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Confab Report key to Nigeria’s future, Falae

By Leo Sobechi
17 July 2016   |   3:13 am
Falae, who spoke in an exclusive interview with The Guardian in Akure, noted that the British, who created regional governments, were no fools, adding that under that arrangement each area would not feel oppressed.
Olu-Falae

Olu-Falae

National chairman of Social Democratic Party (SDP), Chief Olu Falae, has said that the 2014 National Conference Report is key to “the future of this country”, stressing that ethnic self-determination has become the dominant international political force.

Falae, who spoke in an exclusive interview with The Guardian in Akure, noted that the British, who created regional governments, were no fools, adding that under that arrangement each area would not feel oppressed.

Wondering whether opponents of restructuring are suggesting that the present arrangement is here forever, the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) said “someday, events will make that report inescapable.”

His words: “Not because I was one of the participants; that that conference took place at all was divine, because the president then did not want to call it. He was not convinced. But eventually it held.

When we got there, how were we going to take decisions, the chairman and co-chairman went to see the then president for guidance, he said go and sort it out yourselves. That made it easier. He never intervened.

“Yet after all the hullabaloo, over 600 decisions were reached by consensus. Look at the composition of that conference, old, young, north, south, soldiers, nurses, traditional rulers, were all there and we agreed on 600 resolutions! If that was not a political miracle, tell me what it was. My view is that when the time comes, somebody will dust it up.”

Falae, who was once the nation’s minister of Finance, said policy inconsistency should be blamed for the crisis in managing the economy, pointing out that “my personal opinion is that if we want optimum growth, we must allow the market to substantially, not exclusively, determine what happens in the economy.”

Describing Nigeria as a quasi-command economy, the economist noted that the  “Central Bank and its agencies were not ready to remedy the malfunctioning of the system.”

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