Atiku calls for merger of states
For the country to be able to solve some of its challenges there is the need for states to merge.
Former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar gave the advice on Monday while delivering the Annual Professor Ademola Popoola public lecture of the Faculty of Law at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State.
He spoke on the theme: “The constitutional and political framework for reconstructing Nigeria for true federalism and national integration.”
Atiku said: “There is no doubt that many of our states are not viable and were not viable from the start, once you take away the federal government allocations from Abuja.
“We have to find creative ways to make them viable in a changed federal system. Collaboration among states in a region or zone will help.
“We can examine the possibility of using the existing geopolitical zones as federating units. We can also find other ways to determine the viability of states, for example by introducing a means of test such that a state that is unable to generate a certain percentage of its expenditures internally for a specified period of time will be deemed unviable and collapsed into another or a group of states,” he said.
