Insecurity, others, a threat to democratic politics – Malam Yusuf
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Media Trust Limited, Publisher of the Daily Trust titles, Malam Kabiru A. Yusuf, said yesterday that it is worth celebration that Nigeria has “put behind twenty years of unbroken democracy.”
He made this known while welcoming guests to the 17th edition of the Daily Trust annual dialogue.
Malam Yusuf juxtaposed recent comments by former President Ibrahim Babangida and Professor Wole Soyinka on the state of the nation and the crisis over the legality of Amotekun as a pointer to some of the issues that characterized Nigeria’s democracy.
The chairman said Babangida’s reading of the “national mood” sharply differed from that of Professor Soyinka who said that the “fragile state of the polity today was similar to that of the mid-1960s just before the civil war.”
On the issue of regional security outfit, he said the South West’s Amotekun saga and the South East’s response to overhaul its security architectures were both politically motivated.
“After some dithering, the federal government has declared Amotekun, and by implication all other nascent regional security organizations as illegal. But we all know this is not about law, but about politics. The region hit most by kidnappings and armed banditry is the North West,” he said.
According to him, “Despite repeated assurances by the Inspector-General of Police and the governor of Kaduna state, most of us here know better than to take the short drive between Abuja and Kaduna, the major Northern highway.
“In Katsina, where President Buhari comes from, thousands of people have abandoned their villages for IDP camps, while the state government negotiates with the bandits for some sort of ceasefire,” he said.
Expressing concern over the current state of things in the country, he asked: “Are we celebrating twenty years of democracy, or are we witnessing the beginning of another slow dance of death?”