PDP's
presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar wrote a lenghty piece as a guest
columnist for Thisday titled, 'To Win the War on Terror, We Need
Opportunities and Jobs'. In the article, Atiku said, 'to defeat
terrorism, we need to arm our military & motivate them with good
working conditions, especially the lower ranks who face the greatest
risks & are the least paid. We need to demonstrate that when you
fight for Nigeria, Nigeria will fight for you'. Read the full piece
below... In order to defeat terror, Nigeria needs a well thought out
anti-terror plan and one thing that must be central to that plan is the
buy in of the people because terror can only thrive where there is local
support. Take that local support structure away and the terror
architecture will collapse like a pack of cards.Terrorists are
themselves human beings. Terror groups depend on recruiting from the
local communities to replenish their ranks or they cannot grow. The
members of Boko Haram are not spirits and while there definitely is some
foreign influence, the overwhelming number of their leadership and
followers are members of the local population.Central to our plans for
defeating terror therefore must be to find out why young men in those
communities are aggrieved enough to be alienated from Nigeria and
attracted to the radical philosophy of Boko Haram and ISWAP. When we
find out, we must prevent this alienation from occurring.The key to
answering this question is to look at the economy of Nigeria and how
that economy is distributed.Within Nigeria, the heartland of the terror
insurgency is the Northeast, with Borno and Yobe states being the
hardest hit. Surely, it cannot be a coincidence that the Northeast is
also the most economically backward part of Nigeria with Borno and Yobe
states worst affected.Recently, someone called Nigerian youths “lazy”.
Rightly, there was an uproar over that indecorous slandering of a whole
generation, but that type of mentality exposes the mindset that has led
to the alienating of huge swathes of our youth, especially in the
Northeast.When Nigerian youths feel that they are not valued as equal
members of society that should have equal access to opportunity, they
begin to take matters into their own hands.When the leadership of a
nation fail to provide positive avenues for the youth to assert their
intelligence positively, then the youth will find negative uses to
express their innate intelligences.Lack of access to education is linked
to poverty and poverty is undoubtedly an incubator for crime, terrorism
or militancy.On November 22, 2016, the United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF) revealed that a whopping 70% of children in Kebbi state are not
in school. They also revealed that they do not have reliable figures
for states such as Borno and Yobe, but the numbers may well be more.
Even likely so.In 2016, my running mate, former Governor Peter Obi, gave
an Independence Day speech at The Platform event organised by Covenant
Christian Centre in Lagos. It was an unforgettable Independence Day
event which, according to Google analytics, was the most searched item
in Nigeria on that day, besting even the President’s own speech.Why was
that speech so attractive to Nigerians? It is because Mr. Obi gave a
detailed breakdown of the reality of governance in Nigeria today, which
is one of a wasteful squandering of the riches that should have gone
into the development of our youth.And he is not alone in noticing this.
Youth everywhere and especially in the Northeast are seeing this. The
Nigerian government and the Nigerian elite are not offering them a way
out of this dilemma. However, anti social groups, like Boko Haram and
ISWAP, are exploiting their dissatisfaction with society and are
offering our youth a utopian ideal which is in reality a dystopia.These
youth read about highly connected government officials who pilfer N200
million that was meant for Internally Displaced Persons, without so much
as a slap on the wrists, they hear about suspected mega thieves who are
returned by government, reinstated into the civil service, given
promotions and armed guards and treated like royalty.These events only
deepen their alienation from society and affirm the twisted messages of
groups like Boko Haram and ISWAP.To defeat terrorism therefore, we need
to arm our military and motivate them with good working conditions and
terms of services, especially for the lower ranks who face the greatest
risks and are the least paid. We need to demonstrate that when you fight
for Nigeria, Nigeria will fight for you, but even more importantly, we
must show that when you die in the services of Nigeria, your name and
your survivors will be celebrated by the society that you died for.We
must also help our military win the hearts and minds of the people of
the Northeast by empowering them to open soup kitchens where they give
food to the hungry. We must encourage them to set up field hospitals
where they treat the local population free of charge. Even something as
giving each soldier a pocketful of sweets to handout to little children
on the streets will help the military win the love and affection of the
local population and turn their allegiance to our armed forces.That is
one part of the plan. The other part of the plan, which is even more
important, is that we must starve Boko Haram and ISWAP of their
recruiting tool by quickly and effectively restructuring Nigeria so that
we have a society that allows for inclusiveness and social justice.A
very good first step is to go back in time to find out why an initially
peaceful movement became violent. It all started with the extra judicial
murder of their charismatic preacher and founder Ustaz Mohammed
Yusuf.In fact, the current leader of ISWAP, is Mohammed Yusuf’s son, Abu
Musab al-Barnawi. It is clear that that act of extra judicially killing
Mohammed Yusuf is one of the grudges that these groups have against the
Nigerian state.We must deprive Boko Haram of the means of claiming
injustice as the rationale behind its insurgency by trying all those
behind Mohammed Yusuf‘s extra judicial murder.As Theodore Parker said
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards
justice”.Just as we are satisfying this moral debt, as a nation, we must
ensure that there is a fairer redistribution of the wealth of Nigeria
amongst all Nigerians. Our budgeting system must be upended and we must
have the political will to start spending more on capital expenditures
than on recurrent expenditures.We must curb waste in government by
eliminating security votes and those wasteful spendings highlighted by
Governor Peter Obi which include, but are not limited to, eliminating
huge and expensive convoys, overseas medical treatment at public
expense, reducing unnecessary travel and building people instead of
building edifices.We must learn from countries like Rwanda that has
stabilised its society by statutorily reserving 30% of all legislative
seats for women. As the late Kofi Annan said in 2006, “there is no tool
for development more effective than the empowerment of women. No other
policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, or to reduce infant
and maternal mortality”.When you empower a woman, you empower a family, a
village, a community and eventually, a nation.In our case, we can go
further by reserving at least 35% of all legislative and executive
positions for not just women, but also for our youth, at all levels of
government, federal, states and local governments. We must convert our
youths from onlookers to stakeholders.They must see that it is easier
for them to influence the direction of Nigeria by going into government
or business than by going into crime or terrorise.But above all, we must
massively invest in education by building capacity, which must not just
be limited to establishing more schools, but by training teachers. In a
situation where we do not even have enough teachers, it is a mistake to
sack the few that we have because they fail adhoc examinations.
Instead, we must build their capacity to teach via training and
continuous development.It is impossible to have 70% of the children of a
state outside the formal school system without having destabilising
crime and terrorism such as we are currently having in Nigeria. And it
will be a mistake to fight only the symptoms without fighting the
cause.We must accept the wisdom that a provision of equal opportunity
and social justice is the panacea to almost all of the ills of
society.By reversing our budgeting ratio from 7-3 in favour of recurrent
to 7-3 in favour of capital expenditure, we will create an atmosphere
for jobs.If we are building and rebuilding infrastructure, there will be
jobs for our youth. They will have increased purchasing power, which
will itself lead to further jobs flowing from the goods and services
they patronise. They will keep their monies in banks, which will result
in more liquidity with which the banks can then provide loans to more
small and medium scale enterprises. The snowball effect is almost
limitless.Again, let me state that we have to make these changes to
rescue our nation from the brink. Only last week, the World Bank
revealed that in recent years, Nigeria “has underinvested in human
capital and remains very low compared to others.”If we do not address
these negative indices, we will continue to totter, while nations that
sufficiently invest in their youth make advances that we can only dream
of.These are the only ways we can decisively defeat terror and defeat it
we must otherwise anarchy await us.•Waziri Atiku Abubakar is the
Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party.