At an extraordinary meeting to consider the ongoing farce about efforts by selected members of the National Assembly and the Senate to derail Nigeria's nascent democracy through what appears to be a fairly orchestrated conspiracy to impeach President Olusegun Obasanjo, Egbe Omo Yoruba made the following resolutions:
That Egbe Omo Yoruba sees the ongoing farce in Abuja regarding the impeachment of President Olusegun Obasanjo as a ruse by certain individuals to derail Nigeria's nascent democracy. The Egbe believes that if Obasanjo has broken the laws of the nation, our legislators, whose achievements are as questionable, if not more questionable than those of Obasanjo, should give the Nigerian voters the opportunity to use their own electoral veto to discipline Obasanjo. Nigeria is too close to the next presidential election (less than 8 months away) for its legislators to create a crisis of confidence that an impeachment is likely to engender. The failure of any arm of the legislators to effect the recall mechanism of senators who decamped from the parties that elected them to the Senate is an evidence that the legislators themselves have lost every moral right to initiate any impeachment procedure against General Obasanjo
In view of the general malaise that is evident in all aspects of the Nigerian polity, including the legislatures, Egbe Omo Yoruba reiterates its position in 1999 that any federal elections without a sovereign national conference was only a means to delay the progress of Nigeria and frustrate the aspirations of its citizens. Egbe therefore repeats its call for a sovereign national conference before any presidential or federal elections in Nigeria.
Believing that Nigeria will continue to flounder without a sovereign national conference, reinforced recently by the fiasco that marked the recent voters' registration exercise and Obasanjo's readiness to abandon INEC's earlier decision to include fingerprints and photographs as part of the registration process, Egbe Omo Yoruba calls for a new registration exercise that will include all the sub-processes involved in a credible registration/voting exercise. These are namely: verification; identification; and duplication-elimination. The use of fingerprints and photographs would go a long way achieving a credible excercise. The new voters' registration should take place while the sovereign national conference sits in Abuja to work out the modalities of returning Nigeria to true federalism.
The Egbe calls on Yoruba leaders and the multitudes of Yoruba assocations and civil society organizations to mobilize Yoruba citizens to boycott any federal election that is not preceded by a sovereign national conference and a credible voters' registration that is capable of preventing mass rigging of elections in Nigeria. The disappearance of millions of voters' cards during the recent registration exercise indicates the rigging of future elections in advance and the abortion of electoral democracy in Nigeria.
Egbe Omo Yoruba also calls on the masses of the Yoruba Nation of Nigeria to urge Yoruba politicians from governors to legislators and councilors and leaders of patriotic Yoruba groups: Afenifere, Oodua Peoples Congress, YCE, Yoruba Parapo, Oodua Youth Movement, Oodua Liberation Movement, COSEG, etc. to demand that Yoruba leaders desist forthwith from plans to participate in federal elections until there is a sovereign national conference of all the nationalities that constitute Nigeria.
Egbe Calls on Yoruba people to brace up and face the realities of Nigeria by seeing through overt and covert manipulation of Nigeria's political system by people and sectors with interests beyond that of true integration of the peoples of Nigeria and true development of the country's economy. Unless Nigeria is re-structured, thousands of Obasanjos with fixation on national unity with or without purpose and an abiding readiness to please Hausa-Fulani oligarchy will not bring progress to the teeming millions of people in Nigeria. The time has come for Yoruba leaders and the entire Yoruba populace to face their future with courage and determination so as to ensure a place for their children in the global world that is now emerging. Nothing short of true federalism can bring peace, stability, and development to Nigeria, and Yoruba people have to summon the courage to face this, instead of getting further engrossed in the horse trading of power between Hausa and Yoruba or Igbo and Fulani, or Igbo and Yoruba.
The Egbe also enjoins the masses of the Yoruba nation to finally hold their governors and legislators at all levels responsible for failing to see the handwriting on the wall and responding creatively to the politics of manipulation and sectional interests that has dominated Nigeria since the advent of post-military democratic governance in Nigeria. The governors, legislators, and councilors have no other group to blame for abandoning the struggle for true federalism and re-structuring but themselves. If the Hausa-Fulani states could so easily introduce cultural federalism through the introduction of Sharia, what has stopped Yoruba governors and legislators from introducing measures and policies that can integrate Yoruba economy and secure Yoruba states from marauders unleashed on the nation by the enemies of democracy and true federalism?
Yoruba voters are enjoined to insist that anybody seeking their votes should produce blueprints for the development, integration, protection of life and limb, and consolidation of popular democracy in the Yoruba states of Nigeria.
Egbe also encourages Yoruba men and women in diaspora worldwide to enjoin their extended families to adopt and popularize the Yoruba Declaration on the inevitability of national sovereign conference and restoration of true federalism in Nigeria as a prerequisite for the involvement of Yoruba people in any future federal elections.
Signed,
Olaseni M. Ajao
President
Mrs. Abiola Popoola
Publicity Secretary
Egbé Omo Yorùbá National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America
USA and CANADA
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