Lawyer, don offer path to Nigeria’s greatness

Lagos lawyer, Mr. Onyekachi Monday Ubani, has insisted that restructuring holds the solution to Nigeria’s developmental challenge. He asked the citizens to ensure that aspirants for the 2019 general elections undertake to restructure the country.

Ubani commended the Federal Government and members of the National Assembly for the passage and signing into law of the ‘not too young to rule’ bill.The lawyer, who addressed newsmen yesterday in Ikeja on the state of the nation, submitted that Nigeria has a foundational challenge which must be urgently addressed.

The second vice president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) stated: “It is unfortunately we have failed, refused and or neglected to deal with it to our detriment.“Previous governments have paid lip service to it even when they found out the truth that the country cannot make much progress with the present structure in place. 

“The present structure is bogus, over-bureaucratic, over-centralised, oppressive, devoid of justice and equity. The worst sin of the present structure is the near absence of mechanism for efficiency and prudent management of our God-given resources. 

“The structure encourages laziness, lack of competitive spirit that was prevalent in our polity in the early sixties due to the apparent adherence to the tenets of operational federalism. Today, what we operate is a highly distorted economy, with the federal taking everything that belongs to the federating units and gathering the states in Abuja for handouts monthly.”

However, a professor of Development Sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of Ibadan, Olanrewaju Olutayo, says for the nation to develop, it must be original with its concept of development and stop copying the “so-called developed societies.”

Delivering the institution’s 429th inaugural lecture entitled “Sabiticate is Equal to What?” yesterday in Ibadan, the don noted that Nigeria has been preoccupied with the colonial mentality of copying other countries rather than developing her own development needs and tapping indigenous resources and knowledge systems to drive it.

Olutayo described as “balderdash the placement of Nigeria as 152 out of 158 countries in the human development index,” adding that development was never by comparing a nation with another based on yardsticks set from outside.

He challenged the academia to produce knowledge relevant to the transformation of the nation.According to Olutayo, the usefulness of earning a certificate was not to hold the paper but using the knowledge to impact the society.