By Adedayo Akinwale
Former Governor of Imo State and the Senator representing Imo West senatorial district in the National Assembly, Senator Rochas Okorocha, has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to imbibe the spirit of “hire and fire” mechanism, saying there is no point keeping incompetent people in government.
Okorocha stated this when the Integrity Group, a forum of non-National Working Committee (NWC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC), paid him a courtesy visit in his office yesterday in Abuja.
According to him, “I must say here that what works in most developed countries is ‘hire and fire’ which brings discipline into the system. There is nothing as bad as persons who occupy government positions and are not working, but are kept for sentiment reason. They should be fired to create room for those who can perform. There is nobody on earth who is Alpha and Omega; if you can’t do the job, be sure that someone else can do it.
“But when you know you can’t be fired, if you messed up, you tend to messed up the more. So, I suggest that our party should begin the issue of ‘hire and fire’. That is why I commend the decision to remove the leadership of the APC. That is how it should go, if you can’t do the job, we show you the way out. I will urge our party the APC, under the leadership of President Buhari to imbibe the spirit of ‘hire and fire’ so that people can sit up and do the right thing, rather than engaging in the primitive accumulation of wealth only for themselves.”
Okorocha also lamented that the party was not giving President Buhari the structural support, accusing the party leaders of selfishness.
The former governor also decried the reward system of the party, stressing that those who joined the party yesterday have taken over from the founding fathers of the party.
Okorocha added: “We no longer have what I term collective responsibility, rather, we have selfish responsibility, where leaders are busy thinking about the next election and what positions they can occupy instead of thinking about the dividends of democracy as it should affect the people of Nigeria.”
Earlier, the leader of the group, Mr. Sadiq Abubakar, insisted that the crisis currently bedeviling the party is the lack of a concrete reward system for loyal party members.
