Fani in his letter reminded the President not to forget the fact that the same way someone handed over to him, so he will definitely do one day, stressing that leadership was not all about revenge.
His letter reads bellow:
“Mr. President, as one of your most loyal and faithful subjects who has nothing but the utmost respect for your person and your office I am constrained to write you this open letter.
This is because there are a number of issues that I believe that it is important for you to clarify and to come clean on. I say this because some of your assertions of late are at best contradictory and at worst patently dishonest.
Whichever side of the political divide we are on I believe that we can all agree on one thing: that the prosecution of the war against terror is not something that any of us should play politics with.
This is especially so given the fact that human lives are at stake and the very existence of our nation is under threat. Like much of the rest of the world, our country is going through hell at the hands of the jihadists and Islamist terrorists.
There is no gainsaying that we must all come to terms with the fact that the Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL), Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, Hamas and another group that the internationally-respected Global Terror Index has described as the ”Fulani militants” (aka Fulani herdsmen) are nothing but bloodthirsty murderers and the lowest form of life.
They are indeed the scum of the earth, the troublers of humanity and the vermin of hell. It is with this in mind that I urge you to take the war against terror far more seriously than you are doing and plead with you to stop passing the buck.
Your penchant for blaming your failings in this regard on the previous administration is simply nauseating and it does not serve you well.
You continuously contradict yourself when it comes to this matter and frankly such flip flops are unworthy of the office that you presently occupy.
We your subjects look up to you for consistency, strength, unequivocal commitment, a firm resolve and the ”leadership from the front” that you promised during your presidential campaign in this war. We do not want and neither do we need doublespeak, lame excuses and buck passing.
Permit me to point out a few examples of your contradictory assertions and your buck passing in this short intervention.
Initially you claimed that your predecessor in office President Goodluck Jonathan never bought any arms and that instead he squandered and stole all the money that was appropriated for the procurement of arms.
Yet when the British Minister of Defense visited you in the Presidential Villa the other day the story changed. You did a U-turn and gleefully told him and the wider world that President Jonathan bought arms with raw cash.
One wonders which story you shall come up with next and which one you will conjure up in the future.
Kindly tell us what the position is: is it that Jonathan did not buy arms at all and stole all the money or is it that he used cash to buy arms? You cannot have it both ways. It is either one or the other.
Quite apart from your glaring doublespeak on this matter there was another issue which you ought to have raised with your highly esteemed and respected British guest.
You forgot to tell him that his was one of the countries that not only refused to sell weapons to us during the course of this bitter conflict but that also helped to impose and enforce the international arms embargo on our country even though we are at war.
This resulted in the unnecessary death of thousands of our people because we found it difficult to procure the weapons to protect them.
Your guest’s country insisted on towing the American line and doing this to us even though we were fighting a war against a relentless, well-motivated, well-funded and well-armed fighting force that Global Terror Index has described as the ”deadliest terrorist organization in the world.”
One is forced to ask: with friends like this, who needs enemies?
Given the fact that the embargo was in place, one wonders how we were supposed to procure arms unless we did so with raw cash on the black market.
The alternative was to buy none at all, to do nothing and to allow Boko Haram to take Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu and Lagos. Perhaps that is precisely what your western friends and allies wanted but thankfully it never came to pass.
Despite the challenges and constraints President Jonathan faced, instead of losing any more ground, he rose to the occasion and retook no less than 22 local government areas and virtually pushed Boko Haram out of Nigeria.
The only place that they occupied by the time the election took place was Sambisa forest.
Jonathan achieved all this with those arms that he bought with raw cash. This is apparently what you are now complaining about. Permit me to remind you that it is those same arms that Jonathan bought with raw cash that your army is still using till today.
Yet sadly since you were sworn in as President seven months ago, you have lost some of those same local government areas that were earlier recovered and they are now back in the hands of the terrorists.
Despite this you keep telling the international community and the Nigerian people that we are ”making progress” in the war against terror.
As a matter of fact you went as far as to say that we had ”won the war” against Boko Haram and your Minister of Information, Mr. Lai Mohammed, echoed that grotesque mendacity and reiterated that sentiment by adding the words ”technically won” (whatever that may mean) to the equation.
