Nigeria’s current presidential system of government is too expensive and should be abandoned if the country must progress, says Senator Femi Okurounmu.
Speaking in an interview with PUNCH, Okurounmu also said the presidential system of government also breeds Corruption and doesn’t allow good people come into leadership positions.
“We have to abandon this presidential system of government. The presidential system of government is killing Nigeria. It is killing Nigeria in the sense that, one; it is so expensive to operate. The way Nigerians operate the presidential system is very expensive; the way Nigerians have been operating it is very corrupt and it breeds corruption. It encourages corruption, and it doesn’t allow good people to come into leadership positions”.
“You have to be a billionaire to become a president in Nigeria today, and being a billionaire doesn’t mean you are the smartest, it doesn’t mean you have good ideas for Nigeria, it doesn’t mean you have a good vision for Nigeria”.
“Normally, in politics, political parties are organised around visions and different visions for society. In Nigeria, the presidential system encourages gangs of people who call themselves political parties, who are just after wealth and power, and whichever gang of the so-called political party offers a politician the greatest opportunity to achieve his objectives of making the most money or having power, he will join because all the gangs are the same. They all have two goals, to make money and to have power”.
“In seeking power, you find out that most of them are people with very dubious backgrounds because since you need to have a lot of money to contest in the first place, you can imagine if you already have to pay more or less N50m to get the form, then you have to contest primaries, which is going to cost you billions of naira before you even come to the election itself”.
“So, it is only billionaires that can do it, and most of them didn’t make their money through hard work; they didn’t make their money through industries that they set up employing Nigerian workers. Most of them made money through crime-related activities”.
The Afenifere chieftain said President Bola Tinubu must take the issue of restructuring in line with the policy of the socio-political group.
“My message to the President, both silently and loudly in many forms, is that if he wants us to take him seriously, now that he is in a position to do something about it, now is the time for him to embark on the restructuring of Nigeria along the line that all of us in Afenifere agreed, because he was an Afenifere member; he still claims to be an Afenifere member even till today”.
