Home NEWS 2015 Poll Falana Insists: 2015 Election Is Not About Those Who Have No Shoes

Falana Insists: 2015 Election Is Not About Those Who Have No Shoes

Femi Falana

A Lagos lawyer, Femi Falana has made it clear that the March 28 election would not be about people those who do not have shoes, neither would it be about religion and ethnicity.

Falana who spoke at an event sponsored by the United States Consulate in Lagos to mark the African-American History Month accused religious leaders for endorsing President Jonathan.

“This election is not about religion. It is not about ethnicity. It is not about not having shoes. This election should also be about others who have not acquired shoes.”

Falana said that some undesirable elements through their actions and statements are trying to bring Nigeria back to the dark ages that followed the June 12 election.

He insisted that the election must hold and whoever wins must be allowed to govern the country.

Meanwhile, the Pro-National Conference Organisation (PRONACO) has tasked leaders of conscience in the country to immediately rise above political partisanship and give a more profound direction to the country.

The group in its periodic state of the nation intervention said it was not a surprise that the country’s democracy is currently grinding to a halt with desperate and panicky acts of the political class all over the nation.

Speaking through its spokesperson, Olawale Okunniyi, the group said by the framework of the subsisting 1999 Constitution and its attendant amendments, it would be impossible for any government in Nigeria to meet the democratic  expectation of the Nigerian people.

“Hence the economic failures of successive governments and the present electoral ‘war’ in the country as the current civil rule from its outset in 1999 has been designed constitutionally to flop,” PRONACO said.

The group, however, lamented the inability of the political class to correct the inherent anomalies in the constitutional structure of the current democracy which it said sustained the explosive politics breeding the current electoral tension in the land.

“Politically, Nigeria is currently sitting on a keg of gunpowder, and may have just postponed the doomsday with the recent extension of the forthcoming elections by six weeks. The fact is that the constitutional structure of Nigeria is deeply self-contradictory to democratic survival.

“Nigeria’s governance and electoral structure is endemically warped and lopsided as it has not been designed by the military to sustain democracy but to blackmail and compromise it for the self-serving agenda of the existing military,” PRONACO asserted.

It also wondered why the political class, for what it called narrow gains, has made it so difficult for the country to correct its dangerous polity with all the humongous economic crisis and horrendous bloodletting and killings witnessed under the current ‘wrongheaded’ democratic dispensation.

“The ruling class may have to take responsibility for the imminent failure of civil rule in the country; now that it seems almost likely that the prediction of the United States in 2005 about Nigeria’s disintegration in 2015 now seems most likely to come to pass.

“In spite of all the warnings and great interventions of leaders of conscience in movements like PRONACO, Project Nigeria and Patriots, the self-serving ruling class have chosen to be deaf to the ominous signs ahead.”

It warned that disturbing developments in recent times are clear signals that democracy is about to be truncated in Nigeria as was done on 12 June 12, 1993, when the presidential election won by MKO Abiola was annuled by military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida.

Abiola, who ran on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), defeated Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC), but Babangida annulled the election, leading to a crisis that ended with Sani Abacha toppling the Interim Government headed by Ernest Shonekan on November 17, 1993. [myad]

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