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 Daily Independent Online.
* Monday, July 26, 2004.
Don’t convoke SNC, Omoruyi
warns Obasanjo
By
Oguwike Nwachuku
Group News Editor,
Olayinka
Oyegbile
Assistant Editor
and
Habib Aruna
Assistant Political Editor
Former
Director General of the Centre for Democratic Studies Omo Omoruyi at the
weekend revisited the issue of convocation of a Sovereign National
Conference (SNC) and warned President Olusegun Obasanjo against heeding
the call.
To
him, the political system currently in place has not shown that it cannot
carry on without the conference.
The
system would first have to collapse and the convocation would have to be
a spontaneous reaction from the people against current trends in the
polity, he explained.
Omoruyi
spoke in an exclusive interview with some editors of Daily Independent
in Lagos after he came briskly into the country from the United
States few days ago. He has been living in self-imposed exile in free and
democratic America for the past 10 years.
He
noted that Nigeria missed the opportunity of addressing its many
socio-economic problems by the “unwillingness to sacrifice” whereas it
should have insisted on resolving the issues behind the annulment of the
June 12, 1993 Presidential
election shortly after the death of Sani Abacha.
“The
President should not be disposed to the SNC unless the system is
collapsing. If the system is collapsing and it eventually collapses, it
is not the President who would convoke a national conference, the thing
would come as way of resolving many issues”, Omoruyi declared.
He
identified instances at which the country missed the opportunity to force
the government of the day to convene a conference of ethnic nationalities.
His
words: “As I said somewhere, Nigerians missed the opportunity of their
lives when Abacha died. First opportunity where they would have been
talking about a sovereign national conference, they lost. It was then
they would have talked about the issues in the annulment of June 12.
“If
you recall when Obasanjo was released from prison and the speech he
delivered in church at Abeokuta, he said patriotic Nigerians should get
together and discuss the issues in the annulment. He was right! Nigerians
should not have gone for the Abubakar transition programme in 1998. That
was the second opportunity they lost.
“At
the death of Abacha, we should have said aha! We would not go forward
unless we resolve the issues in the annulment, not the annulment. And we
would not go forward unless the person who won the election is part of
the solution, the government would not have gone further, I can assure
you that.
“You
cannot have a third chance again because a sovereign national conference,
as the prototype in Republic of Benin has shown, arose from a collapse or
a system that has collapsed. We don’t have that situation again today.
The system has not collapsed, nobody is praying for it to collapse”.
On
the annulled June 12 Presidential election, of which he was a principal
character, Omoruyi stated that the election cannot be wished away since
it is now in the annals of political history, but he said it is high time
Nigerians forgot about the past and looked to a promising future.
“I
have told you, it’s a fact of Nigeria’s life. The American civil war
defines the American society today. The civil war is still a divisive
element in that country. But that doesn’t mean that a southerner cannot
campaign in the north or a northerner cannot campaign in the south. Kennedy,
a Massachusetts indigene, won the United States Presidential election
with a vice-president from Texas.
“So,
I don’t believe that because one person annulled an election you now say
ah! because of this historical fact we can never grow over and above that.
I think we should be able to and I believe we can. Don’t let us be
fixated”.
Even
so, he is strongly in favour of the political ambition of former military
President Ibrahim Babangida because “he has what it takes to turn the
country around and put it on the path of glory.
“My
candidate for President in 2007 is Ibrahim Babangida. If I were in the
country during the election I would vote for him. But it is for the party
to decide if they will nominate him. So, I don’t want us to jump the gun,
there are so many hurdles to scale before he can become the candidate. If
that is his aspiration, he will be.
“Can he make it? He has a very
good chance to make it. Will he be a good President? Of course I do
believe so. Because I know him. I know him, I have listened to him in the
past few days and I am convinced that if the vision he has for this
country is ever realised, you the one questioning me would fall for it”.
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