Tanko Yakasai, an elder statesman of Northern extraction has blasted a former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar over his comments on restructuring, saying that they are lacking in substance.
Abubakar had said that the country could be restructured in six months, but many Nigerians are failing to see the possibility in his pronouncement, chalking it up to an aspiring politicians campaign slogan.
Yaksai said in an interview with Vanguard that Abubakar, a former VP ought to know better instead of spreading hogwash that could lead the country into anarchy.
His words: “I thought, as a politician that he (Atiku) is, that he has read our constitution from A-Z before suggesting that we can restructure in six months. My question here is, what are the details of the budgetary provisions for the Ministry of Works that should be transferred to the states’ ministries of education and so on and so forth before he made his pronouncement that these could be done within six months?
“Atiku served as Vice President for eight years. So when he threw his support for the new slogan, I celebrated that, for the first time, because of the strategic position he held in the past, he would come up with a clear definition of what we didn’t know about restructuring.
“We already have a budget approved by the National Assembly as empowered by the constitution for appropriation. So, how can we take the fund already appropriated by the National Assembly for the federal government to execute its programme and now transfer it without the consent of the National Assembly?.
“The money approved by the National Assembly was for the federal ministries with their heads and sub heads cited in the Act. How do we achieve all this without recourse to the constitution? How is it practically possible?
“If you are going to put a coma in the constitution, I know that you have to go through a process. It means you want to amend the constitution and it must go through the established protocol to avoid chaos.”
“As time goes on, Atiku will give further insight into how we are going to transfer an item from exclusive list to either concurrent or residual list without amending our constitution to justify his new position.”