Nigerians Speaking Against The Government Is Part Of The Dividends Of Democracy – Lawan

Senate President, Ahmed Lawan has come out to outline the need for reduction in external borrowing.

He recently revealed this while interacting with State House correspondents after meeting President Muhammadu Buhari, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, the Federal, State and Local governments must quickly find lasting solutions to the menace of agencies that are not remitting revenues to the treasuries.

He added that people castigating the president, governors, and other politicians in Nigeria is simply part of the intangible dividends of democracy.

His words, “We also had discussions on some other governance issues that have to do with making the revenues in the country, especially for government at the federal and the state levels, and even local governments even more.”

“There are so many agencies of government that are not remitting their internally generated revenues and this is something that we have to address and address as stiffly as possible and as quickly as possible because we need to find a way of reducing the borrowing that we do.”

“People say anything or everything about the President, about the administration, about members of National Assembly, they call us names and this is part of the intangible dividends of democracy.”

“But we are determined to ensure that the space is wide open for everybody to say whatever he wants to say, but I will advise that don’t say things that are bad… Recently, somebody said $10 million was given to the Speaker and the Senate President to give to members of the National Assembly to pass 3% host community development fund. That is funny, but also very serious.”

“I really want to take this opportunity to take exceptions to those kinds of unwarranted, unprovable, false and fake information being fed to the Nigerian public and the danger people will face with this is you cause unnecessary damage to the reputation of people.

“I had to take someone to court because of this kind of thing about three months ago, but Nigerians are better judges than anywhere else. So, the freedom of expression is there, probably more than anywhere in the world, but I want to caution that Nigerians should always think positive about their leaders and their administration and their governments and if they have issues they feel very strongly about, let them speak the truth and we are prepared to take corrections that we feel should be able to make us do better.”