A Northern group, Arewa Youth Assembly, has given President Muhammadu Buhari and an ultimatum of Wednesday this week to sack his National Security Adviser, Major General Babagana Mongonu (etd.) or face mass action.
The group said the failure of President Buhari to sack the NSA before Wednesday would result in the occupation of the Presidential Villa, Abuja until General Monguno is sacked.
The group, comprising youths from the 19 Northern States and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, had on August 1 handed down a 14-day ultimatum to President Buhari to sack the NSA. The ultimatum expires on Wednesday.
Ahead of the Wednesday date, they wrote to The Presidency, the Nigeria Police Force, FCT in that regard, a copy of which was obtained by The PUNCH in Kaduna on Sunday.
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 NSA, the Director General of the Department of State Services (DSS), and the Nigeria Police Force, FCT Commands respectively.
The group 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, they described the NSA as the worst the country had produced in terms of “performance” since the era of General Aliyu Gusau (rtd) 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.