Barely 24 hours after the Senate President, Ahmed Lawan opened up for the first time saying the level of insecurity in the country has gone beyond party politics and called for immediate review of national security architecture, Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign as Nigeria’s president.
Before now, there had been massive expression of concerns by many Nigerians over the near out-of-control of killings and destruction of properties across the federation by bandits, highway kidnapping and killings by herdsmen and insurgents.
But at plenary on Wednesday during open discussion a motion on national security challenges and the need to review the current security architecture, Senator Abaribe, who was the first to contribute to the motion, faulted the President for failing to tackle the security challenges in the country.
The Abia State Senator without missing words wondered why President Muhammadu Buhari would claim to be surprised at the jumping insecurity nationwide and recalled that “When I was coming, I saw a newspaper headline of THISDAY, the commander-in-chief expresses shock at the level of violent crime, in other words Mr president was expressing surprise, but, according to our rules – Order 53(13), I will not go into that but I can only say in pidgin English ‘this surprise, surprise me.’
“I want to say, Mr President, if you didn’t insist that we will not be partisan I’d have called out the presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, who, when the CAN leaders complained about the killings of a priest, he turned around and said CAN was acting like a political party.
“Now that we are talking about it here, let me hear him say that all of us are acting like a political party when many are complaining about these incessant deaths in this country,” he said.
Seantor Abaribe, who called for getting to the root of the matter, averred that “those who live by propaganda will die by propaganda.”
Without recourse to an interruption by the Senate President, who asked him to “stick to the topic being discussed,” the angered lawmaker recalled earlier claims of the Federal Government that “Boko Haram has been defeated, Nigeria is now safer, everything that was being done to make sure that the hard work that was supposed to be done in securing Nigeria was not done because certain people did not do their work but preferred to cover the eyes of Nigerians with propaganda and trying to find all these excuses for non-performance, have now come to stare us in the face.
“Nigeria did not elect the IGP, we did not elect the chief of staff, we did not elect the joint-chiefs or national security adviser. We elected the government of APC in 2015 and re-elected them in 2019. The reason we re-elected them is that they continued to tell us that they had the key to security.
“When you want to deal with a matter, you go to the head, so we will go to government and ask this government to resign because they can no longer do anything,” he said.
At the instance of another caution by the Senate President, the Abia lawmaker towered further reminding the Senate that “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 to be partisan and advise against hate speech,” the Senate President noted.
Though he was stopped while making his final note, the aggrieved Abaribe averred that “government even said if ‘we don’t perform, stone us’, we are going with the stones to stone them now.”
Whereas the next lawmaker to speak, former Governor of Nasarawa State, Abdullahi Adamu, moved to condemn Abaribe’s outbursts and demanded withdrawal, it was continued fireworks’ as the Senate had earlier reserved Wednesday for discussion on national security.
At the lower House, it was the same anger, fury and lake of confidence on the security structure as Hon. Mongonu raised similar issues and revealed how ‘technically defeated Boko Haram’ has been making life unbearable in North East.
However, after rounds of presentations, the House adopted the motion calling on all security chiefs to resign their appointments considering the clarity that their had run out of ideas or be replaced by Mr president as soon as posiible to allow for fresh security managment ideas.
