Abuja – Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, at a roundtable on Chibok girls and vulnerable people, on Wednesday called for increased funding of education at all levels to empower the people and make them unwilling tools by insurgents.
Vice President Osinbajo specifically emphasised the importance of addressing vulnerability through quality education especially for girls.
He was speaking in Abuja at a one-day Roundtable on Vulnerable People in Insurgency and other conflicts in Nigeria, a forum organised by the Office of the National Security Adviser in conjunction with the Presidency.
Osinbajo gave the assurance that the Federal Government was committed to improving the sector and urged states and local governments to join in this effort to ensure quality education for their people.
“It is important in my view to have a lot more advocacy to reverse the situation where about 10.4 million children are out of schools.”
He urged stakeholders to do more in line with the theme of the Roundtable “Together We Can Do More”.
He stressed that all issues thrown up at the roundtable were critical towards having a holistic approach to addressing the plight of the vulnerable people across the country.
Osinbajo, cautioned against cynicism and hopelessness about the rescue of the 217 Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram, stressing that their rescue was uppermost in the mind of President Muhammadu Buhari.
He explained that the rescue of the Chibok girls was of utmost importance to the extent that it dominated the security meetings and that President Buhari as a parent was traumatised by the incident.
“At any security council meeting that I have attended, the President in particular has always been concerned about the question of Chibok girls in particular.
“Of course it comes out of ensuring that apart from the international importance attached to it, he reflects on the abduction as if any of the girls is one of his own,” he said.
Osinbajo expressed government’s appreciation to NGOs, CSOs and international partners and sought for their continued collaboration and assistance in further addressing issues around the wellbeing of victims and the rebuilding areas affected by insurgency.
Osinbajo said understanding that fundamental problems of poverty, corruption and lack of education were interconnected was critical to fashioning out long term solutions to the plight of vulnerable people.
He noted that vulnerable people were exposed to the harshest conditions not only in conflict areas but in everyday life.
“Interconnectivity of many issues like poverty, corruption and lack of education exposes the fact of vulnerability especially of women and girls in our society.
Underlining the role that government could play in solving the problem of poverty, the Vice President observed that past budgets had largely ignored such need, stressing that budgets should be tailored to provide for the poor people.
“ There is a sense in which we must pay attention to how we design government programmes, how we plan budgets, so that we take into account the great poverty of our people”, he submitted.
He said such concern was the reason the Federal Government voted N500 billion in this year’s budget for five different social intervention programmes including conditional cash transfer to the very poor.
On corruption, Prof. Osinbajo said the present level of systemic corruption in the country made it difficult to deliver service to the people because funds meant for infrastructure and social uplift of the people were diverted.
“I believe we must deal with corruption, it is at the heart of what has gone wrong in this society.’’
The Ambassadors of U.S. and France, who were at the event, noted the agony of parents of the Chibok girls two years after their abduction and pledged their countries’ continued support in the search and defeat of Boko Haram.
The Special Adviser to president Buhari on Internally Displaced Persons, Mrs Mariam Uwais, said the government had put a lot of intervention programmes to address the needs of vulnerable people.
She said there was need to build confidence in the conflict torn communities to give the people a sense of protection.
Also the Minister of Interior, Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau, said that Chibok was a test of the nation’s security and other institutions and suggested better intelligence gathering to forestall such incidences. (NAN)