The Senate Minority Leader, Senator Harcourt Enyinnaya Abaribe, has said that the government of President Mohammadu Buhari is motivating insecurity in Nigeria.
Senator Abaribe made the allegation when he appeared in the Signature Show, an Africa Independent Television, AIT programme monitored in Abuja on Sunday.
He said insurgency by Boko haram, herdsmen attack, banditry and kidnapping had persisted because the current government had resolved to treat the issues with kids glove.
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP senator who represents Abia South, Abia State in the senate wondered why the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, MACBAN would address a press conference claiming responsibility for the death of 26 persons in Plateau State and the government will not go after them.
”The state will not go after them because the state has been motivating and indeed giving succour to these actors. Unfortunately, people have come out to say we committed these crimes and nothing had happened to them,” he stated.
Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, who is a principal officer in the senate wondered why the government reserves different treatments for people from other parts of the country, especially the South East.
”On the contrary, when a group of people from the South East now said we are being treated badly, we are being treated like second class citizens and therefore, we seek a referendum, so that we can determine whether we can continue to stay under this uneven yoke; the state deployed everything called coercive force to now het them and proscribe them and called them terrorists. So those who are murderers, who had come out and said they are murderers were not called terrorists, were not arrested, were not done anything to’.”
According to him, this a clear indication of the disparity in the treatment of ethnic nationalities in the country, a justification of the fact that something fundamental is wrong and needed to be fixed.
”What is fundamentally wrong is that there is no justice, you can’t have a society where people are treated unequally. A kind of feudal system or a system that says that some people are superior.”
On whether or not his call for President Mohammadu Buhari to resign was borne out of frustration, the lawmaker answered in the affirmative, insisting that it is the culmination of the frustrations of both the National Assembly and the generality of Nigerians who he said are fed up with the growing insecurity in the country.
”Yes, the frustration was there. At every point, ew had reports coming in from everywhere, and a couple of days, the Senate President Ahmad Lawan also indicated his frustration with what had been happening,” he added.
He recalled that in 2013, General Mohammadu Buhari had recommended that President Goodluck Jonathan, then Commander-In-Chief of the armed forces should resign as a result of insecurity in Nigeria.
”President Buhari had advised former President Jonathan, two years before the elections, in the cause of making comments as a statesman in the country, saying that he didn’t have the capacity to be commander-in-chief. So, he had made that recommendation and so now that we are seeing an incapacity too, to be commander-in-chief, why don’t you take your own medicine, resign, because you had earlier made that recommendation. And so the frustration wasn’t just me, I was expressing the frustrations of all well-meaning b
Nigerians who did not know what else to do and who else to complain to,” he said.
You can follow the details of these and other stories on the interview on Signaturetv.org
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