CAN, NOSCEF Set Agenda For National Dialogue

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) representing the 19 Northern states in the country, in association with the Christian Elders Forum of the Northern States (NOSCEF), have sent the agenda for the upcoming nation conference. The bodies, earlier in a statement co-signed by the president of the northern CAN, Archbishop P.Y. Jatau, and the NOSCEF chairman, Mr Olaiya Philips, had thrown their collective weights behind the conference, saying it was a “visible evidence of an intent to establish a society in which the will of the people is the foundation from which all else flows – the fount of legitimacy.” Believing that the “inadequacy” of the 1979 constitution, upon which the 1999 constitution was based, was “imposed by a military government and was founded on a lie,” the bodies believed that with the coming of elections in less than eighteen months, the deliberations should not be totally divorced from the hustle and bustle of politics. Therefore, “what can be done is the setting of clearly stated time lines that will be vitally important in ensuring that the national conference is not supplanted by the coming elections in the national psyche.” According the bodies, the prospect of the National Assembly retaining the capacity to further amend the deliberations of the people runs counter to the reasons for the conference, as there could not be “two masters on a ship. The Nigerian ship of state is about to set course on the journey that is the future of this country, and in so doing its people have effectively taken back their sovereignty over their affairs from their representatives. Those representatives are, therefore, honour-bound to listen to those that elected them rather than seek the cover of their elective positions to obstruct and frustrate the will of the people.” They, therefore, urged that during the deliberations, the secular nature of the Nigerian state must remain sacrosanct, saying that the “security of minorities (including religious minorities) has continued to be a thorny issue and the last decade has shown what manner of whirlwind can be unleashed by religious intolerance. Religious minorities, especially in the North, have a long history of being persecuted, discriminated against and excluded from the affairs of their states of origin; that type of marginalisation cannot endure in the kind of society we look to shape. “Whether or not Nigeria is to continue as presently structured (36 states) has to be addressed. It is difficult to see how a country with our developmental needs can be expected to persist in spending prodigious amounts of money on the administrative machinery of governance. There is little or no benefit correlation between the efficacy of governance and the cost of running 37 legislatures, over 37 judiciaries, 37 executives and all the paraphernalia that accompany these. We do not believe that there is a perfect number of administrative units but we do know that as presently configured we have too many.” Culled from Tribune Newspaper