Obadiah Mailafia, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), has said the insecurity bedevilling under the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari is the worst ever in the country’s history.
Mailafia said this in an interview on Wednesday while reacting to the attack on Samuel Ortom, Governor of Benue State, by gunmen in Tyo-Mu, along Makurdi-Gboko Road, on Saturday.
According to Mailafia, the security situation in the nation during the era of the late military head of state, Sani Abacha, was better than the insecurity confronting Nigerians currently under Buhari’s government.
“This is totally unprecedented. This is the worst time ever in the history of Nigeria. You can’t even compare with Abacha’s time; Abacha’s time was a golden era compare with what is happening,” Mailafia said on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily.
“You think Abacha would have tolerated all these? You can’t travel on these roads, killings everywhere, destructions everywhere.
“World powers want to destroy Nigeria and what they have done is to come and meet some people and tell them, ‘You are born to rule’. There is an agenda (ex-President Olusegun) Obasanjo called Fulanisation and enforcement of one particular religion against the rest.
“The world powers encourage them and tell them, ‘We are behind you, go ahead’. They provide the weapons and some local people buy into that idea and they begin a campaign of genocide because if you carry a heavy weapon and go into the forests, go into the ancient Savannah, you kill people, you rape women, what are you? You are committing genocide against the unarmed and defenceless.”
The former CBN deputy governor also insisted that the attack on Governor Ortom is an attack on the Benue people.
He stated that the people of the Middle Belt condemn the assault and are not afraid of those who carried out the assault.
He said: “This attempt on the life of an executive governor and incumbent of a state is an attempted attack on the entire people of the state. Those who are trying to do this wicked thing need to understand the implication of what they are trying to do.
“If the governor of a state cannot feel safe to go to his farm, how will the ordinary Benue people feel going to their farms? This is a very bad precedence. The circumstances in Borno are very different. Borno is a war zone, we’ve been living with these evil people for a while but what happened in Benue is totally different and diabolical. We don’t know what they are trying to do but this could affect the whole country.
“Benue people and the people of the Middle Belt will never ever accept this attempt on one of their sons. Nobody is afraid of these people but it is just that these people are given arms and allowed to move freely while the machetes that the ordinary people have are being dispossessed from them, they are not even allowed to defend their homes and their families but we are glad that God saved the life of his Excellency, Governor Ortom.”
