The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Adewole Adebayo, has accused the Federal government of enabling insecurity, insisting that President Bola Tinubu has lost control of his administration.
Adebayo, who spoke in an interview on Tuesday’s edition of Channels Television’s Politics Today programme, said that Nigeria cannot pretend to lack the tools to fight violent crime and tackle the rising insecurity.
“The government needs to come out and confess the truth that they are enabling this insecurity, and they cannot pretend that they don’t have all the tools that it takes (to tackle insecurity),” he said.
“The first enemy of government is government. The first enemy of the people is the government. You cannot commit a crime and last one week, or one month, if you don’t have government people cooperating with you,” Adebayo added.
The SDP chieftain questioned how ransom money moves freely through the system. He advised President Tinubu to reorganise the security architecture urgently.
“I cannot go now to the bank manager in my bank and say to them that I want to withdraw 6 million naira; they will not answer me—(calling the) EFCC, money laundering.
“But people are paying millions of naira in ransom. The people collecting the ransom are not worried about where they are carrying the money to.
“What I am letting you know is that President Tinubu, in my own humble view, has lost control of his government and he is flailing around—he needs to put his hands together, organise his government, and make sure that he understands that the police cover this country effectively because every local government in Nigeria has a police division,” he said.
The party chieftain argued that every local government area already has at least one police division that should be privy to respond quickly to threats.
Adebayo also questioned the government’s operational priorities and wondered how armed groups execute mass abductions with ease.
“There is a DPO; even in some large or massively populated local governments, you have more than one division of police there.
“Are you telling me that in Eruku, in Isapa and in all those places, there is no division there? Are you saying that if there is a youth corps member in Eruku criticising the APC or the government, they will not go and arrest the person?
“This is a government that could capture somebody in Nairobi, Kenya and bring him here for trial and sentence the person, but they cannot capture people who are going around.
“How do you go and carry hundreds of people? Have you been a nursery school teacher before? To get 35 children to cooperate with you in the class, is it easy? How will you carry 35 people?” he said.