You must tackle insecurity now, Archbishop Martins tells Buhari

By Philip Nwosu

Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, Rt. Rev. Adewale Martins, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to rise to his responsibility as Commander-in-Chief and arrest the spate of insecurity in the country.

The cleric’s admonition came few days after fiery Catholic Priest, Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka, staunch supporter of President Buhari, called for his resignation or face impeachment following his inability to halt the killings.

Martins spoke at the Young Christian Workers (YCW) International Workers Day ceremony held to mark the 2021 Workers Day celebrations. He lamented the inability of the Federal Government to secure Nigerians, especially from various non-state actors who are beginning to take over the control of territories in some parts of  the country.

He said the security situation was getting from bad to worse and lamented that the  government seem not interested in safe guarding the lives and property of citizens.

Martins said with what is going on in the country, it can be rightly said that Nigeria is at war.

“The Commander-in-Chief must rise up to the occasion and give Nigerians some assurance, even if it means addressing the nation and giving us some of the things they are doing or are to do to douse the situation.

“We can only hope that the President of this country really rises up to the occasion. We learnt they had some security meetings  on Friday, we have had series of security meetings, what we need now is some demonstrations of the fact that there are positives coming from those security meetings, especially as Boko Haram has started taking territories not too far away from the nation’s capital.”

In his homily, Rev. Fr. Ethelbert Aura listed the challenges facing Nigerian workers to include poor remuneration, casualisation, insecurity, over blotted workforce and over blotted wages and called  on governments to consider an upward  review of the minimum wage, especially in consideration of the fact that N30,000 is too meagre to meet the needs of Nigerian workers.

He lamented that most Nigerian workers suffer oppression from their employers during their active days at work, and at retirement they still struggle to get their pensions paid, which he said was not good enough.

Aura said all these put together had reduced Nigeria to the poverty capital of the world.