Government should not negotiate with any insurgent groups —CNPP boss

The head of the Conference of all political parties (CNPP), Olapade Agoro, has advised the federal government not to negotiate with any insurgent group in whatever form it appears as this will not help the country but will rather encourage other such groups to spring up and make demands.

Agoro in an interview with Nigerian Tribune stated that President Muhammadu Buhari, who he described as a gentleman with fine character should not negotiate but rather continue to tackle all security issues. “He should never negotiate with Boko Haram; that will bring trouble, when you negotiate with one, another group will resurface. He is winning the war already, when your enemy starts shouting that it is time to negotiate, they are already feeling the brunt so he should go ahead with the war and negotiate with nobody.

“He should tackle insurgency without looking back and should not be dissuaded  to negotiate with anybody. Jonathan negotiated and negotiated with fools and in his time Shekau was killed a number of times and at one time, a corpse was shown to us as Shekau and now, he is still talking, how many Shekau was killed?,” he asked.

He further advised the government to inject money recovered from looters into the economy so that life will become easier for the people and companies that had folded up could get a new lease of life while it will also return thousands into the employment market.

“The money recovered from treasury looters should be used to revive industries that are folding up and give them a time frame to return it. We have industries that must be revived all over the country; those companies must first be brought back to life. People are saying that we should go back to agriculture, do we get results from agriculture immediately? It is a systematic area that takes time, you can’t harvest immediately,” he stated.

Further, he called on government to review activities of research agencies and organisations, adding that the nation is just wasting resources paying the staff of such bodies. “What are these agricultural research agencies researching? They must be made to research and produce. Each research agency being funded should do research and produce food. Any agricultural university that cannot research and also produce food should be folded up.

“In agriculture, the foundation has already been laid, let the Science and Agriculture minister work out modalities that will make this work. They should stop researching and start producing food. Let us have food first before we start talking of new agriculture. There are many research bodies that should be able to produce what will feed Nigerians,” Agoro stated.

He concluded that the myriad of problems on ground is too much for the president to could tackle within the spate of one to three years. “Unfortunately he made the mistake, forgetting that those that made the nation dark during Jonathan’s era are now part of the APC, they are back. So the people who did the damage are back in the government, that’s the first problem.