Adesina: Buhari’s Political Enemies Sponsoring Killings in the Country

Eromosele Abiodun
Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, has alleged that the killings around the country are sponsored by the political enemies of the president, who are aware that security is the president’s strongest point.
Adesina, who stated this while speaking on a programme on THISDAY sister broadcast network, Arise News, added that the security problem is multidimensional.

According to him, “You have the true herders and farmers who are clashing and you have hidden hostile hands that have crept in under that umbrella to play what the president has described as irresponsible politics. This famers/herders clash has been going on for a long time. When I say long time, I mean before this administration came in. Like the president said, the issue is even older than anybody living today. What you have today are being sponsored because they know security is one of the strongest points of the administration.”

While stressing that the killings are being instigated and sponsored by the opposition, he said: “The president said so in a national broadcast. He also said the security agencies are investigating, and warned that once they are identified, they would be dealt with. The intention of the opposition in any democracy is to weaken the incumbent as much as possible and the opposition in Nigeria has identified security as one of the strong points of the Buhari administration. So they decided to go to that area finding the soft under belly and stick a knife into it.”

The media aide also stated that the protests around the country over the killings are driven by political motives.

“People are being killed, this should not happen because it is the duty of government to guaranty safety of life and property. When our president met President Donald Trump of the United States recently, even Trump said security is a collective thing. What we see in Nigeria is that some people expect security to come from the top, rather it should be bottom up,”he said.

On the need to allow for state police to address the security situation, he said the president cannot do it alone because it is a party matter.

Adesina said the Buhari administration has improved the Nigerian economy, adding that the kind of change that Nigerians envisaged in certain areas will not come in the short term.

“However, there are some which are immediate. When a country goes into a recession, you spend to get out of it that was why the government spent on capital projects to stimulate the economy. In the 2016 budget, N1.2 trillion was spent on capital projects; 2017, N1.4 trillion was spent on capital projects, and in two years, the government spent N2.6 trillion on capital projects,” he said.

The presidential aide said the government’s spending created jobs and denied that more Nigerians have lost jobs as a result of Buhari’s policies.

“Those statistics you have of unemployment are from white collar jobs, and that is not all that make an economy. We have a record of blue collar jobs. For example, rice farmers, when this administration came, was only five million, as at today, they are over 12 million, that is seven million additional rice farmers. When you heard that Nigeria cut rice importation by 90 per cent, it was not just from the blues,” he said.

Speaking about the economic growth of over six per cent that the country recorded before the administration of Buhari as against the 0.8 per cent today, he said Nigeria was running a bubble economy that was unsustainable.

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