Roman Catholic Mission (RCM) Bishops in
Nigeria have called on President Buhari to
take full responsibility for the poor state of
the economy and stop blaming his
predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
Speaking through the Arch-Bishop of Sokoto
Dioceses, Mathew Kukah at a dinner
organised on the occasion of the Catholic
Bishop Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) 2016
by Ondo State Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, at
the International Event Centre, Akure on
Tuesday September 13th, the clergymen said
Jonathan was no longer president of the
country and no amount of insults heaped on
him will make things change.
According to them, the reason why the new
government was elected was to come in and
provide solutions to move the nation forward
rather than the point fingers at the ills of the
past governments.
“If the previous government did badly
that is why we voted a new
government. We didn’t vote a
government to complain about
wednesday. If we wanted wednesday,
the new government would not be
there. It is really about taking
responsibility.
No matter how much
you praise or abuse Jonathan, he is
not the president of Nigeria. I think
that people must understand, you take
power to solve problems not to
agonise. As the head of a family, no
matter how bad things are if there is
no food in the house; you as a father
can’t enter the house crying. It is the
question of developing the
mechanism. You can’t solve the
problem by guess work. Even my best
friends in APC now realise that
nobody can sing the song about
Jonathan being responsible for the
problems we are in.
We are not asking
you to change the whole world.”
According to Kukah, it was better for this
administration to identify the good in the
past administration and improve on them
than become slaves to its shortcomings.
“We are now riding a train between
Abuja and Kaduna now. The train
wasn’t there before. Things that
Jonathan did that can help Nigeria,
let’s continue with them. The bad
things that Jonathan did and those
who deserve to go to prison should go
to prison.
But sending people to
prison will only be useful if it puts
bread on the table of people. I think
the challenge government is facing is
this: just to be able to explain to the
people that this suffering has
something redemptive about it
because if you know that at the end of
this suffering something good is going
to happen, people will be ready to live
with the consequences.
But so far, I
don’t think government is
communicating effectively with
ordinary Nigerians and to know where
we are and the state of things.
So,
this is why you increasingly have a
situation which people are not willing
to make sacrifices because they still
believe that their obligation is to
protect themselves.”
On the current war against corruption by this
government, Kukah said
“I have always said, you can’t cure
malaria by just providing tablets. You
might provide tablets to cure malaria
but you have to look at the cause of
malaria. As long as dirty waters and
mosquitoes are around, there will still
be the disease.
My argument has
always been that we are not really
fighting corruption. We started off
with the assumption that corruption is
all about people stealing money. But
stealing money is actually the other
end of corruption. The reason we don’t
seem to make much progress is based
on the kind of diagnosis; how we
diagnose the problem. I still believe
that unless we get to the root cause
of poverty, inequality, which is really
the evidence and symptom of
corruption, you can talk of fighting
corruption all the rest of your life and
very little is going to happen.”
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