Senate minority leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe has advocated for Biafra of the mind and not Biafra of territory, arguing that people of the various ethnic nationalities could develop their areas at their pace and still be happy in a united Nigeria.
Abaribe stated this while delivering a keynote address at the Bar Week of the Awka branch of the Nigeria Bar Association, NBA in Anambra state.
The senator, who represents Abia South senatorial zone condemned the increasing wave of killing of security operatives and burning down police stations in the South East, describing the action as barbaric.
He said: “Whenever we talk of restructuring in the national assembly, some of our colleagues from the north will say, is it not for you to have Biafra? Yes, I want Biafra, but I want Biafra of the mind, not Biafra on land. I believe that people can develop their areas in a properly restructured Nigeria. We in the South East can be the richest part of Nigeria through our hard work.
“I don’t believe we can get what we want through anarchy. We can get what we want by doing the needful, which is encouraging ourselves to participate in the planned constitutional amendment. It is better for us to make Nigeria a more conducive place to live in, than this blood we are spilling every day. If things are not working properly, there will always be agitation.
“However, while we all accept that it is necessary to tinker with the structure of our country; we must agree that the immediate cause of our woes is injustice and inability to manage our diversity by the present government.
“I think that the inability to undertake some critical thinking may have led some of us to see the term restructuring as a silver bullet that will solve all of Nigeria’s problems. Can we say that it is the structure of our polity that has made different arms of government abdicate their constitutional responsibilities?
“For example, discipline, recruitment, and promotion in the judicial arm is vested in the National Judicial Council, NJC, while another arm of government, the Executive, took it upon itself to remove the head of the judiciary against the stated procedures laid out in the constitution, thus breaching the law. Would we argue that it is the fault of the structure? “It now seems to us that we have been put in a catch-22 situation. We seem to be going round in circles. The government says to anyone that wants restructuring – Go to the national assembly as the body empowered to amend the constitution. Those who want to restructure feel that the national assembly represents what they also want to be restructured and therefore, do not trust that the national assembly would restructure itself and the nation.”