Power, Politics and Death by Olusegun Adeniyi

Author:Olusegun Adeniyi [Adeniyi, Olusegun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Front-row Account of Nigeria Under the late President Yar'Adua
Published: 2012-01-13T23:26:32+00:00

We are also talking to President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire to hold a credible election by the end of this year. If we are able to achieve this, we would have achieved our goal of ensuring political stability and putting a stable democratic system not only in Nigeria but throughout the West African sub-region. But we are also having an emerging issue in Niger Republic, where the president will finish his second term, which is the constitutional limit, by December this year. But efforts are being made to extend his stay, in the first instance by three years, to 2012 and then subsequently on a sit-tight basis.

I have sent a delegation from ECOWAS to talk to President Tandja to have a rethink. We have also sent a joint delegation of ECOWAS, African Union, EU, and UN, but there seems to be no positive response. As soon as I get back to Abuja, I will invite President Tandja to come to Abuja because we need political stability, peace and security for us to pay attention to issues of development, education, human development and the other many challenges facing us.

These efforts are also being replicated at the African Union level to ensure that within this decade we achieve total political stability in Africa so that the entire continent can focus its attention on developmental issues.

During our last two summits, we placed much emphasis on integrating African economies, taking cognizance of the fact that the economic ties between individual African nations with their old colonial masters are much stronger than the ties between ourselves, even in terms of movement of people. You find, for example, in Nigeria that you can’t fly to Niger Republic, which is our neighbour; you have to go through Europe before you can get to Niger, and in a lot of African countries this is the case. So we need continent-wide infrastructure that will integrate our people, and we need structures that will ensure free movement of our people within the continent, structures that will ensure that we have a common market and we move towards assisting one another economically.

On this we have decided to work together with our partners in the developed world. We appreciate all their efforts, they may help with aids and grants, but clearly, only we in Africa can solve our problems for ourselves. Our salvation is in our hands. For our economy to develop, we must put in place critical infrastructure, like power and energy as well as transport, that will ensure mass movement of goods and people. We need railways, waterways and good interconnected road networks. In Nigeria we are aware of all these challenges, and that is one of the reasons we introduced Vision 20-2020, and we have identified seven critical areas of infrastructure which we call the seven-point agenda that will enable the nation [to] accomplish this objective.

While we work on these plans, we are also conscious of our responsibilities to our other African countries. For instance, in our national

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