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| Olatuja Gabriel-Wealth |
By Olatuja Gabriel.
The young Nigerian entrepreneur and national transformation advocate, Olatuja Gabriel while addressing some youth in a "One Nigeria Reality Project" platform on Sunday said that Nigerians can be united regardless of our diversities. He added that we can have functional democratic processes if we are all ready for it. See his notes below:
Nigeria is a country with great diversities, a country of nations of different cultures, religions and believe systems, languages and of course of diverse resources.
Integrating our diversities is supposed to be our strength and lots of opportunities are encrypted there in. However, our leaders, instead of harnessing the opportunities in our diversities, they are more interested in using our diversities to divide us or cause chaos to make their personal gains. They therefore divide us along zonal, ethnic and religious lines.
The existing structure in our system cannot form any basis for an unequivocal unity. To bring about national unity,
(1). There should be national referendum to bring together the civic (non political) representatives from all groups, with more of the youth who can ideate, innovate and formulate policies to representing their constituents.
(a).The referendum will be an avenue for the formulation of the terms and conditions for our being together as a country with equity and equality of every group.
(b). In the referendum, there should be a formulation of guidelines of resource allocation for states and zones.
(2). Autonomy: State governments should be able to control their resources, use their resources to develop their communities with a percentage of internally generated revenue to the central(federal) government. States and regions should be in charge of natural resources in their land. Every state has a resource. The northern state didn't have petroleum, but were able to boost the economy with groundnut pyramid. Its a sense of laziness for some people to say if states have autonomy over their resources, some stares will be poorer with no fund to run their affairs. There are lots of resources in the north, south, east and west. Most of the states can generate revenue through crop and livestock farming. This will help all State governments to think outside the box and diversify or invest into different industries to boost their revenue instead of waiting for the monthly allocation (national cake),
(3). Someone said and I quote, "friendship is not by force...". This literally means that we should not be forced to live together as a people, rather, the people should be made to see and benefit from the dividend of staying together. This is contrary to what we have in our country. Instead of the government to ensure that every group is pleased, get equity and equality in treatment and allocation of resources, they rather prefer to force us together by devising forceful humiliation means on the people with the people's agitations unaddressed and needs unmet. Nigerians should be happy to be Nigerians. We are human beings and we know our needs. You cannot expect the people to be committed to national unity if they need food and they are given stone. We cannot expect some people to be happy to be together when others are being treated with preference and favouritism in terms of revenue sharing. To live together with unity and peace, the people, irrespective of where they came from, should have access to the basic necessities of live. The government should be responsible to provide food, shelter and clothing, security of lives and properties, electricity, good water, good road, quality education system, good healthcare, jobs for the youth etc. If all these can be made available to the people, all agitations and disunity would long be gone.
(4). Democracy: As far as I am concerned, our existing constitution has too much loopholes that the armed robbers who find their ways into our political offices are legally protected. The constitution we have now can't support the democracy we clamour for. In as much as we still use this constitution in our democratic system, we can't enjoy the dividends of democracy.
Our constitution needs a complete overhaul and amendment. Thereafter, we need absolute implementation and enforcement. Our rule of law should have absolute supremacy over the leaders and the lead (followers). The followers elect the leaders into offices to represent them, I see no reason why the leaders will have immunity to shield themselves from facing the wrath of the law when they fail to act accordingly while the least offenders among the down-dogs face the brutality of the law. The constitution should clearly pronounce equality of supremacy over everyone without fair of favour.
Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people, not the government of some people, by some people and for the people as we have it now.
(a) Election: This is the hallmark of democracy. No election, no democracy. So far we've had poor electoral process and hence the consequential nonfunctional democracy. If we can't conduct a reputable and credible election, how do we expect fair conducts in democracy?
Leveraging on technology is the key to whatever question we want to ask around election. There should be a paradigm shift from the analog way of conducting election to digital means. I have a solution that many other Nigerians have to solve electoral problems, but our leaders don't want to be in support of initiatives such as e-voting, integrated electronic data synchronization of banks, INEC, NPC, NIMC and Telecommunications databases of the people. We can get to the level where we vote by dialing codes on our mobile phones after synchronizing the difference databases aforementioned and that would be devoid of rigging and written. We need leaders who are digitally inclined rather than analog think tanks who want to consistently sabotage our electoral success.
If we can't conduct credible election to bring credible people to our public offices, then we haven't started. Our success in democracy like other first world countries solely depends on the degree of success of electoral conducts. In as much as we have people with poverty mentality, people who are visionless, and devoid of passion about solving national problems rather than selfish interests, people who are uninformed with zero creativity, innovation and inventive insight in our political offices, democracy will never bring out its beauty.
To have democracy work in Nigeria, there should be room to elect leaders who can bring about the transformation and sweep the clueless folks under the carpet.
Youth empowerment: Human capital is the best resources that any country can have. The government must cater for the people's livelihood, improve human capital development, education system and alleviate poverty.
The best way to empower the youth is to provide functional education system for them. Our education system has only produced under-baked products. Our primary, secondary and tertiary institutions should be made the Haven for learning for Nigerian people such that locally produced graduate can compete with their counterparts all over the world.
The government should support innovation, invention and reward professionalism. The future of any nation is a function of its educational standards. The best nations in the world are those that invest all it takes into their youth, incubate ideas, encourage innovations and inventions among the youth.
In conclusion, we can be united, we can run the best democratic government, we can make Nigeria livable and our youth can be the best globally, if we are ready to make it happen. We should not expect anyone from anywhere to do it for us. The great Nigeria we anticipate is in you and I. Let's give birth to it now, not later.
By Olatuja Gabriel-Wealth
[email protected]
08067380225
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