By Tony Nwankwo

P rince Salau Olatunji Sekoni is an All  Progressives Congress (APC) leader in  Lagos State. A former Executive Chairmanof Amuwo-Odofin, Sekoni, in this interview, looks at the bastardization of local government administration across the country and the corruption inherent in the system, among other issues.  Excerpts:

Your Irede community are mostly fishermen.  What do you make of cattle rearers who want Nigerians to provide grazing land for their herds?

Well, it is still part of farming, but unfortunately, we don’t do that in this area.  Ours is mainly fish farming, coca farming, but the issue of this cattle rearing has been on for sometime now and everybody is expressing displeasure on the silence of the President of the country. What I don’t like is for people to say because he is Fulani, that is why he doesn’t want to say anything. If somebody has a responsibility and he is not discharging it, let us accuse him that ‘you are not discharging this responsibility, why?’ I am sure himself will not say because I am Fulani, and Fulani herdsmen are Fulani, no, he can’t say that.

We all know that he has the responsibility as the President of the country, irrespective of who is committing anything, he has to say, something. He might still be studying the issue as to how he wants to tackle it, because it is a new phenomena, its new dimension. We have not been hearing this for sometime.  These cattle rearers have been with us ever since we all knew Nigeria.  So, they are not a new stock in this nation. They have been rearing their cattle, but the propensity of this massacre or infighting between the farmers and the herdsmen have not been blown out like this. So, we should give him time to study the situation and allow him to make comments, but we cannot continue to keep quiet.  It is very worrisome that cattle rearers will be carrying AK47.

There are loose arms from , Syria, Libya, Sudan, etc. And government seems incapable of checking the inflow of  arms into the country.

The issue of loose arms from these countries is a clear fact. We know that the borders within these countries are porous.  I was reading a Customs officer’s comments the other day, that there are some thousands of illegal borders, not the official ones, and they don’t cover those areas, especially in the North.  All these are affecting the security of the nation.  These have to be investigated. We don’t expect herdsmen to be spending that much for a gun. Imagine that they use little children to do havoc with suicide bombing that we never expected. So, it could be a way of Boko Haram coming to the South.

The APC government is having a hectic time: fuel scarcity, poor electricity supply, insecurity in the country. What do you think?

Well, the security in Nigeria has been loose, since from the PDP time, and you see, when something is bad, to repair it is always a problem. It is easier to spoil, but to repair it cannot be easy. We are all talking about Sambisa Forest, we have not been able to locate the over 200 Chibok girls.  They have not yet been found. So, it is easier to spoil something than to fix it.

We need time, we need to cooperate with government.  We need to give the Federal Government time to do all these things. Imagine the sort of revelations we are hearing of late. We were talking about N2.1 billion, arms deal, and now its over N200 billion, and yet, they did not procure these things for the poor soldiers, and yet they were court marshalling them. Is that right?  Are we being humane? When you say somebody should go and fight somebody and got the money to procure arms, you say you are sending a child to the farm, yet you didn’t give him cutlass, you didn’t give him hoe, what is he going to do there?  What can his hand uproot in the farm.

You were responsible for the massive development in Amuwo-Odofin LGA and later Oriade LCDA. What do you see now?

Well, this is part of the degenerating issue I have been talking about. Local government administration itself has been bastardized. The state is not living to its statutory requirements of the local government. We read in the papers what comes from the Federal Allocations to each local government, but what do they actually release to the local government from the Joint Account?  Even those there, what are they doing now?  Most council chairman now, I am sorry to say, are not worth that office. And they receive backing from the top.

You can’t report them and get anything done. So, why do you worry yourself? So, definitely, things will degenerate. And it is degenerating. But with the sort of fierce attack by the EFCC, I am sure a lot of people will sit up.  And the parties, whether PDP, APC, or APGA, they should seriously screen candidates to be presented if they want to make moves. Things have degenerated a lot I am sorry to say.

One could say, those at the top should discipline these people. Why are they not doing that?

Exactly, what I am saying, they are not giving disciplinary measures. They are even aiding and abetting them. If the state says local government chairman should bring N50,000, he would come and say, it is N150,000. The civil servants that will prepare the papers will make it N200,000. Everybody wants to have their own share.