Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has declared that a four-year term is too “small” to govern Nigeria.
In an interview he granted Financial Times in Lagos on Thursday, he said, “I think that for anyone who is in office, it (four years) would be too small because obviously you have all manner of plans and things to deliver. But my take is that the moment you have the right people and you put the right structures in place, you can do a lot, and I think we’ve been blessed with an incredibly good team.”
His spokesman, Laolu Akande, late Saturday released a transcript of the interview.
Osinbajo said the administration wished it had done better in the manufacturing sector.
Q: What areas hasn’t the administration been able to achieve all that it had planned to?
He said Nigeria had not signed the African Free Trade Agreement because of the need for further consultations, especially with the private sector.
Asked how the present administration was tackling insecurity, he said: “First of all, let me say that the nature of the security threats is asymmetric coping with it. And this is the same with countries all over the world; coping with terrorism is the sort of thing that most countries are grappling with.
‘I think that we are dealing with that as well. And my take is that the way we are going about it is the right way, in other words, we are working with partners in the sub-region to ensure that we are able to stem the flow of small arms for example.
“We are also working on developing our local capacity. One of the strong initiatives that we are pushing is community policing; because a lot of the terrorism that you see are the sorts of opportunistic attacks that require local policing.
“And one of the strong initiatives that we are pushing is the whole question of the state police; more local and community policing, and we are working on those initiatives with the governors, like in the National Economic Council, which I have the privilege of chairing. We are trying to see how we can do more in terms of local policing, intelligence gathering, in order to be able to respond much more quickly to some of the threats that we see.
“For example, in Benue State, we have deployed Special Forces now to several of the places where we have the disturbances. So, it is an ongoing engagement, and, as I said, asymmetric threat of this nature means that we just have to keep planning ahead as much as we can.”
Osinbajo noted that the herdsmen-farmers’ crisis did not start with the present administration.
“I think we are at a point that we believe that the right response; our response, has to be robust to ensuring that we are able to keep communities safe, which is what is going on. We are doing that in various parts of the North central,” he said.
The vice president said the present administration had able to deal with grand corruption.
“By that, I mean the sort of corruption where you found huge sums of money missing from the treasury and all of that. And because we were able to control grand corruption, we were able to do more with far less. So, for example, we invested N1.3 trillion in 2016 on capital for the very first time in almost 10 years of the country’s economic history.
“So, if we were able to invest more when oil prices at some point, were $50 or $60, than when oil prices were at $110, $114; especially on infrastructure and capital; I’m sure anyone could say that there is something wrong with that. I think we managed to do far more with less,” he stated.
