The Governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole has identified poverty and the widening inequality in the world and the attendant global injustice as the major contributing factors to the emerging threat to global peace.

Delivering a lecture with the theme “Contemporary Transnational Threats to Global Peace” at the International Association of Lions Club, Multiple District 404 Nigeria, 32nd Annual Lions Day with the United Nations celebration in Lagos, Comrade Oshiomhole said this imbalance is perpetuated through a regime of trade distorting subsidies, especially in the Agricultural sector.

According to him, one of the overwhelming consequences of the inequalities in the international system, especially the unfair trade regime is the growing tensions at various world fora.

“It has been well acknowledged that the growth in mass poverty levels especially in Africa, many parts of Asia and the Middle East is due largely to the unequal distribution of income perpetrated by the international trading order,” he added.

The governor disclosed that around the world, there is a fast rising humanity of the poor and the disempowered, who are usually ever-ready materials for terrorism and similar movements.

He said, terrorism thus reflects the larger trend in society, where the privileged form the aristocracy while the poor constitute the foot soldiers, adding that elements laid off by closed factories and those unable to benefit from education and employment are readily available for negative use, because they are no longer capable of responsibility to a system that disempowers them.

Comrade Oshiomhole noted that as their counterparts in other parts of the world, Nigerian elites also espouse the need for peace, but in their utterance and actions of some leading players in the Nigerian polity, economy and society they clearly undermine peace and stability.

According to the governor, the elites undermine peace and stability through the do or die character of the political competition and the willful subversion of the electoral will of the people as well as the resurgence of the ethnic and the religious unionism among elites.

He noted that while leaders enjoin the youths to be nationalistic through schemes like NYSC, which the elite use to appraise the country through regional and religious prisms and platforms such as OPC, ACF, Ohaneze, Northern and Southern Governors, Senators and traditional rulers forum.

“But the greatest evidence is simply that the political and economical system is not working for the people, but is working only for the benefit of a few elite who dominate the political and economic process,” he said.

While commending the Lions International for organizing the ceremony, the governor noted that the theme suggests a concern on the part of the Lions International about the need to address some fundamentals which impact on world peace.

“I believe that we need to find explanations for the rising turbulence in the growing deep seated poverty, inequalities, exclusion and dislocations at international, regional and even national levels. I am convinced that there is need for more serious scrutiny of the nature of the international political, economic and trading system or what is now more popularly referred to as globalization

The Edo state governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, Chief Akintola Williams, doyen of the Accountancy profession in Nigeria and the governor of Lagos State were among those presented with awards at the ceremony.


Peter Okhiria,
CPS to Edo State Governor,
08023145286, 07030508268.