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By Chinelo Obogo
The Vice Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 election has claimed that the All Progressives Congress (APC) deployed insecurity as a strategy to seize and remain in power
Reacting to the statement made by former Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, who claimed that the government was financing bandits, Datti stated yesterday during his appearance on ‘Politics Today’, that such statements gives credence to his belief that the APC has used insecurity as a strategy.
“My argument is that insecurity is part of the APC and has been the party’s way of getting power. It has been part of APCs way of staying in power. It is my candid opinion that is being strengthened by the kind of unfortunate comments, like that of el-Rufai. I have clearly given you statements of government functionaries that are undisputed. Go back in time and remember when a former Nigerian President was attacked by terrorists. It is unprecedented and has never happened in the history of Nigeria. Do you also remember that I made a passing statement on that in 2022?
“When Nigerian leaders leave power, they are forgiven of all their errors but this one, they followed him to try and kill him. Why did this happen? Why did you decide to run for election in 2015 after saying you would not run again? What was the link? I contested alongside the late President Buhari for Senate in 2011. We have it on YouTube where he said the blood of the baboons will be soaked in blood. When he made that comment, I refused to campaign with him. It didn’t matter if I lost the election. I won it eventually. For a former President to say something will be soaked in blood, then there was serious violence on Kaduna, many houses were burnt.”
Datti went further to claim that during the 2015 presidential election, the APC brought in people from the neighbouring countries in readiness to remove Goodluck Jonathan by all means. He said the desperation of people to get Jonathan out of power has built up and added to the insecurity.
“Most horrifically, this group of people used the tools of insecurity as we have seen in 2015 and it worked and they achieved what they wanted. Again, they use the tools of religion, ethnicity, division within political parties and heavy use of money. Irrespective of what the law says, when you change the law to what suits an individual, there cannot be security and peace.
“The purpose of being together in a nation is that you must be secured by whoever is leading you. If you’re not secured, you’re living in hell and we are almost there now. You have someone who served as a governor for eight years to come and say that it is a policy of government to reward terrorists and criminals and the history of these people who have been in power including the governor who said it, is consistent with what he claims and that government still has two years to go,” he said.
