. Let the Niger Delta develop on its own terms. Restructuring is not a luxury. It is the foundation for a truly productive, competitive and prosperous Nigeria.
Dr. Austin Orette, an African Democratic Congress (ADC) Delta South Senatorial Candidate, Wrote in From Owhelogbo In Isoko North Local Government Area
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