The Senator representing Edo South Senatorial District in the National Assembly, Matthew Urhoghide has called out President Muhammadu Buhari over the growing insecurity in Nigeria.
According to the lawmaker, President Buhari is grossly incompetent and doesn’t seem ready to do anything meaningful about solving the security challenges in the nation.
Urhoghide added that the National Assembly has taken many steps to ensure the insecurity is tackled but the executive arm under the President has failed to take the corresponding action.
He lamented that many roads in the country are becoming unpassable due to the fear of bandits, terrorists, and kidnappers. Particularly, Senator Urhoghide labelled the Abuja-Kaduna road as a complete death trap.
TrackNews understands the Senator made the allegations while addressing journalists in Benin, the Edo State capital.
In his words, “Let me say that every Nigerian is highly disturbed about the security situation in the country and the events of the past few weeks have shown that the Federal Government is not ready to tackle insecurity in the country.
“The National Assembly, as an arm of government, has done a lot to encourage the government to improve security in Nigeria by appropriating the funds required to buy all types of equipment and recruitment of manpower, so that all the security forces can be mobilized to fight insecurity. There is nothing the National Assembly has not done in terms of organizing security summits, coming up with resolutions which, of course, have been passed on to the FG for implementation in order to end the menace of insecurity. But these are suggestions and our resolutions and decisions do not carry any element of compulsion, that is why this situation is beyond the opposition.
“The President has shown a lot of incompetence and a lot of us believe that he does not want to do anything or else there is no reason why we should be in this dire situation, where everybody in Nigeria today is not sure of being alive the next minute.
“If somebody wants to commit suicide in Nigeria, the simplest way to do it is to travel from Abuja to Kaduna by road, because the person stands 50 percent chance of not returning and the federal government knows this.”
The senator also lamented a situation where Nigeria with a population of about 200 million people, has a shortage of security agents, stating that the country has just about 1.2 million military and paramilitary personnel.
He added that the National Assembly has given the approval including making a budgetary allocation to increase the figures, particularly for the Police over a number of years but the executive has not implemented it.
“There is a serious shortage of manpower in the military and paramilitary. We have the statistics to show that all the security forces put together (the Army, Air Force, Navy, including Customs) are not up to 1.2 million in a country of 200 million people.
The Senate, some time ago, mandated those in charge of the police to at least recruit 10,000 every year and went ahead to do the appropriation for them to be able to implement policy reforms, so that the police can be In tandem with international best practices when it comes to policing. I want to tell you that since the last four years that that decision was taken, the Nigeria police has not recruited that number,” Urhoghide said.
