This is what I hate. If the Federal government doesn't want to hear calls for seccession, why can't they create an equitable environment where everyone can feel like they are part of the country?. I am more for restructuring than dissolution but I have had it with the stubbornness of Nigerian elites. They refuse to restructure, turn legitimate criticism into ethno-religious conversations and then throw empty adjectives about Nigeria's unity. Let them continue.

As Nigeria continues in its present trajectory, the time is coming where the Northern elites would canvass for our proposals only to be told that it is too late.

I may have agreed with you before but the Fulanis have made things unbearable for Nigerians. From the sectionalism to the harassment by herdsmen, to now defending terrorist sympathizers, it is obvious that the Fulanis are going down a dangerous path, and quite frankly, I don't think the rest of Nigeria needs to join them there. If they want to make their regions a hotspot for violence and terrorism, let them be isolated in their own failed state so the rest of us can be left alone to progress.

Aconomist:
Blacks in general can't rule themselves. Imagine a country with no electricity in 2020. The black brain is not as developed as other races. He doesn't understand long term or strategic thinking.

A black man would steal government money to buy Lamborghinis and Gucci belts, and then he is surprised when other races call him monkey.

Are you stupid? The oyibo man says the black man can't rule himself even though we did so before they came along and you are agreeing with him. I think the problem comes from us. We don't hold these vagabonds in power accountable enough. We parrot their lies, participate in ethno-religious strife and allow the selfish leaders to rob us blind. Why won't we fall into civil war? The same dynamic happens in oyibo land where the poor white men blame their financial woes on people of color and vote in demagogues.

Ademola47:
Awaiting more opinions.

The executive president pulls double duty as head of state and head of government, and more often than not is directly elected by the people. Because the whole country is his constituency, he has a mandate to implement laws, and is not accountable to the legislature but to the public. (Some exceptions include Botswana, South Africa and Micronesia where the President is voted for by the legislature). He is also expected to have stronger powers and while above the fray, he still plays a partisan role.

The president in parliamentary republics play a similar role to Constitutional Monarchs like Queen Elizabeth. While they are nominally supposed to be part of the executive branch, most of the executive power lies in the prime minister and the cabinet. That being said, parliamentary presidents theoretically have reserve powers but hardly exercise them without advise from the government. Instead, they tend to be non-partisan and apolitical figures who perform ceremonial functions, attend ribbon-cutting events, and would often be someone who can be trusted to unite or rally the citizens regardless of political views. To keep them non-partisan, they also tend to be indirectly elected, usually by an electoral college (I think Ireland is directly elected).

I have my thoughts on the merits of both systems. I prefer the parliamentary system to the presidential systems in general but I think the executive in theory but ceremonial in practice nature might be confusing and unfulfilling for the president in question. Given them powers to check the constitutionality of bills and the discretion to appoint integrity officers would be more worthwhile because the problem with executive president is that they can be hard to remove if absolute power corrupts.

Timewaster:
Listen carefully.


Never have you heard and Igbo Man fight or hurt a South West man in Igbk land.


Yet this South West people will blame igbos for almost anything in any part of the country...



Never have you heard and Igbo Man harm a South West man or even a South West ant in south east.


Yet this cone headed gworo chewing traitors will still blame the igbos even when their peniss refuse to erect so they can fuckkk their Goats.



Never have you heard and Igbo Man caught stealing a pin in their Brown roof land yet they'll blame igbos when the Hausass or Fulani come to their land and kill them.



This people are evil.



They can sell their destiny for YAM porridge or Intercontinental Draw soup or Eweduu or Kwilikwili




This people are evil



Yorubas s have been the major cause of division in the south since time immemorial.



I grew up and spent all my life in the south south.

.my best friend I share a room with is from calabar



No south south man have ever blame igbos for anything because they know igbos are peaceful people.




Igbos have never held any meaningful position in Nigeria politics yet this demons won't allow them rest.



Oya allow them have Biafraaaa


This useless dogs say no.


Ask them why?


They have no answer



OK.


Since you won't give them Biafraaaa


Why not allow them stay peacefully in any part of Nigeria


This South West theifs will still find a WAy to make other tribes gate igbo for no just reasons.



South West man.


I with all parts of my heart despise you

What is wrong with you? Can't you leave tribalism behind for a day? If Nigerians don't move past this tribalism we are going to be used by these political opportunists who don't care about us, and quite frankly if you even get Biafra, it is likely that it becomes nothing but a mini-Nigeria.

It wasn't a public address, it was a threat.

OriOko88:
Buhari sending his boy, a southerner to appease us, cos he thinks since the protrst is not from d north or Hausa Fulanis re not d ones being shot at lekki gate. That's y he's not talinkin or feeling concerned. No southerner shud justify buhari silence on this matter pls, or else that person wil die of stray bullet ni.
Buhari is silent only because the protest is not happening in Katrina or any other parts of d north. Aye buhari maa baje nioo.

Even Katsina matter, the man is silent. I don't know why people still defend this president. Although, I am not even sure if anything he says will be of great value to Nigerians.

Ever8090:
But ever since Nnamdi made that claim,.the man in Aso rock has visited places within and outside Nigeria naa...I think Buhari is just too stupid to act responsibly but he is alive

It might be the case that he didn't die but maybe the hospitalization caused him to lose certain cognitive abilities, which is why he struggles to even do the basic aspects of the job. Either ways, the man had no business running for a second term, and ought not to have been reelected.

Buhari has always been a wicked person who specializes in selective justice. Because of the evils of IBB and Abacha, there was a tendency to see him as a less evil dictator who was big on discipline and anticorruption. However, the man has always believed in two sets of rules: one for the his kinsmen and one for the rest of us. There is a reason he had plenty of energy for the Southern politicians in the Second Republic yet overlooked or minimized the crimes of his brothers. The sooner the expired milk is out of Aso Rock the better for all of us.

OZOnNengiTheory:
So?

You think say Hausa/fulani mumu? Dem dey look Una from the beginning of the protest till e reach red level. By the time you are done destroying your properties, Una eye go clear. For as long as nothing happens to their representative (Mr President) aswear Hausa/Fulani man no fvckin care!

And if you think your protest in the South can unseat the man from the north, you are mad and you have no one to tell you. In the entire South, s little above 50% has been protesting..and out of this 50%, only about 10% which are obviously the insane ones have been shouting Buhari must go. This to every discerning mind is insignificant compared to those that voted him in.

You are a very heartless individual. I have always rejected secessionist talk because I don't necessarily agree that the North is too blame for all our problems but people like you make it so hard. Seriously, are you really happy with the Buhari government right now? If his government was so great, would they be complaining about banditry, insecurity and boko haram up North?. It's not every time that you must be contrarian for the sake of spiting the South. This is your country too. If you want Nigerians to accept presidents from the North, demand better governance from them.

I don't pretend that it is easy to preside over a nation, especially as one as diverse as Nigeria but it is extremely stunning to watch the way Buhari fails at even the simple things. If we still practiced the parliamentary system, he will fail as head of government because his policies are senseless, and he will fail as head of state because he cannot do the simple tasks of addressing Nigerians or representing us without disgracing himself and the country. At least, if we still practiced this system, his party members would have thrown him out a long time ago so he doesn't take them down with him.

Golan007:
Just say PDP rejects it.

Absolutely nothing they can do about it.

She's not a card carrying member of any party but a professional who has carried out her service to the president meritoriously.

Modified

But picking the issues one after the other, Sunday Vanguard discovered that the 1999 Constitution is part of the problem. For those accusing President Jonathan of appointing known partisan individuals to the board of INEC, Section 156 of that constitution says no persons shall be qualified to be appointed as a member of INEC if “he is not qualified or if he is disqualified for an election as a member of the House of Representatives†. (See Box on What The Constitution says).


To be a member of the House of Representatives, an individual must belong to a political party and, by extension and implication, to be a member of any of the executive bodies, the person – and in this case INEC – must belong to a political party. When this issue was first raised in 1999, the whimsical explanation even by lawyers then was that the qualification did not relate to membership of a political party but just qualification sans party membership.



https://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/06/inec-appointments-and-the-president-errs/amp/

Even if we agree that she is qualified, common sense dictates that you don't appoint someone like Onochie to INEC. INEC may not be perfect but the only thing Buhari accomplishes with this appointment is killing whatever little trust Nigerians have in the electoral system. 2023 is still far but Buhari will still go, and its moves like these that discredit APC, leading to the return of PDP.

kokomilala:
Buhari is a failure as well as an accident of history. By accident of history, I mean ,he fortuitously got to power on two occasions in history,without being prepared and equipped for it.. He's got neither the charm offensive of a leader nor the consciousness of what it means to lead a people. And, by failure of history, I mean, he fails, not because history fails, but because, he himself fails as a leader.Thus,attributing his inadequacies to history. So, what we have is a megalomaniac careening from failure to failure, as he tries to get firmer grips on power.

Don't mind him. Buhari is a man who ascended to power because Nigerians were unsatisfied with his predecessors, but both times, he ended up making Nigerians miss them in retrospect. One may excuse his failures the first time when he was in khaki, but what is his excuse now that he is in babariga. Since 2003, he kept on contesting for office citing his anticorruption credentials, but ever since Nigerians relented in 2015, this man's government has proven to be devoid of vision or anything of value to Nigerians. Even his Northern brethren are complaining about him because banditry has increased under his watch. I sincerely hope there is still a Nigeria left by the time he goes because the painful thing about this failure of a leader is that 2023 is still far.

I think Nigeria needs a system similar to Belgium where regions and communities are the federating units. For those concerned about economic viability, maybe we can have 6-8 regions who take over management of natural resources, police, health, education, roads and regional development. For those who care about Nigeria's ethnic nationalities especially the minorities, maybe every nationality should have a province where they control cultural issues, education (language of instruction), aspects of tourism and welfare policies, and maybe customary courts. I don't know. I think there is validity to a return to regionalism and the need for self-governments for ethnic nationalities.

I sincerely hope that after our experience with Buhari, we'll stop giving second comings to folks who failed as leaders when they were in khaki. This is someone that kept presenting himself for elections since 2003, and kept bragging about his anticorruption credentials, yet his administration reeks of both corruption and gross incompetence. I know Nigerian politics tend to lack standards but by now, he should know that appointing a partisan to a sensitive position like INEC comissioner will cause Nigerians to question the integrity of the institution. Like how stupid does one have to be?

omenka:
This attitude of us blaming EVERYTHING on the NORTH is the reason our respective states government get away with all manner of crimes against our people. They feel they owe us no responsibility whatsoever, because regardless of what they do, we will BLAME THE NORTH.

I am not sold to this nonsense of blaming the north over everything. I prefer to ask, first of all, what has my successive state governments got to show for the allocations they've received over the years? Ditto local government chairmen, Senators and Representatives. What is there to show?

Is the North the reason why a Southern governor's brother who has no visible source of income, drive the most exotic cars and build the most luxurious houses and buy the choicest properties?

Is the North the reason Southern government officials populate employment vacancies with their family members?

Is the North the reason a Southern state governor owing aged pensioners go on to collect billions in "security votes"?

Are they the reason we have comatose public health and educational systems in the South?

Are they the reason why our state houses of assemblies have become rubber stamps for the executive and the speakers exalted houseboys of the governors?

Are they the reason Southern Senators and Reps collect constituency allowance and pocket same without executing a single project?

The questions are endless!

We should stop blaming the North and hold our very own leaders to account for once. That is what an educated man would do.

This attitude of seeing everything North as bad blinds us to accepting progress. But for the 12 states proposal, there is not much for me to disagree with, and if I was being honest, Gowon's 12 state structure is probably one of the better compromises between our unworkable structure and the unbalanced federal structure from the First Republic. The two things the structure had going for it was the balance between North and South (South had Lagos, Western, Midwest, East Central, South East and Rivers while North had Kwara, Kano, Benue-Plateau, North Central, North West and North East), and that a lot of the states were responsive to minority agitations (Rivers, Benue-Plateau, South East, North East) or regional separatism (Kwara wanted to join the West, Kano vexed after Bello dethroned their Emir and Lagos was proud of its independent status as capital).

Obviously, I think the motives of the 12 states were suspicious, and provinces like Rivers and Kano got their states, provinces like Sokoto, Bauchi, Borno, Oyo, Niger all started asking for their own states too. Also, Lagos and Kano as standalone states in this arrangement may have made sense in 1967 but not so much in 2020

I don't necessarily think I want Nigeria to revert back to the Gowon's 12 states but I think we need a balance between returning to autonomous regions for economic viability reasons, and ensuring that the minorities and ethnic nationalities are not marginalized like they were in the First Republic.

I prefer the proposal that turns the 6 geopolitical zones into regions, although I think the eight zones or region makes equitable sense. The regions can modify the current states and LGs how they deem fit, although if it were up to me I would ensure each nationality in my region has a state or province, and then I would basically merge LGs with autonomous communities.

Flango:


I don't know what is wrong with restructuring that people are afraid of it. Restructuring simply means a change of structure. It is what we do daily in our homes and at our work places.

When something is not working, we look for ways to tweak it to make them better. We don't leave it the same way and hope it works.

Some say a new structure should be a fiscal federation, some say it should be parliamentary. Whatever it is, the idea is for everyone to agree first that the country needs a new structure. Once that is agreed, we can then discuss what the new structure should be. My problem is that people don't want to believe in the possibility of a new kind of Nigeria. They just want it to remain the same way it is.

If you fall in that line, the question you should ask yourself is, is Nigeria working as it is currently structured? If your answer is no, then, why are you afraid of change? Except you are happy with the way the country is presently, then I rest my case.

I am not proposing any structure here, I am only saying that we agree first that this isn't working and a change is required. All of us have to come to that agreement first.

I think for a lot of our so-called leaders, the current setup benefits them so there is reluctance to change it. I think there is also a pride factor. The centralization of the country and the presidential system was a result of some of the issues in the First Republic but was obviously conducive to a military regime. If we restructure to a more federalized parliamentary republic, it might cause them to admit that most of their solutions didn't work.

Rugaria:
As far as I'm concerned, no restructuring, no referendum, no national conference should happen under this man's tenure! It will amount to a total waste of time and resources as his very dangerous brand of nepotism will never allow him to accept any result that can altruistically solve the problems of the country without lopsidedly favouring his over pampered fulani stock. We should all find a way to stampede him out of office and when he is gone, the real and serious process of reengineering the political structures of the country to meet up with the aspirations of the people should commence..

This man sef. I once rooted for him in 2015 because I thought PDP had been doing a poor job, and needed to be defeated. That said, I think it was a big mistake for Buhari to be the first president under the APC ticket. The man is no democrat and his leadership style is a relic of the military era. If he were competent, it will be another thing but it's obvious that he doesn't have what it takes to improve the country at all. I don't know how sincere the ACN faction was about restructuring but it is clear that Buhari is uninterested and will keep making excuses for not doing so. If there is still a Nigeria in 2023, we have to vote in candidates that actually have a serious workable plan for restructuring because Nigeria cannot continue on this path.

But Mr. Minister, this is why you should have been a champion of restructuring. That way, we would have a clearly defined division of labor between the center and our federating units. We would know what to expect from our governor, what to expect from our president, and correctly know who to assign praise or blame when it comes to amenities. Instead, you were blaming our regional federalism and our system of government for the woes of the First Republic. Since the government you are part of, continues to concentrate power in the center, Nigerians will continue to hold them responsible for the failure to provide basic amenities for their citizens. Simple as that.

You're reading presidentialisms into the parliamentary system we practiced in the First Republic so let's break it down.

As the first indigenous governor-general and President of Nigeria, Zik was the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. As the first and only Prime Minister of Nigeria, Tafawa Balewa was the Head of Government and Chief Executive of Nigeria. You could make a case for both of their wives being first ladies since Balewa was the counterpart to our Military Heads of State and Executive Presidents. However, in spite of the power they wield, prime ministers are never designated "first citizens" for two reasons.

Since the Prime Minister's role depends on the number of his party members win seats in parliament, the executive is theoretically supposed to be accountable and subordinate to the legislature. In practice, it is the other way around. Also, because of the adversarial nature of politics and Westminster, the Head of State is "number one" on paper since he is supposed to be an apolitical figure akin to the Queen of England who rallies and unifies the nation in a way the Prime Minister cannot. In practice, Balewa was regarded similarly to our subsequent first citizens, and you might as well include his wife among the first ladies.