- Those clamoring for cabinet change selfish
- Buhari will defeat those opposed to his re-election
- Opposition playing politics with insecurity
Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
The Presidency has justified the planned amnesty to be granted to members of the Boko Haram terror group who are ready to drop their arms and embrace peace.
It said, in the final analysis, it will saves lives lost to bombings, killing of service personnel and that money spent to procure weapons would be channeled into providing services, infrastructure and welfare for citizens, saying “It is a win-win situation.”
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said this at the weekend during an interaction with State House Correspondents.
President Muhammadu Buhari on March 23rd, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, while receiving released girls who were abducted from their school in Dapchi, Yobe State, had promised to grant an amnesty to members of the terror group who were ready to drop their arms and embrace peace.
The President had said, “While further efforts are being made to secure the release of every abducted citizen in Nigeria, the government is ever ready to accept the unconditional laying down of arms by any member of the Boko Haram group who shows strong commitment in that regard.
“We are ready to rehabilitate and integrate such repentant members into the larger society.
“This country has suffered enough of hostility. Government is, therefore, appealing to all to embrace peace for the overall development of our people and the country.”
Asked to react to the assertion that President Buhari is shielding herdsmen from prosecution and even begging them to accept amnesty, Shehu said:
“Well, I hope you also realize that social media has brought a lot of good things to the world and it has also brought a lot of problems not only in Nigeria but everywhere in the world. Nations of the world are talking about regulations and control. This is happening in Germany, in the UK even the US you see that a lot of these technology companies are being fined for infringements that they caused. The thing is that there is a tendency to see things from a negative point of view when your point of view is shaped and coloured by social media.
“It’s always been heard that the default position of social media itself is to be negative, so people have turned out to ignore grand reality and project images that are very negative… This is an administration that has done so extremely well and to a President who has sworn an oath to defend the constitution and protect every life and property, it is very unfair and uncharitable to say that he will shield anybody. And in any case, the President controls only one layer of authority; what are the governors doing? Is social media also saying that the governors are protecting the herdsmen from the law, are they saying the local government are also protecting them?
“You see, it has to take everyone at various levels of authority to shield somebody from the law in those circumstances, and the President himself has a passion for the country. This is a president whose passion is not even for the office, even when everyone is asking him to go for a second term, he is keeping quiet because his focus remains the nation and the problem of the country.
“Whoever is peddling these rumours that Boko Haram is being granted amnesty and so on I would ask them who doesn’t want to make peace with the enemy? In any case, as it is proverbially said, all wars end up in the boardroom. You can defeat people technically in the field but at the end you must come to the conference room to resolve all issues. So if Boko Baram would lay down their arms and stop fighting and stop preaching that negative ideology, the country should be able to embrace them, welcome all of them so that they continue to live normal lives and be useful to the nation. What that means is that we will be saving cost, saving lives that are being lost through bombing, killing of service personnel and we will be saving money that we are using to procure weapons so that such money can go into services and infrastructure and welfare of the citizens of this country. It is a win-win situation,” he said.
Asked if he would you advise President Buhari to rerun for the office come 2019, Shehu said, “Yes, I will because he richly deserves a second term in office.”
On his contemporaries in the military and former presidents asking him not to run, the presidential media aide said, “My response to them is that if they like they can come and contest against President Buhari. He will defeat them, all of them.”
On Nigerians who think that Buhari should not be talking about a second term when people are hungry, Shehu said, “With all the noise the PDP is making, even during their tenure [in the Presidency] did they give breakfast, lunch and dinner to every citizen? Is there any country in which someone does not go hungry? I am not saying it is perfectly in order, but they are just politicizing these issues.
“This is a government that has removed this country from the shame of food importation, every state of the country now into rice production, and we are feeding not only Nigeria but West Africa. And the government is working on having respectable prices for food items, food inflation is coming down grossly.
“Everyone complaining of hunger should go and work. And you know that this is the only government that has introduced social investment schemes. We pay out now for the poorest of the poor, the least they will get is N5,000. And a lot of these jobs that are being created are from loans with little or no interest from the Central Bank, Bank of Industry, Bank of Agriculture, Development Bank and the rest. So there is a lot going for people who really want to go out there to work, especially in Agriculture.”
On the call for Buhari to reshuffle his cabinet as some of his ministers are perceived to be weak, and that the lack of technocrats in the cabinet is responsible for some of the shortcomings in the administration, the presidential media aide said:
“The President is the one who wears the shoes, he know where it pinches. If the President hasn’t sacked his ministers, it means that he wants to continue to work with them. Maybe those agitating for the sack of the ministers are also looking for a chance to come in to replace those who are there. In that case then they are driven by selfish motives.
“As President and Commander-in-Chief, he reserves the right to hire and fire. For the fact that he hasn’t done that does not mean that he does not have the power to do that. I am sure if he wants to do it, he will do it at his own pace and time but people who want to become ministers, how many ministers can we even appoint in this country? I think people should just be busy, let them go and start farming instead of sitting down to speculate whether they can be made ministers or not,” Shehu said.
On Nigerians saying the President has failed in the area of security, basing their arguments on the Fulani herdsmen-farmers crises, Shehu said, “the problem between farmers and herdsmen predates the independence of Nigeria. If you read history, you will see that farmers and herdsmen had fought for space in this country even before British colonial rulers were here. So this is not something new. I am not saying it is welcome, but I think it is over-amplified now.
“There is a media spotlight on it because the opposition cannot engage the Buhari administration on any other issue other than this lacuna that they have found.
“They cannot discuss the war against corruption because that’s a very uncomfortable area for them. They don’t want to discuss issues of infrastructure with Buhari. They don’t want to discuss economic diversification [in] which this administration has achieved a lot of success. Today we have 12 million rice farmers in this country, six million new jobs are being created by Agriculture alone, food import has gone down by 95 percent, we are feeding ourselves. This year, the government is planning a ban on rice importation. So we are doing so well moving from over-reliance on oil to agriculture and manufacturing.
“Therefore, I am not saying that it is okay that the farmers and herdsmen are fighting, but we are doing a lot. You can see that the recent activity, especially the military operation now in the north central section of the country, has led to the recoveries of large quantities of weapon illegally held by militias and even herdsmen; so something is being done about it. I know by the time this is done with, I don’t know what else the opposition will be talking about,” the presidential aide said.