Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo has spoken against proposal to move the country’s away from the current presidential system of government to parliamentary.
Sixty members of House of Representatives are backing a bill that would return Nigeria to parliamentary on grounds that the presidential system is expensive and throwing up bad leaders.
The proposal is somehow gaining traction with prominent member of the Northern Elders Forum and former vice chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Prof Ango Abdullahi among those dignitaries rooting for it.
On Saturday at the public presentation of the book “Court and Politics,” authored by Umar Ardo, governorship candidate of the Social Democratic Party in the 2023 general election in Adamawa State, Obasanjo expressed concern over the proposition.
The ex-President who was represented by ex-Niger State Governor, Aliyu Babangida said the county’s problem is not a function of the political system in place but that of the actors.
According to him, “To bring it back home, no matter what you bring, if the political culture is not there—the same attitude, the same people, the same ways of doing things—we are wasting our time. The second issue is that you imported the parliamentary system in 1960 without the requisite political culture to hold it.
“Now you imported the presidential system, and I have heard people say to bring back the parliamentary system again.
“Anybody who remembers the coup of 1966 will associate that coup with the elections of 1965, leading to the killing and murdering of people in the name of politics. No matter what you bring and no matter what you import, if the political culture is not there, it will not work.”
