Following the widespread criticisms of his recent comments on the call for the restructuring of Nigeria, the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has declared that Nigerians require a deeper and better understanding of the restructuring debate.
The Vice President, in a statement issued on Tuesday by his spokesman, Laolu Akande, disclosed that President Muhammadu Buhari had already adopted two of the recommendations in the report submitted after the 2014 National Conference convoked by his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
He stressed that the current administration has implemented some of the recommendations listed in the 2014 Confab Report, not necessarily because they were in the report but because they were “sound decisions”.
Osinbajo cited instance with the merging of the budget office with national planning and the adoption of a 60-40 per cent recurrent and capital expenditures in the 2016 budget, which he stressed were among the recommendations adopted by the federal government from the confab report.
According to him, “The president will do what is right even without recourse to the confab report. We have an agenda which is to promote the well-being of the people and bring the benefits of governance to the people.
“We will not be stuck in an elitist political rhetoric that does not deepen the issues.”
The Vice President, who noted that the restructuring debate, as it currently is, has many meanings and interpretations, said he “wholly supports the idea of having State Police across the country as articulated in the APC’s Roadmap to a New Nigeria…
“Different groups are taking different approaches and at times this confuses the debate and reduces it to mere political rhetoric.
“Restructuring debate should go deeper than what we see on newspaper headlines and we need to understand all the angles to it. What do people mean when we talk about restructuring?
“Some focus on regionalism, some focus of the fiscal part, allocation of more resources, devolution of power, state police. It’s important we understand which part we are talking about at any given time.”
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