Presidential aspirant, Prince Adewole Adebayo, says he will have a compact with those in charge of the nation’s security to address the tide of banditry, insurgency and other criminal vices.
The Social Democratic Party (SDP) aspirant, who uses the campaign slogan ‘HopeForNigeria’, made this known in a recent interview.
Adebayo promised that if elected president in 2023, he will engage his Service Chiefs and the bureaucrats and ward off those who have commercial interests.
According to him, the measure of performance will not be about money.
He noted that due to the negligence of successive governments, insecurity has now become an excuse for reckless expenditure.
“All you need is to have a compact with those in charge and they will do their job. The compact we have now is a compact between those who have political power and authority, those who have the professional skill, those who have commercial interests, and those who have administrative responsibility,” he said.
“All these people are united in a compact to make money out of the insecure situation of the country. This compact is seen in the relationship between those who appoint professionals into service positions and those they appoint; they have to be greased; that is why the selection of who will head any of the services or how long he will stay is not done professionally; it is seen as a lucrative ground, so only people who are in a compact with them are appointed and how long you will stay is not a measure of your performance but how much returns you make to those who put you there.
“What I will do differently is to engage my Service chiefs and the bureaucrats and ward off those who have commercial interests. My measure of performance will not be about how much money I can make. This problem is not peculiar to this administration, it started with the previous administration whereby the security situation was not taken seriously. The insecurity has now got worse and becomes an excuse to spend money recklessly. Look at the structure of this spending and compare it with spending during the ECOMOG and civil war, you will find that the spending now is not going into fighting insecurity because it is not producing results. If you look at our military and paramilitary, you will discover their problem is not that of capacity or training; it is a problem of leadership and that is why I’m coming out”.
Contrary to public opinion, Adebayo said Nigerians have never been this united in a long while.
His words, “Some of those who say Nigeria has not been this divided are using it as a weapon to keep us disunited and to challenge the government of the day. I can tell you that Nigerians themselves have not been this united in a very long time. Nigerians are united about the problems the country is facing.
“The problem is that the elite have not been this desperate at any time in Nigeria’s history to use disunity to keep us divided as they are doing now. Since 1999 when terms and tenure of political offices were defined, the political elite have discovered that no matter how powerful or mischievous a politician is, after four years, he must have to take another mandate to continue in office during which his renewal of mandate could be denied and even if it was renewed after eight years, he cannot renew it again.
“So, what the political elite in Nigeria have done now is to form a conclave and put their names in a basket. A governor today will after eight years put a lackey to succeed him and move to the Senate and after some years in the Senate, he will take a shot at the presidency and if he doesn’t get it, he will become a minister. They keep the people disunited to succeed in doing this. Sometimes they use ethnic strife and other times they use religious tension but the bottom line is that this does not have any effect on the real life dynamics of the Nigerian people.
“The common Nigerians are united by the misery the political elite foist on them. The political elites’ own interpretation of unity is whether they are all represented in government. We must contrast the cry of the elite over the sharing of the loot and our common patrimony and what the Nigerian people are going through because the common people of Nigeria are not disunited among themselves. I don’t join the elite in their ethno-religious classification and interpretation of what a disunited Nigeria is based on how much access they have to the villa. The Nigerian elite is the ones stubbornly trying to promote disunity”.
