Government caucus working against ending insecurity, SDP standard-bearer alleges

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo, has alleged the presence of a caucus in government against the successful termination of insecurity in the country because its members benefit from it.

Speaking at a press briefing in Abuja on Friday, he observed there is a convergence of interest between those causing insecurity and those in charge of solving the problem.

He explained that insecurity is one of the five problems confronting the country, for which he had got a plan on how to put it to an end if elected.

According to him, insecurity “is the most embarrassing, the most annoying, and it is the most dangerous if we don’t deal with it.”

The presidential candidate analyzed the different shapes of insecurity in the country, saying that “at the same time that that is happening, there’s a caucus inside the Nigerian government that believes that insecurity is an opportunity to spend money.

“And that if insecurity expands, you spend money on internal security. So, you go around the country you see purely theatrical checkpoints where you can say ‘I deployed 200,000 men’ even though all the men under you are not up to 20,000.

“So, you collect all the money, the feeding allowance and all of that. Maybe they will think, ‘Oh, I’m not killing anybody’ but by allowing the insecurity to extend in order for a such steady income to extend, they are actually contributing more to the problem than they are solving it.”

Adebayo observed that the “artificial poverty we are experiencing in the country is because a lot o our resources…the government is pretending, I don’t think the government can be that powerless, the government is pretending that they have no control over our maritime assets.

“So, ships, heavy ships run by international companies that are well known that have home governments, come to our lands and take millions in barrels of crude oil.

“So, at a time when our currency is supposed to be very strong when the oil price is up, we don’t have any income.

“Those are the areas I’ll deal with. How am going to deal with them is to ensure that when am going to the State House, you don’t bring special interests and people who don’t have loyalty to the country into your government because that’s where the problem lies.

“Because the way the system has been working from my observation since 1999 to a certain varying degree, somehow, the permanent government doesn’t change. If the tenure of a president expires, he goes…whether he loses or wins, whoever comes in, the permanent interest remains the same in the State House.

“And the presidency is designed to work against the president. The essence of the presidency is to limit access to the president, to limit information to the president, and to limit his scope of action.

“So, before we even go into the presidency at all, all the 5,000 appointments that we need to make, we are thinking about people whether they are involved in our politics or not who we know, who we are interacting with, we know that these people have a genuine concern for the country, they are experts in the aspects that we are dealing with whether it’s tackling terrorism, whether it’s tackling kidnapping, any of these areas.

“I must say that I don’t have many worries about handling these issues because 80 to 90 per cent of the time, the solutions are obvious. But the special interests must exhaust the budget.

“Because how do you have a department that could spend $30,000 and solve a problem but you have a budget of $3 million? Are they going to solve the problem with $30,000 and return the rest of the money?

“What happens to all the wives and families travelling to Dubai, all the houses people are buying around the world? So, those are the things that make it look as formidable as our Armed Forces are, they look like they can’t handle this problem.

“It looks like there’s a convergence of interest between those who are causing insecurity and those who are in charge of it.”

The SDP presidential candidate said his administration will behave differently to solve the nation’s problems, including declaring his assets before the election.

According to him, “If am going to make a difference, I must immediately stop almost everything that people are doing already and I must stop everything that they are doing badly.

“First, before even the election, if you are going to deal with transparency, a good presidential candidate must first disclose his assets for scrutiny. You don’t wait until you have won the election because that time is too late. You will go and give it to one quiet agency that will say due to legal reasons, we cannot release it.

“I think that it’s a challenge. I had that understanding with SERAP and SERAP put up the challenge to all the presidential candidates that Prince Adebayo says ‘all of us should disclose our assets publicly so that the public can know who we are, how we came to where we are now and all of that.’

“I wait for the time. Nobody apart from (Omoyele) Sowore has accepted. The others are absent. So, am thinking that I’ll wait till around October 1 or thereabout. If nobody comes up, then we will invite the media and do that disclosure.”

On the ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), he said he will sever the relationship between the federal government and tertiary institutions by making them accountable to their governing councils.

“You don’t need the federal government to control the universities,” he said.

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