APC National Secretary faults Clark’s call for State of Emergency in Northeast

The National Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji
Mai Mala Buni, said yesterday that the call by Chief Edwin Clark for
declaration of state of emergency in the North East was misguided and
ill-conceived.

Buni in a statement was responding to an earlier call issued by Clark,
in which he demanded President Muhammadu Buhari to declare complete
state of emergency in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states because of
renewed Boko Haram attacks.

The APC scribe said Clark, an elder statesman from the South South had
been an anti-North East crusader for long. "Initially, during the ex-
President Goodluck Jonathan era, Edwin Clark and his cohorts denied
there was abduction of the Chibok girls, saying it was politically
intended to malign the ex-president. "He (Clark) later pressed for
imposition of state of emergency in the North Eastern states which
only gave advantage to the insurgents to launch vicious attacks on the
people," he said.

Buni explained that it was the likes of Clark who misled former
President Jonathan into treating the fight against Boko Haram with
levity. "It was also on the advice of people like Clark that
ex-President Jonathan attempted extending the state of emergency for
the third time but the move was rejected by the National Assembly
because the previous experience yielded no results," he said.

He said the Buhari administration had grossly tamed activities of Boko
Haram without a state of emergency, saying, "We remain confident that
this administration will bring an end to the insurgency without a
state of emergency," he said.