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What Nigeria must do to end security challenges – Dogara

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The former Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, has highlighted the critical steps that the Nation must take to end the security challenges facing the country.

Dogara said that the electoral system should be rejigged to ensure the emergence of credible leaders.

Dogara who was a keynote speaker at House of Justice Annual Summit in Kaduna on the theme: Leadership, Governance and National Security, said “Clear and sustainable policies must be evolved to tailor development that has human face with poverty alleviation as the measure for determining policy success or failure.

“Government must continue to adopt deliberate policies to enhance the rapid development of the private sector by establishing industrial clusters and enhancing the agricultural value chain to put food on the table of citizens, create jobs, reduce unemployment and ensure even development,” he said.

He opined that the sanctions provided for in the Electoral Act should be activated to deal with electoral fraud and instill public confidence in the process.

“The National security architecture must be reformed to remove the existing rigid centralisation and allow for more rapid deployment while at the same time insulating it from abuse,” Dogara said.

“The National security architecture must be deployed proactive rather than reactively as is the present situation,” he added.

The ex-speaker who was worried by the level of injustice said that the full weight of the constitutional provision for Federal Character in conjunction with the provisions of the Federal Character (Establishment etc.) Act and the inherent powers of the legislature should be brought to bear on its implementation to ensure equity and justice to all. “With the sanctions provided for under the charge of non-justifiability should be rested.”

Dogara believed that the police to population ratio should be enhanced “as a matter of great urgency while training and motivation should be stepped up. All public as well as private sector regulatory bodies should ensure that the tenets of good governance are strictly observed in their respective spheres.”

“The farmer-herder challenge must be handled in a manner that promotes cohabitation as was previously the case and criminality seeking to hide under the guise of religion and culture must be isolated and dealt with decisively and fairly. Nigerians must accept the reality that the Herder problem is not a Fulani problem alone, it is a Nigerian problem. Unless we elevate it to the level we elevated the Niger Delta militancy question and deal with it as a National problem, I am afraid, we will never find a solution to the problem.”

Source: Guardian.ng

   

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Time Nigeria is a general interest Magazine with its headquarters in Abuja, the nation’s Capital.
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This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. 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The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. 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The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. 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