By Felicia Imohimi
Miyetti-Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) has advised the Federal Government to channel resources towards subsidising food, medicine and make them affordable for the masses.
Alhaji Baba Ngelzerma, National President of MACBAN, who gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja, urged the government to also channel resources in mitigating security challenges.
Ngelzerma, who identified insecurity, food and healthcare as the major challenges confronting the nation, suggested that government should channel all money that would be raised as revenue towards addressing the lingering challenges.
He specifically appealed to the government to apply non-kinetic measure to address the socio-economic challenges in the country.
According to Ngelzerma, non-kinetic measure is to come up with measures that will alleviate poverty, employment challenges, engage the youth on how to generate money and adopts a lot of policies that will keep the youth busy.
The president, who identified youth as accounting for over 60 per cent of the nation’s population, emphasised that engaging them in profitable ventures would help in addressing the issue of poverty, hunger and inflation.
“There is no need spending money on construction, let all capital project like road construction and others stop for a while and address the issue of food security, medicine and security challenges squarely.
“Government should focus on provision of food and medicine at subsidised rate and affordable for the ordinary man.
“Declare state of emergency in the economy, suspend any capital projects in the budget and address issue of food security squarely,” he said.
On security challenge, Ngelzerma urged government to adopt dialogue approach among farmers, herders, traditional rulers, religious leaders and security agencies to ensure lasting solutions to the challenge.
“Government should get the views of those in the forest, farmers, who always complain of bandits’ attack, vigilante groups, who are working to protect their communities against attack.
“Get the views of traditional rulers, religious leaders, get their suggestions on how the problem can be stopped and with their input through dialogue, we will get solutions to security challenges,” he said.(
NEWS AGENCY OF NIGERIA