The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to immediately dismiss his National Security Adviser Major General Babagana Monguno (Rtd) for undermining the National Security of Nigeria.
HURIWA also asked President Buhari to arrest Popular Kaduna-based Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, for allegedly negotiating with terrorists who have been meeting with suspected bandits terrorising schools and communities in the North.
The Rights Writers disclosed this in a statement issued on Tuesday by the group’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko.
HURIWA alleged that Monguno is providing the enabling environment for Sheikh Gumi to continue to negotiate for the dreaded kidnappers and terrorist, adding that the NSA boss should be sacked for failing to check the alleged corruption in his office and also for allowing his subordinate to allegedly deploy soldiers to go after officers of EFCC who were performing the lawful duty of marking identified illicitly acquired housing assets linked to him.
The statement read in part, “The best negotiation to have with the terrorists called armed bandits by the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is to use the instrumentality of the law to inflict on them the severest and harshest of punishment and not the illegality being peddled by the likes of the National Security Adviser Major General Babagana Monguno (Rtd) who is providing the enabling environment for Sheikh Ahmed Gumi to continue to negotiate for the dreaded kidnappers and terrorist.
“We are definitely as shocked as millions of Nigerians that President Buhari has kept his failed and non-performing National Security Adviser who relies on a civilian and the Kaduna based Islamic cleric Ahmed Gumi on how to deal with terrorists and who also has failed to stop the alleged financial malfeasance said to have been perpetrated by no other person but someone he, the National Security Adviser made the Director of Finance in his office.
“Insecurity and corruption are the twin evils that Muhammadu Buhari’s administration purportedly came to power to eliminate but right under the nose of Mr. President is a National Security Adviser who for six years has not offered any workable Security Advise and under whose office, his trusted staff allegedly committed monumental corruption as alleged by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission.”
“Mr. President needs to dismiss Monguno immediately with only less than two years to his end of the last tenure unless the president does not care about what kind of legacies he wants to bequeath to Nigerians in 2023 that he must quit the public arena into a quiet retirement.”
“How can President Buhari keep an adviser who admitted allowing Sheikh Gumi to violate the Anti-terrorism Act (a valid and binding federal anti-terrorism law) by encouraging negotiations with terrorists whose hands are drenched in the blood of innocent Northern School Children?
Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, who has been meeting with suspected bandits terrorising communities in the northwest and in the north-central had likened them to militants in the Niger Delta and asked that they are not tagged, criminals. But the NSA endorsed the unorthodox Modus Operandi of this Sheikh who has only just recently reportedly stated that school children will continue to be kidnapped unless the government grants soft landing to terrorism.
“Sheik Gumi is doing what he’s doing because he believes in what he’s doing. He’s a Nigerian and under the constitution, he can talk to anybody. He can deal with anybody,” he said. I met with him when I went with the service chiefs to Kaduna, and we spoke generally during the meeting and he resolved to help the government. We are waiting for him. That’s all I can say.”
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