A Security Consultant and Defence Strategist, Colonel Hassan Stan-Labo (rtd), has stated that former President Muhammadu Buhari failed to make significant progress in combating terrorism during his eight-year tenure.
In an interview on Arise News Television on Wednesday, Stan-Labo claimed that during Buhari’s administration, ministers and governors with alleged ties to terrorists were allowed to remain in their positions, including those responsible for national data.
He said, “I agree with the opinion that General Buhari in the last eight years or thereabouts did virtually nothing in our fight against terrorism. If anything, he promoted and enhanced our hardship as far as the fight against terrorism was concerned.
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“It is unfortunate that we are talking about our number one citizen as of then within the period of the last eight years, a period which I referred to that Nigeria had no political leader.
“We saw all the lines of actions taken by the political-strategic level decision-making taken from the presidency, even from ministers who had business or things to do with terrorists, were made to remain in their positions as ministers.
“One was even in charge of our national data. We allowed undue sentiment right from the presidency, to be visited in our purported plan or action against terrorism.”
According to Stan-Labo, during the Buhari administration, “You could read religion, you could read tribalism, you could read ethnicity and so on. It is unfortunate and at a subnational level, we had governors, especially from the North under that administration that had all sorts of romance and unholy relationship with terrorism, degenerating to a situation where some of them were even talking of amnesty
“It was shocking to some of us. Amnesty for who? You tell me they are repentant terrorists. Repentant from what? We are soldiers. Our duty is not to grant repentance, our duty is to hasten your appointment to God in heaven or hell he will grant you penance.
“For us to bring a large number of people from the forest who hitherto, were armed and taken on fellow Nigerians, then on the appearance of soldiers, they dropped their weapons and you are compelled as professionals to take them PWs and bring them back to us and say they are repentant what?
“Then you give their godfathers sitting in government houses to talk about amnesty and even referring us to how amnesty was granted to some chaps way back under President Yar’Adua in the creeks.”
On President Bola Tinubu’s government, he said that nothing had changed from the previous administration.
He advised the President not to listen to ill advice from those who had sympathy with the Buhari administration if he must sincerely and squarely fight and win the war against terrorism in Nigeria.
He said, “We now have a new administration in place. In the last six or seven months, I have not seen a change from what has been happening in the last eight years. We hope that the President now is not listening to some ill advice coming in from some elements who had sympathy with the last administration, to him as to how to fight terrorism.”
