Prominent human and social rights activist, Shehu Sanni on Wednesday evening described the proposed national conference as a political chess game meant to blackmail a set of Nigerians, as the report of the dialogue and contributions from people are sure to end up in the hands of traders selling bean cakes.
Sanni, the president of Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, said this in a statement to journalists.
“The national conference is another diversionary circus aimed at setting the North against the South in a war of words that will only overheat the polity without addressing the problems of the country,” he said.
“It is blackmail and a mischievous political chess game meant to hang the fate of the nation on the continuity of the Jonathan Goodluck regime.”
Describing it as “the Goodluck Conference”, he said the dialogue would deliver nothing but reports that would neither see the light of the day nor that of the night.
“It’s self-deception for anyone to believe that this government will embrace and implement critical views of Nigerians from its conference when the same government has found it difficult to tolerate dissenting opinion from within its party and consistently behaved belligerent to the our university teachers and resident doctors,” he said.
“Those who will take the pain to write and submit their volumes of memoranda to the conference will find their memoranda in the belly of termites and bugs or with akara sellers in Lugbe.
“It’s technically impossible to organise a meaningful and orderly conference at a time when the president and members of the National Assembly and, at the same time states governors, are out on re-election campaigns next year.
“President Goodluck Jonathan-government is a bourgeoisie government with a philosophical base rooted in the preservation of the iniquitous socioeconomic system and the sustenance of the existing capitalist master-servant relationship. This government, like its predecessors, has not implemented any committee report and undoubtedly this conference and it’s report will meet its fate of dust.”
Sanni said the conference would be embraced and attended by people who have enough time to waste and people with patented hope in Pharaoh.
Instead, he admonished Nigerians to “work towards uniting themselves and electing credible leaders who will stamp out corruption, end pervasive insecurity, industrialise the country and lift our teeming masses out of poverty.”
