Nigeria’s problems beyond restructuring, says Daily Times ex-MD

Against a seemingly popular view in many quarters that Nigeria’s nationhood could be salvaged if restructured and power devolved from the centre, a former Managing Director of Daily Times of Nigeria, Chief Tola Adeniyi, has called for the outright separation of the current entities that make up the country.

Adeniyi said that the Nigerian state was no longer workable and that restructuring would bring no succour to its people.

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian in his Lagos home, Adeniyi stressed that he saw no future for the country within the context of how it currently exists and how things were being run.

He said: “Nigeria has become a country where anything goes; there is no structure or system. It’s a society of an admixture of all sorts of rubbish. That is why I do not see any future for the country. And everyone should know that this country is gone.”

Though he once subscribed to restructuring as a way out of the nation’s myriad of challenges, Adeniyi bemoaned the fact that the country had now degenerated beyond that solution.

The former Daily Times MD expressed the view that so long as such institutions as the federal army and police exist, and the 36 states that are not viable and unable to pay salaries to exist, things would not get better.

Adeniyi does not, however, expect the responsibility for the separation to be shouldered by elected National Assembly representatives because of his belief that the executive arm of government has captured them.

He said: “We have a National Assembly that almost 95 per cent of the people there is in the pocket of the Executive.”

The Judiciary and all the security apparatus are also in the pocket of the Executive. So, which National Assembly are you talking about? They have been killing people in Benue State all along and except for a few of the members who talk occasionally, what have they done? Nonetheless, the separation would happen without violence and without our representatives’ involvement.”

He noted that the process of separation was already on with agitations happening all over the country, adding that whether the likes of Omoyele Sowore, the convener of the botched #RevolutionNow protest, were suppressed or not, the build-up would continue.

He said: “Those who say the chaos is being exaggerated, it is because their children or wives have not been kidnapped. Let their wives be abducted and raped by seven dirty stinking kidnappers, then they would know that we are in danger.”

A lot of Nigerians are still feeling unconcerned because it is not their relative that was kidnapped. Let it happen to them, then, they would know how it feels. How do continue to remain in the same country with this animalistic barbarism?

“This has nothing to do with Fulani or Igbo. I am not talking about name branding or generalisation. I have gone beyond that. It is about a particular agenda of wanting to import Fulani from all over West Africa into Nigeria, and by so doing, drive away everybody into IDP camps, kill as many as they can, terrorise as many as they can, just to attain that agenda. That is the agenda we must attack. Kidnapping and highway terrorism are just symptoms.”