Rule of law: Garba Shehu goofs on Sambo Dasuki
*Mallam Garba Shehu
(Nigeria) By Yushau Shuaib
(Nigeria) By Yushau Shuaib
The most painful and mind boggling dilemma in issuing
rebuttals is the attempt to challenge respected professional colleagues who
should know the truth from fallacy. Wrong actions of current administration of
President Muhammadu Buhari have compelled some of us to take the pain and risk
of disproving false allegations and reckless insinuations on innocent people by
those in the corridors of power.
Mallam Garba Shehu, the Senior Special Assistant to
President on Media and Publicity is one of senior professional colleagues who
positively impacted in my career benefitting from their guidance and
benevolence (https://goo.gl/RZV6j3).
Meanwhile, with due respect to my elder, I have been
thoroughly embarrassed and even shocked that Mallam Garba has been misled in
joining the bandwagon of those attacking former National Security Adviser,
Sambo Dasuki blindly and baselessly.
While Dasuki has remained in unlawful incarceration since
2015, the system has refused to give him the opportunity to clear his name on
frivolous charges against him and occasionally prevented him from appearing in
court.
In an attempt to defend the flagrant disobedience to court
orders by the Buhari regime, Mallam Garba recently said that the government of
Buhari is not ready to release Dasuki because according to him there “were many
cases against Dasuki for which he had not been granted bail.”
Mallam Garba was further quoted to have said that “The
ex-NSA’s problem is not with President Buhari who I must say has the highest
regard for the rule of law. If five courts of the land are trying different
cases in which a man is involved and one or two of those courts let the accused
persons go home on bail, what happens with the other three cases?”
Mallam Garba should know that Sambo Dasuki was arraigned and
charged on bailable offences which all the courts of competent jurisdiction
have granted him bail. Since 2015, when Dasuki was arraigned before different
high courts, he was granted bail by Justice Adeniyi Ademola and Justice Ahmed
Rahmat Mohamed of the Federal High Court as well as Justice Peter Affen and
Justice Hussein Baba-Yusuf of the FCT High Courts. The ECOWAS Court had also
ordered the Federal Government to release him immediately from the unlawful
custody and imposed a fine of N15,000,000 on the government but up till now,
all the judgments have not been obeyed. There is currently no single court
order or a legal warrant for his detention. Rule of Law indeed!
This is not the first time the respected political
communicator, Mallam Garba would play to the gallery. On his assumption of
office, Garba raised a similar erroneous insinuation against Sambo Dasuki on
October 15, 2015, when he told the world at The Red Media Summit in Lagos on
how he and others plotted to accuse Sambo Dasuki of coup plotting (Link:
https://goo.gl/qqu7r9). He was quoted to have stated thus: “We agreed we were
going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser at that
time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against Muhammadu
Buhari.” As alarming as that statement was, Mallam Garba did not retract the
offensive and offending statement. As a respected communicator, he should know
better.
Meanwhile few year before then, Malam Garba predicted the
challenges Dasuki would face as Fulani man from North-West against Kanuri
people of North-East who would frustrate him. He made the assertion immediately
after the appointment of Dasuki as NSA by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2012.
In his weekly article in Premium Times with the title “Dasuki as NSA: Issues
below the Surface,” (Link: https://goo.gl/Hi3Vib) Shehu even recommended and
listed some Kanuri people that should have been considered for the appointment.
Mallam Garba claimed that the appointment of Dasuki as a
Northerner might produce the direct opposite result of appeasement of the
region. According to him “the Boko Haram terror movement is dominated by Kanuri
boys, despite the recruitment of volunteers from areas outside Borno and Yobe
States. Dasuki’s appointment ignored the historical rivalries between the
Kanuris and the North-west or more directly, the Fulani hegemony.”
Buhari’s spokesperson therefore asked “Can a scion of the
Fulani royalty, even though a Northerner cultivate the trust and confidence of
the Kanuri boys against the background of these historical rivalries? Can a
Fulani Northern National Security Adviser conduct negotiations for disarmament
with Boko Haram in the face of these historical rivalries? This may be Sambo
Dasuki’s biggest challenge.
“Whatever theories may have developed around Sambo’s
appointment, the Kanuri factor in the appeasement policy should not be ignored.
No confidence building strategy can succeed which ignores the undercurrents of
historical rivalries between the Kanuris and the Hausa/Fulani of the north. It
is doubtful if the North-East or Borno State in particular, lacks credible
retired army officers who can do the job.”
Even though, those fear of my senior brother, Mallam Garba
could not be ignored, especially when Dasuki was appointed at a period Boko
Haram members were not only terrorising the North-East but the North-Central
and North-West with weekly attacks on worship centres. Nevertheless, the ex-NSA
succeeded in restricting terrorists’ notoriety to the North-East before
recovering more than 25 towns from the Boko Haram. In fact, the excesses of
Boko Haram were curtailed to the effect that 2015 elections were peacefully
held throughout the federation, including North-East where governors and
legislators were elected without any hitches.
I request my senior brother, Mallam Garba to
read my “Open Letter to Femi Adesina” (Link: https://goo.gl/TFdNmP) on some of
the achievements of Dasuki in office and the list of over 20 towns recovered
during the previous administration. I appeal to professional colleagues in
government to avoid playing politics with sensitive security issues that could
be misleading.
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