all hands must be on deck in confronting insecurity in Nigeria - Sylvester Okonkwo
Posted by admin | 10 years ago | 2,872 times
Sylvester Okonkwo is a chieftain of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Anambra State. Recently he spoke to Factnewsonline.com, insisting that all hands must be on deck in confronting insecurity in Nigeria.
Some people think politics is a dirty game, especially in Nigeria. Do you agree with them? Do you also agree that decent people should not venture into politics?
Well if good people are not involved in politics, then bad people will take over. There is no vacuum in life. So, you cannot separate politics from the way we live and what we do. It is a dirty game to the understanding of the person who describes it as dirty, perhaps in the context of the language; in the context of the fighting, and all that. Get down to the villages where they believe their man must win, after the election and their man did not win, they may start fighting. But the truth is that the more good men get involved, they will be able to carry the message that the desire to lead is not a do or die affair. If you are running for office and the people say we don’t want you, you simple say thank you. This is because what we are coming for is to offer service, if they don’t want you in, you don’t kill for it. You make the effort of using everything you have to ensure that people get the best.
I do not agree that politics is a dirty game. It is described as dirty by the man who doesn’t understand that the struggle for leadership is an intense exercise.
There is so much going in the country at the moment, insurgency, kidnapping, corruption, Nigerians would want to know how you feel as a Nigerian?
Naturally I feel concerned as a Nigerian and I feel concerned because when it was happening in other parts of the world, many of us felt immune. The average Nigerian then would ask you which Nigerian would like to carry a bomb on himself, but suddenly it is here.
However the truth is that every era of a people comes with its own problems. This era has the problem of terrorism and hate, occasioned as it were by criminals who masquerade as religious bigots. You would recall that when Osama Bin Laden bombed the twin towers in the United States of America. We all have all kinds of imagination what manner of man would go into the mist of people to drop an aeroplane to kill everybody, and for what purpose?
But that singular act actually was like a virus that has affected the whole world because it unleashed a reality that living amongst us are people who have imbibed hate as an attitude of life. They hate you just because you are you. Forget about what I call ‘the masquerading’ which they call religion and all what not. It is not religion, it is just that they have warped idea of what the next person should be, and so they wants him dead because he is not the way they wants him to be. That is the general problem that is affecting the entire world.
Then in some spheres you find extremism that is occasioned by political disagreement as it is in Iraq; as it is in Somalia and all the places you have extreme reaction to disagreement. When you don’t agree civilised people are known to have always gone to table to settle their disagreement, but today, what you have are people who think that once you disagree with them you should die. And I have asked them, if you kill everybody who will live in the world? So that is the contemporary national and world issue.
Now that it is here with us, what do we do?
As it is affecting Nigeria; now that the thing has come here, I hear people saying this Jonathan, this government, but that is not the issue. The issue is that we have a new phenomenon that is too destructive of security. So, each and every one of us must be a part of solving the problem. Be the Police man in your neighbourhood. Be the watch man over your daughter; over your son; over your neighbours son and family. Report to the Police, the Police are not magicians. Imagine that you are just sitting in your parlour and the man next door has just decided to drop a bomb in your house, what will Jonathan do at that instance? But if you able to let the Police know about it, they will find solution to it.
So, that is my position on this national malaise, I hope that not very long, with concerted efforts and improvement in national security, we will overcome.
Looking at the kind of politics we play in Nigeria today, do you think it can solve our problems?
Of course you know that politicians attempt to make gains out of every situation, people who wish they are the present leaders. So, everybody will tell you if I were Jonathan I will do this I will do that. But the truth is that at our level of national development and infrastructural development at the moment, the much we can do, until all those facets of our national infrastructural development are in place, is to find ways of combating the problems that are facing us today.
Take for example when the bomber bombed Boston, Massachusset, if you remember, for two days, they had a total lockdown of the city. The governor of Massachusset said to the people, “make no mistake for we will find them”, and of course by the fifth day they found them.
Now, what did they do? They closed the city; they did a check on their infrastructure, what they already had in place – their cameras; their digital data base, and they were able to track down the people that did this thing; they got them. So people trying to point fingers at Jonathan are missing the point, because they fail to consider the fact that if the military over time did not put down infrastructures that would allow us to fight present day insecurities, what do they expect the man to do? We don’t have the arsenal to fight present day insecurities, what do you expect them to do until we get the arsenal.
What it means is that now that the budget has come, everything we are doing must reflect the situation. So instead of putting money which people think it would be naturally used for this thing when it is for the aspect of security, people must ensure that it is used for that purpose. Remember that we fought the war almost 44 years ago, and so we have not behaved like a nation under threat because we were not under threat. We just believed that Nigeria was a peaceful country; we were not looking for any people’s trouble, and so we were not amassing armaments like Libya and other African countries that had problem.
It is wrong for anybody to try and make political capital out of the situation we find ourselves as a nation today. What we have is a threat to all of us, and so where the government is not doing right and you are criticising, it ought to be constructive. You must not criticise out of mischief as people who do not know what is at stake. You don’t throw away the ladder, after all, the man you are bringing may not even have the answer yet.
The truth is that where we are today, we may yet be able to match the insurgents because of the quality of arsenals they have amassed. We may not be able to match them at this point in time; it will take some time, then we will crush them.
Ok, what about the economy? Do you not think it has a part to pay in the sad things happening in the country like insurgency, insecurity, and so on and so forth?
Yes, I do know that if a people are hungry, they are angry. Just like the saying goes that a hungry man is an angry man. There is no denying the fact that if you have a buoyant economy, in the sense that if you are paid 10 Naira and you get to the market and purchase goods enough for a day’s meal, you live better with your neighbours. But not when you are paid 500, 000 Naira, and you cannot use it to provide for a family of four. So, economy has something to do with it. However, the economy is a function of the infrastructure. If you have it the economy will continue to grow. If you have light, if you have roads, if you have it, the economy will continue to grow. Money alone cannot do it, even though we accept that money is a principle factor.
It is true that we have the capacity to earn very large revenue, but also the population is also large. There is a presumption that if we are able to manage economic programme well, we produce wealth. But I think we are on the path of economic growth. By the time we finish and have stable power in Nigeria, and have roads into all the nooks and crannies where agricultural products are going, by the time we develop the agricultural sector and the entire food sector, production will stabilise and once the raw materials come out, the immediate needs will be reduced, and of course, consistently, you will have prices start to coming.
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