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The Director-General of the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies, NILDS, Professor Abubakar Sulaiman, has called on political leaders in Nigeria to have a deeper understanding of the problems confronting the country if they hope to find lasting solutions to them.
Speaking at the opening of a capacity building workshop for research fellows of the institute in Abuja on Friday, Sulaiman said political leaders in the country need to change their mindset and develop the right attitude to understand the factors responsible for the conflicts especially the issue of insecurity in the country and develop also the right capacity required to resolve them.
He said the current mindset of insisting and maintaining a hard stance on issues even in the face of a superior and overwhelming sense of reasoning will always be counterproductive in the quest for solutions.
Sulaiman said it is in the light of this that NILDS under his watch and in collaboration with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung has vigorously embarked on this kind of capacity-building workshops to broaden the minds of stakeholders in the legislative arm of government as critical actors in Nigeria’s democratic process.
Also speaking, the Country Representative of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Vladimir Kreck said Nigeria’s democracy has witnessed a remarkable improvement in terms of the quality of debates and resolutions reached since 1999.
He, however, noted that there is room for improvement in the area of capacity building for the parliament given especially the high turnover of lawmakers and Parliamentary support staff after every legislative tenure in the country.
He welcomed the partnership between his agency and the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies with a promise to continue to do more to promote democratic values in Nigeria.