Osinbajo Berates Elite for Orchestrating Nigeria’s Disunity
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Vice President Prof Yemi Osinbajo has berated Nigeria’s elite saying they are reason why the country has been unable to build virile institutions,the social and political consensus upon which a just and orderly society can stand.
Osinbajo delivered the scathing rebuke yesterday while delivering his keynote address at the 2020 Leadership Conference and Awards held at the International Conference Centre, Abuja in memory of the founder of Leadership Newspapers, Mr. Sam Nda Isaiah.
The theme of the lecture was: ‘National and Regional Insecurity: The Role of Political and NonPolitical Actors in Stabilisation and Concensus Building.’
He argued that the assumed failure Nigeria as a nation should not be premised on external vulnerabilities and its colonial past.
Rather, he pointed darts at the political class, saying they are drawing the country backward by putting selfish interest above collective interest.
“The chief weakness is a human one. Our elite. our political, economic, and religious elite. An elite that has so far proved to be socially irresponsible, one which either by selfishness, negligence or ignorance or a lack of self awareness has so far been unable to build the institutions and more importantly the social and political consensus upon which a just and orderly society can stand. And because dominance must be premised on some consensus, the elite depend on a dubious one, promotion of tribal and religious fault lines for legitimacy,” Osinbajo said.
He lamented that on a nationwide and regionwide scale, the nation is seeing challenges to national order driven by a profound and pervasive sense of exclusion and marginalisation.
The VP said: “So the attacks we see on law and order are themselves symptomatic and they are driven by emergent critiques of the fabric of order itself. These critiques are manifesting as insurrections and insurgencies along various axes of identity.