Ohanaeze, Okorie call for national emergency

Apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, and former National Chairman of the defunct United Progressives Party (UPP), Chief Chekwas Okorie, have called for a national emergency to navigate out of the present health and economic crisis wreaked by a coronavirus.

They insisted that the country must restructure if it must survive.

President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief John Nwodo, told The Guardian yesterday that the country could have escaped the present economic bleak had the leadership adhered to the call for restructuring aimed at economic diversification and empowerment of the various segments.

Stressing that the solution remained “a restructured Nigeria that recognises contributions of various segments,” he stated that the economic mess was compounded by wrong opinions held in certain quarters that doing what was right, several years after a particular system had been tried and failed, meant empowering a section of the country and depriving others.

Nwodo lamented that various leaders produced in the country failed to read rightly the warning signs when countries began to search for alternatives to dependence on oil, stressing that ideas and technological know-how dominated the new world order.

Okorie, stated that the government must get the people back to the land with improved effort on production of staple foods, especially with the farming season that has just commenced, as an economic measure.

His words, “There should be a national emergency on staple food production and part of our funds should be made available to people who have land to embark on farming. Luckily, this is the farming season, so we should take advantage of it to ensure that as we are exhausting the grains, more is coming.”

He called for the restructuring of the country to give states/regions power to survive based on comparative advantages, adding that there was a need for the Federal Government to devolve some powers to the regions to enable the country to survive.