PDP challenges Buhari to expose terrorism sponsors

President Muhammadu Buhari. Photo/TWITTER/NIGERIAGOV

• Nigeria not interested in naming, shaming, Presidency insists

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), yesterday, said the refusal by Federal Government to expose sponsors of terrorism in Nigeria had vindicated its position that the All Progressives Congress (APC) government has been “providing official cover for terrorists and bandits pillaging the nation.”

The main opposition party said its position followed the “declaration of the Buhari Presidency that it was not interested in making public, the names of six Nigerians reportedly sent to the Federal Government by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as sponsors of terrorism in our country.”

The PDP, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, insisted that “the decision of the APC-led government to cover the identity of sponsors of mindless mass killings, maiming, raping, kidnapping of our compatriots, as well as the endless violent marauding of our communities under the APC watch, validates our stand that such individuals have connections with the APC.”

The party went on: “This unpatriotic stance by the Buhari Presidency raises serious national anxieties of high-level complicity in the administration and further explains the reported compromising of our security system in the escalated killings and acts of terrorism in our country in the last six years under the APC.”

The party said it had always alerted of a “connection between the APC and terrorists ravaging various parts of the nation and how the APC, as a party, had always failed to forcefully condemn acts of terrorism in our country.”

REACTING, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, stated that the current administration was not interested in naming or shaming Boko Haram sponsors and other financiers of terrorism across the federation.

The presidential aide said rather, the government was preoccupied with bringing the “malefactors” to justice. He spoke yesterday evening as a guest on Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’ current affairs programme.

It had earlier been reported that the UAE named and prosecuted six Nigerians and 32 others for allegedly financing terrorism.

Asked to give an update on the prosecution of terror sponsors in the country, Adesina, who is part of the entourage of the President in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, said: “Naming and shaming would not be the motive, rather bringing malefactors to justice would be it.