Bakare urges FG to prosecute subsidy profiteers

Pastor Tunde Bakare  | credits: File copy

Vice-Presidential candidate for the Congress for Progressive Change in 2011 elections, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has called on the government to prosecute those who illegally benefitted from fuel subsidy.

The Serving Overseer, Latter Rain Assembly, spoke at the church’s auditorium on Sunday while delivering the Part Four of a sermon titled, ‘Intervention in Governance: Wisdom for Public Service’.

The cleric, who used the biblical story of King Solomon and the two women who brought a case over the maternity of a child to him as a metaphor, stated that President Goodluck Jonathan must do justice to Nigerians by ensuring that the subsidy fraud was thoroughly investigated.

He said, “God will give the President the wisdom on how to do it. A leader needs wisdom to administer justice. Wisdom is the tree of life. The subsidy issue must not be swept under the carpet. There should be justice because there can never be peace without justice.

“This is not a matter of politics. We should fix the problem before the problem fixes us. There should be no attempt to sweep the matter under the carpet, else every other thing will not work. We need to know who collected certain amount of money and what it was used for.”

Bakare added, “Sometimes, we think that integrity was enough to serve in government but in the Nigerian context, it had shown that it is not. Integrity is not enough, experience counts.”

He lamented that a majority of the Nigerian political leaders are only concerned about themselves while those who elected them wallow in abject poverty.

According to Bakare, no good leader will look down on the people he is supposed to serve and call them “ordinary”, “miscreants” and “masses”.

He added, “No leader that is worth his salt will look down on the people he is supposed to serve and call them ordinary, masses and miscreants. They only become ‘great’ when he was seeking their votes.”

On whether the Save Nigeria Group, which played a major role in mobilising Nigerians during the fuel subsidy removal protests in January had abandoned the fight against unpopular government’s policies, Bakare declined comments.