Former Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission Chairman, Professor Chidi Odinkalu, on Wednesday claimed that President Muhammadu Buhari is a “lazy and uncaring Commander-in-Chief”.
Odinkalu, a human rights lawyer, stated this while speaking on the state of insecurity in Nigeria on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme.
He frowned that President Buhari travelled out of the country a few hours after operatives of the Guard Brigade were ambushed and gunned down by terrorists in Abuja.
According to him, it was more frustrating that Buhari could travel to Liberia to speak on security while leaving an unsecure country behind,
Odinkalu opposed the argument that the state governors should also be blamed for the rising insecurity in the country, saying, “Security can not be outsourced to the state, all the security services have only one operational chief and that is the president.
“If you are talking about the police, the army, the navy, the SSS, the NIA, the Directorate of Military Intelligence, National Security Adviser, everyone reports through one channel to one person.
“The president is not just a commander-in-chief, he is the operational head of all of these agencies, they report to him.
“A president who is present will contain that [security] damage. The tragedy of our current crisis is that President Buhari is neither present nor capable of providing leadership, even worst, he does not care.
“You can’t have personnel of Presidential Guards Brigade being killed in Abuja and the president travelling off to Liberia to deliver a lecture on security. Are you serious?
“The job of a president is a lot of jobs in one. The president is the party leader, the president is the head of government, the president in the current administration, the petroleum minister. The president is a diplomat as well as a Commander-in-Chief.
“President as a party leader, somebody else can do that job. President as the head of government, somebody else can do that job. President as a diplomat, he can deploy the foreign minister or some other people to do that.
“There is only one element of the job of the president that can never be delegated as long as the president is terrestrial and that is the Commander-in-Chief.
“And when the Commander-in-Chief is as lazy, as uncaring as the current one that Nigeria has, the country is exactly where it deserves to be.
“A country can only have one Commander-in-Chief at a time and at the moment, Nigeria has a lazy Commander-in-Chief and an uncaring Commander-in-Chief.”
Decrying the lack of relationship between leaders, intelligence and operations, Odinkalu said the “transnationalisation of insecurity in Nigeria is the reason it’s hard to fix security.”
The human rights activist equally regretted the failures of Nigerian politicians to read security reports, recalling the revelation on Tuesday that 44 security reports were sent to the government before the Kuje prison attack.
According to the lawyer, the 2023 elections may not take place in many parts of the country if nothing is urgently done to tackle the security menace.