Posted by Some ethnic minorities in Nigeria’s north have proposed dividing the country into the South, the Middle Belt, and the North, with the support of the Coalition of Indigenous Middle Belt Organizations (CIMBO).
A new “people’s constitution” would be the answer to Nigeria’s problems, according to the ethnic nationalities, who have also called for a rewrite of the present constitution, which was passed in 1999.
The two-day conference in Kaduna concluded with a statement that proposed using the report from the 2014 national conference as a springboard for a national reorganization.
In his conference paper titled “The position of the Middle Belt on Restructuring, Boundary Adjustments and Constitutional Review,” Professor Ejeikwu Emmanuel Oloja advocated for the division of Nigeria into three regions: the South, the Middle-Belt, and the North/Northeast.
He thinks that a reorganized Nigeria with several units will increase the fight for control of resources, bring about real federalism, decrease corruption, and make the country rely too much on centrally allocated statutory funds.
The chairman and secretary, Timothy Barau Gandu and Prof. Emmanuel Ejeikwu, jointly issued a communique stating that the need for Nigeria’s restructuring was greater than before. This was mainly because of the Middle Belt’s diverse ethnic makeup and rapid population growth, with an estimated 44 million people living there as of June 2024.