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 Arise News on Wednesday, 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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