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VON DG Begs NDA, MASSOB, IPOB To Embrace Dialogue

Published

8 years ago

June 27, 2016

The Director General, Voice of Nigeria, VON, Mr. Osita Okechukwu, weekend, appealed to separatist groups in the country to embrace dialogue and support President Muhammadu Buhari in his efforts to rid the country of corruption.

Okechukwu spoke in Enugu at a reception organized for him and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama by their kinsmen under the aegis of Ekeh Progressives Forum,EPF.
Delivering a speech titled, “True Federalism: Panacea or Placebo to Nigeria’s Paralysis; Eke Town as a Case Study,” at dinner organized as part of the reception, the chieftain of All Progressives Congress, APC, blamed greed and corruption for the gross inequality.

Speaking before an audience which included former Vice President, Alex Ekwueme and former Senate President, Ken Nnamani, the VON boss recalled that President Buhari had in his 2015 Chatham House, London speech, vividly described this gross inequality in the country as a tiny island of the affluent in the ocean of misery.
“Corruption in all its ramifications, not just the fleecing of the state fund, includes petty human frailties like jealousy, hatred, stereotypes and prejudice. We shall return to these two opaque pages of the same epitaph of greed and corruption, a commonly misunderstood theme.

“These two opaque pages may help us to show that ethnicity and religion play less crucial roles in our dysfunction than greed and its grandson, corruption. Ethnicity and religion are more of the tools of scavengers and predators. It would amaze us to look closely at our communities, local council areas and zones. We are most likely to find that they are the victims of the cankerworm called corruption.
“Consequently, an honest and pragmatic assessment would surely expose the popular sentiment of True Federalism as an innocuous medication to a paralysis engendered and poisoned by the fangs of corruption. The narrative will also show how ethnic merchants and bigots exploit our weaknesses to advance themselves at the expense of the same tribe or religion for which they claim to fly their flag,” Okechukwu said.

He said that the same corruption was equally responsible for the paralysis in his Ekeh hometown, which shares the same ancestral history, 99 percent Catholics and one Wawa dialect, but yet seriously divided.
Okechukwu, however, traced the debate on true federalism from the pre-independence era, to when it exploded in the 1990s as an unintended consequence of annulment of June 12 presidential election and championed by the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) through PRONACO, its constitutional conference arm.