I will not tell you what the agenda of the Christian body is until it is made public in the conference. As I have always said, we need to pray. Some people will say ‘but things are still rough with all the prayers’, but I tell you, Nigeria cannot survive without prayers, even for one week. Prayer is the glue that gums Nigeria together; if you remove that glue, Nigeria will break into pieces. Let us put aside tribal and religious sentiments. Nigeria has long awaited this conference; so, I advise that those who have not been chosen to attend the conference should take away malice and sentiments and pray for its success.

If you ask me, I would say that corruption is extremely high in this country; there is no other polite way to say this.

It is extremely unfortunate, because Nigeria as a country has tremendous intelligent people who do not have to be corrupt, because they have all it takes to be successful. Nigerians are resourceful and they are living in abundance of wealth and to acknowledge the fact that there is corruption in Nigeria is disheartening.

The debate as to what form the Constitution review should take has been very intensive. Some believe that it should be sovereign while some say it should not. Some even believe that such exercise was not necessary or that the matter should be left with the National Assembly as provided for in the present Constitution. While the position of those calling for a sovereign conference is not yet clearly defined, they probably envisage that the outcome of such conference should not be subjected to interference by anybody as was the position in the past.

I think the governors there can help the security to overcome the excesses of these people. They are the chief security officers of their states; therefore they have a duty to ensure the safety of their people. These are matters that there should be outside publicity; if I have serious suggestions, I will channel them properly, not on the pages of newspaper, it will not work.

Looking into what is called state of emergency, I could have advised the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the Senate and the House of Representatives to put heads together with the service chiefs to redesign the concept in the troubled states. It is not supposed to be a haphazard state of the emergency. I call for a full military declaration in the states.