Former President Goodluck Jonathan has taken a swipe at President Muhammadu Buhari, saying insecurity is getting worse under his administration.
The ex-President stated this on Tuesday when he paid a condolence visit to the leader of the pan-Yoruba socio-political organisation, Afenifere, Pa Reuben Fasoranti, whose daughter, Mrs Funke Olakunri, was killed by suspected herdsmen along the Ore-Sagamu Expressway on Friday.
But in an apparent response to his critics including Jonathan, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo and the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, Buhari on Tuesday said those who were criticising his handling of security in the country were not patriotic.
Although Jonathan did not mention Buhari during the condolence visit to Fasoranti, he called on the federal and state governments to be more proactive on the issue of insecurity in the country.
The former President made the comment a day after Obasanjo in a letter to Buhari warned of a Rwanda-like genocide in Nigeria.
Soyinka, on Sunday, during his 85th birthday, pointedly stated that the Buhari government had “failed” in addressing insecurity in the country.
Expressing concern about insecurity in the country, Jonathan on Tuesday stated, “The Federal Government in conjunction with the state government must design a different approach to this issue. I was there as president and security challenge was there, but now it is getting worse every day and we can’t continue to use the same old method.”
According to the ex-President, every generation of human beings faces problems and that generation must find ways of solving those problems.
“The first major kidnapping was described as commercial kidnapping because some money exchanged hands which happened in 2006 when I was also a governor of Bayelsa State. From commercial kidnapping, it moved to terrorism in the North and now some kind of terrorist attacks all over the country, when people will just come out of the road and spray bullets on innocent people; that is a terrorist attack. You have no reason to attack somebody you don’t even know; that is terrorism.”
The Punch
