Buhari can save Nigeria from break-up – Prof Anya

As the clamour for restructuring and implementation of the 2014 Confab report gains more ground and support from eminent leaders across the country, erudite scholar and prominent Igbo leader, Professor Anya O. Anya, has come out with the things President Muhammadu Buhari needs to do to tame the wave of agitations and save the country from possible break-up. Speaking with VINCENT KALU, in Lagos, Anya who is the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Abia State, also spoke on other major national issues.

Nigeria seems to be on edge, with crises and agitations from various quarters. How did we get here?

Nigeria ought to be on edge, because there have been cumulative injustices, cumulative unrighteousness, and we are now in the time of judgment. But the good thing is that this year is going to mark the change from our ignoble past to a brighter and better future. We have to pay the price for it. Take the Nnamdi Kanu phenomenon that is fully and completely created by the Federal Government for example. He has been running his Radio Biafra, and nobody paid attention to it, and he has been coming and going and nobody paid attention to him.

Then suddenly, this time he came, you pounced on him. Not only that, you get to the point where not only one time, not two and three times, court said, release him, but you didn’t do so. That served two purposes. One, people took notice of him, because you have been unjust to him, and the human mind reacts to injustice, which is why we tend to sympathize with the underdog than the big man.

Second, Nnamdi Kanu is only a symptom of a larger malaise. Let me give you example of the so-called Northern youths’ quit notice. According to them, the reason for the quit notice order was that the whole of Southeast was obeying Nnamdi Kanu. Again, I say, the government created the situation that made it mandatory for people to sit at home.

These boys have been going on non-violent protests all over the places. It happens in the history of any nation, there comes a time when the youths are not satisfied and they show dissatisfaction in peaceful protests. But each time these people went out for peaceful protest, the military would be there to welcome them with bullets. It happened in Aba, Onitsha. Some say it also happened in Asaba and Port Harcourt, and the people were buried and that was the end of it.

I was in the village in the Southeast and I was to travel back to Lagos on that day, but I decided to travel the next day for just one simple reason. Read more