The Northern Elders Forum (NEF) has said President Muhammadu Buhari must do more to secure the lives and property of citizens rather than blaming everyone else for the woes befalling Nigeria.
Speaking in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, spokperson for the NEF, said the government is evidently not doing enough and that is why the results have been felt negatively across the nation.
According to Baba-Ahmed, it is tiring to hear the presidency continue to ascribe the complaints of Nigerians to the workings of the opposition.
“We can’t have a president that is just sitting there and then blaming everybody else for the woes of the country, that is not what we elected him for,” the NEF spokesperson said on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
“If every time Nigerians complain about being marginalized, we (presidency) don’t want to hear this and you dismiss it as this is just the opposition, then these problems will grow. Because even if it is the opposition, it is your job to deal with the opposition.
“Ascribing problems to the opposition doesn’t solve them; because it is the job of the opposition to make you look bad, it’s your job to make the opposition less effective in making you look bad.
“If the only response of the presidency is that every criticism, every complaint, every grievance that the people say the government is not working, we don’t see the result of work, and you say that is just talk, then clearly you are not dealing with the problem.”
Baba-Ahmed stated that it does not appear that the administration recognizes the magnitude of the problem faced by the country.
He, however, noted that even if the government does understand the enormity of the challenges, their response has been unsatisfactory and inadequate.
“This is a country that is facing unprecedented levels of insecurity from all angles and we don’t see any sign that they are doing anything different from what they have done in the last 3, 4, or 5 years, you cannot keep doing the same thing and expect to get different results,” he said.
On the recent case of kidnapping at the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation in Kaduna, Baba-Ahmed said: “Let the president fix security, if he can’t do it immediately then let him do something that indicates that he is capable of securing Nigerians”.
“If you are not going to pay money to get the Kaduna College of Forestry students out, then for goodness sake, use another means to get them. It’s not just the responsibility of Kaduna State government…”
“Please do something about how insecure we are, all these talks about the president is concerned, the president is doing something about it is not good enough, every single day our lives are getting worse we cannot wait for the president to get round to fixing things. He was supposed to hit the ground from day one and he hasn’t and consequently, things are just getting worse.“
Discussion about this post