National confab: Okurounmu blasts Nwabueze’s group

The Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee (PAC) on the proposed National Conference, Senator Femi Okurounmu, yesterday came hard on Prof Ben Nwabueze -led Igbo leaders over  their rejection of the report.

Some Igbo leaders led by Prof. Nwabueze (SAN) had  last Tuesday rejected some recommendations of PAC on the dialogue,   submitted to President Goodluck Jonathan last month.

The Concerned Igbo Leaders of Thought, had after a meeting held  last Monday in Enugu, alleged that the committee recommended a mere amendment of the existing constitution instead of a new constitution.

Okurounmu during a press conference in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital yesterday, described the allegations of the group as just “hear-say”. According to him, the committee under his chairmanship, made no such recommendations as alleaged  by the group.

The PAC  leader who said he would not be pushed to divulging the contents of the report,  noted that he was disappointed by the  erudite scholar.

His words: “These allegations show clearly that members of the group have neither seen nor read the report that they are criticizing and are merely acting on hear-say because the Presidential Advisory Committee, under my chairmanship, made no such recommendations as alleged.

“The above criticisms were surely meant to be a setback for the conference by injecting a crisis of confidence between the committee, the people and the government. Without doubt, the critics have added more fuel into the fire of the opposition to the conference, who may be reveling in a feeling of vindication.

“That is why the chicanery of the critics must be exposed at once because by the time their unethical and unprofessional conduct is fully grasped by the public, they would merely have succeeded in destroying their own credibility, lowering their own esteem in the eyes of the public and eroding from whatever respect they may have hitherto enjoyed.

“The Nwabueze-led group has clearly gone beyond the bounds of decency and decorum by fabricating a report purely from their own imagination and leveling such scathing criticisms against it with a view to discrediting the real report, which it has obviously not yet seen.

“ I shall resist temptation here to disclose what my committee’s report actually recommends in an attempt to refute the unsavory allegations against the report. 

This is because it is the President who appointed us, and it was to him that we submitted the report.

“It is therefore up to the President to decide whether or not to make the report public. I can say, however, that very emphatically, that all the above allegations are false. They are wild, mendacious, obfuscatory and ill-intentioned,” he said