Senate Leader, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, has said the National Assembly will this week pass the constitutional amendment bill seeking to establish state police, describing the reform as long overdue amid worsening security challenges. In this interview with ADEBAYO FOLORUNSHO-FRANCIS, the lawmaker representing Ekiti Central Senatorial District also explains why the Senate rejected calls to probe military spending and more
Why is the Senate not interested in addressing the motion to probe military spending amidst the rising insecurity across the country?
The issue of insecurity is one about which no serious, God-fearing public official can pretend any longer. It is a major issue. People may argue about whether the situation is getting worse or better. For me, the more important question is not simply to categorise it one way or the other, because sometimes things get worse before they get better. Let me explain that in the context of what happened on the floor of the Senate last week. The motion in question sought to establish a national committee to probe all financial releases made to the military in the prosecution of this war. We did not think that was the right approach, and we will not pretend otherwise. In the first instance, our military are giving their best under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Let us remind ourselves that this is not a conventional warfare. This same military faced Boko Haram terrorists in conventional battle and dislodged them. There was a time when these terrorists had their flags flying over communities they had captured — local governments in this country had become no-go areas under their control. When they sought to advance further, our military confronted them, defeated them in conventional battle, and reclaimed those territories. At that point, rather than continue engaging our forces in open combat, the terrorists dissolved into cells and adopted guerrilla tactics. For the first time in our nation’s history, a military trained for conventional warfare was suddenly required to fight an unconventional enemy. Nobody had envisaged this — not the nation, not the military itself. But they did not give up. They have sustained the fight at great sacrifice — sacrifice to our officers and soldiers who are losing their lives, sacrifice to the families of victims who have been killed or kidnapped, and sacrifice to a government that must manage highly sensitive information while remaining accountable to the public. When that motion came before the Senate, the question before us was whether we wanted to put our own military on trial in the middle of a war.
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