According to Aare Afe Babalola (SAN), Nigeria need to return to regional government in order to recover from its economic woes and myriad of challenges confronting it.

Having a central government with a president directing the affairs of a large multiethnic and religious body has been the reason why Nigeria has failed to develop, he said.

“I have attended three conferences in Nigeria and return to regional government has always been my position. Nigeria consists of over 300 ethnic groups and with different religious bias, so what we need is confederation or loose federalism, where each region will be allowed to grow at its own pace and contribute to the centre," he said.

“This has been the practice in USA, Australia and Canada. But in Nigeria, we have a central government , where only one person determines what happens everywhere. In the past we had regional governments where each was allowed to develop and Nigeria was better off then.

“Nigeria has six geopolitical zones and these can be allowed to function as component parts and Nigeria will be good for it. During the regional government, Nigeria was growing faster. Malaysia is a very small country with a population of about 30 million and this makes it easy to govern.

“If Nigeria has been operating the regional government, we would have developed even better than Malaysia. Our fore fathers considered the population, land and resources as very large, that was why they introduced regional government. It has always been the smaller, the better," he said.

Afe Babalola is the founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti (ABUAD).

He spoke at the weekend during a programme tagged ‘diplomatic talk’ organized by ABUAD's Department of international Relations.


Daily Post