The National Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Mai Mala Buni, said yesterday that the call by Chief Edwin Clark for declaration of state of emergency in the North East was misguided and ill-conceived.
Buni in a statement was responding to an earlier call issued by Clark, in which he demanded President Muhammadu Buhari to declare complete state of emergency in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states because of renewed Boko Haram attacks.
The APC scribe said Clark, an elder statesman from the South South had been an anti-North East crusader for long. “Initially, during the ex- President Goodluck Jonathan era, Edwin Clark and his cohorts denied there was abduction of the Chibok girls, saying it was politically intended to malign the ex-president. “He (Clark) later pressed for imposition of state of emergency in the North Eastern states which only gave advantage to the insurgents to launch vicious attacks on the people,” he said.
Buni explained that it was the likes of Clark who misled former President Jonathan into treating the fight against Boko Haram with levity. “It was also on the advice of people like Clark that ex-President Jonathan attempted extending the state of emergency for the third time but the move was rejected by the National Assembly because the previous experience yielded no results,” he said.
He said the Buhari administration had grossly tamed activities of Boko Haram without a state of emergency, saying, “We remain confident that this administration will bring an end to the insurgency without a state of emergency,” he said.
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