Former presidential aspirant and legal practitioner, Chief Reuben Famuyibo, has berated what he called the gale of inciting statements by disgruntled northern leaders targeted at taking down the administration of President Bola Tinubu and plunging Nigeria into chaos.
Famuyibo, who decried the onslaught on the Tinubu administration, said that it was insulting that political, traditional and religious leaders who sat eerily quiet and tongue-tied while the Muhammadu Buhari administration wrecked the economy, worsened Nigeria’s security situation and plunged millions of Nigerians into poverty, had suddenly found their voices again now that a southerner is in charge at Aso Rock.
Speaking in a chat with Sunday Tribune in Ibadan yesterday, Famuyibo said he had consulted far and wide with Yoruba leaders home and abroad and indications showed that they were becoming uncomfortable with the sub-texts of threats, subversive statements, unfair criticisms and innuendoes cast at President Tinubu based on the premise that Nigerian leaders deserve censure only when they are from a particular section of the country.
Famuyibo said: “My consultations across the length and breadth of the South-West and with leaders in the disapora shows that while many of our leaders see nothing wrong in President Bola Tinubu receiving criticism over the pains Nigerians are going through following the policy reforms embarked upon by his administration, they are however surprised that certain elements in the North have been hiding under the issue of the policy reforms to openly make politically charged, ethnically insensitive, and provocative statements aimed at inciting the Nigerian public against the Tinubu administration and plunging Nigeria into civil strife.
“There will be serious counter-reactions in the polity if these agent provocateurs who ascribe ethnic and religious sentiments to even the purely administrative actions of the Tinubu administration, including the relocation of key departments of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) to their natural habitat in Lagos, do not stop their subversive activities.
“We learnt authoritatively that even Julius Berger, the construction company behind the CBN Abuja office, said that the over population of the Abuja CBN office with 11,000 plus workers when it was designed for 4,000 workers could cause the structure to experience strain, yet these so-called northern leaders act like nothing was amiss.
“We want to remind those threatening fire and brimstone against President Tinubu over the problems created by the Muhammadu Buhari administration, which ran the economy aground and made Nigeria the poverty capital of the world, that neither Nigeria nor Abuja is their exclusive preserve.
“They have earned themselves damnation by keeping eerily quiet when the Buhari administration destroyed all the key metrics of a functional country, taking Nigeria many decades backwards.
“They must stop the politics of provocation and incitement influenced by a born-to-rule mentality and years of patient endurance by other sections of the country.
“The self-serving, perfidious, insidious, provocative and inciting utterances must be denounced by all right-thinking Nigerians.”
