According to Cambridge dictionary, referendum is a vote in which all the people in a country or an area are asked to give their opinion about or decide an important political or social question. Referendum is a direct voting where matters of grave national/social/economic consequence are posed to the general population within voting age to decide upon. A recent example of a world-popular referendum was UK's 2016 referendum to leave the EU, brexit where 52% of her voting population voted to leave the EU and 48% voted against leaving. Leaving EU was a weighty decision given its impact on the national/cultural/economic interest of the UK, and instead of relying the decision-making on just a few 650 parliament members in a country of over 66,000,000 individuals, the decision-making was posed to every electorate in the country to make instead.

However in Nigeria, the 1999 Constitution as amended (2011) does not provide for this very important and useful policy and decision-making tool. The question is then, who does Nigeria belong to? If Nigeria truly belongs to the Nigerian citizens, to the over 200 million people and the next 200 million after it, then how come the ability to make important decisions that affect them, that affect national interest, economic interest and so on are not given to them, but instead placed in the hands of but a single man, a president, or a few caucus of friends and colleagues, the senators and honourables?

Nigeria as it is known is quite a delicate country, there are diverse interests, various ethnicities, various religions, various cultures, etc. and as a concerned resident of Nigeria it is pertinent for me to raise this issue: "why is there no provision for referendum in the Nigerian constitution?"; "don't Nigerians deserve the ability to hold referendums?"; "is referendum useful and has a place in the Nigerian setting?"

On this faceless and quite anonymous forum, I ask these. And should there policy think-thank organizers seeing this, please could you raise this issue and let it be discussed and deliberated upon? And should there be a representative in the National Assembly seeing this, oh I'm in luck, could you think about this and possibly propose it to the Assembly?

Seun Osewa, what do you think about this?