As Nigeria prepares for its presidential elections on March 28, a bishop in Sokoto has called on the next president to address the issues that he says are destabilising the country.
According to Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, these include the unequal distribution of the country's resources, and the growing threat posed by insurgent Boko Haram.
Bishop Kukah lamented that ordinary citizens are not benefiting from an equal distribution of wealth because the current distribution privileges only a few.
"Despite the huge resources that the nation has received from the unprecedented sales in oil, there is hardly anything to show for it in the lives of ordinary citizens," Bishop Kukah told ACN News. He added that ""[t]he uncontrollable hemorrhaging of resources has led to the ubiquity of misery among the people."
Kukah said he hoped the new government will take efforts to introduce measures to channel resources to the agricultural, education and employment sectors.
Aside from the economical issues that are plagueing the country, Bishop Kukah appealed to the winner of the upcoming election to urgently address the growing insurgency of Boko Haram. Nigerians in the north of the country are living in fear of the Islamist threat, which has prompted people, particularly Christians, to leave cities in the northern part of Nigeria to ancestral homes elsewhere in the country or even abroad.
The bishop said that the violence and fighting have negatively affected the relationship between the Christian and Muslim communities in the country.
"The insurgency has depleted a lot of the good will among the various ethnic groups and further deepened the fracture between Christians and Muslims," Kukah revealed.
Despite that, the bishop said he remains optimistic about the polls and said that Nigerians have "measured optimism" and "excitement" at the polls, albeit with a "deep sense of caution and even trepidation."
Nigeria's presidential elections were originally scheduled for February 14, but National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki secured a six-week postponement due to fears of a Boko Haram attack on Borno state capital Maiduguri on the scheduled polling day. It is hoped the delay will give the multinational force time to eliminate the threat in Northern Nigeria.
