CITIZENS COMPASS— Following the ongoing nationwide protests, the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership (CACOL), have jointly written President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The civil society organisations in a letter dated Saturday, August 3, 2024, they cautioned that the protests may snowball into another unrest if left unattended to.
A copy of the letter made available to Citizens Compass was titled “LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT ON THE STATE OF THE NATION,”
It reads:
His Excellency,
Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR
President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces
Aso Rock Villa,
3 Arms Zone, Abuja,
Federal Republic of Nigeria
Your Excellency,
LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT ON THE STATE OF THE NATION
As part of civil society organizations that had been advocating for a convenient lease of life for Nigerians, the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) and Centre for Anti-Corruption and Open Leadership, CACOL, hereby jointly write to you to voice our opinion on the present state of the nation.
We are constrained to join other well spirited Nigerians both at home and abroad to proffer possible solutions to the current protest being carried out by some groups of people in different parts of the country, which if not checked may snowballed to a national unrest that would further drag the country into dire social and economic consequences.
We would like to commend you for the various giant strides your administration has recorded in the last one year or thereabout in office. Some of these laudable achievements which cannot be overlooked are: signing into law the student loan bill which is now being disbursed to students, securing Supreme Court pronouncement for local government financial autonomy, payment of forex backlog, increment in the minimum wage from #30,000 to #70,000, increment in crude oil production from 900,000bpd to 1.6million bpd, creation of the North West and South East Development Commissions, selling of crude oil in Naira, suspension of tariff on imported grains and other essential food items, release of grains to state and local governments to ease the food crisis, among others.
Our attention has been drawn to information from the media that you will address the nation tomorrow and we would like you to include the following recommendations in your speech.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1. All Nigerians whose business capital is not up to 5 million Naira should be exempted from paying tax.
2. All essential commodities including foods, books, medicine, etc. should enjoy tax waivers.
3. Free education and healthcare should be declared for all children up to the Senior Secondary level in the minimum.
4. Grants should be given to indigent students in tertiary institutions while those who are not so indigent should be encouraged to take the option of the student loan your administration introduced.
5. Nigeria is unnecessarily encumbered by the weight of its top-heavy and unwieldy system of government it enburdens itself with. Our government consists of three tiers of federal, state and local. Each tier consists of three arms, executive, legislative and judiciary. The federal legislature is bicameral with the Senate and House of Representatives. We would like to recommend that a unicameral legislature in the mould of the House of Representatives is cheaper, easier to maintain and makes government business simpler and faster and should be adopted in Nigeria. At the end of the day, if the Senate is more fashionable, they should name the National Assembly, Senate or simply make it National Assembly. Election of Members should be based on the same criteria upon which House of Representative Members were elected.
6. It is also our recommendation that the three tiers of government be reduced to two; the federal and local governments. There is no need for state governments. State governments are just discomfiting interlopers, whose roles can be better played as local governments. State governments are the veritable excuses why local governments had not been Functioning optimally. That is why state governments don’t want autonomy for local governments.
7. We are aware that the constitution provides that at least one cabinet minister should be appointed from each of the component states, our recommendation is that Ministers and state commissioners should also be elected by their respective states or constituencies the same way that the federal and state legislators are respectively elected. The president should only have opportunities of appointing personal assistants and not even special advisers. Ministers should play the roles of advising the President on sectorial issues. The president and ministers should only appoint few assistants whose emoluments would be borne by the government for himself and his ministers. Any public servant who wants more assistants should remunerate them from their personal resources. You must nonetheless put a limit to the number of Assistants employed for them.
8. Finally, we believe that the current constitution, the ground norm with which our individual and collective lives are being administered, was foisted upon us by an illegitimate government of the military. It is on this note that we recommend that the government should convene a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) wherein every Nigerian voice would be directly represented and where a new Nigerian Constitution would evolve. SNC is the foundation of a true democracy and nationhood; without it we would only be living under self-denial in a mere political contraption without any true unifying factor and therefore signifying nothing but a keg of gunpowder waiting to explode!!!
We believe that if the above recommendations are adopted, it would douse the current tension being witnessed across the country in the form of protest and wanton looting and destruction of properties.
Debo Adeniran
President, CDHR,
Chaiman CACOL,
