Femi Adesina, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, has said that Nigeria would have been dead and gone if not for the election of his principal in 2015.
According to Adesina, Boko Haram terrorists had already taken over the entire North and were heading to the South before Buhari intervened.
Adesina’s claim was contained in an article he entitled Insecurity: What Buhari has done, and is doing, and sent to newsmen on Friday night.
“Each time he itemizes the three focal areas of government, President Muhammadu Buhari follows the same order: we shall secure the country, because you have to first secure a country or institution before you can efficiently manage it. We will revive the economy, and create jobs, particularly for our teeming youths, and then, we will fight corruption,” he began.
“The order above shows the priority that the President gives to security, as well as law and order in the country.”
Adesina wondered why each time there is a glitch in the country, some he described as “naysayers” will not remember the past successes.
According to him, they will “scream and wail as if nothing is being done.”
He said that a lot has been done in terms of security, and is still being done by the Buhari Administration.
The senior presidential aide recalled that when President Buhari came in May 2015, he met a country that was almost in disarray, “with bombs going off like firecrackers daily.”
He said, “The insurgency by Boko Haram was festering in the North-east, North-West, North-Central, with Abuja, the Federal capital having been serially bombed.
“There was Nyanya 1, Nyanya 2, United Nations Building, Police Force Headquarters, series of shopping malls, churches, mosques, and many others, all bombed, with many lives lost.”
Adesina said Kogi State was almost being overran by the insurgents and from there, they were headed South-west, from where they would bivouac in South-south, “and the country would be gone. Dead. Forgotten.”
Adesina said that Buhari’s decision to move the command centre of the Boko Haram war to Maiduguri, in Borno State, which was the epicentre of the insurgency was what saved Nigeria.
“Boko Haram got flushed out of Abuja, North-central, North-west, Yobe, Adamawa, and got circumscribed in Sambisa Forest. Soon, their last stand, Camp Zero fell, and since then, they have been scattered like sheep without shepherd.
“They mingled with the civilian population, from where they launch cowardly atavistic attacks. They became degraded, but just like a scorched snake, not beheaded yet, they still retain capacity for evil. But can you compare what is, with what used to be? Not at all.
“But some people have short memories. They say not much is being done to tackle insecurity by the Buhari government. Really?” He added.
The presidential aide, however, admitted that many more frontiers of insecurity have been opened:
He noted that banditry, kidnapping for ransom, communal clashes, farmers/herders clashes, and many others have come up.
But he maintained that “the baby that says the mother will not sleep, he too will not snooze at all.”
Adesina said that Nigerian military was in tatters before Buhari came, adding that they were ill equipped, ill trained, ill motivated, and were already running away from the battlefront.
He said that the first thing the President did was to restore morale through reequipping, retraining and improvements of salaries and welfare and that “It affected both the police and the military.”
