Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) has tasked leading presidential candidates of registered political parties in Nigeria, to adopt the organization’s peacebuilding plan to heal the nation.
This was as it said that the issues that led to Nigeria’s civil war in 1966 and those after are part of the fundamental challenges holding Nigeria back from progress.
It particularly challenged Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peter Obi of Labour Party (LP), Rabiu Kwankwaso of New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), amongst others, to consider the adoption of a national peacebuilding strategy as corner stone to the nation’s quest for good governance.
Peacepro stressed the need for healing, genuine conversation and reconciliation around issues hurting different sections of the country for the nation to make genuine progress in the quest for good governance.
These were contained in a statement by the Executive Director of Peacepro, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, who also said that any government that is able to mobilize significant population of the country around issues of peacebuilding will achieve tremendous success in governance.
Hamzat said; “We must recognize that people, whose tribal and family members were cruelly murdered in the first coup, counter coup, pogrom, civil war and the various riots and organized criminality are still hurting. “They are all front line victims still hurting from the pains of the past. Nigeria as a country should offer specific apology and if possible, relief to these set of victims and a national apology to all Nigerians, who may have been directly or indirectly affected by these unfortunate incidents. This singular action will begin the process of leading Nigeria to civil peace”.
Hamzat explained that Peacepro had since identified national peacebuilding as a necessity to prevent continuous self-sabotage in the country, adding that the realization made the organization to develop national peacebuilding plan.
