Vice-President Professor Yemi Osinbajo has said without joining politics, he would not have been able to make changes required to make Nigeria better.
Osinbajo who stated this on Wednesday at a virtual forum where he interacted with Nigerian fellows of the Mandela Washington fellowship for ‘Young African Leaders’, said the way to transform the society is largely dependent on the actions of those who occupy public offices
According to a statement by his spokesperson, Laolu Akande, the VP said: “It took public office for me to be able to get the scale of change that is required to make a difference,” Osinbajo was quoted as saying.
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“Without public office, I would have remained a pressure group activist; I would have done some nice things, but I wouldn’t have been able to make the changes that my country required.
“I was once where you were. I was part of several civil society groups at the time. I joined the first civil society group when I was 24, I was teaching at the time. I also co-founded the anti-corruption group, Integrity, and then Convention on Business Integrity.
“I was chair of the Legal Research and Development Centre, where we worked on civil rights issues and legal defence for the poor. We did a couple of legal defence initiatives; we got funding from donors and tried to do the best we could.
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“If I count the number that we did all the years, it will be around maybe a hundred or so. We achieved some good, but compared to the scale of the problem, it was really a little.
“But in 1999 came politics, and I was appointed attorney-general of Lagos. With that platform, we took on corruption in the Lagos judiciary and set a model. We reviewed the issues of corruption in the Lagos judiciary and how to address it from remuneration to discipline, and we were able to put in place an anti-corruption framework that has lasted several years.
“The reason why I make this point is that other states, after what we did in Lagos, copied that very example. So many states improved remuneration and a wide variety of things.”
