Buhari was romancing with perpetrators of terrorism, security consultant claims

A security consultant and defence strategist, Col. Hassan Stan-Labo (rtd.) has said former president Muhammadu Buhari made the fight against terrorism in the country harder to win because he was romancing with perpetrators and granting amnesty to those nabbed.

Col. Stan-Labo stated this in an interview on Arise Television on Wednesday.

He said: “I agree that General Buhari in the last eight years or thereabout did virtually nothing and I mean virtually nothing in our fight against terrorism, if anything, he promoted and enhanced our hardship as far as our fight against terrorism is concerned.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re talking about our number one citizen as at then within the period of the last eight years, a period I refer to that Nigeria had no political leader.

“We saw all the lines of actions taken by the political strategic level of decision making, we saw all the lines of actions even from the presidency, we saw how minister who had business or things to do do with terrorists were made to remain in their positions as ministers, one was even in charge of our entire national data, we could go on and on.

According to Stan-Labo, President Buhari‘s administration allowed undue sentiments right from the presidency to be visited in its alleged, purported action against terrorism, adding, that one could read religion, tribalism, ethnicity and so on in the administration’s fight against terrorism.

Stan-Labo added: “It’s unfortunate, and at the sub national level we had governors, especially, up north where I come from, that had all sorts of romance and unholy relationship with terrorism, degenerating to a situation where some of them were even talking about amnesty, it was shocking to some of them.

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“Amnesty for who? You tell me they are repentant terrorists, repentance from what? We are soldiers, our duty is not to grant your repentance, our duty is to hasten your appointment with God, to heaven or hell where he would grant you penance.

“So, for us to be bringing large number of men from the forest who hitherto were armed and taking on fellow Nigerians, then on the appearance of soldiers they drop their weapons and you’re compelled as a professional to take them PWs and you bring them back to us, and say they are repentant what?

“And then you give their godfathers sitting in government houses to begin to talk about amnesty and even referring us to how amnesty was granted to some chaps way back under president Yaradua, in the creeks, its unfortunate,” he said.

Speaking further, the security expert urged the President Bola Tinubu administration not to follow in the same direction but to do things differently.

Speaking on Tinubu’s method of fighting the same war, Stan-Labo said he has not noticed a difference. He then urged the President to act differently in order to end the terrorism fight.

“Now, we have a new administration in place, in the last six or seven months, I have not seen a change, so to speak, 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 or people who have sympathy with the last administration to him as to how to fight terrorism.

“We have an ample opportunity now to change the gal in how we fight terrorism. I will appeal to my colleagues in the military. I understand very much what the rules of international law of war says concerning PWs and so on.

“I must tell you gentlemen, if we’ve got to fight this war and come out of it unscratched and make sure that we don’t eventually leave this war for our grandchildren to fight continually because of our attitude then we’ve got to face this war and face it with all the brut it calls for and not to start heaping PWs here and there.

“The more PWs we gather, the more we are heaping up a reserve force for belligerents, who tomorrow will face our children”, Stan-Labo added.

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