Bishop Tunde Bakare advises FG on Restructuring

Founding Overseer of Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare has called on the Nigerian government to set up a Presidential Commission with a 10-year mandate towards actualising Nigeria’s restructuring.

The cleric, who was presidential running mate to Buhari in 2011 election, said the commission should be allowed to begin by 2018 and end by 2028.

“We expect that the project will be flagged off under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari in the period leading to the next governmental fiscal year,” he said.

The cleric spoke in his State of the Nation address in the church in reaction to various agitations by various groups for restructuring.

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According to Bakare, who is also the convener of Save Nigeria Group (SNG), the body to be named “Presidential Commission for National Reconciliation, Reintegration and Restructuring” should be established by the President through an Executive Order, in full consultation with the Council of State and the National Assembly.

He optimized that the National Assembly would do Nigerians proud on the onerous task of properly restructuring the country based on their antecedents particularly in frustrating the 3rd Third Agenda saga of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and in instituting “Doctrine of Necessity,” that brought in former President Goodluck jonathan – developments, he said, later stablished the polity.

“Not only does the president want agitations managed through appropriate constitutional channels, he also wants a clarification of demands in concise terms, as well as propositions on practical pathways towards achieving those demands,” he said.

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On the job to be undertaken by the commission, Bakare opined that the panel should be handed the mandate and the powers to facilitate, within 10 years, the evolution of a functional and acceptable geopolitical structure subject to constitutional provisions while the 1999 Constitution was progressively amended.

The commission, he said, “shall undertake a geo-economic and geosocial path to geopolitical restructuring by creating geo-economic frameworks, mending geosocial fault lines and attaining a geopolitical climax.