A union leader based in Edo State, Comrade Dr. Oregbe Omorodion, has bemoaned the increasing level of corruption in Nigeria, saying it’s capable of collapsing the economy of the country if the current trends are not properly and urgently stemmed.
He told The RELIANCE during a special interview in Benin City, Edo State, that the alarming rate of corruption in the country was of major concern to him, saying that corruption has nearly spread to all the facets of our institutions.
“In those good days, if you had #10 and you entered the supermarket, you would expect to come out with a very big paper bag. But today, look at what is happening in this country. It’s a shame. Our leaders don’t care about us. All they care about is their pocket.
“Nearly all of them are lining up their children for political positions and other sensitive governmental offices. We have served them and now they want us to serve their children. When you look at the political parties today; how can someone vying for an office where you are not to be paid up to five million naira a month but you use forty million nairaa or hundred million naira to pick a form to contest for such an office?
“You will give twenty thousand dollars; foreign currency to buy one vote and we say we have the EFCC, ICPC and the police in this country? No one called any one of them to question to ask them where they got these funds from. Nobody cares.
“Look at the police sector, today the police have come up with a new system now called Mobilization. It is an indirect way for a complainant to be extorted. Yet they claim that bail is free. Let’s say from Area Command to the IG office, what they do now is that as soon as they approve your petition, they will invite you to make a statement and as soon as you do that, they would tell you to mobilize them.
‘Not something like five thousand naira, they would give you conditions. If you don’t meet those conditions, they won’t attend to your case. You might even meet their conditions and they would still not do your job, it happened to me. They collected the money from me but didn’t attend to my petition.
“Sadly there is hardly any place in Nigeria that is not corrupt? When you look at the whole system, look at the election primaries of the two major parties (PDP and APC), it was a case of electing the highest bidder.
“Even our palace today, they are also not helping matters. An issue happened in my community whereby some people took over our property illegally. The palace intervened. They went there to put palm fronds on the site. That is a sign in Benin that that place is a no-go area. But because some elements within the palace collected money from those people and went there and removed the palm fronds and handed over the keys to those boys.
“Nobody thereafter listened to us, nobody listened to the Enogie. So you see the type of life we are facing today in Nigeria. We are all talking about money, money, money. We no longer have leaders that would blow a trumpet and say “my people, let us do this thing to better the lives of our people”. We don’t have such. All they care about is what will benefit them and their families.
“Unfortunately, it will be very difficult for the people to be able to help themselves because oppressors have placed us in a hunger position. All of us are hungry. So by the time they wave one thousand naira or two thousand naira, you’ll just say ‘thank God, I don get my own but unfortunately, two thousand, five thousand naira cannot take you to the next hour, it can’t.
“But we would continue to educate our people to do it right the in 2023 election. Just like what Peter Obi is doing now, trying to talk to the youths, telling them to put these people away because they don’t have anything upstairs. They don’t have anything in their heads. The only thing they have in their heads is fraudulence, how to defraud us, how to put us in a perpetual poverty position. Until we decide to change this narrative, they will never learn a lesson.
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