Lagos Speaker Carpets Jonathan’s National Confab

Posted by African Examiner Ayo Balogun, Featured, Latest Headlines, News Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

Ayo Balogun, Lagos

Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Adeyemi Ikuforiji has written off the proposed National Conference by President Goodluck Jonathan, saying nothing good will come out of it.

Ikuforiji, who spoke in Epe, Lagos, Nigeria on Tuesday said the timing of the conference was wrong.

Lagos Speaker, Adeyemi Ikuforiji

“Already, the fear is there. Why is the presidency coming up with a national conference when we are barely 14 months to a general election? To have a conference to decide even on the future of a local government, less to talk of a state, it takes months to organise such to get a meaningful result from such a conference.

“How do you bring the different groups together? Under 14 months to a general election? When will the campaign for general election start? How many weeks are we going to spend campaigning? When are we starting this national conference? When are we ending it? And the solutions, when will the President start implementing it?” He asked.

Ikuforiji said if the President is serious about it, this should have been an agenda that should have come to the forefront right in the first year of his administration.

According to him, “when President Jonathan came in 2011, from May 29 to December 31, 2011, I think the President had enough time to think over the issue of national conference and give us a direction and we would have really felt comfortably that the President meant well.

“But with the way it is now, with the disarray in the camp of the so-called biggest party in Africa, which I think is fastly becoming the smallest party, not a majority number of people will believe that the presidency is really serious about the national conference.”

“The Almighty God has brought all of us together for a purpose, and if it has pleased Him, he would have left different ethnic groups apart. But in his wisdom, he has brought us together and we should all work to have the advantage of unity in diversity,” he said.

Ikuforiji said further that Nigerians could learn from other countries that had made the most of their diversities in building a united nation, adding that Nigerian, in fact, had advantage of enormous natural resources for collective prosperity, “sufficient to go round and even bless other countries.”

“The problems we have today are not really God-created but artificial one, created by few selfish individuals among us. I don’t understand why very few will just have their ways over and above millions of others.

“But every religion have clearly defined roles for people in leadership position. If we all go by it, then we will not be having all these problems today. Or if all leaders remember that they would one-day give account of their actions or inactions, without opportunity to deny, then no one would be this selfish and the country having rather ungodly leaders piloting its affairs like we have today,” Ikuforiji said.