 The Middle Belt Forum has said President Mohammed Buhari has failed woefully to deliver his promise to completely eliminate Boko Haram in the country. They noted that the president, rather than fulfilling his promise, to Nigerians watched helplessly while the insurgents spread from the north-east to all parts of the country. Meanwhile, the president has replied to the accusations over the worsting security situation, saying that he has fulfilled his promises to Nigerians on tackling Boko Haram in urgency, reviving the economy and fighting corruption. Joining us to discuss this is George Ashiru. He is the ADC Lagos State Chairman. Thank you so much for joining us, Mr Ashiru. Thank you very much. It's a privilege to be online with you tonight. Great. Your candidate for the position of president is also, of course, running against the candidate of the APC. And if anything that the president has said in light of this conversation is something to go by, that maybe we don't have a conversation to have this night. Or is the president saying something that is not true? Well, essentially, the party in power, or the leader that is in power in government, has a duty to defend its reputation and defend its policies. But we, the electorate and the opposition, it's our duty to also bring forth why we believe that you can do better. So I think one of the formats of leadership is to accept a positive criticism and to acknowledge and review the issues that are related to that criticism in view of correcting them rather than simply stripping them under the carpet. So it's very close to everybody that there isn't enough peace in certain regions of Nigeria, apart from the incessant attacks of the Minitans. We also have the non-going kidnappings and other violence, is including now political violence. And we may not have enough resources to tackle them. There's nothing wrong with the government simply telling us we're doing our best. We don't have enough resources. We don't have enough boots on ground, enough manpower, enough equipment, enough intelligence. And then, you know, let the National Assembly begin to quote, you know, to increase the resources. But it's better than to simply say, oh, everything is all right and, you know, we are good to go. But do you do you not believe that maybe this is what the president believes is the situation? Because half the time when, I mean, I remember from in January 2022, we started off the year with massacres, with killings, you know, in different parts of the country. And I mean, the whole of 2022, if you look at all the events that happened, 80% of them were, you know, insecurity related issues. So, but every time Mr. President reacted to this, he always said he was shocked. He was surprised. So could it be that Mr. President believes or has been made to believe that insecurity is a thing of the past in this country and that we're not facing economic issues? Neither are we facing, you know, underemployment or unemployment? Well, the truth about it is that again, like I said, the government will defend itself every time. Even with the elephant in the room, there will still be a robust defense of the policies, because politically it's a cost to accept that you have failed in any area. That gives a weapon to the opposition, to campaign against government. On the other hand, we can also say the integrity of the president is the reason we believe that the president will not lie when he's saying, in his own opinion, everything is going, you know, on Qidori. And I think essentially it is the briefing that the president gets that he's going to base his opinions on. So if all he gets is we're winning, we're being well, we can give us one trillion narrow, we're wiping out so many thousands of insurgents every second. As long as that's the briefing that the president gets from the security briefing, that's what he's going to present to the electorate. But, you know, we are on the ground and the people in the affected regions will be the testament or the testimony of the effectiveness of these security operations. And perhaps this is the reason why good leaders have town hall meetings. You know, you go to the committee, it's affected, you listen to them. When you listen to them, it informs your judgment and then it forms your actions as the leader. What does this say about the leadership style of Mr. President? Let's not also forget that once the president became our president, sworn into office, it took a long time for us to be able to even get him to speak to us as a people. And it's always been one person speaking and the other one coming to debunk this and that. Looking back at the Bahá'í administration from 2015, what can we say about his leadership style? For a person who tried to run for this office four times and finally got in, can we really say that it was a chance that was well utilized? Well, I think the president himself has spoken in, you know, in time past when he first became president that why did Nigerians choose to make him president at his advanced age, which means the kind of dynamism and energy and quickness of action and reaction and thought that you will associate with a younger candidate. He had gone past his prime in that regard. So he would have to allow basically delegates, a lot of things because of his advanced age. He could have decided not to run knowing that he's too old to run or he's not energetic, as he said. Sometimes you run for office because it is required of you by the people. It's not always a matter of eye. Not all politicians are personally ambitious. They serve because the people believe that their leadership style or their integrity is required. Don't forget the reason that people decided to vote for the president. The thought time around was because they felt that corruption had reached a level and they were holding on to his former reputation as a military head of state that he would be able to cover it. So at that time that was the kind of leadership required, whether or not it was efficiently used and that integrity was sufficient and the difference between political leadership and military leadership, all of them obviously come to play and the result is what we see today. Let's break some things down. Let's go back to the three things, the three pillars through which Mr. President came into office, most importantly in security, fighting insurgency, building the economy and of course fighting corruption. But I want to start with building the economy. Let's look at the economy right now, even though the whole world in 2020 shut down and then most countries are still dealing with post-COVID, but before COVID and now and where we are today. How well has the Buhar administration dealt with our economy, looking at all of the issues relating to banking, agriculture, small-scale loans and all kinds of things? How well have we done, especially also with the CBN governor taking on responsibilities of the Minister of Agriculture, etc., etc. Can we give a pass mark in that regard? No, of course not. I mean the economy of the country since 1999 are strong. The GDP of the country are strong from its peak sometime in 2010 and 2014. Our economy picked, our GDP was over 500 billion US dollars and now it's just barely over 400 billion US dollars and so definitely our economy has shown by about 20% and that's a huge change of any economy and the extent rate has multiplied by a factor of about 200-300%. Again, that makes inflation extremely difficult to manage because we are in an important economy and our sole export, critical export, which is what funds the government, is Kudor and even the Kudor, we are not able to export all that we can produce. We can produce over 2 billion barrels a day. We're not able to even export most of them because of oil theft and bunkering and all that. So, I mean, it's all eyes, eyes can see, these are the things that they call the disease of the eyes. So clearly the economy has not done well. It's not been well managed. The ways to stabilize it has been let's inject more funds into the economy. Let's give out more contracts. Let's focus on infrastructure, like Lagos State is spending 60, almost 60% if not more of its entire 22-22 budget on infrastructure. If you hope that when you floor the markets then it will encourage buying and the economy will float but the human development index for each individual shows that poverty is still rising and so clearly some of these policies are not influencing and affecting the lives of individuals and you can see the effect of this in the JAPA syndrome, terrible inflation. Now people will say that post-COVID, what economy has been in the meltdown? Post-COVID, the inflation has risen, post-COVID, there's always something to blame but other countries have been able to tweak the economy. The inflation rate in America is at the lowest for a long time. The gas price is at its lowest since before even the war in Ukraine and so that means somebody somewhere is taking the right decisions and that's really all we need. We just need the right people taking the right decisions to correct the anomalies in the system because there will be anomalies year in year out forever so that's what having the right technocrats and the right political way that's why it's important. Talking about having the right people in office, it took the president almost six months for us to get a list of people that would be making up our executive council and then they now showed up. I remember vividly the president said he was looking for men and women who you know were upright and had no you know stain or dirt in terms of cockroaches or skeletons in their cupboard but here we are. I laid that foundation because I'm going somewhere. We have an economic council where the vice president chairs you know and we have the minister for finance and several other people that make up that particular council. I would shudder if you disagree with me on the fact that the people who make up that council are very very intelligent technocrats and professionals so is it that they're bereft of ideas or they choose not to implement the ideas that they have? Which is it? Well to start with waiting for six months to appoint ministers is an indication that it thought was not given to the idea of these ministers before 1-1. It would give the impression that the president did not believe he was going to win and so he was not ready. Normally your cabinet is ready. They're called the shadow cabinet. They are ready. These are your policy think tanks. They're already talking to you. You already have ideas of what to do when you're in power. You know they will let you know this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to tackle this one. Tackle that one when they are still inaugurated so that as soon as you get in there good good are ready to move. So that was an error I believe and the momentum subsequently was that they were doing catch up. You know things had already gone awry before the political leaders the technocrats took over and the civil servants were managing the economy and the civil servants are sorry to say you know they just wanted the boat. They don't think outside the box most of the time and so we were just basically thinking let's try this let's try that let's try that and just when we thought the economy was going to stabilize Covid came and we couldn't export anything because nobody was buying away and then as soon as Covid was you know exited the pandemic exited in the world economic scene then if the inflation came and then the war Ukraine came so it now became you know running after being reactive rather than proactive because you didn't prepare for all those sort of things so essentially not just having agates just having people with fantastic degrees is never enough you must there's a thing called in Greek called kathabitso which means perfectly prepared you must always be perfectly prepared for every scenario a general that goes to war always presumes every situation you know if I take this what will happen it's like a chance game if I do this what will happen so I have to have plan B plan C plan D and the right people and I should be able to take action when necessary in order to get the right kind of results so I think at the end of the day a leader is expected to take responsibility for the weakness of the team in implementing their ideas and policies let's look at Nigeria's debt profile which is one of the things that you know a normal day would make some of our leaders our heroes past turning their graves and for whatever better way to describe it a lot of people have compared previous so this is the thing in Nigeria for every time we have bad leadership we try to praise the leadership before that and say oh it wasn't so bad I think it was better and so it makes us continue in that circle of mediocrity but looking at Nigeria's debt profile right now and the last amount of money that the president has asked the national assembly for and he's also put a caveat that if they do not approve the money in time there's more interest that's going to accrue on the money um how do we even begin to dig ourselves out of this hole because whether we like it or not it'll take decades to be able to you know wiggle our way out of this one and and and many would also point to the passenger administration for some of the debt cancellations that we had under his government well the fact that we do budget deficit it's not really it's not really the key problem I mean for the size of the economy what is being borrowed uh in international financial balance is still a manageable percentage of our overall economy so that's not really the issue the issue really is where's the money spent you know what is the money useful is it used to really industrialize Nigerian because competitive are we spending on education or culture that is going to fit the people or education that vocational education technical education uh that will ensure that in the next five ten years we're going to produce more millionaires or are we simply spending it building bridges that cost one billion dollars and things like that that don't have direct impact on the living conditions of the people so that's really where the problem is when you borrow and they spend it on things that are not key priorities of the people and that's because not enough attempt is made to speak to the people about their priorities you know a lot of leaders just don't do enough consultation they don't they just speak to the civil servants and then all this is out and then money spent and then what is the accountable accountability behind this expenditure so for every one billion how we show that you know most of it is spent or is parallel to the way you know 20 percent of it is actually spent for what it's meant for so if you borrow and America is extremely leveraged extremely leveraged to get an issue is unbelievable however whenever they spend money they spend it in something that in the next two three months we will see the impact on the economy but here we just borrow but we don't feel the impact the cost of goods are not coming down the cost of electricity is not coming down cost of fuel is not coming down all the indices that makes a business succeed and therefore the economy succeed they are still unstable so that's the question if you keep borrowing and you don't spend it in the right place you don't get the right results it's as simple as that again before we move away from that because I remember sometime in 2019 if I'm not mistaken IMF had said that if we are borrowing then we need to be able to tell what we're borrowing these monies for for them to be able to make sure that they can get their monies back or these monies are being put to use so what about accountability because we can't have a democracy and then we're not focusing on accountability then that means that it's a circus it's a free for all how do we ensure accountability going forward especially for a time like this in Nigeria's life we don't have we don't have a viable opposition if you look at the american political system and the british political system you know it's almost you know 50-50 49-48 to 55-51 and such that it forces the government to account to a large opposition in government so there is a culture of ensuring that when the president is voted into power the chunk of the legislature goes to the opposition so that there is some level of accountability we don't have that here what we what we have is in a way another form of dictatorship because whichever party is really the executive 100 percent almost always controls the legislation so nobody's holding anybody to account because at the end of the day they're going to go back to party meeting and resolve every issue and choose not to ask questions and so it is a witness in our democratic system that we need to correct uh the opposition needs to have a voice and they need to speak just like the way i'm speaking right now without fear of favor without fear that uh speaking out means that i will not be able to get decent businesses or there's not to be some victimization or the fear that's why i say that are we the democracy or the military because if we're in a democracy and a freedom of speech as long as i'm not insulting anybody i should be able to ask anyone who is in power to be accountable and that is not an any press who should be doing it unfortunately look at the majority of the media they are owned by politicians owned by people who are connected to those in power so they become lobbyists rather than those holding the government to account so unfortunately that's the witness of a system we are in now that we need to we need to help this young people uh there's a new generation this emerging leaders that are speaking and screaming and shouting and asking our leaders to be accountable we need to help them finally let's talk about um corruption um it is something that's become endemic it's eaten so deep into the fabrics of Nigeria's um you know um system and we're asking ourselves how do we make sure that corruption is fought to a standstill even if it's not completely fought but at least you know plug some of these loopholes how do we ensure that well the biggest the biggest strength of um the biggest teeth that corruption at anti-culture fight has is um is holding people to account in the justice system you know if you are caught you should be able to pay for it and as long as there's no impurity corruption will go down but another important thing is being proactive about managing corruption if you have a civil servant with a university degree who is earning one tenth of what a degree holder in the banking system and the oil and gas system is earning you are creating a system that will make that civil servant potentially corruptible and that's what is happening when we are underpain the people managing our economy then corruption is going to increase they're going to demand pickbacks they're going to demand rights they're going to demand well i'm not it's not an accusation for all of them but i'm saying this is the scenario they're going to expect uh something from those who are benefiting from the civil servant and that becomes a culture so the culture of infinity then means that at the end of the day you really can't fight corruption because when you try to fight corruption you go to the legislature 10 years you are still in court because there is no will to come to the to the end of that case the ICPC, the AFCC all these organizations they're filled with human beings some of whom are still not well paid so they're easily corruptible you know by anybody who wants to corrupt them and what we look for what we're really looking for now is leadership at every level that has just decided to rise up against their numeracy system and say no no no not under my watch i'm going to change the culture i'm going to change you where things are and regardless of what happens to me at the end of the day my conscience is clear that i'm going to do it better there's no other way to fight corruption there's no other way even if you use technology people will bypass it if you if you any kind of system with the policies are there the policies are there but it's human beings are they are vulnerable they're vulnerable if you are if you are not if you need to pay rent of five hundred thousand next month and you only have fifty thousand in your bank and somebody comes to meet you and says you know sign this document for this file i'll give you one million it's so easy because you don't have a backup the bank is not going to know your money average in this this economy there's no social safety net for the vast majority of people so it's created a corruptible system that's why i keep saying that investment in entrepreneurship and empowering people is the fastest way the percent of the economy belongs to the organized public sector not the government so they reach out there they reach out the country the country is and the more people them the better for tax collection so we need to we need to find the right balance between fighting corruption as if it's just one kind of entity and the holistic look at the causes of corruption and then make sure that we reduce its impact over the over the next five ten years for whoever is coming in next year this year rather well i want to say thank you so much Judge Ashira is the chairman of the ADC here in Lagos data very great conversation that we've had tonight when we're hoping also that Nigerians will all go get their pvc so that they can vote and make the right choice now it's time for us to ask ourselves the question are we the cause of our own misfortune in leadership i mean other than the ability to sing and dance to a tune of big promises our leaders aren't really builders are they because they possess no demonstrable qualification for building good roads or infrastructure or balancing the budgets without taking out loans and using our future for collateral and for all the clever oratory and sweet melodic promises that they pour down the ears of the masses and all the pats on the back that they've given themselves for solving problems that they have that have actually grown tentacles you know rather than gone away a past mac is too generous a grade to give these leadership but i'm willing to give it to them if it fulfills the old interpretation of barely passing an exam and you know let my people go or in this case please go and never return but election day is a promise of a new dawn let's do better this time go get your pvc and that's my take i am mary ana coe have a good evening