THE Oodua Peoples’ Congress, OPC, has urged the National Assembly Committee on the Review of the Constitution to discharge their responsibility with utmost consideration to return the country to the regional system of government.

The OPC, in a statement by its Publicity Secretary, Mr Yinka Oguntimehin, reaffirmed its support for a call by a group of ethnic nationalities for Nigeria to be restructured into six reorganized regions.

He said: “For Nigeria to make any meaningful progress, we must return to regionalism. It is the best system that will engender progress and development for a multi-ethnic country like Nigeria.

“What we are proposing is a regional system that will make the regions to be self-reliant.

“Each region will be in control of whatever is produced and generated in their region.

“They will also keep 70 percent of such generated revenue and send thirty percent to the centre.

“It is our firm belief that with such arrangement, the country will attain its God-given potentials, while peace will reign with attendant development.

“It is time we realised that the problem began after the military truncated the regional system of government in 1966 and introduced a unitary system of government. From that time, Nigeria has continued to walk in the wilderness without any form of appreciable progress.

“We need to realise that the founding fathers of the country knew what was best for us when they bequeathed a regional system of government to us in 1960.

“Therefore, for Nigeria to make any meaningful progress and stop this vicious -cycle of motion without movement, we must return to the regional system of government, which was the original plan for Nigeria.”