Adebanjo said that if the constitution, which he claimed was foisted on the nation by the military, is amended, Nigeria will be placed on the correct course.
Chief Ayo Adebanjo, the head of the pan-Yoruba sociocultural movement Afenifere, claims that Nigeria must repeal the 1999 Constitution in order to resolve the majority of the issues impeding the nation’s development.
Adebanjo indicated that Nigeria would be set on the correct path if the constitution, which he claimed was imposed on the nation by the military, is amended during his appearance on Saturday’s episode of Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
After gaining independence, he claimed, “we lost the ball when the military seized control and changed the constitution.” He continued by saying that this is what is undermining the nation’s ability to have a stable future.
“Since the military took over, we have made mistakes, and those mistakes continued when they returned to the barracks. We were unaware that they did not return with their suitcase containing the constitution.
“They forced a constitution onto us, and that is the root of the issue at hand. The solution to our situation is to amend this constitution in order to return to where we were. The false constitution that the military forced upon us is to blame for all of our troubles, he claimed.
A unitary constitution, in the opinion of the elder statesman, is inadequate for a multiethnic country like Nigeria.
“Unitary government is not a viable form of government for this nation. Because of the unitary form of government the colonialists used, we have this problem of division, but after the London Constitutional Conference in 1953, which took office in 1954, we switched to federalism. There were no questions or problems prior to then.
“What I am saying is that the problem we are having in this country today, whether it be economic, political, or cultural, it’s based on the way we are running the country under a wrong constitution that was not embedded when we got our independence,” Adebanjo added.
