Former Minister of Youth and Sports under former President Mohammdu Buhari and currently a chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Dr. Solomon Dalung, has said insecurity remains Nigeria’s albatross because politicians and arms dealers are benefiting heavily from the “multi-billion Dollar business.”
Dalung added that the All Progressives Congress-led Federal Government has mismanaged intelligence and abandoned governance for politics of 2027, including decapitation of opposition parties. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Sunday Telegraph, he said: “Terrorism is a multi-billion Dollar enterprise in Nigeria and the stakeholders are categorised … beneficiaries of arms service.
So, the political economy includes those who import arms, who peddle arms from one point to the other. They make a lot of fortune from it. So, elements of either serving or retired security agents, who provide technical support and training to these terrorists. There is the economy of terrorism, those who supply them fuel, not foodstuff and intelligence.
“There are those who help them warehouse the proceeds of kidnappings for ransoms, help them launder those funds back into the economy. That is also an economy of its own. Then there are politicians, who have invested heavily in them because they help them decapitate their opposition stronghold.
They also let them de-populate resistance and there are some politicians that are even involved in terrorism financing because of ethnic or religious colouration.” Dalung added: “It is a notorious fact (that the present administration is deliberately destroying or has destroyed the opposition).
It’s a reality and it is not even an allegation against the Tinubu’s government. Now, how do we corroborate this? We corroborate this by looking at how the government is fighting a double standard anti-corruption war. “The government has categorically come up and created a refuge for looters of the Nigerian economy and this was announced by a sitting senator of Nigeria when he was the National Chairman of APC.
He designated the APC as a safe zone for Nigerian sinners and that once any sinner crosses the line into this refuge, no matter the magnitude, his sins will be forgiven. Now, what are the sins of a Nigerian politician? Corruption, looting the treasury.
These are the sins. “Now, all those who had EFCC cases from 2007 till then are now in APC. Their files are dusty including the Senate President who in 2015, the former EFCC chairman Magu displayed boxes of dollars recovered from the Presidential Lodge where he was staying as a former governor in New York.
He was arrested by EFCC, charged to court. The matter is dead today. “When he was Minister of Niger Delta, he spent N81 billion in three months funding COVID. The chairman of NDDC was invited by the National Assembly to account for the money and you can remember the off-the-mic drama.
The NDDC chairman even collapsed and that was all. You have the account.” Similarly, Dalung referred to the case of a former Accountant General, who is now a traditional ruler in Kano, “allegedly stole N109 billion in one transaction. All these people are in the APC. All these people are people that there are allegations of corruption hovering over their necks but because they are in APC, their sins are forgiven.”
