Insurgency: PDP’s lame excuses

The allegation by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that the high wave of insurgency and sectarian violence across the country is sponsored to undermine the person, office and administration of President Goodluck Jonathan because he hails from a minority ethnic group is untenable.The PDP allegation, which was contained in a statement by its national publicity secretary, Mr Oliseh Metuh, also claimed that the opposition was sponsoring the attacks in order to distract the attention of the president, constrain the successful delivery of his administration’s transformation agenda so as to portray him as non-performing and ultimately ridicule his score card in the time of reckoning.

The statement which said President Jonathan had performed beyond expectation noted that no leader in the history of the country had faced the magnitude of persecution the president had been subjected to since his assumption of office.It said further that while PDP accepts the reality of terrorism as a global phenomenon the peculiar trend of the Nigerian version which subsists on a welter of nebulous demands and masked identities, hacking down innocent Nigerians, especially women, children and the elderly, defies all reason and logic and only summarizes a well-considered agenda of national destabilization for a purely selfish political cause.

The PDP statement pointed fingers of blame on the opposition for the violence all over the country, and urged Nigerians to rise against the brute ideology of violence from which a clique of the political class intends to benefit ultimately. The ruling party listed the achievements of President Jonathan in effectively containing the insurgency and beating hands down distractions and detractors and unprecedented progress in all sectors of the economy in the past two and a half years that he has been at the helm of affairs of this country.

The PDP also thumped up for the Jonathan administration for investing massively on job creation through the You Win and SURE-P projects as well as the widening of the ambit of its (PDP’s) ideology of transferring wealth from the public institutions to the private sector where hardworking private individuals are now thriving in manufacturing, trade, commerce and other critical sectors of the economy.

It did not end there. PDP claimed that Jonathan government had made revolutionary efforts in the work sector with the dualization and rehabilitation of major trunk roads across the country, in addition to the repairs of the Third Mainland Bridge and the commencement of the works on the Second Niger Bridge.We have paraphrased the PDP copiously here to show how objective we intend to look at the issue, not minding our misgiving of some of the purported achievements.

One thing is however clear. The claim that the insurgency in some parts of the country are sponsored to undermine the Jonathan-led government because he is from a minority ethnic group does not make sense, knowing full well that people from other minority ethnic groups have ruled Nigeria in the past and were given full cooperation and support by other Nigerians .General Yakubu Gowon (rtd.), a man from a minority Ngas ethnic group in Plateau State, became a military head of state in Nigeria from 1967 to 1775. In those nine years of Gowon leadership, there was no biased against him by any group of people.

President Jonathan and PDP should stop feeding Nigerians with lame excuses. The President should learn to confront the issues as every leader would have done. He should prove his mettle in tackling the worsening security crises in the country, the awful rising unemployment rate, the high measure of corruption and other pertinent issues begging for urgent attention.