Lagos Archbishop Warns Political Leaders To Stop Heating Up Polity

Most Reverend Adewale Martins, the Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, has admonished politicians to stop heating up the polity as they jostle for political positions.

The clergy gave this advice while he was been interviewed by News Agency of Nigeria on Tuesday in Lagos.

“Our political leaders are heating up the environment too much; we need them to cool down the temperature; all the defections and the rest of it are not helping and the kind of stories that they tell about one another.

“One needs to ask the political elite to please ensure that they prepare for the elections (in 2019) in such a way that it will not create the kind of tension that everybody is feeling now.

“We want elections that are peaceful, fair, and just.

“Our political elite have the duty to make this happen; they must make the sacrifices they need to make for the sake of this country.’’

Martins underscored the important of both the executive and legislative arms of government working together since they are partners in progress.

“We need to get the executive and the legislature right in other that the whole country can move well.

“A situation in which the executive is trying to impose itself upon the legislature as we saw recently with the DSS literary shutting down the assembly, obviously that is an imposition that can create a lot of trouble for democracy.

“And of course if the national assembly is also not cooperating in terms of passing the laws without going through any stress recently we saw the difficulty with passing the budget of the INEC.

“That naturally is a big issue that ought not to have gone there if there was true understanding of what is good for the nation.

“So the executive and the legislature really need to work more because basically the judiciary just executes law, but this one that makes the law, they need to work harder.’’ he said.