A former Military Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (retd), will on Thursday, October 3 chair an international lecture on insecurity and the fight against corruption organised by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.
This was disclosed Friday disclosed by NAN Managing Director, Malam Ali M. Ali, when he led the Agency’s management team on courtesy visit to the Chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, at the commission’s headquarters at Jabi, Abuja.
The international lecture, according Ali, was part of NAN’s efforts to also contribute to the body of knowledge, adding that it would hold at at the Nigerian Army Resource Centre, Mambilla Barracks, Asokoro, Abuja, with the theme, “Insecurity in the Sahel (2008-2024): Dissecting Nigeria’s Challenges, Genesis, Impact and Option”.
The NAN boss informed that the Agency’s team was at the EFCC headquarters to intimate the commission chairman of the international lecture on insecurity and the fight against corruption.
According to Malam Ali, “Thankfully, the former ECOWAS Commission President and currently United Nations Special Rapporteur on Sudan, Mohamed Ibn Chambers, has agreed to deliver the lecture.
“The lecture will be chaired by the former Head of State Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, and the date of the lecture is October 3.
“The President is bid to attend, also the ministers of defense are all going to be there.”
Ali said that NAN felt it imperative to contribute its own quota to finding lasting resolution to the lingering crisis of insecurity in the country and beyond.
”We took it on a bigger scale. We are looking at insecurity in the Sahel, how it has affected Nigeria.
“We are dissecting the origin, the genesis, the impact and the options available to the country.
“We are looking at insecurity in the Sahel, how it has affected Nigeria, we are dissecting the origin, the genesis, the impact, the impact, and the option available to the country,” Ali said.
He asserted that there is a strong relationship between insecurity and corruption which are bedeviling the African continent.
“Why we said we’ll come and give you a first-hand notice is because there is a linkage between the two, the security and corruption,” he said.
Ali said that the EFCC, under the leadership of Olukoyede, had made significant strides in the anti-corruption fight over the years.
In his words, “We have seen the commendable job you’ve been doing in the last couple of months.
We said let us go to the EFCC and intimate them and this is what is happening.
“We do not want to just have the Chairman as a mere invitee. The whole management came to intimate you about our plans.”
Responding, Olukoyede, while describing the media as an important ally in the fight against corruption in Nigeria, stressed the need to collaborate with the media and civil society in the fight against corruption.
According to him, public enlightenment was one of the tools deployed in the fight against corruption, submitting that this could only be achieved using the media.
“We believe that concerning our mandate, we must have strong synergy with the media, especially the News Agency of Nigeria.
”It is extremely important because part of the factors we can deploy to really fight this war against corruption is public enlightenment and the major stakeholders are the media people.
“Without you, it will be extremely difficult to reach the grassroots and let the people know how endemic this problem is, and the need for us to all come together to collaborate.
”The job is not only for the law enforcement agency, it is for everybody,” the EFCC chairman said.
He added that there is nowhere in the world that anti-corruption agencies win the war against corruption without collaboration with the civil society and the media, saying that, “these are the people that will drum up from whatever you are doing and where there is sentiments, they are the people that will be able to balance things up.”
The EFCC boss said that corruption had a strong relationship with insecurity, adding that security could only be achieved when the fight against corruption was won.
According to him, “as a matter of fact, if you can deal with the issue of corruption, the issue of insecurity will become an issue of the past.”