Presidential Candidate for the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, ACPN, Oby Ezekwesili, has said that President Muhammadu Buhari is incompetent and has always rewarded incompetent security chiefs with tenure extension, despite the growing insecurity in the country.
Mrs Ezekwesili, who spoke with reporters in Calabar on Friday, was reacting to a purported move by the presidency to extend the tenure of the Inspector General of Police, IGP Ibrahim Idris, who is due for retirement come January 16, 2019.
According to her, the president has shown himself as that leader who rewards incompetency and failure, especially as the country is going through insecurity.
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“You cannot have a security establishment where the citizens of your country and your military are killed and those who lead those establishments are rewarded instead of being made to account for that kind of failure, and it is not just one failure.
“It is serial failures that we have seen. So the president rewards incompetence and I am not surprised because the president himself is incompetent but does not realize it.
“So he looks at those who fail and he looks at those who fail and what he does is extend their stay in an office in which they have failed. We have seen it with the military; we have now seen it with the police.
“How can the president even be thinking of retaining the IG of police after the expiration of his term in office? Is it for stellar performance? This is the IG of Police that the president told the entire country did not go to where he had assigned him to go in Benue State.
“What the president is essentially telling us is that Nigerian life does not matter that much to him otherwise, he should be very aghast at the level of killings that happen.
“My greatest shock and one of the triggers for my deciding to run for election, not being politician as you all know, is that the debasement of the Nigerian life is the final straw that can turn us into a society of anarchy; for it to be that children should grow up in this society and just come to the understanding that killing a person is a normal thing, that you can just do it, there is no consequence.
“My goodness, what kind of impunity is that? So for me, I want to be the president of this country and be an effective Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces on the basis of competence, capacity and character.
“I would so do that work well that the life of the Nigerian would be the epicenter of our development process. It means that in terms of security, we would run the most effective and efficient security system; we would reform the security infrastructure of the country.
“We would find those brilliant ones in our military establishments and our police that have been hidden away in an era of incompetence and low productivity. We would also reform the systems within the military because when you look at the military anywhere, they are basis if what they call management by objective.
“And that idea is that when resources are made available, resources should lead to performance, accountability and reward and results, and when you are not getting it, you are immediately supposed to know why you are not getting it and to fix it. The president is not known to fix anything that has gone wrong.
“There are Nigerians who are comfortable with the suffering in the country. Comfortable with the mediocrity we have seen in governance. Those kinds of Nigerians would be interested in APC and PDP, but if you are a Nigerian and you believe that this is not our lot, that we cannot afford to be a country that is persistently failing.
“We cannot be a country that locks in 87 million of our people in poverty and think that it is okay for the number of the poor to continue to grow. If you are in that class then you would be the people who would be joining my campaign and saying that we need a new set of mindset to solve our problem,” Mrs Ezekwesili said.
