By: Sunday Oyewole The All Progressives Congress (APC) has warned that Nigeria may crash unless urgent steps are taken by the National Assembly to protect the unity of the country.
Consequently, the opposition party has stressed the need for the legislators to immediately put machinery in motion towards getting President Goodluck Jonathan out of office if the nation’s democracy must be protected.
The party’s Interim National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed in s statement in Lagos on Sunday, enjoined members of the National Assembly to explore the relevant section (s) of the constitution to kick-start the process of impeaching the President before he crashes the country.
Mr. Mohammed decried what he called total failure of leadership. It also warned that the PDP’s court case challenging the defection of five of its governors to APC is capable of plunging the nation into chaos.
He advised the leadership of the PDP and the Presidency to study the Supreme Court judgment to that effect when Atiku Abubakar defected to ACN as a sitting Vice President.
The statement reads, “Our country is drifting dangerously and our people are divided now perhaps more than at any other point in our history, with the exception of the civil war period. There is a total failure of leadership, even as insecurity, unprecedented corruption, palpable impunity, massive unemployment and hunger stalk the land.
“Since the raison d’etre of any government is the security and welfare of the citizenry, and the present administration has failed to live up to the justification of its existence, there can be no other definition of gross misconduct than that.”
“Therefore, the time has come for the head of that government, on whose desk the buck stops, to be removed through the provisions stipulated in the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This is the patriotic thing to do.
The APC also lamented the glaring manipulation of judicial process, saying “There are many such Judges as we can see by some recent events, despite our warnings that the efforts of the current CJN to clean up the judiciary must not be sabotaged by a few pliant Judges.
”One such scenario is the present challenge in court by the PDP of the defection to the APC of five state governors. The PDP has gone to court fully aware of the ruling of the Supreme Court after the party (PDP) attempted to make then Vice President Atiku Abubakar to lose his seat and to also strip him of his privileges following his defection to the ACN.”
“What then can be the sole motive behind the PDP’s action: To plunge Nigerian into chaos! This is why we issued a strong warning in our statement of Dec. 5th thus: ‘We wish to state unequivocally that should the PDP go ahead with this plan, there will be widespread repercussions as the APC has resolved that henceforth, every act of impunity of the PDP and the Presidency will be met with stiff resistance in the form of a vociferous telegraphing of people power, the likes of which have not been witnessed in these parts’.
“We reiterate those words today, and make bold to say that not even the revelation by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, that snipers are being trained secretly and that 1,000 people have been placed on political watch, will deter us from saving this democracy, which was watered by the sweat and blood of many patriots, long before this generation of opportunists stormed the political scene.
“The talk out there now is that Nigeria has never had it so bad. But the government may not know because it has distanced itself from the people. Therefore, for embracing corruption so much and providing succour to corrupt public officials; for threatening the country’s fragile unity through divisive policies and politics, for frittering away the nation’s resources through unprecedented cronyism and clannishness, and for a total failure of leadership, this President deserves to be slammed with the cudgel of impeachment”.
