Clinton Blames Nigerian Leaders for Boko Haram, Other Ills

Bill Clinton, former United States President has blamed religious violence in Nigeria to poverty and wastefulness of her leaders.

He particularly accused Nigerian leaders of squandering the country’s resources and mismanaging money realised from oil.

Clinton, who spoke at the 18th Annual ThisDay Award for Teachers in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, noted that the country could have invested her earnings from oil in other entrepreneurial endeavours rather than squandering it.
 
He also charged Nigerian leaders to harness the “staggering” intellectual and organisational ability in the country which her citizens exhibit in every country of world where they are immigrants and to bring such to bear at home in order that the country could realise her potential for greatness.

“One of the people on my trip with me today who unfortunately could not come up here because he had to go visit his family is a young Nigerian-American named Nnamdi. He is an all proquarter back footballer for the Philadelphia Eagles. He’s a wonderful man; he does great work in America for poor kids in Arkansas City and he became a friend of mine.

“His parents have PhDs, his sister has a PhD; he often says ‘I’m the failure in my family and I only have a university degree and I play football.’ My point is: there are Nigerians who are like this all over the world.

“What you have to figure out is how to keep those people in Nigeria and how to ensure their success leads on into the rest of the country,” he said. Clinton also said that the country must evolve a national policy that would make local governments tackle poverty at the grassroots.

“Prosperity is heavily concentrated in and around urban areas. So, you have all these political problems and now violence problems, religious differences and all the rhetoric of Boko Haram, but the truth is the poverty rate in the North is three times greater than what it is in the Lagos area.

And to deal with that, you have to have both powerful stake in the local governments and a national policy that work together,” the former American president added. Clinton also said that the country must do more to alleviate the extreme poverty in the North to halt the wave of bombings, shootings and kidnappings by Islamic extremists. He said that poverty remained the main driver for the attacks and needed to be addressed by strong local and Federal Government programmes.

“You have to somehow bring economic opportunity to the people who don’t have it. You have all these political problems and now violence problems that appear to be rooted in religious differences and the all the rhetoric of the Boko Haram and others, but the truth is the poverty rate in the North is three times of what it is in Lagos,” he said.

Clinton advised that Nigeria must not take a “divide the pie” approach toward attacking poverty.

“That appeared to be a subtle reference to the endemic corruption that envelopes government and private industry in the country. It’s a losing strategy, the former president said.

“You have to figure out a way to have a strategy that will have share prosperity.” He advised Nigerian leaders to pay more attention to agriculture and education of her citizens to be able to actualise her potential on the African continent.