NIGERIA @ 66 EXPLOSION! “THE FLAG WAS JUST THE BEGINNING” – TGF BOMBSHELL SLAMS LEADERS, SAYS PROMISE STILL WAITING AFTER 66 YEARS!
GREATRIBUNETVNEWS–“Independence Day statement calls for competence-based leadership, state-led industrialisation, rural banking, a leaner cost of governance and an end to the culture of public office as a pedestal”
“A Vote Sold Is A Pension For 4 Years Of Neglect” – TGF Charges Citizens To Demand, Leaders To Deliver!
“The Transformative Governance Forum (TGF) has marked Nigeria’s 66th Independence anniversary with a statement that honours the founders and the resilience of ordinary Nigerians, while charging political leaders to deliver on the social promises written into the Constitution and urging citizens to use their votes to reward service and retire neglect.”
“A Vote Sold Is A Pension For 4 Years Of Neglect” – TGF Charges Citizens To Demand, Leaders To Deliver!
THE TITLE & THE FOUNDERS’ PROMISE:
“Titled ‘The Flag Was the Beginning: 66 Years of a Promise Still Waiting’, the statement was issued by the Forum’s Media and Policy Affairs Directorate. It recalls that the generation of Awolowo, Aminu Kano, Jakande and Bola Ige understood independence as a promise that a child born in Ile-Ife, Kano or Port Harcourt would find a school, a clinic and a fair chance waiting. ‘Chapter II of our Constitution wrote that promise into law,’ the Forum said. ‘Sixty-six years later, it is still waiting to be kept.'”
THE CHARGE TO CITIZENS – DUTY & VOTES:
“Addressing citizens, TGF described citizenship as a duty exercised daily: to know what is done in one’s name, to ask what it costs, and to say so aloud. It urged Nigerians to be willing to bear temporary pain for permanent gain, but insisted that leaders must earn that sacrifice by showing where it leads and by sharing it fairly. Voters were called upon to reward responsive and responsible leadership and to retire those who are neither. ‘A vote sold is a pension for four years of neglect, and you are the one who pays it,’ the statement said.”
THE LOYALTY VS COMPETENCE BOMBSHELL:
“On leadership, the Forum said loyalty is a legitimate claim to office, that parties are built on it, and that those who bled for a cause deserve a place in its government. But loyalty alone qualifies no one. Loyalty only opens the door and competence must carry the appointee through it.”
THE FULL TEXT BY THE TGF
THE FLAG WAS THE BEGINNING: TGF CHARGES LEADERS TO DELIVER AND CITIZENS TO DEMAND AS NIGERIA TURNS 66
Independence Day statement calls for competence-based leadership, state-led industrialisation, rural banking, a leaner cost of governance and an end to the culture of public office as a pedestal
The Transformative Governance Forum (TGF) has marked Nigeria’s 66th Independence anniversary with a statement that honours the founders and the resilience of ordinary Nigerians, while charging political leaders to deliver on the social promises written into the Constitution and urging citizens to use their votes to reward service and retire neglect.
Titled “The Flag Was the Beginning: 66 Years of a Promise Still Waiting”, the statement was issued by the Forum’s Media and Policy Affairs Directorate. It recalls that the generation of Awolowo, Aminu Kano, Jakande and Bola Ige understood independence as a promise that a child born in Ile-Ife, Kano or Port Harcourt would find a school, a clinic and a fair chance waiting. “Chapter II of our Constitution wrote that promise into law,” the Forum said. “Sixty-six years later, it is still waiting to be kept.”
Addressing citizens, TGF described citizenship as a duty exercised daily: to know what is done in one’s name, to ask what it costs, and to say so aloud. It urged Nigerians to be willing to bear temporary pain for permanent gain, but insisted that leaders must earn that sacrifice by showing where it leads and by sharing it fairly. Voters were called upon to reward responsive and responsible leadership and to retire those who are neither. “A vote sold is a pension for four years of neglect, and you are the one who pays it,” the statement said.
On leadership, the Forum said loyalty is a legitimate claim to office, that parties are built on it, and that those who bled for a cause deserve a place in its government. But loyalty alone qualifies no one. Loyalty only opens the door and competence must carry the appointee through it.
Only competent loyalists should be appointed, it said, because public office is a trust held for the people and not a reward to be collected. Every appointee must be judged by results, and those found wanting or incompetent must be removed and replaced without delay. “A government that keeps a failing appointee in post for the sake of friendship has chosen the friend over the citizen,” the statement said.
TGF commended President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for reforms that earlier administrations feared to touch, citing the end of the fuel subsidy regime, the unification of the exchange rate, the tax reforms and the student loan scheme that opened tertiary education to many. It added that history rewards leaders who act on difficult truths, and then set out where more must be done.
The Forum warned that reform is only half a policy without regulation. Deregulation without adequate regulation, it said, hands the market to the strongest and leaves the weak at the mercy of whoever is bigger. TGF drew a line between a government that is business-friendly, which builds fair rules, honest competition and protection for consumers and workers, and one that is a friend of businesses, which protects insiders and calls it liberalisation.
“Every reform must travel with the regulator that makes it just,” it said. It also urged Nigeria to study how the Nordic countries and Germany built the institutions that fund health, education and a decent old age, and to borrow what fits Nigerian conditions in order to fulfil the social rights in the Constitution.
On the economy, TGF called on government to take the lead in production. It proposed substantial state ownership stakes in strategic industries, namely iron and steel, petrochemicals, fertilisers, and drugs and vaccines, with government staying out of management and leaving professional boards to run them free of political interference.
It pointed to Britain’s return of its passenger railways to public ownership as proof that market-minded economies accept that some assets are too important to leave to chance. To carry capital to the village, the Forum also urged the establishment of a Post Bank with full power to accept deposits, and the recapitalisation of the Bank of Agriculture and other development banks, so that farmers, traders and artisans can save, borrow and build.
The Forum said none of this can be financed by a government that spends lavishly on itself, and called for a reduction in the cost of governance. It condemned the craze for expensive imported SUVs in official convoys while locally assembled vehicles such as Nord, Innoson and Proforce are ignored, saying Nigeria First must be lived by those in office and not merely recited at conferences. It described as indefensible the flaunting of opulence while women in labour die in public hospitals for want of money to pay for safe delivery and children die of malaria, a curable disease, because their parents cannot afford treatment. “A people forgive a government its limits,” the statement said. “They do not forgive its indifference.”
Turning to how Nigeria chooses its leaders, TGF argued that the country adopted the American model of multiparty politics, with its showmanship and contest of budgets, when it should have adapted it to local conditions. It pointed to the Chinese principle of selection before election, in which leaders are tested over years in the work of governing before they are entrusted with power, as a lesson worth studying, while stressing that Nigeria should copy no one’s system and should adapt the principle that the people deserve to choose among the capable. The Forum said the duty falls first on the progressive party in power to take charge of its primaries so that only those with proven character, competence and service emerge, and not those with the deepest pockets.
TGF charged President Tinubu to leave a legacy beyond his own tenure: a disciplined, ideologically anchored progressive party that outlives its leaders and supplies the country with tested servants, in the way strong parties have shaped the modern states of South Africa, South Korea, Singapore and China. It also called for an end to the culture in which holders of public office see themselves as deities and not as servants. “Power is a loan from the people, and it comes with a due date,” the statement said.
The statement closed with a charge to both sides of the national bargain. To those who govern, it said: ask whom you have left standing on the roadside when the convoy passes, live on less than the office allows, build what you ask others to buy, and appoint people better than yourselves. To citizens, it said: no government is better than the people it fails to fear, and those who sell their votes or stay silent share the authorship of what is done in their name. “The country we want will not arrive on a podium,” TGF said. “It will be assembled by ordinary people who refused to look away.”
The Forum wished all Nigerians a happy Independence Day.
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