The call to restructure Nigeria has again come to the fore with Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Chief Mike Ahamba, urging the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration to urgently return the country to its productive days by having it restructured.
Chief Ahamba remarked that the need to restructure as soon as possible would compel the component entities to contribute to its growth and development rather than go cap to Abuja every month to collect from the national treasury.
Having agreed to become one entity, said Ahamba, the component nationalities of Nigeria, have a common ground to produce and bring to the centre.
He, however, expressed concern that the agreement has been jettisoned, and turned the other way with states going to the centre to collect allocations, instead of providing for the central government. The situation, according to the notable advocate has made some parts of the country lazy, while waiting to collect from the centre.
“I expect the incoming administration, to, as a matter of urgency, fundamentally restructure the country for our nation to return to its productive past, instead of being a consuming one.
“We agreed to be one country, whose components should produce and bring to the centre and not the other way, in which we go to take from the Federal Government.
“This is making some parts of the country lazy, waiting to collect allocation from the centre,” he said while urging the incoming administration to pursue the goal for better governance and growth of the economy.”
Contributing to the unending restructuring debate, another legal practitioner, Fidel Albert wrote: “California is the 6th largest economy in the World. Its economy is larger than that of France and Brazil. The little problem is that California is not a Country. It is a State in the United States of America (USA). It has little offshore oil, yet its economy is larger than States in the US that are famous for their oil reserves, like Texas. California generates much of its revenue from non-oil products. It found a way to absorb and domesticate much of the intellectual output from its premier university, Stanford University, into saleable products within its economy.
“As a matter of fact, much of California’s economy is built around Stanford University. So with this, Silicon Valley developed… Now with Silicon Valley came Companies like Apple, eBay, Cisco, Lockheed, Hewlett Packard (HP), Google, Netflix, Facebook, Oracle, Tesla…and the list goes on and on ad infinitum.
“These are multibillion-dollar companies. The yearly budget of any one of these companies might be larger than the entire yearly budget of, say for example, Akwa Ibom State.
“I’m talking about companies that are richer than countries. They are all in California. But that is just in the technology industry where the technologies and inventions spewing out of Stanford are caught mid-air and converted to money spinning enterprises.
“But there is also the entertainment industry in California. Yes, Hollywood is in California. The US movies industry contributes about $504 billion to USA’s GDP. Hollywood, as you know, contributes over 70% of that figure…”
