Priscilla Ediare, Ado-Ekiti
Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, has called on the Federal Government to sharpen its intelligence collection and tackle the root causes of insecurity, including poverty, unemployment, under-employment and lack of adequate education.
Governor Fayemi, who noted that everyone in the country was feeling the pang of insecurity in one form of the other, said government needed to get to the root of insecurity nationally in a bid to effectively address it.
Fayemi stated this in Ado-Ekiti when he received members of the Board of Trustees of the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation, led by its Chairman and former governor of Niger State, Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu.
Chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) said while intelligence gathering and sharing among relevant security agencies was important, addressing other sociological factors like poverty, unemployment and lack of adequate education are critical.
He said the NGF would continue to engage the Federal Government to ensure the country is safe for all.
“We are all feeling the pang of insecurity in Nigeria, whatever we can do as a nation, nobody is interested in your excuses, once you are governor, you are in charge of the security of your people, so whatever you can do to ensure you deliver the goods to them in terms of security, you have to do it.
“And we are constantly engaging the federal authority on this, that they should ensure we develop a framework that will sharpen intelligence collection and also begin to address not just insecurity, but the causes of insecurity and we all know the origin and causes of insecurity, poverty is a big issue, lack of education, lack of employment, under-employment, all these factors are critical, so we cannot just look at security on the surface, we must address the sociological underpinnings of insecurity and then work out precisely what we must do,” Fayemi said.
The governor, who posited that education remained the greatest antidote to poverty, said education should be refocused at the national level due to its importance to national development.
On the lingering strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), Fayemi urged the Federal Government and relevant stakeholders in the education sector to have an urgent engagement with ASSU leadership in order to bring an end to the current impasse.
He also urged the lecturers to look at the hardship the students and their parents are going through in view of the strike that has kept the students at home for over seven months.
“We need to get to a point of convergence with ASUU, but I also think ASUU should begin to look at this from the position of their importance. It is the students of the ordinary Nigerians who attend the local universities that will be negatively affected.
“So, ASUU should consider its stand even if it is for the sake of ordinary Nigerians who have children in these universities and cannot afford to send their children to private universities or abroad.Whatever the areas are, we would like to engage them, not as Federal Government, but as concerned parties at the level of government that feel we can still work out an arrangement in which you don’t completely dictate to your employer how he pays your salaries.”