--A backroom view of the state of the struggle for a True
Federalism Constitution.
By Chinweizu
10 January 2015
Our 'mumu' (is it
stupidity?) has caught up with us. Now, no one can escape the
dire consequences of living in our cultural and institutional deceit,
self-denial and delusions. In
brotherly frankness, please take these from me,
Amos
Akingba.
The quote is the last
paragraph of Amos Akingba’s email of 05jan15 to his aburo. It shall be the text
for my discourse on why the decades-long struggle for a True Federalism
Constitution stands today in danger of being defeated.
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From the backroom where ill health has confined me, I’ve
been watching this struggle for a True Federalism Constitution, TFC, and I have
a few observations to share with the elders
and captains of the struggle.
The handwriting on the wall, as I see it, is that the chance
of winning the struggle for TFC by dialogue and negotiation was lost on the
Confab floor during its closing session when Arewa introduced a surprise
amendment to the Confab Report requiring that it be sent to the NASS as proposed
amendments to the 1999 Constitution. By not defeating that amendment, the
non-Caliphate majority of the delegates—from the New South: i.e. south of
Shariyaland, and comprising the zones of South-West, South-South, South-East,
and North-Central as well as the indigenous non-Hafukawa who are trapped in
Shariyaland itself, such as the Zuru in Kebbi State and the Chibok in Borno
State, whose new alliance had secured those far reaching recommendations in the
Confab Report-- threw away all the marvelous gains they had made. In not
defeating that amendment, the New South delegates sent the report to a NASS
where Arewa can kill or gut it. Unless
their fraudulently built-in dominance at the NASS can somehow be overcome,
Arewa will get NASS to nullify the Confab Report and return the struggle for
TFC to square zero where it started decades ago.