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From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has dismissed speculations that insecurity is escalating under the administration of President Bola Tinubu, arguing that it persists because of its asymmetric rather than conventional in nature.
The National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, who gave the defence while presenting President Tinubu’s two-year anniversary scorecard at its national secretariat in Abuja, insisted Tinubu has supported the security forces more than his predecessors.
Morka claimed that since bandits and terrorists were embedded within the civilian population, it has been difficult to separate the citizens from those terrorising them.
“The government is doing a lot. This president has supported the military more than any other president. Even the soldiers say that. I think that we must continue to support our troops and hope that we get a handle to, if not eliminate, but to completely decapitate these crooks, criminals and terrorists to the point where our people can return to their normal lives, go to the farms and live without having to flee from their homes.
“They are not unmasked anywhere you are shooting down aircraft or perimetered where you fire a bomb over 1,000 metres to hit them. They are in the shadows. They are completely embedded within a civilian population.
“So, how do you separate the citizens from the terrorists or the bandits? It is not easy at all. I think Nigerians must get a perspective about this and see that our troops are doing a heck of a job. I can tell you that.
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“They have rescued over nearly 10,000 hostages. You know, more than 17,000, nearly 18,000 bandits are already in custody. When you add all that together, Nigerians should be asking, where are these people coming from? As they’re killing them and arresting them and detaining them, how come they continue to, I mean, populate? Where are they coming from? And we need to begin to look at those threats and address those on the matter,” he defended.
Responding to a question on the effects of fuel subsidy removal, Morka said: “In two years of this administration, we made clear that this president has enacted a vision and proclaimed a mission to tackle problems that were created generationally in our country. All of the difficulties we speak about today didn’t drop from the sky. They were long in coming.
“As I said, all the presidents who came before this president preferred to simply postpone the doomsday. Because we didn’t just wake up in the last two years to realize that fuel subsidy was a destructive device in our country. We didn’t. We have always known that, and as a matter of fact, there is no president who has come in the last 15, 20 years who didn’t, in fact, remove fuel subsidy.
“When you think back, fuel was not at the point that President Tinubu met it back in 1999. It wasn’t. The way they did it was far, far lower. It was cheaper to buy fuel in 1999 in terms of the local economy than it was at the time that the hurricane hit in this country.
“It means that other presidents were in fact taking out subsidy gradually. But let me tell you the difference between this president and the rest of them. Other presidents who intervened in the fuel subsidy regime did so to save a bit of money and to free up some money to get their job done.
“They didn’t do it because they were interested in solving structural problems that beset our economy. They didn’t do that. They simply needed to,” he noted.
