Vice President Yemi Osinbajo Thursday declared that pressure from Nigerian elites to slow down the ongoing fight against graft would not deter the Muhammadu Buhari-led Presidency.
“We get regular messages from some Nigerian elites saying ‘cool down,’” the Vice President disclosed during a meeting with a delegation from the Moslem Congress of Nigeria in his office.
According to a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media Laolu Akande, Osinbajo said, “It is a very strange morality that some of those people have; very complicated but cutting across all tribes and religious differences.”
However, he observed encouragingly that the masses of the Nigerian people on the contrary have a clearer understanding of right and wrong.
According to him, “The masses don’t have that problem.”
Although some of the elite are saying, “It is not a big deal,” and that government should merely ask the looters of the common wealth of the nation to return the money and go, Prof. Osinbajo expressed gladness that “a new tribe of Nigerians, who would not compromise their values but would maintain a sense of right and wrong, is now emerging.
“The man on the street is very clear, so whatever some of these elites say, we shall keep our focus on the masses who voted for us,” the Vice President declared.
He lamented that in the last 16 years, there is not a single Federal Government completed road project, not to talk of rail.
“The reason is corruption,” he asserts, adding that the cost of projects are often inflated as people entrusted with public trust struggle to enrich themselves at the expense of the people.
He said it was the same inordinate desire for enrichment that explains why money meant to procure arms was shared among persons at a time when the territorial integrity of the nation was in danger from terrorists.
“The insurgency has gone on for six years because government could not adequately equip the military,” he stated, assuring Nigerians that President Muhammadu Buhari and he had no other agenda but “the progress of this country.”
-Leadership
