BY TONY EDIKE
ENUGU—AN emerging new generation of leaders in Nigeria have called for a new constitution to replace the current one which it described as “a fraud”.

The group, under the aegis of the Coalition of Nations and Organisations in Nigeria, CONON, comprising leaders from the Middle Belt, Niger Delta and South East, also resolved to sustain the battle by the late Biafran leader and Ikemba Nnewi, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, for a Nigeria where all ethnic groups were treated with respect and equal opportunity to express themselves politically and economically.

In a statement weekend, the coalition argued that the present constitution of the country was the direct result of “undemocratic military incursion into Nigerian budding polity and which after an extended period of sustained unconstitutional and despotic rule, has now bequeathed to our generation the false governing instrument.”

The coalition alleged that it was the false instrument, dressed in the garb of a federal constitution but brimming with a “plethora of decrees now falsely called acts/laws, designed to guide the conduct of our affairs such as the “Land Use Act” and “Petroleum Resource Act,” that subsequent leaders in the country had exploited to despoil the people.

In the communiqué, the coalition was particular about the “inherent constraints and contradictions in the regimes of unjust laws, particularly those regarding the appropriation, exploitation, use and management of our diverse natural resource endowments.

“Our so-called ‘federal constitution’, with the political and economic structure deriving from it, are no longer able to support our national security and stability, peace and citizens’ welfare which are the principal purposes of the state, its governments and governance arrangements.”

According to the coalition, what is called a constitution is nothing more than “evidences of the concentration of power in the hands of a few greedy lots that hold governmental authority at all levels.

“The monopoly and concentration of authority and power in the hand of these few is the foundation of incentives for entrenched culture of political patronage which breed monumental corruption.”

The convention, which was attended by about 10,000 participants from the three regions, blamed the stunted economic growth and apparent lack of development in the country on what it described as inherent structural inequality which had promoted exclusion and suppression of minority interest and weaker segments of the country to access power.

“We, therefore, call on the current executive and legislative arms of government to use the legitimacy it derived from citizens’ votes to organize, empower and work with Nigerians to produce an acceptable and proper peoples’ constitution that meet the aspirations of constituent nations and stakeholders of the country,” the communique said.