Osinbajo:

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo said in Ibadan, Oyo State on Saturday that contrary to his recent postulations, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of Peoples Democratic Party, PDP has always not been in support of restructuring of the Nigerian federation.

Osinbajo, who stopped short of calling the former vice president an hypocrite, spoke while responding to questions on repeated promise of the PDP presidential candidate to restructure Nigeria if he is elected President in the 2019 general elections.

But Osinbajo noted that when Atiku was the vice president and Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was the president between 1999 and 2007, they opposed restructuring.

Osinbajo who was answering question from the audience after he delivered the ninth public lecture, entitled: Developing the Nation through Youth Empowerment, as part of activities marking the 68th anniversary of the Sigma Club, University of Ibadan therefore wondered why Atiku should be talking about restructuring he fought against then now.

The Vice President said, “If you ask those people now talking about restructuring, none of them has done anything compared to what we have done. So, I am not a latter day convert to restructuring. I am an active practitioner of restructuring, and I have gone to the Supreme Court 12 times to test restructuring.

“If today, somebody is talking about restructuring, ask him what does he mean? And where was he when we were going to court? Were they not opposing restructuring when we were going to court? We were in the opposition then. They were at the Federal Government, and they opposed every step that we took on restructuring,” he said.

“Let me explain my position clearly. I am not just an advocate of restructuring, there is no other government in Nigeria that has actively pursued restructuring such as we did when I was Attorney General in Lags State.

“People talking about restructuring, if you ask them ‘What do you mean by restructuring?’ They won’t even know what it means, and that is the problem we have and that we have to face.

“Let me tell you what it is. When I was the Attorney General in Lagos State, we pursued in the Supreme Court, all of the issues of restructuring. We started with fiscal restructuring, which is more of resource control. Should states control their own resources? We went to the Supreme Court. They argued that each state should control its own resources.”

The Vice President noted that Lagos and the oil producing states had argued in favour of autonomy of states to control their resources while other states argued to the contrary because every state wants share the oil money.

“So, our own argument was that each state should control its own resources. We lost at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said no, that you cannot control your resources. If you are an oil producing state, take 13 per cent extra, which is derivation,” he stated.

The Vice President further noted that Lagos State had argued that it has ports and the ports serve the entire nation, so the state should also take 13 per cent derivation. The Supreme Court, he said, said no, adding that the argument was pursued further, which has led to the introduction of onshore and offshore law, “which is fast enabling our state to share from onshore resources…

“All this time, this was 2000, some of those people, including the presidential candidate of PDP, who is talking about restructuring, was the vice president then; they opposed every step that we took. Of course, we were taking the Federal Government to court then. They opposed every step.

“The next thing we did was that the states should be able to create their own local governments, which is autonomy of states. So, we created 47 new local governments in Lagos. The president then, Chief Obasanjo, seized our local government funds and said we could not create new local governments. So, they seized the funds they were supposed to allocate for our local governments.

“We challenged the seizure by going to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court held that the president had no right to seize the funds meant for local governments of the state, and that we have a right to create local governments. But after hey have created the local governments, the process is not complete. They must still bring the list of new local governments to the National Assembly and the National Assembly will then amend the whole list of the local governments in the country.

“So, our local governments remain. But we could not get the National Assembly’s endorsement. So, we passed the LCDA Law. We created 47 and made them local council development areas.