The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has explained why Nigerians should vote to return President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) to power in 2019.
The minister made this known in an interview with Daily Sun published on Wednesday.
Mohammed said that the APC administration led by Buhari has fulfilled all promises it made before it was voted into power in 2015 and the only reward Nigerians could give the party for the feat was to return it to power in 2019.
He said, “You see we have delivered all promises we made. We came in and we promised we were going to fight insecurity. At that time, the major threat to the corporate existence of Nigeria was the Boko Haram insurgency and despite what anybody says, we have decimated Boko Haram.
Read Also: 2019: Nigeria will be doomed should Buhari return – Fayose
“We brought Boko Haram under complete control because when we came in on May 29, 2015, 24 local governments in the North-east, an area three times the size of Lebanon, were under the effective control of Boko Haram and what this means is that they were running the administration. As a matter of fact, once we got to Maiduguri that was the end of Borno State. If you move outside, either to Kaure, Konduga or Bama, they were under the control of Boko Haram. By 2014, 2015, nobody in Abuja could sleep with his two eyes closed. They came and attacked This Day headquarters with casualties, they attacked the UN Headquarters, they attacked the IGP office, Nyanya park was bombed twice, they were active in Suleja, Kaduna, Sokoto, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kogi. As a matter of fact, there was hardly any state in the North that Boko Haram was not operating. It was nipped in the bud in Kwara.
“But today there is relative peace. We have been able to recover all territories and today no single inch of Nigerian territory is under the Boko Haram control. Yes, there have been suicide bombings, that is what terrorism is all about. A couple of weeks ago in US, we saw terrorist attack. About a month or two months ago, we saw what happened in Texas. Terrorists killed many children. This is not a sign of renewed threat rather it is a sign of desperation and weakness. Look at the regularity it used to occur then and now. It is all about intelligence gathering. Yes you would talk about herdsmen-farmer clashes, was it not something we inherited. The first farmers-herders’ clash was in 1947 even before Nigeria became independent but over the years we have been able to manage it.”