Speaking during a special New Year service at the Dunamis International Gospel Centre, in Abuja yesterday January 1st, President Jonathan said his administration is coming up with plans and programmes to fight corruption in Nigeria. What he said below...
"There are two main problems confronting us as a nation: The issue of insecurity in the North where we have the Boko Haram terrorists and in the South where we have commercial kidnapping. The next thing that people worry about after security is the issue of corruption.We are coming out with programmes and plans to clean up. These are things that you don’t just use a magical wand to wave off, otherwise even before I became the President, there wouldn’t have been corruption in Nigeria.
“It is not just about shouting corruption. It is not about looking at one person, arrest the person and show him on television. It is about strengthening institutions and coming up with credible plans to make sure that anybody who gets involved with corruption, the system must have a way of detecting him and punishing him.
“Until you put such a system on ground, you cannot talk about eradicating corruption, you will just be celebrating corruption. You would have noticed that from Christmas to New Year, at least, it has been calm. It did not happen by accident.
“It happened because you have been praying for this country and the government has also been doing something. We do not need to announce what we are doing. With your prayers, we will surely get there. We will continue to come up with programmes that will help the ordinary people.
“The same way we won the war against Ebola, we shall win the terror war. 2015 is a turning point because of the elections. Some people will not mind if half of the country get burnt because of their ambition.
“I always say that we must have a country first, we must have a people first before talking about ambition. We must pray that God should give us the wisdom to do things with some decorum and we should not compromise the lives of the people for ambition.
“I always say that my ambition and the ambition of any politician for that matter, is not worth the blood of the smallest Nigerian.”
“For you to achieve anything, you must have a clear vision. Even if you look at what we have been doing as a nation, you will really see that before this time when the country used to have this 25 years plan, the budget was based on 25 years clear plan for the country. So you know where you are going for 25 years.
“Then it was broken down into five years plan and annual budget and we knew where we were going. But after some time, things collapsed and we run government on emergency basis and you see government start wobbling.
“We are going back to those good days when we had vision. We have plan for agriculture, we have plan for industry, we have plan for automobile and many other areas. If you have a vision, any proposal that comes in, no matter how good they are, must fall into your vision for it to go through. With your prayers, surely as a nation, we will get to where our vision will take us to.
“Having passed through school and being in government for quite some time, I have realised that for you to achieve anything, you must have a clear vision. If you have a clear vision, even if you don’t get the exact target, you will get something close to the target."
Source: Punch
