Former Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Chief Akin Olujinmi,(SAN), on Friday said bad leadership and followership are the twin burdens besetting the country and not the 1999 Constitution as being widely held.
Olujinmi said this in his reaction to the comments of a serving senator, Smart Adeyemi, condemning the Nigerian democracy as worse than military rule while speaking at the 2019/2020 matriculation ceremony of Kola Daisi University, Ibadan (KDU-I).
Olujinmi, who noted that the lawmaker’s comment was in reaction to the hopelessness that the current system suggested, called for proactive solution.
“If the only way out of our dilemma is to grant amnesty to these renegades, I don’t see anything wrong with it because we have to get out of this challenge. We have been on it for many years. Today, you have people kidnapping here and there,” the legal luminary said.
Reacting to the issue of insecurity, Olujimi said no price should be too big for the country to pay in order to get out of the current state of insecurity.
“There must be a way for peace and security in this country and if the price for that is to forgive and rehabilitate those killing and maiming in this country so that they can be better citizens tomorrow, there is nothing wrong with it.
“What we need to do is to look deeply into what is happening in this country today. We say we have democracy. Are we practicing it the way it is done all over the world? When things go wrong, then we start wondering what is happening.
“Can we have something better than the democracy we say we are running? I recall that one former governor of Imo State once said we were not ripe to rule ourselves, hence, we should go back to our colonial past but people started condemning him.
“The truth is that we are not doing well. The political class is not doing well; even we, the followers are not doing well. There must be a way for us to recognise this, understand it and find a way forward. The country is in a very deep trouble.
“For instance, we have faced the menace of Boko Haram for years now and I ask why we are not able to be in effective control? America today, if faced with this kind of challenge, knows what to do. You saw the way they surgically removed Bin Laden in Pakistan? If you let them (America) help you, they know how to get the leaders of Boko Haram.
“It is said that no constitution, no matter how well written, would work in the hands of wrong men. That is the dilemma. It is not our constitution but we, the people that are not good enough for the constitution.”
In his remarks, Professor Kolade Luke Ayorinde, the Vice Chancellor of Kola Daisi University, Ibadan (KDU-I) noted that “to stop the tide of poverty that is evident in several millions of extremely poor people in the land, governments at all levels should show greater commitment to human capital development.”