The public shouting match between President Muhammadu Buhari and Senate Minority Leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, over the latter’s call for the President’s resignation over the spike in insecurity in the country, escalated yesterday with President Buhari threatening to jail the lawmaker for allegedly aiding and abetting the escape of the leader of the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu.
The fiery Senator Abaribe had on Wednesday, asked President Buhari to resign, saying “If you want to treat an issue, you go to the head. We did not appoint the IG or the security chiefs. We will go to the president and ask him to resign.” But in an angry reaction, President Buhari in a statement by his spokesman, Garba Shehu described Abaribe’s resignation comments as “foolish,” saying he cannot resign based on the “stray” opinion of an “armchair critic”.
“If a leader like President Buhari needs to resign, there are millions of other Nigerians who need to resign, including Senator Abaribe who unlocked the door to enable the escape of traitorous and treasonable suspects.” Shehu suggested in the statement that Abaribe lacked the moral authority to call for the president’s resignation, because to all intents and purposes, he ought to be in jail.
“He signed the bond for the court to release Nnamdi Kanu on bail, from which moment the suspect disappeared into the thin air. Senator Abaribe has failed repeated deadlines to return Kanu to the court for trial, yet he has the effrontery with which to accuse someone of failing to the bidding of the law. This is a man who should have replaced the suspects he failed to produce in the correctional facility. Abaribe’s party raped the nation and left it collapsing in 2015 and President Buhari is fixing things up all the years he is in office,” the statement noted.
According to the statement, Abaribe ought to have replaced Kanu in the correctional facility for failing to produce Kanu for whom he stood as surety, arguing that Buhari is fixing the country and striving to keep the country safe. Dismissing Abaribe’s call for Buhari’s resignation as a stray comment, Shehu said if Buhari had to resign, then Abaribe and millions of other Nigerians would have to also resign.
The statement read: “Just because some characters think that President Buhari should resign, then they expect him to quit. That call does not represent the opinion of the country. This is the opinion of an arm chair critic, known for making stray comments. If a leader like President Buhari needs to resign, there are millions of other Nigerians who need to resign, including Senator Abaribe who unlocked the door to enable the escape of traitorous and treasonable suspects.
Abaribe spoke after the Senate Leader, Yahaya Abdullahi, presented his motion on rising security challenges in the country. Abaribe said he was surprised why the president will claim to be surprised at the rising insecurity in the country. He also called out the presidential media aide, Femi Adesina, for referring to the Christian Association of Nigeria as a political party for condemning killings by Boko Haram. “Those who live by propaganda will die by propaganda,” Abaribe said. But Shehu countered that: “President Buhari is working hard to keep Nigeria and Nigerians out of the harm terrorists have unleashed in the entire Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa with the support of Nigerians and our foreign friends, he is going to finish off these terrorists. He alone can do it.”
Senator Abdullahi’s motion, which sparked the debate that was intended to proffer legislative solutions to the security problems facing the country, has the name of all the senators attached as sponsors. Issues of state police, lack of coordination and lack of synergy among the security agencies, lack of political will, and the expiration of the tenure of the service chiefs formed the thrust of the debate. When the debate was thrown open, Abaribe, who was the first senator to speak, lamented that instead of taking practical steps to address the security issues, government officials kept deceiving the people that the Buhari administration had defeated insecurity. Abaribe’s position attracted intermittent interventions from Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, who cautioned against the use of hate speech during the debate. On the submission that the government had failed, Lawan said: “This government was re-elected because it had done well.”
But Abaribe insisted the Buhari administration deserved to be “stoned out of power” for not living up to the expectations of Nigerians. He accused the government of using propaganda to deceive Nigerians that security was being restored. “We are very serious here; this is a matter of life and death! They had said that Boko Haram had been defeated, that Nigeria is now safer. Everything is being done to make sure that the hard work that is supposed to be in place in securing Nigeria is not there because certain people are not doing their work but prefer to cover the eyes of Nigerians with propaganda. We have wasted time in Nigeria trying to find all these excuses for non-performance. Reality is no respecter of persons and it is the reality we are facing now. Senator Sani Musa was shouting every day that his people were being killed in Niger, we just took one motion on a student who was murdered by a Boko Haram and we were told that the killers had been defeated,” Abaribe said.
And when maximum attention was being paid to his debate, Abaribe hit the nail on the head asking President Buhari to resign immediately. “To go to the fact of what we must do, we must have read on the pages of newspapers today where even you (the Senate President) have suggested that we should invite the inspector general of police (IG). Nigerians did not elect the IG, we did not elect the chief of army staff, we did not elect the joint chiefs, we did not elect the national security adviser, we elected the government of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015 and reelected the administration in 2019. The reason we reelected them was that they continued to tell us that they had the key to security, I agree with them. When you want to deal with a matter, you go to the head, so we will go to the government and ask this administration to resign because they can no longer do anything”
Lawan, again, interjected, saying: “Let me remind you once again that Nigerians voted for APC in 2015, and because they saw improvement in their lives, they voted APC again in 2019. I don’t want us to be partisan and I will advise against hate speech.” Undeterred, Abaribe submitted: “Yes! Nigerians voted a government into power and that government even said if it did not do well, it should be stoned. We are going to take stones and stone them now because they are not fulfilling that promise.” Abaribe’s suggestions which attracted applause from many lawmakers, however, led to a moment of rowdiness and exchange of unpleasant words when a former Nasarawa State governor, Abdullahi Adamu, rose and voiced out very hostile words against the call that the government should resign. Adamu described the suggested stoning of the government as another step in promoting insecurity. He advised Abaribe to withdraw his remarks, a position that attracted another round of shouts of disapproval.
The issue of state police recorded a boost during the debate. When the Deputy President of the Senate, Ovie Omo-Agege, attempted to oppose the idea on the ground that state governors would hijack state police if allowed, many lawmakers shouted in disapproval as he tried to explain his position. At the end of the debate, the Senate resolved to urge President Buhari to declare a national security emergency. The upper chamber also set up a 17- member ad hoc committee chaired by Senate Leader, Abdullahi, to engage the security agencies and report back to the Senate in two weeks. It will also engage the NSA on the implementation modalities of the December 2019 national security strategies.
In a related development, House Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, expressed concern over the spate of insecurity in the country. The speaker, who lamented the upsurge in the nefarious activities of the Boko Haram terrorists, particularly supported the decision by the South-west governors to put in place the regional security network code-named Amotekun to support the efforts of the Nigeria Police in preventing crime and protecting life and property. He urged the leadership of the House to take active steps to bring to the floor, appropriate amendments to the constitution and other interventions to protect life and property.
Gbajabiamila said: “We have witnessed across the country, a recognisable uptick in crime, manifested through the activities of bandits destroying communities, kidnappers operating for profit and insurgents seeking to remake our world in the image of a discredited theocracy. Our cup of endurance has run over and we are no longer willing to labour under these dark clouds of random violence inflicted upon our people by faceless cowards whose ends we do not understand, and whose means we do not know.
“The establishment of Àmòtékùn, as the network is called, has met with commentary from across the country, both for and against. Too often, it has seemed to me that lost in these interactions is the hard, brutal and unavoidable fact that Àmòtékùn and other such state or zonal interventions that already quietly exist in other parts of the country are a desperate response to the vile manifestations of insecurity that trouble the lives of citizens, depriving them of the peace and security that gives life meaning.
“I do not know that Àmòtékùn or whatever iterations of it may follow represents the ultimate or perfect solution to the problem of insecurity in our country. Nobody does that. What I do know with absolute clarity and certainty is that the localised manifestations of insecurity across the different parts of our country call for unique and localised approaches that take those peculiarities into account.”
