Enyinnaya Abaribe, the minority leader of the Nigerian Senate, on Wednesday, January 29, 2020 flayed President Muhammamdu Buhari calling for his resignation over the growing security challenges in the country.
Senator Abaribe, who is from Abia State, while contributing to the motion berated the president for incompetence and blamed the growing incidences of terrorism and crimes on the failure of the government, “Those who live by propaganda will die by propaganda,” he declared in his motion which attracted aggressive reactions from lawmakers from the North.
“When I was coming, I saw a newspaper headline of ThisDay. The commander-in-chief expresses shock at the level of violent crimes. 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’.
“You have told us that in this solemn day in discussing this matter; that we may not at any point be partisan. 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 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.
“Because we have to get to the root of this matter. I can only say one thing, those who live by propaganda will die by propaganda. This is a matter of life and death. I was building up to something and I will say what I was building up to simply.”
Abaribe noted that if the APC government cannot tackle insecurity, they should resign.
“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.
“Mr President, 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. In fact, 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 the government and ask this government to resign because they can no longer do anything.”
