Fred Itua, Abuja
President of the Senate, Ahmad Lawan, has attributed the challenges facing the country’s fight against terrorists and bandits to international politics. He said it is slowing down efforts aimed at acquiring sophisticated weapons needed by security agencies.
Lawan spoke at the weekend in Abuja. He explained that the Nigerian Armed Forces are usually frustrated by international politics with the requests taking longer than expected unlike when another country makes similar requests from some foreign governments.
He stressed that the country’s security system is currently over stretched with more resources needed to tackle insecurity declared ”to some extent we are suffering from international politics, I know that in our efforts to try to buy spare parts for their jets, may be write to a certain foreign government and it will take six to nine months while another country will write to the same government and maybe get it in one or two months.
“So something is not right, but that’s to say that it’s now one of our challenges that we will continue to engage with countries that we feel don’t understand what we are doing here.”
”Also we need more resources for the security. By resources I don’t mean just money, we need more personnel for the armed forces, we need more personnel for the police, Nigerian immigration service and almost all the agencies and paramilitary as well. And then of course the resources in terms of equipments, machinery and then training. But what we experience today is we don’t have sufficient personnel, the resources available to security office are inadequate. Government is doing a lot to get more resources in terms of equipments and machinery.”
On the criticisms trailing the recent loans approved by the legislature for the Executive, he said: ”We have a shortfall of almost 14.2 billion dollars funding gap for 2020 budget and with COVID-19 came so many negative things that visited adverse outcomes on our people, we didn’t make hay while the sun shun. We didn’t diversify the economy or invest in the real sectors of the economy.
”Now we’ve come to a point where we have to address the infrastructural gap that we have but the resources are so low, crude oil at one point was selling for 10, 11 dollars per barrel around when this pandemic started around March. We have very significant projects that we need to put in place, like the second Niger bridge, Mambila hydropower, East West road, Lagos – Kano rail line etc, but we don’t have the money.
“If you don’t have the resources and still need these projects, would you because you want to run away from taking loan say let me abandon all these projects. For us in the National Assembly we are conscious of the fact that this economy as affected by the pandemic if it persists you could loose over 20 million jobs in this country.
“The economy will go into serious recession, so you need to have the resources to invest so that the economy doesn’t go into recession and ensure that people don’t loose their jobs. So we feel we should grant the request but we needed to scrutinize everything, the conditions the projects which we did. We approved the loans to ensure that our infrastructural development continues.”