The Founder, School of Politics, Policy and Governance, Obiageli Ezekwesili, has tasked the Federal Government with the kind of reforms the country needs to come out of the woods.

In a Public Memorandum to the people of Nigeria, the National Assembly and President Bola Tinubu, the former Vice President of the World Bank decried the insecurity that pervades the land, adding that the country "is approaching a dangerous precipice."

According to the memorandum entitled 'The Urgency to Restructure Nigeria: Why a Single-Issue Constitutional Amendment Can No Longer Wait,' the insecurity that now defines daily life across vast stretches of the country is not merely a law-and-order problem; it is evidence of a nation-state whose foundational architecture is no longer fit for purpose.

"Terrorists, bandits and other armed criminal networks have entrenched themselves so deeply that they now exercise a form of rival governance, openly contesting the sovereignty of the Nigerian state.

"In a recent public memo on state police, I challenged the increasingly fashionable belief that decentralising policing alone would resolve this crisis. State police is necessary, overdue and ultimately unavoidable. But it is not sufficient. Our national dysfunction is structural, not episodic. No amount of administrative tinkering can repair a constitutional foundation that was defective from inception," the SPPG founder stated.

According to the former minister, the 1999 Constitution, a document imposed on Nigerians without debate or consent, has trapped the country in a cycle of paralysis.

She said: "It provides a pathway for amending itself, but none for replacing itself. Section 9 empowers the National Assembly to alter the Constitution, yet nowhere does it empower citizens to design a new one. For more than two decades, this contradiction has frozen Nigeria's restructuring debate in place.

"This is why Nigeria must now pursue a single, urgent reform: a Single-Issue Constitutional Amendment that creates a lawful, binding and time-bound pathway for a Citizen-led Sovereign National Conference whose final draft Constitution will be submitted to Nigerians in a referendum. Kenya escaped the abyss of ethnic conflict by using its 2010 referendum to give citizens the power to remake the state — a lesson Nigeria can no longer afford to ignore."

Such an amendment, she added, would not be an act of rebellion against the existing order; it would be an act of fidelity to it.

Noting that the idea is not new, she cited the citizen-led Sovereign National Conference proposed to the Senate by #FixPolitics five years ago.

"In 2021, #FixPolitics, the research-anchored advocacy organisation I chaired, proposed this exact amendment to the Senate Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution. The logic remains compelling. Nigeria's problem is not one broken clause but a broken constitutional architecture. A house built on a faulty foundation cannot be repaired by rearranging the furniture.

"A Citizen-led Sovereign National Conference, properly constituted, would negotiate the federal structure, fiscal arrangements, security architecture, human rights protections and national identity that a modern Nigerian state requires. Its composition must be broad enough to prevent political class capture and inclusive enough to reflect the country's true diversity — ethnic nationalities, women, youth, labour, civil society, persons with disabilities, traditional institutions, faith communities, the private sector, Diasporan Nigerians and elected representatives. Its proceedings must be transparent, participatory and accessible to the public. And its final draft must be ratified through a national referendum.

"Some have argued that the Tinubu administration has already 'achieved' restructuring through scattered policy reforms. But piecemeal adjustments are not restructuring. They are, at best, administrative conveniences. At worst, they are distractions that obscure the deeper crisis. True restructuring requires a collectively owned, citizen-driven constitutional process, not executive-led policy tweaks that leave the underlying power imbalances intact," she said.

Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people, she warned, cannot continue outsourcing its future to elite bargains.

The former minister called on the National Assembly and Houses of Assembly to pass one urgent amendment: the amendment that returns constitution-making authority to the people, not amendments that pretend to restructure Nigeria on behalf of the people.

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