Former Minister of Sports under President Muhammadu Buhari, Barr. Solomon Dalung, has accused the federal government of lacking the political will to tackle the worsening insecurity across the country, saying the administration of President Bola Tinubu was more preoccupied with the 2027 general elections than with the lives of Nigerians being lost daily to terrorist attacks and abductions.

Dalung, who served under the late President Muhammadu Buhari in the All Progressives Congress, APC, made the accusation Friday on Arise Television’s Morning Show, where he delivered a sweeping indictment of the Tinubu administration’s three-year record on security, the economy, and political leadership.

“Government seems not to have the political will to deal with it. They have all the gadgets to track anybody who criticises the government — they can pick him up in the next five minutes. But they don’t have equipment to track terrorists who display huge phones in the forest, behead teachers, abduct schoolchildren, torture them in the forest, produce videos and send,” he said.

Dalung described the Minister of Information’s recent call on Nigerians to unite against terrorism as “uncalled for,” “an embarrassment,” and “demoralising,” arguing that the statement amounted to a confession of state failure rather than a rallying cry.

“I think it’s a statement confirming that the federal government has completely and woefully failed. They don’t seem to have any idea of a solution to the ravaging insecurity that is across the country,” he said.

The former Minister identified two fundamental gaps in the government’s approach: the absence of political will and a lack of coordinated strategy among security agencies.

He said the intelligence community, the military, and other agencies operate in silos, with each “scrambling for relevance to access the president” rather than sharing information and pursuing a unified front against insurgents.

He warned that terrorists were now operating what amounted to a parallel forest economy, sustaining themselves independently of the Nigerian state, and questioned what impact American military assistance — whose presence in the country has been publicly acknowledged — had actually made.

“We were told that the Americans are here with us. If the Americans are here with us, what have they been doing? We have not felt their impact,” Dalung said, calling on the government to stop issuing reassurances and instead empower communities to take responsibility for their own security.

On the road to 2027, Dalung expressed deep disillusionment with the political class, saying the country had reverted to the regional politics of the First Republic, with virtually every geopolitical zone now fielding a presidential candidate.

“Nigeria has returned to the politics of the first republic, where regions now have their political parties. Almost all the zones have presidential candidates. So ultimately, in 2027, we may be facing serious confusion as we advance towards election,” he said, adding that the north-central zone would once again become the decisive battleground for votes.

He also assessed President Tinubu’s three-year record as one of missed expectations, saying the “Lagos magician” had delivered little beyond rhetoric on reforms whose benefits had yet to reach ordinary Nigerians.

“Three years into his tenure, it is just blame game and rhetorics of reforms — reforms that no single iota of the benefit has trickled down. Rather, Nigerians are getting impoverished daily. The economy is in doldrums. Insecurity remains rhetorical,” he said.

However, a political scientist, Obafemi George, who also appeared on the programme, pushed back on Dalung’s assessment, arguing that the administration deserved more time and credit for difficult but necessary reforms.

George cited an upgrade of Nigeria’s sovereign credit rating by global agency Standard and Poor’s from B- to B as evidence that the economy was stabilising, and attributed the surge in insecurity partly to the withdrawal of French military forces from the Sahel region, which he said created a vacuum that international terrorist organisations rapidly filled.

“This current administration has confronted insecurity that is higher than the previous administration, spent more, and recorded more successes in combating insecurity,” George said, pointing to multiple rescue operations carried out in May alone across Goza and Katsina as proof of operational gains.

“You know, when you employ someone, you give the person KPIs. And likewise, when you vote a president into office, there are certain KPIs, economy, infrastructure, education, health sector, even security. And if you look at each of those, in my opinion, I could confidently say that the president ticked the boxes.

And we can begin to interrogate his performance not just with data, but even comparative analysis. I ask people to give me one example of a country in a modern era that has transitioned from being a poor country to a prosperous country in 36 months.

China lifted a million people out of poverty, but they didn’t do it in 36 months. It took them 40 odd long years.

And what they did is exactly what we’re doing. When China started that job in 1979, their GDP was just partly $179 billion. They began to invest in infrastructure, which is what this government is doing.

Are you saying, President Tinubu should remain president for the next 40 years?

What I’m saying is that we should be realistic. Even God Almighty that personally took a nation out of Egypt and took them to the promised land, it took God 40 years and it was God personally leading them. When President Tinubu went to Rwanda, people started comparing, saying small Rwanda had done so much. I responded and said Kagame has spent over 20 years to take Rwanda to where they are today. I know that religiously, we’ve been conditioned to always expect a miracle, that you wake up in the morning with N10, I go to bed with N1 million. Yes, I believe in miracles. But when it comes to building a nation, it takes a while. Dubai that we all go to today, they started that journey in 1974. It wasn’t until 2014 that Dubai actually arrived on the global scene as a tourist powerhouse. President Tinubu has laid a solid foundation,

Whichever way you’re going to pay. One of the things that we are going through that is causing our current pain is because some sacrifices that were meant to have been done years ago, weren’t done.

By 2014, the coordinating minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that Nigeria was broke, that we should stop paying subsidy. If we had removed subsidy 10-12 years ago, we won’t be where we are today. And the decision that President Tinubu has made today is so that in 10 years’ time, we will not sit down like this and be discussing this plan again. (Saturday Vanguard)

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