The Coalition of Northern Group (CNG) has rejected the recently concluded zonal public hearings on constitution review organised by the Senate across the country.\
In a statement issued by the group’s spokesperson, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman, on Sunday, the group described the constitution review public hearings as an attempt by the Senate to divert attention from the existing threat to national unity that has been posed by the secessionists.
The statement reads, “We find it quite unreasonable for leaders to contemplate any form of constitution review that will involve an unwilling Igbo population that is violently agitating for secession by attacking people of other regions, killing security personnel at will and destroying the nation’s public and security assets.
“Reasonably, those who call themselves custodians of our laws ought to concentrate first on a process for the separation of the irritating Igbo secessionists from the rest of the country before contemplating a future Constitution.”
The CNG claimed that the activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the Eastern Security Network (ESN) were being funded, fully supported and emboldened by some unnamed people from the region.
The statement added, “We at the CNG are quite aware of the futility of addressing the fundamentals of our national existence through a medium created by a set of representatives that have acquired the reputation of being the worst in the history of our nation in terms of any capacity to generate confidence in achieving credible national goals.
“Already piles of reports from previous such wasteful exercises since 1999 that claim different recommendations and conclusions on many sensitive issues now lie gathering dust in Federal Government offices and legislative chambers.
“The CNG considers it an insult to our collective sensibilities and ordinary rules of decency to expect other parts of the country, particularly the North to continue to coexist as one country with the Igbo as federating partners.
“The coordinated incessant attacks on police formations in Imo, Ebonyi, Aba, Ibadan, Enugu, Anambra and most recently the police headquarters in Kwara and Sunday’s cold-blooded assassination of Ahmed Gulak, a prominent northern leader, are part of a wider plan by the Igbo to replicate the ugly events of 1966 and the more reason why we cannot be reasonably expected to live with them as a nation any longer.
“It is equally insensitive for Senate to come up with such dubious exercise at a time the whole of the northern region is literally abandoned at the mercy of a rampaging insurgency and sundry security issues designed to continuously weaken the region politically and pauperise it economically.”
Credit: Leadership