President Goodluck Jonathan on Sunday asked state governors to stop abdicating their constitutional responsibility of signing death warrant of criminals condemned to death by courts of competent jurisdiction.
The president made the call in a remark at the Fathers’ Day Sunday service organised by the Aso Villa Chapel.
The president said that the governors should realise that the job they were elected to do had both sweet and ugly parts.
He urged them to carry out all their responsibilities according to the dictates of the law.
“Discipline can be in various forms; in the states, it could be admonition. Magistrate can just admonish and allow an offender to go.
“From admonition to various forms of punishment, it could be imprisonment and the extreme is capital punishment.
“In the case of capital punishment, the state governors will sign.
“Even governors sometimes find it difficult to sign and I have been telling the governors that they must sign because that is the law.
“The work we are doing has very sweet part and very ugly part and we must perform both. No matter how painful it is, it is part of their responsibilities”, he said.
The president reminded fathers of the importance of instilling discipline in their children, adding that the love showered on the children must have limits so that it would not ruin their lives.
He encouraged parents to bring their children up properly, saying that fathers, in particular, must continually impress on their children the need to be upright in all they do.
Jonathan recalled the high level of discipline in the society while he was growing up and lamented that the virtue was waning with modernity.
“If we look through all the references that have to do with the father in the Bible, you will see that we expect a father to show love.
