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Nigeria's ex-leader warns against anarchy
Leader of the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, yesterday blamed rising mayhem in parts of Nigeria on the PDP-led government’s inability to take steps to curb insecurity in the land.
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Also, the former head of state lampooned the federal administration for celebrating corruption as a way of life and devising ways of staying in power for life thereby rubbishing the tenets of democracy.
Buhari made the claims at the special national convention of the CPC convened as part of the requirements for his party to dissolve into the All Progressive Congress, APC.
To actualise the merger, two motions were moved and unanimously adopted by the party members to merge with the Action Congress of Nigeria, can, and the All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, to form APC.
He accused the Jonathan administration of creating avoidable mayhem in order to cover its guilt, obscure the issues and then blame the opposition in order to deceive gullible Nigerians. But he warned that the opposition would not tolerate the mayhem or be intimidated by anyone. Buhari said, “Anarchy is knocking on the door of many sections of this country and the Federal Government has not demonstrated that it has the good sense to understand what is going on or the competence to check it.
“The nation is hopelessly adrift. But if we are to survive, this vicious cycle of violence that has engulfed this nation must be brought to an end.”
The party leader, who used the occasion to openly sympathise with the people of Borno, Yobe, Kano, Nasarawa and Benue states over the spate of mass killings in their domains, implored members of the National Assembly to take the lead in restoring peace to the country.
The former head of state described the 14 years of PDP rule in Nigeria as a period when corruption and insecurity loomed large on the horizon, breeding poverty and decay across the country.
“The government has failed in almost everything; it has proved unable to secure the nation’s internal environment, there is insecurity everywhere,” he lamented.
“There is spiralling lawlessness all over the country. There is widespread and rising poverty and unemployment across the length and breadth of the country. There is total decline in the quality of social services and an irremediable dilapidation in the nation’s socio-economic infrastructure across board.
“There is an unprecedented fall in the nation’s standard of living and an astronomical rise in the standard of dying. In short today, there is nothing going right; and we have become a nation in which nothing works as it should, that is, if it works at all. When they said they have what they call ‘Transformation Agenda’, we didn’t understand, but we now know better because, within the space of three years, they have transformed the country into a veritable wilderness, where everything that should work doesn’t; where everything that can get broken, has broken.
“They promised to give the nation credible elections; they couldn’t deliver. They promised to fight corruption, they couldn’t deliver. They promised to stop insurgence and they couldn’t deliver.”
Source: Vanguard