A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who is also the Director-General, Voice of Nigeria (VON) Mr Osita Okechukwu, has blamed the insecurity challenges facing the country on Nigeria’s former Head of state Ibrahim Babangida.
According to Okechukwu, the present spate of insecurity was as a result of ‘Extreme-Poverty’ planted in 1986 by the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) of the Ibrahim Babangida regime.
General Ibrahim Babangida who left power almost 3 decades ago had overseen a structural adjustment program while he sway at the helm of affairs in Nigeria as Head Of State.
Okechukwu, in a statement he personally issued Sunday, said that SAP sowed the inhuman seed which gave birth to insecurity, stressing that it calls for introspection and deep reflection on how the country became the world poverty capital and how best to exit fast.
He stated: ‘Yes we of the APC pledged to fix security in our dear country in every particular matter. That’s our pledge, and to be honest, we are deploying billions of naira and every material and human resources to contain it. However, we are confronted with extreme poverty planted in 1986 by the IMF Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). The day SAP was born was the day the gross economic inequality and insecurity in Nigeria was born. It has badly mutated since 1986.
‘Economic inequality breeds extreme poverty, hate, division and hostile insecurity, in countries wherever it is allowed to thrive throughout history. To be exact, no matter how much trillions of naira we spend on military hardware, or how many times we change security chiefs, with extreme poverty security will remain a mirage.’
The VON DG went further to say that the primary solution is to return to mixed economy model clearly stated in Section 16(2)(c) of the 1999 Constitution which supports economic system operated in a manner that permits the concentration of wealth and means of production and exchange in the hands of few individuals or of a group.
According to him, ‘Truly, Nigeria’s security problem is that we run an artificial economic model, where there is an ocean of poor people and an island of rich people. The opaque system created banks which make billions of profit annually and operate poverty induced Shylock interest rates.’
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK