Obasanjo: State Police is Solution to Nigeria’s Worsening Insecurity

*Serial leadership failure responsible for national woes, says Obi
James Sowole in Akure and Emmanuel Ugwu-Nwogo in Umuahia  

Former  President Olusegun Obasanjo, yesterday, said multi-level policing otherwise called state police was the solution to the nation’s concerning security situation.
Obasanjo, who stated this when the leadership of the National Association of Ex-local Government Chairmen in Nigeria, paid him a courtesy visit in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, said state police would be a better option to community policing.
This is as a frontline presidential aspirant and former governor of Anambra State, Mr Peter Obi, said the serial leadership failures in the country was responsible for the intractable security problems and other woes plaguing the nation.
However, Obasanjo, whose position was contained in a statement by his Special Assistant on Media, Kehinde Akinyemi, commended the initiative behind the formation of ALGON, saying it showed that some local chairmen were better than some top elected leaders.
While responding to one of the speakers, Chinwe Monu-Olarewaju’s submission on creation of community police to curb the wave of insecurity, the former president said the idea needed to be changed.
“Our situation in Nigeria concerns everyone, particularly, the case of terrorism. The case has gotten over the issue of community police. It is now state police. It is from that state police that we can now be talking about community police,” he said.
Obasanjo also spoke on the need to strengthen the traditional system and the local government administration, “which I prepared during the popular Murtala/Obasanjo administration, because I believe that there is need to enable that tier of government to work truly as a local government. They have their own Executive, Judiciary and Legislature.
“They were working and they were very visible, building and managing roads, looking into education, health, local administration, agriculture, but they were all gone,” Obasanjo said.
He explained that the experience that the former chairmen had in local government administration, was enough to aspire for higher posts, stressing that some of them had the competence, ability and integrity to get to these posts.
Obasanjo, who was presented with a letter of a life patron, assured them that he would look into their request, further noted that he would be available on request for their needs at all times.
Leader of the delegation and pioneer National chairman of the association, Hon. Albert Asipa, told Obasanjo, that they decided to come together in all the 774 local governments in the country, so that they could also contribute to the economy and political developments of the country.
He said it was in realisation of Obasanjo’s position as father of local government in Nigeria, that made them to visit him in order to actualise their goals.
Accompanying the chairman were the Ogun State chapter Chairman, Shoyemi Coker, Board of Trustees (BoT) Chairman, Hon. Chinwe Monu-Olarewaju (Delta State), the traditional ruler of Odogbolu,  Oba Toye Mojeed Alatise, and Gbegande of Ososa, among others.
On his part, Obi, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) member, who spoke while addressing Abia State PDP delegates in Umuahia, yesterday, said there was an urgent need to arrest the drift, otherwise, things would keep getting worse.
He noted that Nigeria had been a victim of bad governance churning out bad development indices that were antithetical to its huge resources and potentials, using statistics to point out that 98 million Nigerians were living under poverty and not sure of food, while the number of unemployed persons accounted for 35% of the population.
The presidential aspirant said it remained a sad story that Nigeria had 15 million out of school children, just the county’s debt profile, which as at 2017 stood at about N57 trillion, had kept piling up and might have hit between 135 and 140 trillion soon.
Worse still, Obi said Nigeria’s huge debts could not be repaid since they were incurred “for consumption and not production”, adding that over 90 per cent the revenue were being used to service debts.
Despite the numbing national woes, Obi assured the delegates that he could fix Nigeria if given the chance to pilot the affairs of the nation, saying, “I know the problems of this country and how to solve them, including insecurity.”
For instance, he explained that insecurity could be addressed with massive employment, whereby people must have means of legitimate livelihood, adding that, “We must change from consumption to production”.
He gave a timeline of four years within which he would get Nigeria on its feet and steady it on the path of progress, peace, stability and sustained growth.
A member of Obi’s entourage and former presidential aspirant, Dr Doyin Okupe, had earlier in his remarks said the former Anambra governor remained the best option for Nigeria come 2023.
“I withdrew from the race to give Obi the chance,” he said, adding that PDP was lucky because with Obi, it stood the chance to defeat the APC federal government, which according to him, was bereft of ideas and had nothing more to offer Nigeria.