Bola Tinubu Says State Emergency Merely A Ruse For 2015

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, chairman of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), on Wednesday described the declaration of a State of Emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States by President Goodluck Jonathan as a dangerous trend in the art of governance and a deliberate ploy to subvert constitutional democracy.

“It is now abundantly clear that President Jonathan has finally bared his fangs confirming what was widely speculated,” he said in a press statement, stressing that by the action, Mr. Jonathan has intimidated and emasculated the governors of these States.

Tinubu said that keen observers have been left with the unmistakable conclusion of the existence of a surreptitious but barely disguised intention to muzzle the elected governments of these states for what is clearly a display of unpardonable mediocrity and diabolic partisanship geared towards 2015.

“Borno and Yobe states have been literally under armies of occupation with the attendant excruciating hardship experienced daily by the indigenes and residents of these areas.

This government now wants to use the excuse of the security challenges faced by the Governors to remove them from the states considered hostile to the 2015 PDP/Jonathan project.”

He warned that the administration is in effect setting in motion a chain of events the end of which nobody can predict, as actions such as this one often give root to radical ideologies and extremist tendencies that are a direct opposite of the intended outcome of unwarranted and unintelligent meddlesomeness.

“The present scenario playing out in the country reminds one of the classical case of a mediocre craftsman who continually blames the tools of his trade for his serial failure but refuses to look at his pitiable state with a view to adjusting,” he said.

Chief Tinubu further warned that Jonathan’s pronouncement, which seeks to abridge or has the potential of totally scuttling the constitutional functions of Governors and other elected representatives of the people, will be counterproductive in the long run.

“A State of Emergency already exists in the states where JTF operates,” he pointed out, noting that residents of the affected communities live in constant fear and their rights are violated with impunity under the guise of searching for terrorists in their respective domains.

“Hiding under some nebulous claims which border on the intractability of the security challenges posed by Boko Haram or some acclaimed traditionalists who have killed some policemen to render ineffective the constitutional powers vested in elected Governors and other representatives of the people, perceived as not amenable to manipulation for the 2015 project amounts to reducing serious issues bordering on the survival of the country to partisan politics,” he said.

The ACN chieftain called on all those who love Nigeria genuinely to advise the federal government not to tinker with the mandates of the governors of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa under any guise, calling it a “potentially destructive” path to take. 

“If security of a society is about the protection of lives and property of the citizenry, the involvement of the people is a sine qua non to effective intelligence gathering,” the statement said. “Any measures put in place which alienate the people, in particular their elected representatives, should be considered as fundamentally defective by every right thinking person in the country.”