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From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to deploy tougher security measures in restive parts of the country to restore situations to normalcy.
Speaking at the 11th National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, he said with the review of operations and strategy, Nigerians can be assure that efforts that resulted in relative peace in South-South, and rescuing of North-East from the hold of terrorists would be ramped up. He said the major challenges have remained in the North Central and North West vowing: “We are going to be very tough. I will like us to reflect on what the situation was before we came in. How many local government areas were under the control of terrorists in the North-East? In the South-South, we all know what the situation was. Now, we have relative peace. With the resources at our disposal, we have done very well. People are very forgetful. Our main problem now is in the North West and North Central. People are killing one another in these places, what for? We are going to be very tough.”
The president urged party members to be mindful of the pitfalls that led to the ouster of the PDP in 2015.
“The PDP thought that only time could remove them, and the time actually came. They thought it was impossible to lose elections. We put together a committee with clear terms of reference on how to remove the PDP from power. The PDP thought it wasn’t going to be possible. But it happened.’
Buhari told new members of the National Working Committee (NWC), which had been delegated powers of NEC for a period of 90 days to work towards keeping the party together by creating more room for discussions.
“There’s no time to develop differences among ourselves. We have no time for that. I enjoin you all to follow due process in all the party processes and more importantly to develop more mechanisms against corruption. I call on all party members to abide by all extant laws, rules, and regulations and to leaders of our party to avoid imposition of candidates that cannot win popular elections. This dictatorial behaviour cost us many strategic seats in the past. In the recent past, this led to some of our strong members unfortunately opting to go elsewhere because of unfairly oppressive behaviour of party leaders at state level. I must caution strongly against any tendency towards developing cliques, infighting within the party.”
