•Restates call for Sovereign National Conference
Kingsley Nwezeh in Abuja
Socio-cultural group, Afenifere, yesterday raised the alarm that Nigeria is tottering on the precipice with the raging criminalities in the land.
At a press conference, Leader of the group, 93-year old Chief Ayo Adebanjo said if nothing urgent was done, the ship of state would soon hit the rocks.
Afenifere accused President Muhammadu Buhari of presiding over a nation steeped in violent convulsion occasioned by insurgency, armed Banditry and other criminalities that appear insurmountable under his administration.
Adebanjo repeated the long-held demand of the group that Nigeria should be restructured and the need to convene a sovereign national conference.
“The Northeast was already aflame before the coming of Buhari, its peoples rendered as pawns in the power games of the northern elite, who allowed Boko haram to fester as the evil powers of the federal government was lost to them, and the insurgents were seen as ethnic champions, indeed, Buhari protested about the onslaught on Boko haram, and for those who might have paid attention, Gumi’s interventions are merely saying what Buhari used to say, before he gained office in 2015.
“But what used to be confined to the northeast, has today become a pan Nigerian problem”, he said.
“The terrorists have crossed into the north-west and as they have ravaged the entire region including the president’s home state, kidnapping hundreds of schoolchildren and their teachers, raping and pillaging the land, the Buhari regime has treated them with kids gloves, and have blithely labeled them as bandits, businessmen, vandals, and even recently as Area Boys”, he lamented.
He further stated that “train track bombers, who were clearly intent on the derailment of a passenger train, are labeled as vandals in a clear advertisement of the complicity of the Buhari regime in the terrorist led insurgency, ravaging Nigeria.
“In the Middle belt, what were once episodic outbursts of Fulani herdsmen and farmers conflicts, a conflict as old as man, has acquired a most evil dimension.
He affirmed that Afenifere remained convinced that the need for a sovereign national conference is imperative and that the basis of the Nigerian state must be clearly negotiated.
“We are not asking for Buhari’s resignation, and since the National Assembly has not seen fit to impeach him, he remains the president of Nigeria until the 27th of May, 2023.
“But it is the considered position of Afenifere that he urgently constitutes a Government of National Unity, charged with the sole task of seeing to the restructuring of Nigeria, in consultation with the Nigerian peoples.
“The Buhari regime has no plans for any elections in 2023, and this statement is not a difficult proposition to establish, once the parties to the debate, are fully seized, of their faculties”, he said.
Stating further that; “The Buhari that stormed the Government House in Ibadan during the administration of Late Alhaji Lam Adesina, is the one established inside Aso Rock, and the extreme nepotism of the man, his unbridled Islamist irredentism, are not only intact, they are unfettered by any pretense at presidential leadership.
*“Be your brother’s keepers” was Buhari’s response to the slaughter in the Benue debacle, and “give up your land in order to live” was the spokesman’s recommendation to the victims*. In the southeast, in the lands of the Igbo people, Gen. Buhari has been most indecorous with his words, but his actions are even worse than his words, and he has effectively lost control of the East.
The Anambra elections are instructive on several fronts, and I shall return to the subject soon enough, but the facts of the restiveness of the East, is not a fact that might be said to be either in issue, or in dispute, and yes, this is without having factored in the existence of pockets of Fulani terrorists, in parts of Igboland.
The South-South has been up in arms for a while, and the Niger Delta is essentially a war zone.
These are the realities of the Niger Delta, where the wealth being evilly dissipated around the length of Nigeria originates, but where all of the Nigerian deprivations are curated.
The environment is even more violent, rendered so by decades of criminal exploitation of its land and peoples by the Nigerian state, and just as volatile as the hydrocarbons that are being taken from its bowels.
The Niger Delta is a volcano waiting to erupt, and the PIA is poised to ignite it.
*The southwest, home to the Yoruba people and all men and women of goodwill, whom we have always welcomed, and who have made our lands their homes, have never had it so bad*
“Our hospitality has been violently abused, our generosity of spirit, taken for granted, and the security of lives and properties wickedly undermined.
Bands of Fulani terrorists are in our forests and farms, they rape, rob, kidnap, and TERRORIZE the people. They bear arms brazenly and they act above the law, and when our people respond in self protection, they are victimized by the Nigerian police and the army, which have acted to establish presidential complicity.
“I have pondered Chief Awolowo’s words in his 1981 public letter to Alhaji Shagari, and I have found a part to be metaphysically intriguing, even though it has only served to deepen my alarm, such that I believe that I owe it to posterity to place my fears on the record; “the ship of state is fast approaching a huge rock and, unless you, as the chief helmsman, quickly rise to the occasion and courageously steer the ship away from its present course, it shall hit the rock, and the inescapable consequence will be an unspeakable disaster such as is rare in the annals of man”.
Buhari was to be that disastrous rock a few months after the warning.
The problem with the rock this time, is that the rock is the helmsman of the ship, and he would appear to be DELIBERATELY AND INTENTIONALLY steering the ship to its END.”
