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A member of the House of Representatives, Bamidele Salam has called for devolution of powers between the federal, States and local governments.
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This call formed part of the lecture titled: ‘Nigeria at 62:Poverty, insecurity and the search for a workable constitution’, which he delivered at the 2022 annual lecture of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Osun Council Week on Monday in Osogbo.
Salam, who is the lawmaker repressing Ede North, Ede South, Egbedore and Ejigbo in the House of Representatives maintained that Nigeria at 62 ought to have attained certain milestones in every sphere of existence.
According to him, “Unfortunately, even those countries that we were at par with 62 years ago have overtaken Nigeria and it is so unfortunate, but for every darkness there is a silver lining and the silver lining is that we still have hope as a country.
“To rebuild our fallen walls, to fix insecurity, to fix poverty, to evolve a system that will make sure that the greater good of the Nigerian people is serviced by the government of Nigeria.
“To build a system where the average Nigerian will be very proud to live, to work and to stay in his own country so that we can save our young population from roaming about countries of the world that are less endowed and we are being humiliated in them.
“To build a country that is prosperous and where justice is available to everyone regardless of their tribe or class.
“Everyone would like to stay and work in Nigeria. So, we have a long way to go and that’s exactly what we have exposed in the lecture today.
“Well, I said quite a number of things and one of them is that we must be able to evolve a political system that will be as inclusive and will not be as expensive as the one we have at the moment that will put more resources into real development than the current expenditure.
“We should be able to build a security system that will devolve responsibilities for security to the government that is closer to the people, devolve more powers to States and local governments, more resources to the States and local governments so that they can frontally tackle problems of insecurity, poverty, lack of effective infrastructure and every other problem that we have identified.
“So it is just another word for restructuring. We just have to devolve powers and make sure that our country works as a truly Federal Republic of Nigeria,” he concluded.
The Chairman of the occasion, Yemi Farounbi described Nigeria as a computer.
Farounbi, who is a veteran broadcast journalist and former Nigerian Ambassador to the Philippines, explained that, “Since a computer is made of hardware, software and operator, the hardware is the constitution which has crashed. The software is the politicians who have been infected by a virus.
“I always ask myself, the next thing is to look for an operator because no matter how good the operator is, the software is virus infected and our hardware has crashed. We need to find new hardware that will be workable and virus free.”
