Raging issues threatening Nigeria’s unity, yesterday, dominated discussions as the Chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) and Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, and former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Attahiru Jega, decried the poor attention being paid to it by politicians, IgbereTV reports.
The duo spoke at different fora in Abuja.
At a summit on national unity organised in Abuja by National Prosperity Movement, Fayemi said: “To be sure, unity cannot endure where injustice, exclusion, inequity and marginalisation are embedded in the practice of governance. I have often shuddered at the spectacle whereby some among us who have been entrusted with leadership responsibility very easily slide into the role of ethno-regional champions, xenophobes, and zealots.”
The Ekiti governor submitted that fostering unity in a context of multiple diversities requires fulsome attention to equity, justice, fair play, and merit.
Fayemi advised that “while it is normal that leaders must have their ears to the ground and feel the pulse of the people who have elected them – imbibing, reproducing and spilling out raw and crude bile and pushing scorched earth solutions crosses the line of representation to become an exercise in the shirking of responsibility.
“Unlike the bulk of their followers, leaders are positioned and privileged to know that in matters of nation- and state-building, the world is far more complex than the simple and many a-times simplistic binary divisions that are frequently deployed to oppose black and white.
“Leaders must truly lead by using the broader, more complex, and better nuanced understanding they have to help moderate and modulate seasons of deep division in the polity, rather than becoming the ones who add fuel to a raging fire.”
Delivering the Keynote address, Jega berated all civilian administrations since 1999 for not doing enough to promote national unity.
