Funsho Doherty Urges Leaders to Prioritise Public Interest in Addressing Economic Woes

A Former Lagos State governorship candidate, Funsho Doherty, has called on Nigeria’s leaders to put public interest above personal and conflicting interests to tackle the country’s economic challenges. Speaking on Radio Now with Abiodun Adelowure, Mr. Doherty warned that failure to do so would leave Nigeria trapped in longstanding issues dating back to independence.  

He identified corruption, lack of transparency, and impunity as critical problems that require urgent action stressing that addressing these issues is essential to creating meaningful economic reform and governance improvement.  

He said, “The way to good governance is that the people who are in positions of leadership have to act in the public interest and not in self or personal or conflicted interest. That’s one of the biggest problems that we face. If you don’t deal with that, with the situation in which we’ve been since independence, if you give us another 50 years, we will still be in that situation, if we don’t deal with that thing.Because you make progress for two or three years, we’ll lose that progress over the next three to five years. So we must deal with corruption, we must deal with this lack of transparency, this impunity in government, and we must deal with it decisively. People have to be prosecuted, you have to have a zero tolerance for it.You cannot not do it and expect to make progress. We can talk from now till whenever, but if you don’t do it, we’ll not make progress.”

The former PDP candidate also criticised past and present administrations, attributing the country’s economic struggles to poor decisions made over the years. He argued that the current government has exacerbated these challenges through its handling of critical issues.  

“When the people who are in the seats are there acting for the people, the question then becomes are they doing the right things? That’s when the question of competence comes in, the right policies versus wrong policies, etc. And we can have debates around, you know, subsidy, around exchange rate, and so on. And that’s the topical debate.It is granted the reason why we are in the situation in which we are with respect to fuel subsidy and exchange rate is because of the actions of many governments, not just this government. But this government by its approach compounded some of those issues,” said Mr Doherty