A former Minister of Education and presidential candidate of Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, has described President Muhammadu Buhari as incompetent, saying that is why he rewards incompetency by keeping his incompetent appointees in office.
She made the remarks in Calabar on Friday while exchanging views with journalists on why she was running for the office of the President.
She said, “We have seen serial failures in this administration. The President rewards incompetency and I am not surprised because the President himself is incompetent but does not realise it. What he does is to extend their stay in offices in which they have failed. We have seen it with the military. We have seen it with the police.
“He has retained the IG of police after the expiration of his tenure. Is it for stellar performance? This is an IG of police the President told the whole country he did not go to where he was assigned to go to in Benue State. What the President is essentially telling us is that the Nigerian life does not matter that much to him, otherwise he should be very aghast at the level of killings that happened.”
On why she is running for President, she said, “My greatest shock and one of my triggers for deciding to run for election, not being a politician as you all know, is that the debasement of the Nigerian life is the final straw that can turn us into a society of anarchy. For it to be that children will grow up in this society and just come to the understanding that killing a person is a normal thing; you know, you can just do it, there is no consequence. My goodness! What kind of impunity is that? That is a dangerous level of impunity.
“For me, I want to be the President of this country and be an effective commander-in-chief of our armed forces on the basis of competence, capacity and character. I would so do that work well that the life of a Nigerian would be the epicentre of our development process. It has implications. It means that in terms of security, we would run the most efficient security system.
“We would reform the security infrastructure of the country. We would find those brilliant ones in our military establishment that have been hidden away in an era of incompetency and low productivity. We would also reform the systems within the military because when we look at the military anywhere, they are the basis of what is called management by objective. And that idea is that when resources are made available, resources should lead to performance. And they should lead to accountability, they should lead to reward and when you are not getting it, you should fix it. And the President is not known to fix things that have gone wrong.”
She decried the high level of poverty in the country and said as president she would focus on the right kind of policies, institutions that would promote investments and find innovative solutions to infrastructure deficit.