A former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, has said that the Nigerian government will have no moral ground to blame citizens for seeking help elsewhere if it cannot provide security.
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Speaking as a guest on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Monday, Lawal said the government must assure the people of their safety if it does not want them to cry for help from outside.
“The government should assure us that they can give us the peace, security, and prosperity that we desire,” Lawal said.
“If they are unable to do that, they cannot blame any part of society that decides to seek help anywhere,” he added.
‘Genocide Or Pogrom’
The former SGF also supported US President Donald Trump’s position that the killing of Christians in Nigeria qualifies as genocide.
“It’s a genocide; if it’s not a genocide, it is a pogrom,” Lawal stated.
He insisted that the claim that more Muslims than Christians were killed did not justify what is happening.
The former SGF said, “I have watched the argument going on about this issue of genocide; it is one-sided. Obviously, those who are more vehemently opposing it are the Muslims whose brothers are the perpetrators of the genocide,” he said.
“They come with this very funny narrative that, ‘Oh, Muslims too are being killed, more Muslims are being killed than Christians.’
“That is their argument, but it does not justify what is happening. If 1,000 children are killed, and among them one is your own, your worry is about that one.
“In any case, why dodge the fact that those being accused of carrying out the genocide are Muslims, not Christians?”
Lawal claimed that before the current pressure from Trump, President Bola Tinubu, then a leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), had led a delegation of party leaders ahead of the 2015 election to inform former US President Barack Obama that Christians were being slaughtered in Nigeria.
The opposition African Democratic Congress (ADC) chieftain said the issue of whether there is genocide or not should be secondary, as the government’s priority should be to guarantee the security of lives and property.
He also lamented that soldiers continue to lose their lives to Nigeria’s lingering insecurity because the government had left them with outdated weapons to fight terrorists equipped with more sophisticated arms.
Lawal’s assertion followed a recent threat of military action in Nigeria by former US President Donald Trump over what he described as the “Christian genocide” in Africa’s most populous nation.
Source: Channels TV
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