A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in Kwara, Alhaji Mohammed Ajia-Ibrahim has blamed the state government for the armed robbery attack on banks in Offa, Kwara state.
According to him, if youths in the state were fully engaged in one vocation or the other, they would not be involved in criminal activities.
Ajia-Ibrahim stated this in Ilorin on Saturday at the 4th Kwara Youth Stakeholders Conference.
He lamented that over seven out of the 12 suspects arrested in connection with the Offa armed robbery were indigenes of Kwara.
The politician further urged Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed to pay greater attention to youth empowerment to reduce crime in the state.
Ajia-Ibrahim said: “if the government has made adequate provision for the youths of the state, they will not be involved in such dastardly crime where dozens of innocent people lost their lives.”
The governorship aspirant, therefore, called for total autonomy of local governments in the country.
He said that if local councils were autonomous, individual local council chairman will know how to engage the youth in his council area.
“If local governments are autonomous, chairmen of the council will engage the youths in one job or vocation to take them off the street and from going into crime.
“Youths cannot continue to sit on the fence; we must take our destiny in our own hands by being actively involved in politics.
“It is time for youths in Kwara to wake up from slumber and take up the gauntlet as the future belongs to us as leaders of tomorrow,” he added.
He appealed to the youths to make use of the “not-too-young-to-run’’ slogan and venture into politics with the sole aim to serve and not to loot.
Ajia-Ibrahim said that the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led Federal Government and Kwara Government had failed the youths.
He, therefore, appealed to the youths to register in the ongoing voter registration across the country to enable them exercise their civic responsibility in the 2019 general elections.
“Your PVC is your weapon to vote out inept and bad government out of office.
“I appeal to youths in the state to register and collect their PVC so that collectively, we shall decide our future in 2019,” Ajia-Ibrahim said.