PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari, on Thursday, left his interviewers during the Arise TV interview more confounded than satisfied with his incoherent answers.
It soon became a trend that President Buhari will aloofly give an entirely different answer whenever a question is presented before him.
A few examples will suffice:
One of the interviewers, Dr. Reuben Abati asked:
“In the Northern parts of the country, the schools have been subjects of attacks. If these schools are perpetually being attacked by bandits and terrorists, and you want to lift 100 million people out of poverty and their parents are also under influence, how do you think that that goal of lifting 100 million people out of poverty can be achieved?”
Mr President answers:
“Try and appreciate what the federal government has done. One, we have removed all the Service Chiefs and the Inspector-General of Police and we bring new ones. W allowed them to go round and see the problem; they have been part of it all the time but now they are in charge.
“We will make sure that their priorities is to ensure that their priorities is to make sure that that they brought normalcy, people to accept responsibility of their offices and perform. They are working very hard on this, you cannot give it enough of…[incoherent] because we do not want to give serial warning to the real criminals.
“The ones on North East we know, the ones in South-South we know. The problem is with North West. The same people, same culture, killing each other, stealing each other cattle, while in their…[incoherent] As I said, we are going to treat them in the language they will understand.
“We have given the police and the military power to be ruthless and you watch it in a few weeks’ time there will be a difference. Because we told that if we keep people away from the farm they are going to starve. And the government cannot control the public.
“If you allow hunger to famine the whole society the government will be in trouble. And we don’t want to be in trouble. We are already in enough trouble. So we warned them, so sooner or later you will see the difference.”
Another interviewer asked:
“Now you talked about the people of North East and the language they understand, there is a crisis around that language. So it shows that, of course you are a former military man, you are talking about using force to restore order. But it’s understood in another way that especially what happened last week when you spoke about the South East, IPOB, and all that. One the controversy of Twitter, when is the government going to lift its ban on the suspension of twitter? Nigerians are expecting when the government will lift the ban and two how are we going to resolve the crisis in the South East.”
President Buhari answers:
“Well, South East, ehm, I was encouraged by what I hear. Nobody told me. Two statements from the South South; one by elderly people. They said this time around there will be no…[incoherent] I’m sure you understand what they mean.
“Again the youths made the same statement……[incoherent] So that IPOB are just like a dot in a circle. If they want to exist they won’t have access to anywhere.
“And the way they are spread all over the country, having businesses, having properties, I think IPOB doesn’t know what they are talking about.
“In any case, we say we will talk to them in a language they understand. We will organise the police and the military to pursue them. That’s what we can do and we will do it.”
Yet another interviewer asked:
“Still on the South East, Mr. President, how do you plane to include more people from the South East and the South in general in your government, especially the security services and the MDAs?’
The president answered:
“You look at the NNPC and look at the military.
“People who have been there for eighteen years or people who have been their tenure for ten years, they trained in Zaria, or in Abeokuta, they came through the ranks, and because they served under circumstances and gradually rise to the status and you think we’ll take somebody to balance up?
“This positions have to be earned. There are people who have been there for ten-fifteen years.
“If you don’t join, you are not forced to be joined but when you join you go through the rigmarole, you go through the programme throughout and you learn by the system.”
After several efforts to elicit a coherent and lively discussion to no avail, the leader of the evidently frustrated media crew abruptly ended with “Mr President, thank you very much for your time”, and left.
Watch the video of the interview below:
Longer audio version:
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