A former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Chief Wole Olanipekun has said the Nigerian constitution needs ‘a total overhaul’ in a bid to drive the development of a new Nigeria.
He observed that the constitution needs “a total overhaul, a redrafting, a re-crafting and a total replacement, starting from the preamble to the definition schedule”.
The Legal icon who pointed to the recent reported incidents of human rights violations during the #EndSARS violence submitted that the country is in dire need of restructuring.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria spoke at his hometown, Ikere Ekiti, Ekiti State, on Saturday during the 2020 edition of the yearly Wole Olanipekun Scholarship Award ceremony where 67 secondary school students, 73 university undergraduates, three Law school students and a doctoral student benefitted.
He said, “Between now and 2023, we should be able to have a clean, practical, pragmatic and acceptable constitution which can jurisprudentially be described as grundnorm.
“All arms of government have to be completely redefined, resituated and restrategised for a new Nigeria which will bring about ‘unity and faith, peace and progress’.
“To achieve this end, the National Assembly must also come to the reality that we need the application of the doctrine of necessity for them to jettison whatever powers are vested in them by the Section 9 of the constitution, etc. to segmentally amend it according to the whims and caprices to ‘we, the people of Nigeria’”.
