Nigeria: NADECO Calls For Election Cancellation, Demands Return to Independence Constitution

Nigeria’s pro-democracy group, National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) has called for the cancellation of further elections in the country under the 1999 Constitution.

The group said democratic elections in Nigeria should only be considered after a return to the negotiated 1960 and 1963 Federal Constitutions to which citizens subscribed at independence and when the country became a Republic.

NADECO in an open letter to Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari accused the country’s leader of dealing with the Fulanis specially which has led to various discomfort experienced by regional groups.

The letter which was addressed to the Nigerian leader and signed by its secretary, Mr Ayo Opadokun read: “Other than diminishing Democracy to a virtual DICTATORSHIP, NADECO wonders by which Section of our Ill-founded and presently extremely beleaguered so-called Federal Republic of Nigeria Constitution 1999, do the trio of your good self, Mr President, the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives aided by your hound dog, the Minister of Justice, public service officers all, with specific functions set out in the Constitution, find the justification to judge yourselves entitled to jump uninvited, with decrying statements, into the compendium of frays between trespassing Fulani herdsmen and ancestral land owners exercising their primordial rights to decide whom they want or do not want on their lands?

“Perhaps, better put, NADECO should be wondering whether because the President is the Patron of the Fulani Herdsmen and Cattle Traders, (Miyetti Allah) land owners’ rights must be suspended in awe of such trespassers!

“Needless to say that it is such defence for specially preferred ethnicities that has led to the various discomfort experienced by groups like Ndigbos and now NINAS (the whole of the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria), who have reached the end of their tether, wanting OUT from NIGERIA, variously on the unacceptability of this Administration’s now obvious Policy of Fulanization and the President’s refusal to discontinue operating NIGERIA in accordance with a Constitution concocted to fraudulently obtain the consent of the people of Nigeria to surrender their sovereignty, lands, resources and RIGHTS to the control of the promoters of the forged constitution and a clever ploy to transfer the resources protected by THE INDEPENDENCE CONSTITUTION for the ethnicities in the spaces where they are found, to the 1999 Constitution’s and the President’s preferred and substituted beneficiaries.

In all the circumstances of this matter, NADECO has no alternative but to join in the insistence that there better be no more elections under the 1999 so-called Federal Constitution, until we return to the negotiated 1960 and 1963 Federal Constitutions to which Nigerians subscribed at independence and when we became a Republic.”

According to NADECO since the ethnic nationalities have no independent institution for crisis resolution and redress of justice, it has resolved to transmit a letter of complaint to eight world personalities and institutions.

They are the United Nations Secretary-General, the UN Security Council, the President of the United States and Speaker of Congress and Leader of US Senate; the European Union and Parliament, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the House of Commons, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the President of Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs of Nigeria, and two leading traditional rulers in each of the six zones.

By Abel Ejikeme

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