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Former Nigeria Minister of Sports, Chief Solomon Dalung
By our reporter
A former Minister of Sports, Chief Solomon Dalung, has said not much should be expected from the presidency of Bola Tinubu if he fails to address the immediate security challenges confronting Nigeria.
Dalung stated this during an interaction with journalists in Abuja.
“My expectation of the new administration will be on how it will deal with the insecurity in the country. Because without security I don’t see any of the economic indices making any progress.
“Insecurity has a broad national interest: banditry, Boko Haram unleashing terror on people in the northeast and in the East, the issue of unknown gunmen has left several persons killed on daily basis,” Chief Dalung stated.
He doubted if there will be a political will from President Tinubu to deal with the issue of insecurity headlong.
Chief Dalung cautioned on the emergence of former Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Godswill Akpabio as the Senate President.
“I don’t expect Senator Akpabio to deal with any Nigerian problem. Looking at the past record of the new Senate President when he was a governor and Minister in the Niger Delta, the unclear huge allegations on his stewardship among others, one would have expected the president to remain neutral.
“Look at Senator Ahmed Lawan, even at the end of his tenure, he was still approving loans for Buhari. Loan for what when the entire citizens were in abject poverty?
“Despite corruption allegations against Akpabio, he was appointed as minister and now elected the Senate President,” the former minister stressed.
He added that Nigerians are now faced with excruciating accumulative pains in which corrupt leadership and haste decision on subsidy removal has caused.
Chief Dalung explained that the subsidy removal as announced on May 29 by President Tinubu was a conspiracy for a new fuel price regime.
He wondered why the announcement coincided with the Dangote refinery date of production and the take-off of the Petroleum Industry Bill implementation date schedule for July, about two months in between.
On insecurity in the Middle Belt, Dalung said it is a mistake to look at it as a mere farmers/herders’ clash former Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom had postulated.
He warned that the region is still the most affected as it is now the hub of both armed bandits, kidnappers, terrorists and unknown gunmen.
The former minister insisted that what was happening in Plateau, Benue, Nasarawa, Niger, Taraba and southern part of Kaduna was not banditry but terrorism as the massive killings are targeted at ethnic groups.
He further explained that denying a people of the fruit of development is also terrorism, adding that the killings in the middle belt are strategic and all the elements of terrorism are playing out in the region.
He said people should not use sentiments to analyse the killings and urged the government to do better to protect the lives of Nigerians.
