Sack Monguno, arrest Sheikh Gumi Now – HURIWA tells Buhari

HURIWA, the Nigerian Human Rights Writers Association, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to fire his National Security Adviser, Major General Babagana Monguno (Rtd), for damaging Nigeria’s national security.

HURIWA also demanded that President Buhari detain Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a popular Kaduna-based Islamic scholar, for reportedly talking with terrorists who have been terrorizing schools and towns in the North.

Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, the Rights Writers’ National Coordinator, made the announcement in a statement released on Tuesday.

HURIWA claimed that Monguno is enabling Sheikh Gumi to continue negotiating for the feared kidnappers and terrorists and that the NSA chief should be fired for failing to check alleged corruption in his office and for allegedly allowing his subordinate to allegedly deploy soldiers to go after EFCC officers who were lawfully marking identifiable documents.

The statement read in part, “The best negotiation to have with the terrorists called armed bandits by the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is to use the instrumentality of the law to inflict on them the severest and harshest of punishment and not the illegality being peddled by the likes of the National Security Adviser Major General Babagana Monguno (Rtd) who is providing the enabling environment for Sheikh Ahmed Gumi to continue to negotiate for the dreaded kidnappers and terrorist.

“We are definitely as shocked as millions of Nigerians that President Buhari has kept his failed and non-performing National Security Adviser who relies on a civilian and the Kaduna based Islamic cleric Ahmed Gumi on how to deal with terrorists and who also has failed to stop the alleged financial malfeasance said to have been perpetrated by no other person but someone he, the National Security Adviser made the Director of Finance in his office.

“Insecurity and corruption are the twin evils that Muhammadu Buhari’s administration purportedly came to power to eliminate but right under the nose of Mr President are a National Security Adviser who for six years has not offered any workable Security Advise and under whose office, his trusted staff allegedly committed monumental corruption as alleged by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission.”

“Mr. President needs to dismiss Monguno immediately with only less than two years to his end of the last tenure unless the president does not care about what kind of legacies he wants to bequeath to Nigerians in 2023 that he must quit the public arena into a quiet retirement.”

“How can President Buhari keep an adviser who admitted allowing Sheikh Gumi to violate the Anti-terrorism Act (a valid and binding federal anti-terrorism law) by encouraging negotiations with terrorists whose hands are drenched in the blood of innocent Northern School Children?

Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, who has been meeting with suspected bandits terrorizing towns in the northwest and north-central parts of the country, compared them to Niger Delta militants and urged that they not be labelled criminals. The NSA, on the other hand, backed this Sheikh’s unconventional Modus Operandi, according to which schoolchildren will continue to be kidnapped unless the government offers terrorism an easy landing.