Aisha Buhari’s Summit wants First Lady office Legalized into law.
Nigerian First Lady, Mrs Aisha Buhari took the opportunity of the Summit on Emerging Trends in the Role of the First Lady in National Development, which was organized by the Office of the First Lady in collaboration with Women and National Development (WAND) to recommended that the office of the wife of the president and her counterparts at state levels to institutionalized.
Too Much Of Arms are flooding into Nigeria as if The Nation Is In war— Bolaji Akinyemi
Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi is a highly respected Nigerian, distinguished, an accomplished academic and retired diplomat.
In Arise Television Morning Show when fielding questions, Professor Akinyemi speaks his mind on the happenings in Nigeria, he was very much emphasized on the backdrop of the recent invasion of the nation’s prison and police headquarters in Imo State capital, Owerri.
Also on the state of insecurity in the country and the bad image of Nigeria in International community.
See below response from Professor Akinyemi:
Professor Akinyemi: Well Nigeria has always been a lucky country and that luck is still operating in the sense that the rest of the world doesn’t have the time to focus on Nigeria’s misfortunes now since they have problems in Myanmar.
They have problems with COVID-19, they have problems even in the United States and all over the world.
So it is not to say that the world is not paying attention to our misfortunes and that has been ably illustrated by the fact that while Biden was calling African leaders and Kamala Harris was also calling African leaders, they relegated Nigeria to the position where it was their foreign minister calling our foreign minister. So we’ve been put in the third class category.
This is very upsetting to those of us who have been in the field.
It might not be upsetting to other Africans because you must recall that none other person than Nelson Mandela said in an interview with a Nigerian journalist that the world will not accord blacks their rightful status in the world until Nigeria gets its act together.
So the rightful insult meted out to Nigeria was to all blacks and we must keep that in mind that whatever we do in this country reflects on blacks all over the world because we are the only authentic African country that has the capacity to lift blacks by their boot traps onto, if you like, a first-class status. I said the only authentic African country because I’m aware that south Africa is there, I’m aware that Rwanda is there but we are the only African power. If I can still use that word without you bursting into laughter out of respect for our audience, we are the only African power that has the capacity to lift Africa from the third world status to the first world status if I can borrow the words of from Lil Kwan Yun.
What do you make of the statement by former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar that there are six million arms in Nigeria resulting in the death of 80, 000 people? Dr. Ekomo, a security expert said the six million arms is an understatement.
Professor Akinyemi: Yes I do agree with Dr Ekomo that that’s understated. President Jonathan set up a task committee. I Don’t know if it was a task force or just a task committee on this same issue and like everything else, they classified the report but it wasn’t made known to the public because I was a member of what I call the Boko Haram committee. We got hold of a copy of the result and maybe it’s because of the content was frightening. Arms are flooding into Nigeria as if Nigeria is a war zone. Maybe, it is going to be a war zone; maybe they are telling us things that are going to come.
The moment Ghaddafi got destabilized and you would say it wasn’t Ghaddafi just Libya but you see, at that time Libya was Ghaddafi and Ghaddafi was Libya but the moment he got destabilized, the arms depots were looted and those arms just came down south and Nigeria at that time with Boko Haram flexing its muscle was regarded as a rightful platform for which the arms could find usage.
They did a risk analysis of the problems of Nigeria and they knew that we were not headed for a wedding ceremony, that we were headed for a turbulent future in this country.
There was money available to different groups who had been funded by people with money. I mean to procure the arms and that’s why those arms found a respectable acceptance you in Nigeria.
And you have seen the evidence of that, how useful that calculation was to them, not to us because from the Boko Haram insurgents in the North-East, you now have herdsmen or bandits or whatever you call them all over Nigeria and those arms are still flooding in.
Now the question you ask is what are we doing about it and I dare say I’m not in the business of running down governance or running down anybody. We are doing nothing about it.
We still have an underpaid army. There’s a United Nations report on the strength of that, but they restricted it to the police only.
Again, we came across this in one of the task forces I served that instead of the 345,000 plus policemen that we have, Nigeria actually needs over one million policemen in Nigeria. we are nowhere near that and I keep asking myself, there are educated people who have no jobs who will gladly become policemen; what is the problem about increasing the number of policemen in Nigeria from maybe 345,000 to 445,000 to 545,000 every year until we meet that united nations target? But we are not doing that.
My opinion is that, in this life you can be lucky at God.
