Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Cardinal John Onaiyekan has opened up on the state of the nation.
He said; “Truth of the matter is that we are in deep trouble. The security of the country is in serious condition. Not only that we know this, we suffer it.”
“It has not always been like this but the government congratulates itself that it is doing its best and that we Nigerians should be grateful. For me, that’s where the problem lies.”
“Until government recognises that security has changed for the worst in the last five years, it is unlikely that they will put forward means to reverse the trend. We still want to believe the state can protect us, because the alternative to is that we do not have a government.”
“I can hardly accuse the National Assembly of not doing the right thing, because they claim that they are doing the ‘bow and go’ screening of the ministerial nominees in line with their standing rules.”
“As a Nigerian watching, I am looking forward to a federal executive council that will move into action swiftly so that within a month or two, Nigeria will be able to say ‘Mr. President has put together a good team.”
“But if you ask me, I will say 43 ministers are too many for the presidential cabinet. But we can only make a final judgement at the end of the day, when we see how they perform. By their fruits, we shall know them. Democracy can only be judged by its fruit, which is good governance.”
“The federal government did not define to Nigerians what Ruga is? What the objectives are? How will it work? These questions gave rise to a free ground for all kinds of conspiracy theories which has generated a major crisis on the nation.”
“If the government had explained what Ruga means, Nigerians may begin to see for themselves what the good intentions for the Ruga project were and perhaps embrace it.”
“My position is that let us not throw away the Ruga plan like throwing away the baby with bad water but let us apply it now positively to every part of Nigeria.”
“We must admit that the structure we have on ground is not working well. No country has a perfect structure. Every country is working to improve your structure.”
“There is nothing special with the fact that there is something wrong with the structure we inherited. What is needed is to improve it. So, the call for restructuring is an effort to look at our structure of governance with a view to seeing how we can improve upon it.”
“Just like a building with a faulty architecture, the thinking is that the architecture of our state is wrong and no amount of patch up can fix it. We seem to have arrived at a situation where we cannot continue to patch up this system.”
“We need to improve the structure and doing so means we may need to sit down together as a people and decide the kind of federation we want for our country.”