OFFA-ERINLE CRISIS: THE GOVERNOR, LIKE THE LG CHAIRMEN, MUST ALSO GO!

Innocent people murdered during the crisis.

True to prediction, the PDP-led state government today announced the suspension of the duo of the Local Government Chairmen of both Offa and Oyun respectively, thereby making the unfortunate Council chairmen the scapegoats of the state government stack incompetence in successfully stemming the orgy of violence in the two warring communities. As much as we would not want to question the merit or otherwise of this latest sinister orchestration of the PDP-led state government, we make bold to say that the action is an inexplicable selective justice against council chairmen whose only offence is that they oversee volatile communities that have been denied peace and tranquility as a result of the PDP’s long neglect and I-don’t-care-attitude to the communities considered as the strongholds of the opposition in the state.

If the State Governor expected a standing ovation for firing the Council Chairmen, then het must be mistaken, because this latest move is no doubt a dangerous ill wind that blows no good.  The move is as reckless and thoughtless as it is feckless and insensitive! For us at the CPC, it beggars belief that the PDP-led Kwara State Government has decided to ply the ignoble and treacherous route of playing cheap and potentially precarious politics instead of decimating its energy on how to successfully bring calm and tranquility to an already traumatized population. We find it out rightly beyond comprehension that Mr. Fatai Ahmed, the Chief Security Officer of the state and the one in whose hands the security apparatus of the state resides would shift the blame of the communal crisis on the innocent Council Chairmen instead of himself and the security agencies who have woefully failed to .

We make bold to say that since the obviously mismanaged bottomless pit called security vote is an exclusive preserve of the Governor and his PDP goons, then the buck of securing the life and property of the people of the state stops squarely on his table. The PDP-led Government in the state must therefore admit its stack incompetence to stem the tide of communal hostility and bloodletting across the state. At no time in the history of the state has our corporate existence as a people been so dangerously threatened by communal strife, statewide orgy of violence, hooliganism and cult clashes. The state, unlike never before, is now daily inundated with terrible news of avoidable deaths, ranging from cultist clashes, ghastly motor accidents, ritual killings, industrial ruins and now communal hostilities.

If therefore the overseeing Council Chairmen must come under the hammer for only presiding over volatile areas and nothing more, then the State Governor himself does not enjoy any moral right to continue in office, going by the warped logic of the PDP-led government. In other words, since the State is aggressively being overrun by cultists, ritualists, armed robbers and assassins, right under the nose of Mr. Abdulfatai Ahmed, and all indications point to his crude ineptitude, gross incompetence, stack lack of judgement, the least the Governor must do in this unfortunate instance is to throw in the towel, if all animals are equal in the PDP animal farm.

But as a vigilant champion of legality, constitutionality and the rule of law, we will not fold our arms and watch the PDP deliberately throw the state back to the days of the locust. And this informed our resolve to earnestly alert the public to this dangerous and reckless decision of the state to fire the Council Chairmen. We especially wish to urge our revered traditional institutions, security agencies and all public spirited Kwarans at home and in Diaspora to to rein in on the State Governor to rescind his decision, as this wicket gambit is capable of precipitating a political chaos of epic proportion the end of which no one can clearly predict.

Alhaji Soliu Mustapha
Deputy National Chairmen CPC
08033584659