4th January, 2013
The Publicity Secretary of the Save Nigeria Group, SNG, Mr. Yinka Odumakin, has said that insecurity was practically Nigeria’s man of the year in 2012, adding that if events of the previous year are anything to go by, the year 2013 is going to be a difficult one for the country and expectations will be very grim.
The SNG spokesman said that in spite of the fact that insecurity was pervasive in the past year, the Federal Government did not show it had the political will to deal with the situation beyond throwing a quarter of the budget at it most of which was swallowed by corruption.
He said: “President Jonathan, more than any leader in the history of Nigeria, has attended more funerals and issued more condolence messages, yet we have not seen any concerted effort to fight terror. The highest profile personality arrested so far in connection with terror is a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senator who was granted bail and even allowed to go on holy pilgrimage. Nothing else than this confirms the President’s statement that he knows the promoters of Boko Haram. And that makes the fight against terror a lost one and except there is a fundamental change of course, there will be a continuation of the high level of insecurity.
“The inability of Nigeria to conduct a clean, free and fair election is one of the bases of the projection by American Intelligence that Nigeria may not make it beyond 2015 as a corporate entity. But beyond some isolated cases of a people enforcing their will, there will be no major electoral reforms as most of the handlers of the country at the moment are products of bad elections.
He said that from 1999 till now, every attempt to review the constitution has been either to spend the money budgeted for the exercise or pursue a hidden agenda and or both.
“The current exercise is, therefore, another hollow ritual out of which nothing will come,” he said, adding that National Assembly members were elected to make laws and not to write a constitution.
“What we need is a people’s assembly to do a new constitution and I can see the Nigerian crisis maturing towards crystallisation of such in 2013.
“Corruption has virtually killed Nigeria and, unfortunately, we have a leadership that is very cosy with corruption at the moment. The implications this is that more attacks will be visited on the living standards of the people in 2013 and the people might fight back.
“For Nigeria to have peace and make progress, leaders must be accountable and stop stealing the commonwealth. The people on their part must insist on taking back their country,” he said.