The National Chairman of the Peoples Redemption Party, Mallam Falalu Bello, has said the leaders of the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party are the saboteurs of the security and economy of the country and should be answerable to the bandits and the Boko Haram, and not Innocent Nigerians looking for means of survival.
The PRP chairman added that it was unfortunate that the victims of Boko Haram in the North-East, banditry in the North-West and North-Central and tribal killings in South-West and South-East were poor and harmless Nigerians.
Bello stated these in an opening address at the Second Media Dialogue of the PRP held on Wednesday.
The dialogue was titled, “Time to reverse the slide into anomie.”
The chairman noted that the majority of Nigerians are being continuously manipulated by the rich to continuously rule and dominate them.
He said, “The victims of the Boko Haram in the North-East, banditry in North-West and North-Central and the tribal killings in South-West and South-East are preponderantly the ‘talaka’; the poor Nigerians that are being continuously manipulated by the rich to continuously rule and dominate them.
“Both the killers and victims need to realise their real enemies; the elite political class that continuously mismanage their public trust and subject them to insecurity, economic woes, unemployment and restlessness.
“We, as your party, urge all to stop wagging war against each other and begin to lawfully engage your real enemies in PDP and APC.
“The ruling class in these parties are the saboteurs and they are your real enemy that you need to dislodge through the political process. Both the northern poor (talaka) in Turunku or Dansadau of North-West, Toto and Bokkos of North Central as well as Sasha in Oyo, Orlu in Imo State and Baguma in Rivers State are victims of these ruling and heartless elite, clashing your heads together so that they continue to rule.”
The PRP chairman lamented that successive Nigerian administrations had over the years failed in their constitutional responsibility to provide good governance to the country’s teeming citizens.
“The resulting frustrations – driven by the increasing pauperisation, enervating mass poverty, ubiquitous unemployment and lack of opportunities as well as decaying educational, health, social and physical infrastructure – are what our country is now harvesting in the form of insecurity, criminal banditry and a progressive and dangerous descent into violent ethno-cultural exclusiveness.
“In our humble view, the solution to the challenges facing the country today lies squarely in finding solutions to at least some fundamental political and economic problems.
“These problems have to do, first, with the manner and mode we employ in recruiting our class of people that are entrusted with the responsibility for managing our political and public institutions,” he added.
Bello continued that a political recruitment system which relied in favour of the money-wielders and plutocrats could only produce political and public managers who worked in the interest of moneyed and propertied classes, both domestic and foreign.
The chairman stated that this orientation among the masses must be changed to have a new socio-political and economic system in the country.
“This is what the Nigerian talaka must change and change urgently if the nonsense going on in the name of governance must stop. The downtrodden must organise themselves to publically take over power of the plutocracy must stop,” he said.
He continued, “This leads us to the second question that needs to be addressed; namely the transfer of power to the citizenry, in real and not theoretical terms. In other worlds, how do we go about transferring sovereignty (political power) to the Nigerian citizenry in concrete terms, so that the Nigerian citizen is empowered to exercise that power on a day-to-day basis to promote and protect things that matter most to him?
“This is where it becomes a matter of utmost necessity that efforts are strenuously made to build and strengthen civil society organisations and institutions throughout the country.
“The formation of virile and viable cooperative societies, occupational and professional organisations and residential groupings are all central to this strategy of transferring political power, in concrete terms, to the citizenry.
“These civil society groupings have to be mainstreamed into our country’s political process if we are going to reverse the present descent into anomie in our nation.
“This institutionalisation and mainstreaming of civil society organisations in the country’s political and public management process are consistent with the programmes and promises made regarding security and community policing by the PRP in its manifesto for the 2019 general elections.”
Bello added that another manifestation of the steady decline and descent into anomie was the increasing tendency towards ethnic cleansings, with certain ethnic nationalities being given quit and marching orders out of sections of the country.
“These developments have led to the killings in Ondo and Oyo states of poor Hausa-Fulani and other tribes of northern extraction trading and doing menial jobs in South-West. Also, the same ethnic identities are being killed in South-East Nigeria,” he stated.
