Dr SKC Ogbonnia, the former presidential aspirant of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in the 2019 elections has faulted President Mohammadu Buhari’s response to Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe’s demand for his resignation.
Senator Abaribe had requested that President Buhari should resign his position as president for inability to effectively tackle the escalated insecurity situation in Nigeria.
Ogbannia has equally decried that the insecurity situation has indeed continued unabated because of stark hypocrisy within the political class.
Speaking in a statement on Monday, Ogbonnia said that the political responsibility of a good opposition leader was to constantly alert the public of the failures of government such as Abaribe did.
Ogbannia lamented that instead of Buhari to tender a rational response, the presidency chose to muddle the matter with tribal inuendoes.
“The most rational response, of course, could have been to explain the specific measures being undertaken by the government to address the problem of insecurity and the readiness to embrace alternative ideas.
“Or, Buhari could have maintained a level of political equipoise by countering with the cliché that the problem did not begin with the current ruling APC; and nothing stopped the president from being more direct by reminding that Abaribe might have been awol all along in the 7th Senate when his People’s Democratic Party, PDP, embezzled a whopping $2.1 billion meant for the procurement of arms to fight Boko Haram at a time the insurgency was still at its infancy.
“Buhari did none of that. The presidency chose to evoke Biafra, clinging on Buhari’s long-standing emotional myopia which assumes that any protest against injustice somehow poses more danger than Boko Haram and Fulani Herdsmen terrorism put together,” Ogbonnia said.
He noted that even though Senator Abaribe helped to bail Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB, it was also true that Kanu later jumped the bail.
“But none of these instances makes Enyinnaya Abaribe a criminal nor has anything to do with the rising insecurity in the country.
“Invoking Biafra was basically a tribal dog whistle to diffuse and trivialize Abaribe’s timely attention on security as the typical Igbo palaver,” Ogbonnia faulted.
