Former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, has said that Nigeria needed a new constitution that would take into account the 1963 and the 1999 Constitution and the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference.
Anyaoku, who described Nigeria as a country in an unprecedented level of divisiveness and declining sense of national unity, said the nation’s economy was in doldrums with 133 million of our population in a multi-dimensional poverty, great insecurity, killings and kidnappings by unknown gunmen and marauding bandits.
Speaking during the 2023 Convocation Lecture at the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD), Ekiti state, on “Management of Diversity: A Major Challenge to Governance In Pluralistic Countries”, noted that Nigeria’s diversity was more successfully managed in the early years of the country’s independence.
According to the elder stateman, “All this has changed when the military intervened in the country’s governance in January 1966 and changed the existing constitution.”
He added that in Nigeria today, all our infrastructures including power supply, road and education, health facilities are in poor state.
He pointed out that there is complete bastardisation of our society ethical values, and an unfathomable level of corruption evident in the often reported massive looting and mismanagement of the country’s resources including the continuing unbridled theft of crude oil.
He called for a national constituent assembly of directly elected on a non-party basis representatives whose task would be to discuss and agree on a new constitution for Nigeria, taking into account the 1963 and the 1999 constitution and the recommendations of the 2014 national conference.
Founder of ABUAD, Chief Afe Babalola (SAN), who condemned the present situation in Nigeria, said the wealth of the nation is in the hands of few politicians who have made politics a lucrative business.
Babalola supported the former secretary general’s position that Nigeria needed a new constitution for the betterment of the country.