Insecurity: Sack Monguno As NSA Now, Northern Group Tells Buhari

A Northern group, Arewa Youth Assembly, has given President Muhammadu Buhari an ultimatum of Wednesday to sack the National Security Adviser, Major-General Babagana Mongonu (retd.), or face mass action.

The group said the failure of the President to sack the NSA before Wednesday, they would occupy the Presidential Villa until Monguno was sacked.

The group had written to the Presidency, the Nigeria Police Force, Federal Capital Territory, in that regard.

The organisation, comprising youths from the 19 northern states and Abuja, had on August 1, handed down a 14-day ultimatum to Buhari. The ultimatum expires on Wednesday.

The letter, addressed to the Director of Administration, Presidential Villa, was titled, ‘Notification of peaceful protest over rising insecurity in the country and the urgent need to sack the National Security Adviser,’ and copied to the National Security Adviser, the Director of the Department of State Service, and the Nigeria Police Force, FCT commands respectively.

It reminded the authorities of the earlier 14-day ultimatum handed to the President while noting that after the expiration on Wednesday, they would occupy the Three Arms Zone, Abuja.

The letter partly read, “The Arewa Youth Assembly, an umbrella body of 157 youth groups that runs a parliamentary system of leadership, wishes to notify you of our resolve to organise a peaceful protest at the Three Arms Zone at the expiration of the two weeks ultimatum we issued to the National Security Adviser, General Babagana Monguno (retd.) to resign over his inability to come up with a workable strategy to tame the rising insecurity ravaging the northern Nigeria.

“We are aware that Buhari responded to calls by Nigerians to replace the then-service chiefs. We have equally observed that the change of guard yielded little or no significant improvement in the state of our country’s security situation.

“It is therefore our considered view that the NSA, who is in a position to give Mr. President counsel on a workable template to stamp out the terrorist elements might have run out of ideas or he never had any at all.

“As lovers of Mr. President, who desire to see him handover a more secured and prosperous Nigeria to his successor in a few months, we have resolved to organise a Massive peaceful protest at the Three Arms Zone to magnify our call on the NSA to either resign or be sacked by Mr President.”

Meanwhile, in a statement by the Spokesperson of the Assembly, Ali Mohammed, issued in Kaduna and obtained by The PUNCH, the group described the NSA as the worst the country had produced in terms of “performance” since the era of Gen. Aliyu Gusau (retd.) as the NSA.

According to the statement, for the past seven years, the current NSA has merely been supervising the killings of innocent Nigerians with nothing to show for it.

This, the group noted, was enough reason for Monguno to resign if it were to be in a sane (another) country, adding, however, that despite the NSA’s woeful performance, he was still comfortably occupying office while terrorists were “butchering” Nigerians.

They also reminded the President that it was the same Nigerians that stood by him during the elections that were being killed today.

Against this background, the group urged Nigerians to come out en masse “for the national protest On Wednesday, August 17, 2022, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.”