This signing of the Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership ETIP by the Minister of Trade and Investment is simply put a recolonization agenda coming through the back door. This trade deal accommodates British legal practice in Nigeria and does not provide for Nigeria legal practitioners to compete in UK.
The real debate about this Enhanced Trade Partnership deal should be whether at this point of our nationhood, there is plausible need for us to resubmit ourselves as a nation to another era of British colonization in view of the fact that we’re not just able to manage our affairs sustainably as a nation.
Can we proudly be saying as a nation that our self government is really working for us? Why do we have those we didn’t vote for still governing us since 2015? How did the NBA as a body react to electoral slap on the faces of Nigerians as occasioned by INEC serial impunity? How did the NBA react to judicial impunity that brought about strange outcomes from even the Supreme Court? Why did NBA recuse itself from drug peddling allegations surreptitious to the last conducted election and leading to the swearing in of a man that suffered judicial malady as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?
Where was NBA when the masses of this country looked up to them to rise to the occasion of judicial estoppel of attacks on our constitutional provisions by a privileged highly moneyed few resulting in the state capture of Nigeria by already identified and verified criminals?
Now the chicken of the NBA has come home to roost. This chicken will suffer environmental disability, existential disability and ecosystemic disorder. NBA just like most Nigeria institutions are subsumed in the thraldom of tribe, ethnicity, religious divide and disunity. NBA made a mistake to have kept quiet when Tinubu illegally removed a non existent and questionable subsidy regime at his inaugural broadcast and fraudulently hiked the petroleum products prices to levels predetermined and handed to him by Buhari and his unpatriotic fellow looters of the nation.
NBA made a mistake to have kept quiet when Tinubu again jerked up the exchange rate and illegally floating the Naira against monetary regulations with the active recommendations of the IMF and World Bank without recourse to the Nigerian people. NBA has kept quiet for too long while the economy is being systematically destroyed by foreign capitalists and carpetbaggers. NBA is coming late to the party after the ruins and so one wonders what damage control mechanism can be employed at this point of unmitigated social delirium.
My advise to NBA is to go back and begin to mobilize the masses of this country to come together and stop the present orientation of this Tinubu government from signing a done deal to recolonize Nigeria. Or maybe, just maybe, we may even try getting the British to repeal our self rule. Its just not working for us because criminals are on a rampage in all our government institutions.
Dr. Engr Odo Ijere.
