A member of the House of Representatives representing Orumba North and South Federal Constituency, Hon. Ben Nwankwo, has lamented the worsening security situation in the nation.
He accused the Federal Government of not caring enough about the life of Nigerians, saying there was “too much silence” over unprovoked killings across the country.
In an interview with The Sun published on Monday, Nwankwo, a third-time PDP member of the House who recently defected to the APC, enjoined the President Muhammadu Buhari to step up efforts to defend hapless Nigerians.
The reasons citizens surrender arms is for government in turn to protect the citizens, hence any government that is not doing this is failing in its constitutional duties. What is happening today is that it appears that the life of Nigerians do not matter to the government. Why should your fellow countryman be your worst enemy to the extent that you use daggers to cut the person’s intestines and the gory site is all over the place? This happened to the extent that the National Assembly had to shut down its business for three days to protest and passed a vote of no confidence on all the service chiefs and even invited President Buhari to come and answer questions on his inability to protect the lives of citizens; that to me is a very respectful way of telling him that he needs to wake up and do his work better.
There seems to have been too much silence over these killings which have in turn been sending the wrong signals, President Buhari should be able to brace up and convince Nigerians that he has what it takes to guarantee the safety of lives and properties of the people in this country. We have even gotten to the stage that we are no longer asking for social amenities; everybody is now bothered about security to avoid being slaughtered by herdsmen or Boko Haram. Nigerians are tired and I hope it doesn’t get to that stage where people will begin to take laws into their hands, this is so because I have this believe that if you don’t engage the youths constructively, they will engage themselves destructively and if we get to that level I tell you we won’t be able to curtail the consequences.
When you are driving on the road you meet cows passing and you would have to wait until they swagger out rather reluctantly out of the road; you find infant herdsmen who ought to be in school commandeering cows from forest to forest; the only way of feeding cows is by open grazing and damaging farmlands. I like to remind every Nigerian that this is 21st century, because it seems we are oblivious of this fact. This is not the only country where cattle are being reared in the world, but other nations have gone into more advanced rearing such as ranching. As a matter of fact, all the years I stayed in Europe I didn’t see any life cow, yet whenever I visit the grocery stores and meat shop, cow meat was never in short supply; it doesn’t mean that they are reared up in the air, but not on the main roads or on people’s farms. You don’t confer more rights on cows than on human beings, so for me, we should have ranches all over the country which should as well not just be limited to cows but to other animals as well.