The New Independence Group ( NIG) a socio-economc think tank condemns the attempt by the Minister of Education, Alhaji Adamu Adamu’s move to resuscitate the defunct Northern Nigeria Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies, NBAIS as a parastatal of the Federal Ministry of Education. The group, in a statement issued in Lagos on Monday, and signed by its Convener, Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde, considers the proposal as ultra-irredentist and flagrantly insensitive to plural sensibilities in a putatively secular state. According to NIG, a nation already grappling with the perpetual condition of atomism, occasioned by mutual distrust and mismanagement of cultural and religious differences, need not further ruffle sensibilities with the impression that a section of the country is being promoted at the expense of others in a supposedly federal milieu.
It is unfortunate that the present crop of Ministers in the Buhari administration are either grossly incompetent or confused on the scope of their mandates. While we have nothing against insular agitations and believes that the promotion of provincial interests are the prerogatives of their proponents, the extant constitution, as imperfect as it seems , accommodates such yearnings as those that the states can legitimately legislate upon and bring to fruition, says the NIG.
"It is awkward and indeed comes across as a fundamental reversal of the logic of federalism that the federal government would be at the vanguard of such sectional cravings.
"At this critical period of economic recession, it is difficult to rationalize why the Federal Government would be interested in further creating more programmes and projects that have to do with dominance of a particular region where the practice of a religion is preponderant ,and selectively generate employment for a religious group, when a lot of its agencies are unviable and surplus to our institutional requirements, and should even be scrapped or merged as pointedly suggested in the Oronsanye Presidential Committee on Restructuring and Rationalization of Federal Government Parastatal ,Commissions and Agencies’ Report.
"What we rather expect from the Federal Government in respect to education is to revisit The Needs Assessment Report recently prepared in respect of its tertiary institutions and unity schools, and endeavor to meet the funding gap that had hemmed our Universities, Polytechnics, and Teaching hospitals in state of rot and made perennial union strikes inevitable.
"It is also important that the Federal Government should clarify to Nigerians whether the country still runs on the working hypothesis of secularism
"As stated above, there is nothing really bad in enclaves agitating for an order which they deem best for their social progress, but such cravings should be channeled through legitimate quarters and not be insensitively presented as national agenda.
"The nation cannot pretend to be making national initiatives that exclude certain parts of it in application.
"It is better we restructure the country and get it back to a similitude of what obtained in the first republic when initiatives such as the NBAIS were affairs of the region and were essentially exclusive of others that had other ideas on how to extricate their peoples from the backwaters", concludes NIG
