Akande blames military for lopsided political structure

Former Interim National Chairman, All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Bisi Akande, has carpeted successive military governments that ruled Nigeria for 29 years since independence, saying they created states and local governments by fiat for selfish reasons, rather than through scientific political reasoning.

He lamented that the military might have inequitably created more local governments per population per state in the North than in the South, thereby giving the North an unfair advantage in revenue allocation from the national treasury.

Akande, a former governor of Osun State, made the assertion in a paper on ‘Devolution of Powers and National Restructuring’ he delivered at the APC-USA Second Annual Convention in Washington DC, United States of America, where he was Special Guest of Honour.

He, therefore, called for restructuring, which he described as “equitable rearrangement and redistribution of existing states and local governments per population within the various ethnic nationalities”.

The former APC chairman, however, admitted it would be politically unwise to define the word equitable in such a way that it would be easy to convince those enjoying the unfair advantage at present to surrender such.He said restructuring was an herculean task for all Nigerians, compared to political change of power for which the APC was created.