Roman Catholic Mission (RCM) Bishops in Nigeria have called
on President Buhari to take full responsibility for the poor state of the
economy and stop blaming his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
Speaking through the Arch-Bishop of Sokoto Dioceses, Mathew Kukah at a dinner
organised on the occasion of the Catholic Bishop Conference of Nigeria (CBCN)
2016 by Ondo State Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, at the International Event
Centre, Akure on Tuesday September 13th, the clergymen said Jonathan was no
longer president of the country and no amount of insults heaped on him will
make things change.
According to them, the reason why the new government was
elected was to come in and provide solutions to move the nation forward rather
than the point fingers at the ills of the past governments.
“If the previous government did badly that is why we voted a
new government. We didn’t vote a government to complain about wednesday. If we
wanted wednesday, the new government would not be there. It is really about
taking responsibility. No matter how much you praise or abuse Jonathan, he is
not the president of Nigeria. I think that people must understand, you take
power to solve problems not to agonise. As the head of a family, no matter how
bad things are if there is no food in the house; you as a father can’t enter
the house crying. It is the question of developing the mechanism. You can’t
solve the problem by guess work. Even my best friends in APC now realise that
nobody can sing the song about Jonathan being responsible for the problems we
are in. We are not asking you to change the whole world.”
According to Kukah, it was better for this administration to
identify the good in the past administration and improve on them than become
slaves to its shortcomings.
“We are now riding a train between Abuja and Kaduna now. The
train wasn’t there before. Things that Jonathan did that can help Nigeria,
let’s continue with them. The bad things that Jonathan did and those who
deserve to go to prison should go to prison. But sending people to prison will
only be useful if it puts bread on the table of people. I think the challenge
government is facing is this: just to be able to explain to the people that
this suffering has something redemptive about it because if you know that at
the end of this suffering something good is going to happen, people will be
ready to live with the consequences. But so far, I don’t think government is
communicating effectively with ordinary Nigerians and to know where we are and
the state of things. So, this is why you increasingly have a situation which
people are not willing to make sacrifices because they still believe that their
obligation is to protect themselves.”
On the current war against corruption by this government,
Kukah said
“I have always said, you can’t cure malaria by just
providing tablets. You might provide tablets to cure malaria but you have to
look at the cause of malaria. As long as dirty waters and mosquitoes are
around, there will still be the disease. My argument has always been that we
are not really fighting corruption. We started off with the assumption that
corruption is all about people stealing money. But stealing money is actually
the other end of corruption. The reason we don’t seem to make much progress is
based on the kind of diagnosis; how we diagnose the problem. I still believe
that unless we get to the root cause of poverty, inequality, which is really
the evidence and symptom of corruption, you can talk of fighting corruption all
the rest of your life and very little is going to happen.”
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