NIGERIA: Nwabueze decries Okorounmu’s comments,
• ‘Asemota submitted a Minority Report’
THE Patriots have faulted the recommendations of the Senator Femi Okorounmu-led Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, saying they fall far short of what they had canvassed in the 30-page memorandum they submitted to him in late August 2013.
In a letter to President Goodluck Jonathan dated December 6, 2013, Professor Ben Nwabueze, on behalf of the Patriots, a group of eminent Nigerians, said the conference the group has in mind should have two fundamental attributes: one, adopting a suitable new Constitution embodying re-negotiated terms and conditions on which the diverse ethnic groups comprised in Nigeria can live together in peace, security, progress, prosperity, general well-being and unity as one country. Two, the Conference should be one of ethnic nationalities making up or composing the Nigerian state as the pivot or focal point.
Rather than a conference with those attributes, the Patriots lamented that the Advisory Committee recommended a Conference the results of whose deliberations will only be integrated into the existing 1999 Constitution and of individual Nigerians as autonomous entities or of interest groups.
Also, it has emerged that contrary to denials from the Presidency, a member of the committee, Mr. Solomon Asemota (SAN), indeed submitted a Minority Report to the President.
In his letter to the President dated December 6, 2013, ref. No. P20/vx/2013/138, Asemota said he was forwarding the Minority Report rejected by the Advisory Committee because he was “not in any doubt that the committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to the rejection of a Minority Report,” and that the President “is entitled to the best advice which the committee individually or collectively can offer.”
The Patriots, in the letter, had said that any drive towards building a New Nigeria would be sheer delusion if it did not recognize the character of the ethnic groups as separate nationalities.
The Conference recommended by the Advisory Committee, the letter said “is one totally different, in its object or purpose, from that envisaged in our Memorandum and oral presentation to you, as set out above. We view it as, not only a complete departure from the fundamental attributes of the type of National Conference we envisaged, but also as a complete betrayal of our expectations and aspirations for a National Conference. Reading the Report has created in us a deep feeling of disappointment, disillusion and frustration.
“Nowhere in its 68-page Report did the Committee affirmatively recommend that the adoption of a new Constitution for Nigeria is the primal purpose or object of the Conference or that a new Constitution so adopted shall be submitted to the people in a referendum for approval. Its recommendation on this all-important issue is to advise that it be left to the National Conference itself to decide the “legal procedures and options for integrating the decisions and outcomes of its deliberations into the Constitution and the Laws of the nation.”
The letter went on to urge President Jonathan not to act on some aspects of the Committee’s report objected to by the Patriots, but that he should “give to Nigerians a new Constitution for Nigeria, which will be submitted to the people in a referendum for approval.
“You owe it to Nigerians as a historic duty to give them such a Constitution. Such a Peoples’ Constitution is their birthright as a sovereign people, a birthright of which they have long been denied, first, by our British colonial masters, then, by our military masters, and, now, by our democratic rulers in the Executive and the National Assembly.”
In a related development, Professor Nwabueze has responded to Senator Okorounmu’s criticism of the position of Igbo Leaders of Thought, of which he is a member, taking strong exceptions to Okorounmu’s denigration of him.
To show that he had no personal animosity against Senator Okorounmu, Nwabueze said he had in a letter dated October 31, 2013 congratulated Okorounmu on his appointment to head the Committee.
Reacting to Okorounmu’s comments Nwabueze said: “It is against my principle to make public statements impugning the character of people I do not know. Senator Okorounmu and I have never met. He does not know me. I do not know him. I have not heard of him before his appointment as Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee. I cannot, therefore, in keeping with my principles, make public imputations on his character by way of a retort to his denigration of me.”
GUARDIAN
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